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Following are some software programs that I've used that have helped me
in my home automation endeavors. Some actually control appliances, others
are just side dishes that you can't do without.
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For advanced home automation geeks, there is no other product like HomeSeer, by Keware
Technologies! This progam will allow you to do everything. You can talk to your computer, and it will talk
back. You can control your home via e-mail. You can get paged when certain events happen. You can launch
other programs. You can use if-then-else logic. You can write your own scripts (VBScript, JScript, PerlScript).
You can even control your house from the web! There is an infinite number of possibilities.
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Willow Talk is a great little program that speaks in a computer voice.
It reads from any currently running application, even web pages. My main use for it is to create wav files that
I use in my home automation program. To do this, you simply fire up Notepad, type your text, click a button and
Willow Talk will read the text and automatically save it to a wav file. And if you leave it running all the
time, it will announce the time on the hour. Quite handy.
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If you have a dynamic IP address, and you need to access a web server (or other internet service) running on your
PC, then you need to get Here.
When you run Here, it will connect up to your web account (or finger account) via ftp, and write your current IP address to a simple
text file. Then people can lookup your current IP address and connect to your web server.
Also, if you know how to write CGI scripts, you could easily write one that opens this text file and redirects
the user to your local web server based on the IP address.
As is, you need to run the program manually, each time you connect to the internet. But if you're using a program
like ICQ, you can configure it to run the program for you, each time you connect.
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For home automation beginners, I recommend ActiveHome. This is the program
I started with in 1998. It has just enough functionality to get you going, and it is reasonably priced.
You can usually get it in a kit that includes a couple of X10 modules and a CM11A computer interface.
You can automatically schedule appliances to turn on/off at certain times. You can create macros, so
that a single event (like sunset or motion in your office) can trigger many appliances turning on and off.
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I've used a few other programs, but I just can't think of them right now. I'll add more to this page as I use more applications.
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