What is the Single Coolest Thing You Do with HomeSeer?

[outbackrob]

These are a few of my favorite things....

1) Being able to shut down the whole house and secure it for the night with the press of a button on the remote by the bed.

2) Haviing Rosie (Homeseer) announce inside and outside the house when someone (or some thing) has entered the back yard, driveway, garage, back porch or front porch.

3) Rosie gets us up each day, tells us the weather and our appointments and gives us a countdown to when we have to leave in order to make it to school/work on time.

4) Almost fully automated Halloween front door. Kids can choose a happy Peanuts themed experience or a scary LOUD experience by pressing the appropriate BRS on a sign by the sidewalk. Traffic light changes from red to a green arrow for happy and a yellow caution arrow for scary! Rosie lets us know inside whether to put on the scary mask or the happy one. Working on an automagic candy dispenser.... Might have it ready for 2012.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQFJtcgCtJk&feature=plcp

5) If the sun is out and the temp is above 90, we can walk out on the back porch, and the fan and the cooling misters will start up and our music will start playing out there.

6) LEDAM shows us who is calling, time, temp, WOTD, and breaking news and mesages all slilently while we are watching movies or relaxing outside.

Pretty unsophisticated stuff, but it is really nice. Friends and neighbors love it. My son's friends love to come over and open and close all the appliances so they will make noises....and to have a conversation with Rosie. HS is fun for everybody.

[wpiman]

Yes or a video!

I have a voice for the newspapers.... Maybe my wife will narrate.

[macromark]

1)
4) Almost fully automated Halloween front door. Kids can choose a happy Peanuts themed experience or a scary LOUD experience by pressing the appropriate BRS on a sign by the sidewalk. Traffic light changes from red to a green arrow for happy and a yellow caution arrow for scary! Rosie lets us know inside whether to put on the scary mask or the happy one. Working on an automagic candy dispenser.... Might have it ready for 2012.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQFJtcgCtJk&feature=plcp

Very Cool

[Michael McSharry]

While they are things I do but not with Homeseer, and there is more than one, they are in the spirit of things one can do with some smarts added to the home.

Save Dollars/Resources
-----------------------
Irrigate lawn and garden based upon past weather and forecasted precipitation
Calculate consumption rates for awareness and show short term and long term usage trends on digital frame for electricity, water, propane
Turn on hot water recirc pump based upon lifestyle shower usage including impromoto scheduling
Track water usage to discover overflows and stuck fill valves
Water detection sensors and alarms at likely under-house leakage points
Turn off lights in low-use areas (e.g. garden shed) each evening
Instrument HVAC data to collect operating characteristics over time
Remotely control HVAC thermostat just in case I forget when I leave

Make Life Easier
----------------
Turn on 600 ft sequence of road Lights ahead of direction of motion and off when passed by
Adjust TV volume up/down to compensate for noise of fireplace fan as it goes on/low/high
Turn on/off hallway lights based upon direction of motion. Lights are ramped to ease dark-light transition
Turn on/off staircase lights based upon vibration on first step
Rip DVDs and CDs for access without need to manage physical media
Play TV/DVR on computer screen window via Slingbox
Use DVR to timeshift viewing with remote access to add new recordings
Control AV equipment with consolidated Harmony remote
Turn off bedroom space heater when temperature beyond sleep conditions (due to falling asleep)
Project LED beam onto windshield on car in garage to know when to stop
Use Caller ID to lookup name via local or web search and show on desktop
Matrix switch audio for listening in desired set of rooms
Let Roomba do its thing

Make Life Safer
--------------
Short siren at house when first road checkpoint passed to provide awareness of entry
View cameras around house perimeter at two house locations
View cameras inside house at remote house location
Report open exterior doors at nighttime. Bedroom Audrey top LED and screen used for reporting

Just because I can
-------------------
Temperature of each room shown superimposed on floorplan updated on digital picture frame
Show weather staellite time-lapsed loop on digital picture frame for two different locations
Contol Spykee robot (Motion, Video, Audio) for survellience and to torment animals
Track pond temperature to know how hungry the fish will be
Detect vehicle presence using RFID
Detect vehicle newly in garage based upon radiated engine heat
Detect presence of someone at front door using radar
Detecting obstacle distance using sonar, but no practical use identified
Report when mailbox door is open for mail delivery
CNN breaking new announcements, but format changed so often I stopped using it
Internet Joke of the Day to TTS, but it has also gone by the wayside
Collecting and trending remote environmental data (ground moisture, humidty, temperature) via internet with WebControl

Things I know others have done - at least what comes to mind now
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Snapshot photos at doorways
Use doorbell button to activate voice or other novel greeting
Whole house water turnoff on leak detection
Control bathroom fan based upon humidity level
Aquarium monitoring, water conditioning and feeding
In/on-bed sensing with pressue pads for event conditions
Bar code scan to help with grocery list

[Guest]

I have an Arduino Uno that I've played a little bit with... having a good deal of inputs and outputs I could easily program it and have my UPB I/O controller sense contact open / closures as well as initiate closures to trigger the Arduino. Is anyone doing anything with HS and Arduino that was made easier or possible using the board? The ease of integrating servo controllers is something that interests me. I foresee a Pee Wee Herman kitchen fixing breakfast in the mornings before too long :-)

[rmasonjr]

I have an Arduino Uno that I've played a little bit with... having a good deal of inputs and outputs I could easily program it and have my UPB I/O controller sense contact open / closures as well as initiate closures to trigger the Arduino. Is anyone doing anything with HS and Arduino that was made easier or possible using the board? The ease of integrating servo controllers is something that interests me. I foresee a Pee Wee Herman kitchen fixing breakfast in the mornings before too long :-)

I have an Arduino Uno with a relay shield that turns some amplifiers off/on via HS. I use scripting for now, but am moving it over into a plug-in little by little.

I also have another Arduino Uno on my test bench with 3 ultrasonic distance sensors coming from china. This will be used to monitor the cat food and dog food bins with alerts via HS when its time to get more pet food.

I have yet another Uno that is waiting to be hooked up to a water flow meter to monitor usage.

[Rotech]

I think ,the icing on the cake for me is, to control any device, any event, any info you need thru voice recognition. Currently I have a open mic connected to a AP800 with Eco concellation, I can control ligths, ask for info from the net, chk my door and windows, activate my alarm, check my emails with just my voice.

My setup is not 100% reliable, but with the 75% that I have Iam happy with it. Every time I ask for a task it answers differently because of the BLRamdom plug I just installed. Friends just freek out

[nsisman]

just a few of mine

1. ds10a's on mouse traps in the garage and shed so the traps don't get stinky after a capture !

2. ms13 under lid of greenbox tells me when it has been emptied at the street

3. ds10's on all garage doors and shed door act as alarms when doors are opened and also chime every 30 minutes until doors are closed.

4. palmpad on kitchen wall for 1 to 8 minute timer announcement

[Steve Q]

A very simple but very valuable Homeseer event is my Medication reminder. A MS16A motion sensor inside the medicine cabinet triggers a reminder announcement if the door is not opened before 10AM.

Steve Q

[macromark]

Water usage monitoring.

Regards
Michael

How did you do this? Which plug-in and which hardware did you employ?

[mmn]

How did you do this? Which plug-in and which hardware did you employ?

The ideas came from others. I just did the implementation. There's a discussion of it here:
http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=153566

ACRF2, DS10A, water meter with reed switch, some scripts I wrote to log usage, and importing logs into a spreadsheet to use the graph tools.

Regards
Michael

[Rick Tinker]

I suggested to Mark that he start a thread where we can discuss "how" some of these are done - I for one would like to know where people find/get some of the sensors that they are using (e.g. water flow amount, dog bowl level... love it).

Until then, I also could not contribute a single "favorite", so I will also list a bunch of them, but if I were to segment them to highlight a few, then it would have to be these:

• Most Unusual
  • I built a box with a coin acceptor, that has an X-10 scene controller on the front. You press one of the scene controller buttons to select a category, then drop in a quarter, and HomeSeer speaks two quotes from that category - e.g. humor, Star Trek quotes, riddles, etc. I need to replace a couple of parts to make it Z-Wave compatible now that I no longer use X-10.
• High WAF, WAF Favorites
  • Driveway detectors that announce when a vehicle is coming or leaving. With a 600' driveway we can be there to greet people.
  • Laundry reminders - time based (low complexity) but simple to use and effective. Press a button to start the wash or dryer timer, and when it expires (the load should be done) then a reminder is played every 10 minutes until it is taken care of by another button turning off the timer.
• High on my 'Like' list
  • Reminder to take the garbage and recycling to the curb.
  • Announcements twice a day (morning and evening) of the day's appointments or the appointments for tomorrow. (Each family member has their own Google calendar, and HomeSeer reads all of the appointments and reads whose appointment it is first.)
  • Telling me that the security system cannot be armed because one of the garage doors is open.
  • The various events that turn off lights that the kids love to leave on.
• My most probable favorite
  • Using a Way2Call and HSPhone, blocked caller ID calls are sent away without the phones in the house having even rung once, out of area callers are sent to voicemail but can ring the phones if they enter a phone number we know, and most of all, other phone numbers of solicitors are put in to the address book and are configured to play a message stating that we do not accept calls from solicitors, or in several cases, HomeSeer just hangs up on them - and we never hear the phone ring with these because the PBX is set to not ring through the first three rings and by then HSPhone has CallerID information and can handle the call properly. Those solicitors are ANNOYING and the ones from another country ignore our do-not-call list.

Some of the rest....

• Garbage and recycle reminders will be enhanced (as they once were) with RFID so that we do not have to manually turn off the reminder - if the garbage can or recycle bin are not detected in range of one of the readers, then it is at the curb and the reminder will turn off.
• Security system automatically armed if all of the doors and windows are closed. Also based upon guest mode and other factors.
• HVAC (3 thermostats) intelligently controlled. Changes when security is armed/disarmed, whether I have a single room air conditioner operating (changes setpoint for that floor), changes to OFF if one of the house doors or windows is open for more than 5 minutes and then returns to its previous state when it is closed, and (big time love) puts the thermostats into AUX mode if the temperature drops below 38 outside so the heat pumps are not constantly reversing to thaw and struggling to work in cold weather, and heat pump recovery mode that reaches a set temperature we want at a set time by incrementing the temperature 1 degree per hour so that the Aux heat is not forced to kick in unnecessarily.
• Floor flex sensors are used to trigger when the hot water circulating pump is turned on - otherwise it can take a couple of minutes for the hot water to reach the shower in the morning!
• Items to help with the fact that I still have a child attending school:
  • Script checks the school website to see if school is in session (winter sometimes causes school closures or delays).
  • Automation wakes up my child for school by raising the light level, and playing talk radio - which gets louder by the minute - until a light in the bathroom is turned on indicating that bed has finally been left...
  • Calendar (text file presently) driven school schedule so HomeSeer knows which days to wake us up for school and which days are holidays.
  • On school days (the night before rather) any music playing around the house is turned off (all zones) in the evening so the music does not keep people awake who have to get up at O'Dark Early.
• Energy monitoring of the whole house (CurrentCost) as well as Aeon Labs power monitoring switches on my water heater's power exhaust vents which help me determine when the two heaters are set properly - two heaters work in stages - if the first one is set too high then it will work much harder and stage two will rarely turn on. If the first one is set too low, then the opposite is true - consumption of electricity by the exhaust fans tells me how often they run so I can tell when they are balanced.
• Automatic locking of the doors when the security system is armed.
• Text messages when the security system is disarmed, or when a voicemail is left by somebody.
• Having the pool pump turned on and off automatically each day, and being able to turn on the pool heater - on the rare occasion that we use it - without having to go out to the pool equipment area.
• Using SpeakEasy and some relays controlling the speakers to turn off certain talkback speakers at certain times of the day (e.g. turn off bedroom speakers when we are asleep), to have something spoken just in specific locations (very useful for wake-up routines), and queuing up the things that are spoken when the security system is armed in away mode and then having them spoken after we return.
• Having bedroom ceiling fans turn off automatically several hours after they are turned on. (e.g. too hot when you go to bed so you turn it on, but then if it ran all night it would be way too cold in the morning with a fan blowing cold air on you).
• High traffic areas (upstairs hall, stairway) have the lights controlled automatically so they are no longer left on all night - flex sensors in the floor or motion detectors combined with Z-Wave lights that have instant status make this pretty easy.
• Drip irrigation system is turned on providing it has been at least 8 hours since the last rainfall, and according to a frequency schedule.
• Weather station that allows me to know the accurate outside temperature, wind speed, and rainfall amounts to drive so many other "decisions" that HomeSeer makes.

I'm sure there are more, but I have to get back to coding!

[ArbWare]

Got some nifty ideas reading this...

Wife's Favorite... "Washer/Dryer is finished" announcements.

My Favorite.. Arm Alarm system if it is bedtime and no activity on first floor for 1/2 hour.

Guest Favorites... Custom Greetings for the evening... (Pre Programmed) that welcome the guests to the house.. (Triggered by key-chain remote that i press after guests arrive...)

[Guest]

Here's my silly project I put together this last Sunday. Not completely appropriate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTrtFEShhdM

And I don't know why I thought Barry White sang 'Let's get it on.' Marvin Gaye I know :-)

Adam

[Moskus]

Here's my silly project I put together this last Sunday. Not completely appropriate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTrtFEShhdM

And I don't know why I thought Barry White sang 'Let's get it on.' Marvin Gaye I know :-)

Adam

I'm sorry but this is somewhat related:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt9zSfinwFA