• Alexa,  Home Automation

    Control A Wink From Alexa

    One of my favorite options in the latest round of home automationry is the ability to voice control all the things. The Wink has a pretty substantial list of supported home automation devices. The Alexa can control the Wink. Therefore, the Alexa can do all the things, even though integrations with Alexa were not built for most of those devices by Amazon. The beauty here lies in the ubiquity of APIs these days. Alexa has a recipe-style option called a Skill (further humanizing her). Basically, you add the Wink skill, then scan for devices that are connected through the Wink, then viola, tell Alexa to do something to them. To get…

  • Home Automation

    Add A Chime To Your Ring

    The Ring is a great little device. I love it when I see an alert on my Apple Watch, tap a button on my phone, and then see the UPS deliverer walking away from my front door. When you’re home though, it’s nice to have a door chime. The first thing you do when you’re setting up one of these is to join a wireless network called Chime-****something****. This is pretty common in the home automation world. Devices ship running as a WAP so you can wirelessly control and set them up. Once the device joins the wireless network, open the Ring app and then verify that you’re joined to the…

  • Home Automation

    Add A Chamberlain Garage Door Controller To Wink

    There are two main garage door openers in the home automation space. The first is the Chamberlain MyQ and the second is the GoControl. The hardest part about setting up the MyQ was that I had to hit a funny orange button on my existing non-automated Chamberlain opener and then hit the button on the opener in my car to sync ’em up. It took about 10 tries, but eventually it worked. Once configured, I didn’t love the loud noise the device made to open the garage door (guessing that because it’s compared with a strobe that this is a safety measure). Once the Chamberlain is configured, open the Wink app.…

  • Alexa,  Home Automation

    Alexa, Order Me A Pizza

    Domino’s is arguably not the best pizza in the world. But it’s pizza. And, if you have an Amazon Echo, you can order it without opening an app, touching a keyboard, or making a phone call. This makes for a great look at using one of the skills options in Alexa to extend the usefulness of an Echo. To do so, you’ll first setup a Domino’s account (aka Pizza Profile). Do that at Dominos.com (avoiding any conflicts with the Noid along the way). Also setup an Easy Order, which is the kind of pizza that Alexa will order each time you tell her to do so. Once done, you’ll need…

  • Home Automation

    Quick and Easy Home Automation For Christmas Lights

    OK, if you’ve been following this site for awhile you probably know that I’m a huge z-wave nerd. But I’m open minded and I like to experiment with new systems. So I bought some Belkin WeMo stuff. I am mostly pretty happy with it. To start, it came in a cute little box. You can just get the light switch, but I splurged the extra $5 and got the little motion sensor, which is well worth $5. I got mine at Best Buy who has a couple of WeMo products in stock at the stores around my house. First up, install the WeMo app on your iOS device from the…

  • Home Automation,  Mac OS X,  Minneapolis,  sites

    Control the Weather Using Curl

    Wait, did I say control, I meant query… Sorry to disappoint! I am a home automation nerd. Recently I’ve noticed that as it gets closer to warmer or cooler extremes that it takes longer for my hvac system to bring my house to the temperature I want. I’ve also noticed that NEST claims to automatically learn these factors. Not to be outdone by the Griswolds, I decided to look at building this into my system. I had been experimenting with using the weather.com site to pull this data but then someone pointed out that NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) actually publishes this information on their site. I was…

  • Home Automation,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Xsan

    Lights Out Managing Mac Mini Servers with Vera

    There is no Lights Out Management for a Mac mini Server (btw, am I the only one that noticed that these are now called Mac mini with Lion Server, where mini isn’t capitalized). While the Mac mini Server doesn’t have the Lights Out Management (LOM)/IPMI chips in it, there are a few things that we can control anyway. Convention would say that we’d get a NetBotz card for that spiffy APC we’ve got, which can do minor automation and even a little environmental monitoring. And there are a few other systems out there that can do similar tasks. But I’m a home automation nerd these days. So I decided to…

  • Home Automation

    Monster Delivers Z-Wave Win

    Who knew, Monster is getting in on the whole Z-wave thing. I can’t even find “Z-wave”  on their official website. But their Z-wave dimmers are available at a few different websites, including Smarthome: http://www.smarthome.com/8500SD/Monster-Wall-Dimmer-Switch-Z-Wave-Lighting-Control/p.aspx. I ordered one of these and my system automatically saw it (as a Leviton btw) and I was controlling yet another light in my basement within about 5 minutes. Total Z-wave win. While I don’t see the dimmers, what I do see on Monster’s website is a new Z-wave remote in their Revolution 200: http://www.monsterproducts.com/productdisplay.asp?pin=3369&id=9139.  It’s a little fancy for me (I prefer things that are beige and covered in DIP switches), but it’s cool to see…

  • Home Automation

    Home Automation :: Mi Casa Verde's Vera Light

    Mi Casa Verde has had the Vera appliance for a number of years. Recently, they released the Vera 3, which controls practically any Z-wave device ever made (in fact many are guaranteed to work). The Vera 3 is also wireless (802.11), so you can place it practically anywhere in the home. Now there’s Vera Light, which retails for $100 less, has a much smaller footprint and no 802.11 networking but otherwise it appears to have pretty much the same feature set. I’m sure it can’t control as many things concurrently, given the smaller footprint, but it looks to me like a great deal for those looking to get started with…

  • Home Automation

    Look ma', no keys!

    When you’re out in the field, wouldn’t it be nice to know that your stuff is safe at home, and in the most geeky way: http://www.ap501.com/ Thanks for pointing this out to me, Zachary!