About

About Me

I started my journey into home automation at a home theater and security installation company in 2005. There my job was primarily to program fancy remotes (Logitech, RTI, URC, Marantz, etc) and calibrate TV colors. Towards the end I was learning how to program AMX devices and other lesser known brands. I also did many full installations and programmed a lot of DSC security systems. After I finished up at university I became a software engineer in a field outside of home automation, but I have still kept doing it as a hobby.

My personal setup started in 2012 with a 3M-50 wifi thermostat, dsc alarm system, and a home made controller in Java. I used sphinx4 to do speech to text for voice control since the Amazon Echo didn’t exist yet. I very quickly added an Insteon USB PLM and a couple dimmers after I got the core up and running. I was used to Insteon from the HA company I worked for. We used Insteon for lower budget projects and Lutron for higher budget projects.

In 2015 I got an Amazon Echo and expanded the dimmer collection to most of my house. I also started using OpenHAB as the controller instead of my own solution. This was when I really started automating things by using the door and motion sensors from the alarm system to make decisions on when to turn lights on and off. The layout of the place I was living in made it hard to completely automate all lights based on my moment.

In 2018 I moved to a new place, got a lot more motion and door sensors, and automated most lights. I only controlled lights by voice to turn lights off when watching TV or when leaving my place. I also added in some other smart devices I will talk about in other posts. At this point I did give Home Assistant a shot, but I felt like OpenHAB was a lot more powerful at the time.

In 2022 I moved again to my current place. It’s a large 3-story house with a whole bunch of new automation challenges I’m tackling. The biggest - everything must now pass the WAF, or Wife Acceptance Factor. I also took this time to start trying out new technology to see what has changed over the years. Based on common posts on Reddit asking about where to start or some less common usecases, I decided to document my latest foray into automating my house.

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