Zabaware Support Forums
Zabaware Forums => Ultra Hal 7.0 => Topic started by: rock1star2 on October 30, 2010, 02:38:46 pm
-
I know this is my first post I forgot my last username and dont have the email anymore but I've been around a few years. Anyways I use the X10.com hardware with my Hal Jenny and I've made my house into an awesome smart house I'm posting this because their having ridiculous sales and even name your own price I got hundreds of dollars worth of stuff for fifty bucks. And if you need any help on setting up your smart house just message me.
-
:D Hello, We are very interested in your smart house. What all do you have running in your smart house? My wife Diana is blind and has several talking clocks and a talking microwave oven. It has been a dream of ours to have an interactive house. Very Sincerely, Dan & Diana
-
hi what hardware do you have in your smart house? i am very intrested and the website is very cheap too.
Cheers
andy
-
Guys having played with assorted home automation for years I can tell you that unless you have a very small house with a simple electrical system and/or do not mind a intermittendly working system stay away from x10.
x10 is a very simple protocol but it is highly subject to noise on your electrical lines. Common items like computers AV etc produce this type of noise and will cause all sorts of unreliable results. I like many started out with x10 and when it works it is pretty good but you quickly get anoyed with having things that work only some of the time. If you want to go into this world the cheapest way that still is reliable is probably insteon. There are less actual component options but there are enough to get the basics done, the hardware does not break regularly, and the protocol is very reliable. I have used zigbee zwave and a few others and overall tend to stick to insteon.
That said I do have a few x10 devices still. Particularly they have some cool RF devices that are very helpful and work reasonably well if you get a addon antenna. I also have some of the x10 pro switches for large amp switches like my pool filter that are on dedicated circuit and thus reliable with x10. Past that all my windows sensors, alarm, switches, thermostats etc all are different types but Insteon is by far the bulk of them.
I happy to talk more about this if anybody is interested just message me. In fact one of my key interestest in HAL is trying to figure out how to integrate voice control for my house.
-
ZWave is much better than X10... I used X10 for a while with a program called HomeSeer. Had lots of problems with the X10 being flaky... switched over to ZWave and they work every time.
-
Jake,
What software program are you now using with Zwave that allows for similar control that one can get with X-10?
Not just timers but the use of conditional expressions, AND, OR, etc., weekdays, weekends, after sunset, etc.
Just curious...Thanks!
-
2 Corinthians.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=jaredisone@wordpress.com&src=IE-SearchBox
-
hi all as i am intrested in the full smart house system i would like the end result for hal to control every thing in my house the main thing i am worried about at the moment is i have just moved to cyprus and i have a little 2 year old boy and i was wondering if any of you knew which was the best safty pool alarm incase the boy fell in the pool and where i sould get it from i know this is a little off the point but this is imprtant to me and as this fourm as help me with a lot i was hoping some fou the tec guys could help assist me on this.
cheers
Andy
-
You really do not need nor want to rely on a pool alarm as YOU and your Partner ARE THE BEST ALARM YOU CAN GET!!
A two year old should NEVER be left alone anywhere near that pool...not even for a second!
The very next thing you should consider is teaching the infant to not fear the water and to roll on his or her back and
stay that way until someone comes to assist. There are programs available that demonstrat and teach this to infants
younger than yours.
I am not trying to rain on your parade nor avoid your question but we are talking about the life of an infant child, something
far more precious or deserving than to be monitored by a $24 piece of hardware that can fail!
Best wishes!
-
no i under stand that he should not be left a lone near the pool and he can swim as that was the first thing we had to do before the move whe had him in infant lessons its just as you may well know whet there is 3 kids its a little difficult to watch all every minuet of the day and even tho they are told not to go near the pool with out an adult present dose not mean they listen all the time (kids will be kids) lol it is purely a extra scurity percaution as like you said you can never be to carful with childen not soming we will be reliening on lol which is why we want the the best not the cheapest its should never be used but i would like the peace of mind that it is there worst comes to worst
thanks for your reply
Andy
-
@Art... I still use HomeSeer... http://www.homeseer.com/ (http://www.homeseer.com/)
I spent a couple years a while back writing all kinds of webpages to control all my stuff and purchase several of the 3COM Audrey Internet Appliances when the bottom fell out of that market, (they sold for $500 new, I got 7 of them for around $80 each). There was a lot of people doing the HomeSeer/Audrey touch screen thing then and we all hacked them severely to get just what we wanted for automated control of lights, security, cams, home theater, Music, slideshows, etc. You could easily interface HAL with HomeSeer with just a little code. I definately had my HAL character Audrey involved, but after a while, I turned of the voice recognition because me and Audrey started sounding like we were arguing with each other... funny, but you had to be there. I still am running my old system, but I'm giving a lot of thought to updating to the latest HomeSeer and building a whole new system, (i love projects). The new HomeSeer, plugins, etc, look a lot more refined then back when I was tinkering around with it and you could probably do a lot right out of the box with a few added plugins.
I ramble... :-X
Software... HomeSeer
Hardware... ZWave
Fun.... coding in HTML, javascript, vbscript to make custom webpages.
-
hi all, what kind of hardware / software will i need to get hal to run my A/C units and is there a why i can get him to turn them on while i am out and about ie by twitter or some osrt of android app???
andy help would be appricated.
Cheers
Andy
-
Ok so a few items.
Best pool alarm = fence. The first thing I did when my son was born was fence the pool. I also use a pool alarm I believe it is a patrol but that is more to keep my neigbors kids from swiming at night.
Zwave is good no doubt. I went with insteon due to pricing and unit selection. I have played with homeseer, misterhome, girder, HCA. Overall I stuck with mControl because it was fairly easy to use and for the price had alot of options. Issue with mControl is that it is harder to integrate than something like homeseer.
I use mControl to manage my AC and furnace plus my whole house fan. The thermostats are proliphix and I like them better than my prior attempts with Venstar and RCS.
Anyway I am starting to figure out how to do plugins for Hal. Once I get it down I will likely try to integrate it to mControl so if it works out I will post it. Now if I can only find the time to get it done ;)
-
@Art... I still use HomeSeer... http://www.homeseer.com/ (http://www.homeseer.com/)
I spent a couple years a while back writing all kinds of webpages to control all my stuff and purchase several of the 3COM Audrey Internet Appliances when the bottom fell out of that market, (they sold for $500 new, I got 7 of them for around $80 each). There was a lot of people doing the HomeSeer/Audrey touch screen thing then and we all hacked them severely to get just what we wanted for automated control of lights, security, cams, home theater, Music, slideshows, etc. You could easily interface HAL with HomeSeer with just a little code. I definately had my HAL character Audrey involved, but after a while, I turned of the voice recognition because me and Audrey started sounding like we were arguing with each other... funny, but you had to be there. I still am running my old system, but I'm giving a lot of thought to updating to the latest HomeSeer and building a whole new system, (i love projects). The new HomeSeer, plugins, etc, look a lot more refined then back when I was tinkering around with it and you could probably do a lot right out of the box with a few added plugins.
I ramble... :-X
Software... HomeSeer
Hardware... ZWave
Fun.... coding in HTML, javascript, vbscript to make custom webpages.
I would love to know how to integrate Hal with Homeseer - is that code available somewhere?
-
@Art... I still use HomeSeer... http://www.homeseer.com/ (http://www.homeseer.com/)
I spent a couple years a while back writing all kinds of webpages to control all my stuff and purchase several of the 3COM Audrey Internet Appliances when the bottom fell out of that market, (they sold for $500 new, I got 7 of them for around $80 each). There was a lot of people doing the HomeSeer/Audrey touch screen thing then and we all hacked them severely to get just what we wanted for automated control of lights, security, cams, home theater, Music, slideshows, etc. You could easily interface HAL with HomeSeer with just a little code. I definately had my HAL character Audrey involved, but after a while, I turned of the voice recognition because me and Audrey started sounding like we were arguing with each other... funny, but you had to be there. I still am running my old system, but I'm giving a lot of thought to updating to the latest HomeSeer and building a whole new system, (i love projects). The new HomeSeer, plugins, etc, look a lot more refined then back when I was tinkering around with it and you could probably do a lot right out of the box with a few added plugins.
I ramble... :-X
Software... HomeSeer
Hardware... ZWave
Fun.... coding in HTML, javascript, vbscript to make custom webpages.
I would love to know how to integrate Hal with Homeseer - is that code available somewhere?
Hi Storm.
have you read this yet?
http://www.homeseer.com/wiki/index.php/Creating_A_Script
Jerry 8)
-
Also check out the HomeSeer forum...
http://board.homeseer.com/ (http://board.homeseer.com/)
Back when, that's where I and a bunch of others would hack out our code.
WARNING... I spent an unbelievable number of hours over the approximate 2 years I was playing around with that stuff. I would recommend that most people just go with the stuff/plugins that are already available and supported UNLESS you really like projects, and in that case I say hit the forum. When I was doing all the coding it was mostly because there wasn't the things available that I wanted at the time and now many of them are.
As for all of the code that i have on my HomeSeer system... it was made very unfriendly to make it easier for me to make it very specific to my situation and would not work outside of my system. But I did work with several projects on the forum with others... the main one was a project called "Now Playing". But again, that was years ago and the last I knew, one of the other guys on the forum that I communicated with often, picked up my code, added to it, and made a plugin that they were selling back then. So my final advice would be...
- Use as much of the ready made (work out of the box) stuff as you can.
- And if you like projects... hit the forum and see what happens.