Programming Your Home

I wanted to do some home automation and I wanted to write the code myself (I’m a software developer.) I looked into it and decided to use Z-Wave technology.   I started by buying a USB Z-Stick for about $45 to allow my laptop to talk to the different devices. This can control up to 232 devices and each device rebroadcasts your command so it has a far range.

Now I have this hanging off my laptop – not ideal but eventually I’ll be using a hidden old laptop in a closet to run this.

Next items needed were the Z-Wave devices themselves, you can get motion, light, and temperature sensors, etc.  And you can also get light switches and outlets that replace your normal ones.  So I installed the switch below so I can turn the front porch light on when it gets dark from a program running on my laptop. The switch is always in the neutral position, so if someone switches it by hand it goes back to the middle and it doesn’t move when changed through Z-Wave.

I have 2 of the outlets, one used by a light and one in the kitchen that I”m going to use to control a cat’s auto feeder (done – see here). You can buy all these items on Amazon.com.

Then I downloaded a library that would allow me to send commands to the Z-Stick from my programming language (C#). I used a library called OpenZWaveDotNet.  I had built a schedule for a different project, so I reused that code to schedule commands in this project. Then I’ll just have the program run forever…

Everything is working so far, if you can think of another use for this leave me a comment.