Automated Musings
Information about stuff - currently the Minerva home automation project
Tuesday 4 December 2007, 9:39 AM
Five Subtleties
HA is not about brute forcing complexity into your daily lives, it's about technology augmenting your life in a subtle natural way. Here are five things of note I've implemented in Minerva.
When the lights switch of at night, they fade out over the course of 20 minutes or so to aid more natural sleep. The code is simply,
#!/bin/bash
for i in `seq 1 22`;
do
/usr/local/bin/heyu dim studio 2
sleep 30
done
The sequenced lights come on and slightly randomized times each day, so it's not obvious that it's machine controlled. Because this stems from crontab, and not the X10 module, I have control over this.
The timings on the lights as you go up stairs looks real. That is, the '2upstairs' script puts the landing light on, waits for a minute, then turns the downstairs light off, then shortly afterwards, turns the upstairs bedroom light on. This gives a more natural, lived-in, approach.
The voice may be artificial, but the content is real. I've written a small script that speaks the time in a more humanistic manner. Consequently, 18:39 is read as 21 minutes to 7 PM. It's less than 70 lines of script, but it does make a difference. (See my humanistic time script!)
As I hope you'll see on the forthcoming video, the volume of the music drops when any voice announcement is played. This only works because the voice and music are on different mixer channels.
There are others, but this is enough to whet your proverbial appetite for now... :)
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