Let it be known that Teamcornell is down with the home automation – kinda.

We use a Vera MiCasa Zwave home controller which is a little box that you can plug in to your home network that looks like another router, wifi, or cable modem. That controller runs a little website on your home network that allows you to switch lights, lock doors, or see if something was left open. There are phone apps that allow us to do things easily even when we aren’t home.

“Why, who, what is Zwave?” you may ask. Zwave is a low power, mesh networking, radio protocol thingee. It’s more like bluetooth than wifi. It’s a bit tricky to “pair” devices when once you do they stay paired. Why should you use zwave instead of “wifi enabled lightbulbs” and the like? For one, wifi (some times unless it’s fancy) can be slowed down to the same speed as the slowest device. That one lightbulb forcing your wifi to talk slower means your movie stream may stop working. Also if you /like/ adding home automation it’s going to be a real pain to fix 30 wifi devices when you replace your wifi router in two years or get a new internet service. And finally why you should avoid giving IOT devices your password is that wifi lightbulb could (even accidentally) share that with anyone (everyone) on the internet.

Vera products are not the prettiest or most polished but adding new devices is easy and it is /fun/ to control your house. Easily one of the top most rewarding home improvement projects is to add remote control to your house. Late at night without getting out of bed I can turn off all the nights or close the garage door I left open. Or turn on the heat at 4am when you wake up to San Diego’s one day a year of cold weather.

This is an important sticking point for /why/ we’ve sacrificed a bit of product polish, ease, and packaging:

We are certain that we can still control my house /when/ the company that made is disappears. Notice that I said /when/ and not /if/. People get real confused when you say “if” something might disappear and they assume that it’ll be around for at least a life time. The rush to make everything simpler and online is unfortunately also coupled with the rush to make everything a “service for life (charged monthly until we’re bought out)” . We can still use our home controller when the company dies just by connection to our Home Network (which we can do from far away with a VPN) and then use the webpage to operate the house.

This one simple rule should be like the second or third most important thing you think about when selecting your technology (behind “is this cheap” or “is this cool or pretty”).

An easy way to test your new tech, right after you buy it and while you can still return it, is to just physically unplug your internet from the wall. Pretend the internet was out for a bit and then water your lawn or unlock your front door.

Our setup can do that and that’s worth rolling our own deployment.

Also for computer nerds it is trivial to write your own programs that control your house through a web API. This is very handy when I’m typing away at a console and want to turn on the lights:
matt@rosalind:$ vera on “blueroom lamp”
*click*

It works with google eavesdropping home speakers, phones and watches and it’s oddly satisfying to do yard work and feel a buzz on your phone when you’ve stepped in front of a motion detector that’s watching for snakes coming in under the gate door. It may be a horrible dystopian panopticon future we live in but this slice is /ours/ and we control a fair bit of it.

If you have any questions about home automation let us know and we can share what to avoid and what has worked.

We got a collection of door locks, thermostats, window sensors, motion/heat/moisture detectors, garage door controllers, light switches, irrigation controllers, cameras. The whole thing.