Automating buildings costs money. Lots, lots of money. The return on investment (ROI) is usually very low, and it takes a long, long time (on the order of 5 to 10 years) for such an investment to pay for itself. To make matters worse, people who rent the home or apartment they live in have […]
I have sort of a love-hate relationship with MATLAB, and always had since I read its tutorial in January 2003. On one hand it’s a proprietary closed-source system, which in my book rules it out for any scientific work. My one and only encounter with a Mathworks sales representative did nothing to help my misgivings. […]
Recently I stumbled upon a blog entry by Marc Fleury, whom I believe is one of the lead developers on the JBoss Application Server project. In this post he describes his new pet project, OpenRemote, which has of late bloomed into a full blown affair. There’s an official website and the project seems to be […]
There’s a great discussion on StackOverflow going on, when someone asked for suggestions for a low power, low cost and high availability linux box. Exactly the kind of hardware we need for home automation.
Four people again attended this second meeting, the purpose of which is to share information among people interested in home and building automation. As previously, here are photos of the group’s collective memory along with my comments. Fred told us first about a conference he had attended, organized and hosted by the Demontfort University in […]
A fun online article in the New York Times discusses the current public perception of smart houses. The gist of the article was that home automation is, despite appearances, something perfectly obtainable provided someone pays for it. And you no longer have to be either filthy rich or a geek to obtain it. There are […]
I have just come across a short but interesting interview with H. Michael Newman, the “Father” of BACnet. The interview can be downloaded from here. Two points in particular caught my interest. One is that according to Newman, as far as standards go, BACnet is an EN standard and thus BACnet is now the “law […]
The energy demand of computers—including PCs, peripherals, and corporate data centers—produced about 830 million tons of CO2 in 2007, according to a report by the the Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI), a group of technology firms interested in the potential impact of information and communication technologies on climate change. But they can also help us save […]
On 4 July 2008 we held at LESO-PB the first of (hopefully) a series of meetings for people interested in home/building automation. The idea is to give people of widely different backgrounds a venue, time and opportunity to share, discuss and explore new ideas. It was my pleasure to facilitate this meeting and although I […]
Let’s face it: us geeks do have a tendency to accept computer interfaces barely more user-friendly than, say, a shell. And that’s all right for me; it doesn’t really matter to me that Emacs maps C-w, M-w and C-y to cut, copy and paste instead of the more familiar C-x, C-c and C-v. But if […]