http://www.homesignals.com Building an intelligent home Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:09:48 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en OK, so I’ve made a few changes to the database schema. I’ve simplified it a little by taking the stateHistory table out and simply pushing those values into the perfHistory table. Eventually, I’ll be adding a dimensional model data warehouse to this project and I’ll split these types of measures ... http://www.homesignals.com/database/updated-database-schema-for-data-collection.html For a while now, I’ve been working on the database design for this project. I wanted to keep it simple and limit the number of tables. In this first design there are a few columns that aren’t normalized, but it helped to limit the table count. The design is ... http://www.homesignals.com/database/initial-database-schema-design.html Since this project will collect data from many different sources such as data acquisition boards, pc computers, network systems, and weather station data, I’ve debated on building a centralized collection system or a distributed system. After prototyping a collection database and a windows service that would capture all of the ... http://www.homesignals.com/home-automation/distributed-or-centralized-data-collection.html Basically just a follow up here. I wanted to use the script in Part 1, with some backup hardware and Windows Scheduler to automate this task. I wanted to use something that was easy to swap media out and had a large capacity. With the price of hard drives ... http://www.homesignals.com/backups/creating-an-automated-backup-solution-for-a-home-network-using-vbscript-and-robocopy-part-ii.html One thing I promised myself was at some point (early on) I would create an automated backup solution for my home computers. I wanted an automated and easy to configure system that I was confident of backing up my most important files. The criteria for this operation were the ... http://www.homesignals.com/backups/creating-an-automated-backup-solution-for-a-home-network-using-vbscript-and-robocopy.html So one of the things I would like to include in my Home Automation project is the ability to track performance and capacity metrics for all computers in the household. I would like to monitor PC information like hard drive capacity, free drive space, CPU utilization, current processes, maybe a ... http://www.homesignals.com/home-automation/using-vbscript-and-wmi-to-interrogate-pcs-in-a-workgroup.html While waiting for my current and temperature sensors to arrive, I thought it might be a good time to look at a few devices for interfacing a computer to the real world. Basically we need something to convert the signals from our various sensors and transducers to the computer. ... http://www.homesignals.com/home-automation/interfacing-between-computers-and-the-physical-world.html I’ve researched what type of cheap current and temperature sensors I would like to prototype for my project and decided upon the following: 1. An NTC Type Thermistor from Cantherm (CWF1B104J3950) that provides relatively high precision, reliability, and response time. This type of sensor also allows for a fairly simple conditioning ... http://www.homesignals.com/home-automation/temperature-and-current-sensor-evaluation-for-the-home.html I would like to initially take three different types of measurements and prototype the transducer, sensor, conversion from signal output to a computer-friendly signal, and a rough software service to monitor these signals. The previous post touched on one these properties, namely temperature. The other two properties I would like to ... http://www.homesignals.com/sensors/more-sensors-to-prototype-for-the-home.html I guess I really didn't expand on the idea of sensing in the original goals of the project, but that's what this project is really about. Measuring, recording, displaying, and trending a large number properties inside and outside the home is a large part of this project. I'm not sure ... http://www.homesignals.com/sensors/temperature-sensor-types-for-the-home.html