Sunday, May 14, 2017

Project Home Automation - Thought process - Part 1

Last year I have been so busy with working and planning for my new home and decided that I should plan on working on home automation. The earliest video which I encounter that triggers me to work on automation was this video.



Back then it was so cool that I have a lot of inspiration and thoughts on this. Somehow, along the way, when I try to think of the thought process, I realised that home automation is are cool but are they practical?

I started out experimenting stuff by doing it manually and see why automation is needed and why some are not. I need to plan carefully to be smart home ready before my renovation completed, I will not expect any wires to run around my house to fit into the automation plan.

There are also a lot of ideas and things I wanted to do and since I am revamping my whole house I should start thinking about these few items for a start.

Fundamental of Automation
There are 3 components that make up the Automation
  • Controllers, making an intent to trigger an event
  • Sensors, to react on system states
  • Actuators, the mechanics that output the result of the finished state
Automation Action
2 basic principles to think about.
  • Reactive, when you need to switch on and off something, you need to act on a command so that it sends a signal to the device to act on it effortlessly.
  • Proactive or events, scheduled action that will be acted upon automatically and effortlessly.
Lights
The basic needs for every home automation if you cannot even control your lights, you can forget about automation. In smart lighting automation world, there are a few things that you need to plan before committing.
  • Should you control your light from the bulbs or should you control from the switch?
  • How should you run your wires? Is there different between a normal wiring and automation wiring?
  • Did you do any research that what kind of communication to use? Zigbee? Zwave? Wifi?
Fan and Airconditioning
Fans and Aircon are the 2nd most touched on for automation. In the current market, not a lot of these devices are smart. Most of these device's sensors are using infrared devices. A hard one to picked on.

Securities
This one is optional but useful to have it. I only have 2 ideas on it. Planting surveillance camera and door lock. For the camera, I have no idea which will be better for me and I am not going to drill a hold on my door just for this one. I probably will place in my living room pointing towards the main door. As for the door lock, I will check if there are any APIs which I can work on to connect back to my main controller. This will be my roadmap.

Reminder
It will be cool to have this feature but not too annoying, I will probably take note of it and ran some experiment.

Information
It should have weather reports, bus status and probably my stats. So far I think room temperature is a gimmick which I don't think I will put that in my plan.

In my next few posts, I will be explaining the reasons how did I conclude my decisions and my selections for each of the thought process which I have mentioned above.

To end this post, remember this point, Automation is to help you to improve your life quality and not making you lazier.


1 comment:

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