A peek inside an automated home

If you're curious about what home automation is all about, Matt Bendiksen has posted two articles that will give you a good feel for the type of challenges, tools, and techniques that the advanced hobbyist automator faces.

The first is Which Way Did She Go?—a discussion of how to use wireless motion detectors to infer the direction a person is walking. This is useful information because your automation system can utilize it to turn on lights that the person might need when they arrive at their destination, or to turn off lights in the rooms or areas of the home they've left. The key to a truly smart home is having your automation system make the right decisions without any input from you, and Matt's discussion is a basic technique that can be useful for many situations.

The second article, Control Your Home with Phlink demonstrates how Bendiksen's home automation software, Indigo, can be integrated with other products using AppleScript. I'm a Phlink user, so it's of special interest to me, but again the general principles could be applied to PhoneValet or other products that integrate your Mac and your telephone.

Both of these articles are excerpted from Smart Home Hacks. If what you read on Matt's site piques your interest, picking up a copy of the book might be a good next step (thank you very much). And of course, stay tuned here for more smart home news and tips.