So I have recently begun playing with Ardunio circuits. If you don’t know what Ardunio is have a look at this page http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/Introduction for an introduction. Basically said it is a way one can interact with the physical world more than one can with their desktop computer.
In the first experiment I did which you can watch by going to my article here I made a small project which got some LED’s to light up when a button was pressed. The amazing thing was that the LED’s were not controlled by the button itself, but the button was an input into the program and turning the LED’s on and off were an output. What this means is that a computer program was actually controlling the way that the LED’s were lighting up, pressing the button caused the program running on the Ardunio chip to execute different instructions which caused different lights to light up.
Then the other experiment I did I did not yet managed to create a blog write up for it, but it’s on YouTube, and yes I have noticed that there is vertical syndrome on my videos. This was because I was using my cellphone to record the videos, and this will be corrected in any future recordings I do. You can view the video at this link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmm0aY1lNiU.
So I was thinking what are some real life applications of this kind of technology? One of the things that sprung to my mind are to control things in ones home. I had these crazy ideas flying through my mind, like locking and unlocking the door to the house. Turning on your coffee to brew in the morning, then you can wake up to the smell of the coffee brewing. Other ideas like controlling the lights in your house by turning them on and off at specified times, you could even program the lights to behave in a certain way, so that when you go on holiday your home lights still come on to make it as if you are still around.
Then a friend of mine showed me to a website called Control 4 (http://www.control4.com/) which implements controls to ones house. These systems really look fancy, and include being able to control when your fountain turns on or off. Control your CCTV camera, unlock doors, monitor when a child returns home (the child must unlock the door with their PIN code). The list of uses is endless. These are the types of projects I am thinking about, automating your home.
It brings me back to a vision I had when I was at school, that was of a huge house, or call it a mansion if you will, which had this lounge, and there was a control where when activated it would move the lounge couches to the edge of the room and uncover the pool in the middle of the room.
What ideas do you have of things you would like to automate around your home?