I'm keen to hear what other people have been doing with home Automation. What works, what does and what achieved the holy grail of wife acceptance?
I've been playing around for the last 3 months with rolling out a number of Zwave devices to control mostly lighting and the odd appliance around the house. In that time the following have been my results.
The successes
* TTS announcement and Media Centre pop up of who is calling the homeline
* TTS reminder of when to put the rubbish out/Bed time annoucement for my daughter
* Framed and wall mounted Android tablets to control devices (using HSTouch and Homeseer). Idle screen set to photo screensaver so when not in use looks like an electronic photo frame
* External lights turning on based on location of my mobile phone and geofence around house
* HVAC automation
* Home energy monitoring
* Temp monitoring/graphs
* Automated lights in Hallwaye/access way
* Automated lights in Kitchen/Family room based on motion/brightness of the room (ended up making the logic have as a secondary condition whether the TV was turned on or not, so that laying on the couch and not triggering the motion detector for a while wasn't considered to be an empty room.
The failures
* automated lights in bathroom/toilet using motion sensors (apparently it's not cool for the lights to go off) * showing other people how I can control home lighting via mobile phone when the wife is home alone
* TTS front door announcement when motion sensor triggered (false positives saying there is someone at the front door when nobody there
* speech recognition (don't do it if it's in the same room as TV - way too many false positives and ended up turning it off for peace and quiet). Great novelty factor nothing more.
Next projects
* using IR to control Roomba vacuum to do it's thing when I've left the house
* also starting to think about how I can control the cat door so that it blocks the neighbours cat from coming into the house at night and spraying, open to suggestions on that one