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Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?
96 points by hardik988 on Nov 6, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 54 comments
So has anyone around here hacked their homes? I'm talking about any sort of thing like controlling all lights, air conditioners and other devices wirelessly from a central console ? Or just setting up your own custom anti-theft system. Any hacks would be awesome to hear about.


I hacked my lights and some power outlets. I can turn them on by flipping a simple switch. I also hacked a lock onto my door and hacked some layers of paint on the ceiling. Then I paid some people to install a temperature control hack so that air conditioning can be controlled based on a heat sensor. And some other people came in and hacked some wires to different ports near the floor. They put a box in the alcove where you can turn off power to entire sections of the house. These people were all Mexicans, so I guess they must have some leet hacking schools where they come from.


love this joke (just like I loved your post at http://shrughes.com/p/how-to-vote-on-hacker-news/) and I agree the word "hack" has become tarnished as of late on HN. I think hardik988 was genuinely asking about how to hack together some sort of smart local grid application to control all the equipments around his home though. That's one of my fantasies too and I just haven't had time to do it but one day...

In the meantime, here is a couple of great places for tips on that: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http://ieeex... http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/toaster/

if you want to control the utility down the road too ;-) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=power-hacke...


Thanks, yes I was genuinely seeking inspiration for my home in the future. Thanks for the links, will be sure to check them out.

EDIT : Posted reply above to shrughes.


Dammit, I declined to make this joke because it was off-topic.

I hack masonry and plaster! Much more steampunk (and thus maker-like) than mere paint and wiring.


Just to point out that each of these things were ingenious hacks at the time they were invented.


True. So difference between hacking and just using is sometimes a question of time... Cavemen hacked tree branches into sticks to beat eachother up. Today's version of cavemen just buy baseball bats.


My entire apartment is Z-Wave and I have a custom written iPad app that lets me control most everything.

I've been considering putting some of those cheap 7" android tablets into my walls, but I don't own the place, so I guess I'll have to wait.

X10 is a horrible joke, don't go there. Z-Wave is fantastic though.

Here are some zwave links:

http://www.z-wave.com/modules/Products/

http://www.smarthomeusa.com/search.php?q=z-wave

https://www.zwaveproducts.com/


Can you remark on how much these things cost you, all said and done?


I've probably spent ~1K usd for 5 rooms.


So why is X10 a joke?


Depending on how noisy your house's electrical system is, the commands and responses between controllers and devices can be lost. I control my sprinkler system with X10 from a Linux box and my first iteration flooded my back yard when I was on vacation a couple of years ago when a power-off command wasn't received.


So the problem is lack of feedback, you can't check if a command succeeded, only that it was sent? Can this be fixed at the application level with a status check?


For feedback it depends on the device. Cheap light switches, for example, might just have on and off commands. Better versions will have a status command as well, and maybe a multi-level dim, etc. In my case the sprinkler switch did have status capability, but my cheesy little shell script was just assuming the commands succeeded.


Also, X10 is noticeably slower than Z-Wave.


I haven't hacked my own, but this guy has: http://www.bwired.nl/

He's the most extreme example that I've come across and he even describes how he did it/what tech he uses. If you are looking for inspiration on what to hack, you can't go far wrong using his house as a start!


You guessed it right. I was looking for inspiration when I started this thread. Thanks for the pointer.


someone said X10 "is horrible" but this guy uses it, anyone can give a (link to) comparison with z-wave?


My weekend hacking on IP cameras turned into a startup: Dropcam (http://www.dropcam.com). Dropcams can push alert your iPhone on motion or sound and they store up to 30 days of video.

When I was a kid, I had the Firecracker serial-to-wireless-to-X10 gadget hooked up to a PC running Microsoft Agent/batch scripts. I could voice control my ceiling fan, lights, etc like Star Trek (at least, if the Enterprise had ceiling fans). It was a big hit with the ladies.

I like everything about renting except for how much of a hassle it is to change wiring and put gadgets in the walls.


Wow, I'm so going to buy this. We've got another baby on the way and I was looking for something like this to use as a baby monitor. Nothing out there has really caught my fancy yet, but this looks pretty darn awesome.

BTW, I might not represent your potential customer base perfectly, but I would ideally like to see a few more screenshots of the web interface on your website.


Congratulations! We hear a lot of fun stuff from our baby monitoring customers. One of our users called it "Baby TiVo" ... you can export clips to send to the family, so it's lots of fun.

As for screenshots, did you check out http://www.dropcam.com/demo? You get there by clicking "See it live" on the homepage. We should probably add links to it from the learn more/product pages.


Are you using Wowza?

Did you modify the actual Axis firmware?


Yes. I've been involved in home automation for many many years. Our house has pretty much all the primary lights and outlets controlled by Insteon devices. A Mac Mini runs a software called Indigo that handles all the logic and macros, the same Mini has our primary audio library on it, and some other media.

Every plasma TV in the house also has a Mac Mini at a minimum, some also have Tivos and Apple TVs.

Intelligent video cameras around the house can detect people or vehicles approaching up the driveway or around other perimeter areas and send me email alerts, video clips and/activate other things via the Indigo/Insteon system.

We have a dual-zone heating/cooling setup. The thermostats are Venstars with an Insteon RF interface. Setpoints are selected based on time of day, outdoor temps, and occupancy (sensed via motion detectors and/or our presence at our other house (eg: if there is activity at house X, we can keep house Y from initiating common events)).

I have a Redeye wifi to IR iPod base station thing for controlling the TV and AV gear we spend most time around. This is mostly accessed through an I* app, but can also be controlled via an http interface.

From a web interface, my iPhone or my iPad I can turn any light on or off, change temperature setpoints, read status of various sensors, or control iTunes, all through the Indigo app. Through a separate web interface I've written, I can see recent events from the security cameras and access control systems, see live video, lock/unlock certain doors and so forth.

There is a Russound multi-zone amp and zone selector in the basement ( though we mostly just use the amp now). A combination of airport expresses and rogue amoeba apps allows me to route audio from pretty much any device/point in the house to any other device or room. There are in-ceiling speakers in the bedroom and master bath, speakers in the garage, and on the back deck, all on separate zones.

I've run about 2 miles of cable (cat5 and rg6) throughout the house to create a communications backbone.

I'm probably missing a few things, but the summary of it is that the houses mostly adapt around us for things like lights and hvac. We can listen to music anyplace we happen to be ( there is almost always music playing at our house).

The current incarnation of the system is the result of hacking around with HA for about a dozen years now trying different things to see what works. When I first started doing this my wife was basically like 'NFW' and now she wouldn't want to live without it.


I used a combination of Arduino boards (Atmega controllers), Velleman dimmers and a Velleman relay board to control all the lights in my home, with pushbutton switches that have feedback LEDs. Then I wrote an application on top of that (running off an AT91SAM9 dev board) that implements mood combinations, also exposing a protocolbuffers/http based API (events are IP multicast) that I use to control everything with my Android phone. I also use it to configure the Arduino's (and upgrade them remotely using avrdude). It's still not completely finished, but so far it's been working quite well for me. The central application runs in an OSGi container, and exposes every light and mood as a service, so I would like to plug some light sensors into it so I can let it control some lights automatically (for example the one at the front door). I was lucky enough that I knew what I was going to need so all the wires were in place when I needed them. For future additions I think I'm going to have a look at Z-Wave or Zigbee.


I take my hat off to you, sir.


what brand of pushbutton switches with feedback LEDs did you use?


I used switches from CJC systems (a small Belgian company, a friend of mine designs prints for them, so I was able to get my hands on a few of them for the sake of my "experiment").

http://www.cjcsystems.com/index.php?page=Products&catid=...


cool thanks!


Haven't done my whole apartment (yet), but I built an RFID & HTTP lock for the front door. I can use my Octopus card or iPhone app to unlock the door. See my blog post here: http://www.f-77.com/2010/11/05/octopus-card-door-lock/


I live in a house with 4 other computer science students, which should answer your question pretty well.

About a year ago we designed a system/protocol called 'SHET' (https://github.com/18sg/SHET) which consists of a central server that links many clients together. Each client can present many properties (get/set), actions (like methods, that can be called), and events (that other clients can listen for). This was implemented by me in python/twisted and makes controlling/monitoring computers around the house really easy.

About a month ago, someone wrote a system called SHETSource (https://github.com/18sg/SHETSource) which allows us to easily connect arduinos onto SHET. Since we don't all leave our computers on all the time, we have one arduino connected to the 'server' (old macbook) near the switch, which arduinos in our rooms connect to via the spare wires in the ethernet (if you only want 100Mbps, two of the wires are spare).

In my room at least, I have a pir, 3 hacked light controllers, a servo and two switches connected via SHETSource, which allows me to write all the logic in python.

Basically, we've written a hacking framework.


I played around with X10 networking (device control using the in-house power wiring as a message bus) years ago, for home automation. Fun stuff, and usable even today.

Recently, I've started working on an Arduino-driven thermostat replacement using XBees to get around the problem of running wiring in a house without any conduits (and not wanting to run plenum-rated cabling in the heating ducts). It's actually pretty simple stuff, with off-the-shelf ICs (and I'm no hardware guy) and a little programming. The biggest challenge was figuring out the existing thermostat and HVAC wiring; I knew practically nothing about this stuff previously.

Some folks have gone quite far with this kind of thing: http://diy-zoning.sourceforge.net/Advanced/faq.html

(I particularly like the idea of using R/C servos to provide rudimentary zone control.)


I played around with X10 networking (device control using the in-house power wiring as a message bus) years ago, for home automation

I had lots of fun with X10 back in college, tricking out my apartment to have voice control over the lights and drapes. The X10 computer interface combined with Homeseer allowed me to create pretty complex "scenes" such as the always popular "seduce" command which would close the drapes, gradually dim the lights to 15% in 1% increments over a 1 hour interval, and start playing a playlist of mp3s that sadly started with Sarah Mclachlan and ended with Barry White.


I submitted my simple arduino thermostat a while back to hack-a-day and it got a lot of good feedback. Extending it has been on my todo list, but then again, that list is evergrowing.

Link to my blog documenting the very simple thermostat : http://undiscoveredfeatures.blogspot.com/2010/08/thermostat....


I got a TED (www.theenergydetective.com) and took 3 years to get from a $250 electric bill to a $40. Later I did a similar thing for heat efficiency. Though I suppose that's not what you were asking about.


Awesome improvement! Wattvision began as a hack -- getting data from my electric meter without altering or affecting it in any way, and making consumer install super simple. You can get the TED -> wattvision uploader from our site, too. :)


How open are these solutions in terms of getting access to the raw data stream? TED seems to require proprietary Windows software and I didn't see mention of an API. The usage data is nice, but it'd be nicer to correlate with other data streams.


I just bought a house (chronicled it at http://blackrimglasses.com). My last townhouse was also automated. Here's the general setup:

We use Insteon for the automation system, hooked into a MacMini running Indigo from Perceptive Automation.

I have the system setup so it has "states" that the house is in, ie: home, baby in bed, etc. The "actions" you can do are contingent on conditions. So if my wife and I are closing up the house, but the baby is asleep, it will keep the light near his room from going on.

For whole home audio we have a Sonos, with five zones, including our patio. The Mac Mini system serves the audio. It also has AirVideo transcoding on it for our iPads. We use iphones and ipads to control everything (two of each).

When we bought the house, we put Cat-6 in every room, so most everything runs off hard line Ethernet. We have three dual band Airport Extreme's in the house for wireless.

The thermostat and sprinklers run off the insteon device and are controlled by the MacMini. Our stereo (Denon 3808CI) has a web and socket interface, so that is controlled remotely fairly often.

Our DirectTV's have the "whole home DVR" thing, which uses a MOCA coax adapter on each box to create its own network. We have two DVR's and two regular recievers.

I haven't yet done cameras and such, or motion detectors but we plan on it. Currently for occupancy sensing, I use a hack to get the locations of our iPhones from MobileMe.


My first usage of twitter was for sending DM's to my window air conditioner. At the time I didn't have a smart phone, so using twitter via SMS was my means of communication.

Soldered the air conditioner remote to a relay connected to the parallel port on my computer. Whenever the script pulled down new DM's from my username with special commands, it would briefly flip the relay turning the ac on or off. Also set up a scheduler to turn it on 30 minutes before i woke up.


I moved the kitchen and removed some walls.


In a previous rented place I had a Misterhouse rig hooked up to some X10, Ethernet throughout the house and several MythTV servers so people could watch TV in different rooms. Then some people moved out, non-geeky people moved in who would routinely break stuff and I ended up with just me and my flatmate having hackery stuff going on in our rooms and some in the living room.

As the lock on my room was a bit crappy I had an SGI Indy with an Indycam pointed at the door taking photos every few seconds, and a script on a FreeBSD box that would check for differences, notify me of any changes (this was before I knew about ZoneAlarm) and string the differing ones into a gif with a timestamp. I caught a flatmate going into my room a few times to 'borrow' some things without telling me.

In my current house we've had the mythtv setup going but have moved to a Mac Mini downstairs with EyeTV. The house is a bit too small to justify X10 everywhere, and I have too many other DIY tasks I'm trying to avoid to be able to get away with putting it in :)

I do have a wireless electricty usage meter though, haven't quite figured out how to log the stats yet.


You should check out Andy Stanford Clark from IBM - afaik he uses MQ technologies hooked up to various sensors to control and monitor much of his 16th century house on the Isle of Wight (UK)- http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/06/things_that_tw...


+1, I went to to a talk by him a few years ago and from memory some of the quirkier things he had hooked up were automated mousetrap notifcations and an ambient orb that lets you know how much energy your house is using.


I had X10 all over the place when I was living in the US. It's quite cheap and not too bad of an investment, especially if you are just renting the place.

Now I am back in Europe and I left all that equipment behind in Wisconsin? Is anybody interested? I was planning to sell it on craigslist but maybe a fellow HNer will have a better use.


Totally interested, yes. My email is in my profile.


email sent.


Would it be possible to half and half? :D

I actually happen to live in Wisconsin (Milwaukee)


Haven't done my whole apartment (yet), but I built an RFID & HTTP lock for the front door. I can use my Octopus card or iPhone app to unlock. See my blog post here: http://www.f-77.com/2010/11/05/octopus-card-door-lock/


I did our home lighting, using Insteon w. a few random x10s still around, using Indigo on a Mini, which is connected to our home ent. system. Hacking is at another level when you need to make sure you don't electrocute yourself or burn the house down!

The best hack, imo, is a simple one - running a HD projector and 72" screen. It's only for movies and sporting events, b/c it's too weird to watch anything non-cinematic on a big screen.

Finally, it's not a hack, but i'll throw in a plug for the Logitech Harmony remote - it's the best we've found for set up and control of our HT system. I can't really comment on it directly, though, because my wife is in charge of setting it up;)


Does managing to keep your mum outta your room for a month counts? It's a big deal, I tell you. Especially if you are a messy teens. Tricks like make it smell with your shoes work well.


As a teen, I did quite a bit of work to keep my family out of my room. I come from a very large family, and I'd managed to turn my room into the cleanest and quietest place in the house, which meant everyone else wanted to spend a lot of time there (defeating the purpose of my clean, quiet space.)

I arranged the furniture such that anyone entering the room would have to walk through a narrow space between a dresser and wall, then walk all the way around my bed through another narrow space, before they could get to the open part of my room. I furthermore made sure there were no good places to sit except for my computer chair (by raising the bed to an uncomfortable height, and leaving piles of school papers stacked on my other chair, which I could easily move if I wanted company but nobody else would've moved.)

The best part was, I didn't have to make my room messy, smelly, or uncomfortable for me. I just made it uncomfortable for other people to spend time in the room without my intentionally creating space for them.


"I'd managed to turn my room into the cleanest and quietest place in the house, which meant everyone else wanted to spend a lot of time there"

How true! My home office was also my workshop/server room. I got tired of the heat, noise and technorubble, so I gave away the desk, moved the servers to the (much cooler) basement, and stripped the whole room down to just a sofa and mostly empty bookshelf. Now it's in high demand, and I only use it when I'm home alone. But at the same time, I got rid of all our towers and switched everyone to wireless laptops, so it's not too hard to find a quiet corner anywhere else in the house to work.


Man that is such an inspiration. I am gonna hack around too. I wanna have a minimal room - so I can focus and enjoy being around.

Right now it's a typical teen's super messy room. Hmm Where to start? =/


Jon Oxer (https://qht.co/user?id=jonoxer) has and was working on a TV show about it (http://www.superhouse.tv/).

He's documented some of it on his blog: http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/category/DIY

(I thought he had documented more but I can't find it. :) )


Where are the http://www.gridspy.co.nz/ guys, this is right up their alley...


How much time do you have? :)

Great resources:

http://www.cocoontech.com (forum dedicated to exactly your question)

http://www.charmedquark.com (the software package I chose to buy, though there are many others)

There's also some coverage on AVScience, but cocoontech has largely taken over, IMO.




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