I'm back

Yes, it's been a while since I've updated here. We sold our house last year and it took a good month to strip out all vestiges of home automation. Nothing was left except dual Cat-5 to every room homerun back to a patch panel in the office closet. In the meantime, we're in a rental in one of the most overheated markets in Silicon Valley, waiting for things to cool off a bit (so far it's not!) This limits what automation I can do, but when you're used to living in an automated house, anything less seems like the stone age. We're relying a lot more on wifi than before when everything at our old house was hardwired. I did drag Cat-5 along the baseboards to link the living room, office and master with GigE, and I also got a few things up and running pretty quickly: - HA and media server were brought back up. - Installed a couple outdoor IP cameras and recording is handled by Blue Iris (Avermedia NV3000 has been retired). - Squeezeboxes are back online - A couple Infocasts were brought back up helping with zoned TTS announcements - Only ZWave is being used - only modules, no switches - and no UPB or X10 as I don't want to deal with powerline signal issues - 1Wire serial adapter for with a couple sensors attached - Humidity, pressure and light level sensing is online via Arduinos - Bluetooth presence and RFID are online - X10 wireless motion and DS10A's are online via the W800 - Installed a temporary outdoor antenna and SageTV is running - Some current sensing is running on most AV equipment - the usual xPL apps for GMail, GCal, noise sensing, gamepad contact closure - Voice and IM interfaces I've added a few new things: - the obvious one is Blue Iris (BI) because the Avermedia software I had couldn't handle more than 1 IP cam - xPL interface to BI JSON interface - added MQTT to my automation engine - converted BI interface to MQTT instead of xPL - converted Arduino script from xPL to MQTT - HDMI-CEC control via Raspberry Pi & Python A few things I miss: - IR control - VOIP intercom - Power monitoring I've been playing around with some cloud API devices and doing other random things I'll hopefully get around to mentioning in later posts.