|
Homeseer
Software
The first
few months after moving into my new home in August 2002 were
aggravating for me. After getting settled in, 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 the completion of Integrating the Smart
Home....
I don't
know... it just seemed like there were 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
book); but while I was 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 200 bucks (plus your X10
Interface ), it's definitely affordable
for most of us.
It can
utilizes X10 "right out of the box" to communicate, but there are
numerous plug-ins available
which make it compatible with other HA devices (including
Stargate). The old version (1.x) had a Windows interface for
easy
programming of X10 scheduling, timers, etc., but has now in the new
.NET version gone to a Web interface for the same purposes; yet 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 aren'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.
If that's not good enough, high-quality voices can be
purchased and installed.
Anyway,
with Homeseer and Stargate combined in the same system, there are lots
of new possibilities. One has the brains, the other has the
brawn - and to a great extent they're cross-trained.
For now I
use my house telephones in "intercome mode" to talk to my system, and
it talks back either over the phone or house speakers. But
soon I think
I'll place a mike in the kitchen to add extremely ostentatious
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!
Back to blog
|
