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| February '03 newsletter: the X10 Files
Homeseer
The last couple of months have been aggravating for me. After moving into my new home in August, I'd planned to get my "toys" in order pretty quickly. As I've said before, one of my goals was to use my own personal installation in Book 2 (the sequel to Integrating the Smart Home...). I don't know... it just seems like there have been endless delays in getting things done. Well, I'm not going to go into all that right now (I've actually devoted a chapter to "headaches" in the upcoming book); but while I've been waiting on hardware repairs I decided to start playing around with something I've been meaning to tinker with anyway: Homeseer is a software based application that has some powerful features. At around 100 bucks (plus your X10 interface), it's definitely affordable for most of us. It mainly utilizes X10 to communicate, but there are numerous plug-ins available which make it compatible with other HA devices (including Stargate). Naturally, it has a Windows interface for easy programming of X10 scheduling, timers, etc., but the real power of Homeseer is in its ability to utilize VBscript or Javascript (though its native environment is VBscript). Even for those of us who are't comfortable with scripting, the documentation is quite good. And I have to compliment the makers of Homeseer for their willingness to allow the user community to develop and share scripts, plug-ins, etc. - right on Homeseer's website! You can literally download a script, copy and paste it into an event, and (barring any bugs) it works. If you happen to have an always-on internet connection, there's some fairly neat stuff you can do. For instance, one script (which I believe actually comes with Homeseer) retrieves the local weather forecast and plays it audibly over the PC. There are lots of other neat scripts available. People are always coming up with new ideas & are usually eager to share! But let me tell you about what I think is one of Homeseer's outstanding features: Homeseer has a fairly impressive voice-recognition engine that's actually reliable. When I tested it using a standard cheap PC microphone, it rarely missed. What's more, using Microsoft Agent and text-to-speech, Homeseer can talk back to you in a - hmm - well, almost natural sounding voice. Anyway, with Homeseer and Stargate combined in the same system, there are lots of new possibilities. For now, darn it, I have my Stargate's daughter board in for repair. That's a story in itself (tell you about it in my book); BUT - when it comes back, I fully intend to start having some fun. I think I'll place a mike in the kitchen to add voice activation. Maybe later on I'll put in a gated mixer so I can have several decent mikes around the house. Also, I'll be routing the output from my PC's sound card through Stargate & the house audio system. Finally I'll be able to have an "intelligent" conversation! ... and it's comforting to think that at last someone in my home will listen to me. click here to read more about Homeseer!
Till next time, Andy Jackson,
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