Home Automation - Is your house smart?

For many years I've wanted to automate things around my house. A long time ago (almost 10 years ago!) I use to use MisterHouse. This was a great application and although I didn't have much in looks, it made my imagination run wild. I was using a few X10 components and though it worked, it was somewhat disappointing in it's performance.

Now, I am planning on embark on a HA project once again. This time, I would like to use something which offers a lot more than Mr House. I've been waiting to see how that project matured and how much development was put in... Though I must admit it's a complex project, I certainly look forward to start it. (If my wife lets me.)

This time, I am going to use LinuxMCE and if you ever go on YouTube, look it up. The demo is quite impressive so it's worth it to look at users' environments. This video/demo I liked above was using a much older version of LinuxMCE. It's capabilities are quite impressive.

Now one thing that is good about HA is that you don't have to invest tons to get started. I'm going to start with a module or two and control a light or two. Once I've got it going, I'll hopefully convince my wife to let me invest in one module a month. (One security camera here, one light module there, another VOIP phone here...)

In short - HA is something that has been available for a while and doesn't take a lot to get started. When are you going to start?

Restarting a Polycom (and others) from within Asterisk

It's been a while...

Useful tidbit in Asterisk to reload a phone without going to it to restart it manually.

sip notify polycom-check-cfg user1 [user2 ...]

This allows you to make any changes to the phone system and then have the phones pick up that change after hours or anything like that.

Cool!

-P

Asterisk - so powerful

I've been doing some things with Asterisk that have been causing me headaches. However, this is probably due to my inexperience and the fact that I'm still learning. I can do a lot of stuff already but there's tons more that I know can be done and I'm probably not doing.

My dilema is that if I were to take a course, as far as I can tell, they tend to cover the basics. All the things that I know will be repeated. Now, will I lean something new? Maybe. Will is be worth the £XXXX that I have to pay for the course? I don't think it will.

I am going to see what else I can do that will help me learn - other than trying to implement things, I don't know what I can do that will make me discover ALL that Asterisk can do.

-P