Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

There is this : http://bleepbleeps.com/

The motion detection stuff on pi is indeed very easy.. There is even a lovely package called "motion" that does all the stuff for you. The only issue really with using a pi for this kind of stuff is ensuring that it is resilient to suddenly having its power cord yanked, all of this home automation stuff is only good if you don't have to faff with it once it is installed.

The pi is, of course, overkill for stuff like this, it is expensive for one and despite not being very thirsty it is still more powerful than it needs to be for the job, but against this it is very convenient :-)

Quite interested in these YUN things, but again you are paying for convenience. I'll take a look at the mbed stuff.

I'm really liking the YUN and will probably buy more of them, They're a lot easier to setup for reading sensors and using servos than Pi's in my opinion and I think Pi's are overkill on a lot of it. I have a crap load of Pi's and use them for all sorts of things - currently getting into telescope control rigs and astrophotography which is ideal for Pi.
You can SSH to the YUN, it has a micro sd slot - so for basic web reporting and whatnot it's ideal, at £60 is quite pricey - but I'm really liking them

@hippy we've got two of these http://www.screwfix.com/p/lap-indoor-ceiling-flush-pir/47121 You can adjust them as well, we had to play with the timings a bit, for example the hall one turns off after about 10 seconds, as its generally just pass through traffic, whereas the toilet one stays on for 4 minutes, before it needs 're-activating'. The only problem we find is that the PIR in the bog is almost directly above the throne, and it seems to have a blind spot directly below, so sometimes some comedy waving ensues.
MOC has done all the wiring. They're basically just another light switch. I can probably get a wiring diagram off him if you want.

I think I will get one then to play with.

I've got a bunch of pis doing Squeezebox stuff, using piCorePlayer. I really like it, it is a poor man's Sonos. Synchronization between them is good, controlled from a phone is great. They are robust because the sdCard is essentially read-only.

I'm currently working on something very similar to this http://www.heisenburg.co.uk/RaspberrypiIntro.html
However I'm also working telescope motorised control into the mix as well.

Thanks, might have a look into them.

I'd like an outdoor flood PIR too with an override so I can work on bikes at night - I remember putting one in back in Oz but I'm scared of English wires :)

We have some of those in the back garden, I think you and MOC need to have a conversation.
I think the indoor ones come with instructions to fit, judging by all the good reviews they receive on the screwfix page. If you need a hole cutter for your ceiling let me know :-)

They are due to make a push here shortly, will drop my contact a mail to ask them when

Strictly speaking (or indeed not strictly speaking) outside work requires a "Part P" certified person to do it, or it needs inspecting. It is, however, very straightforward.

Nice.

Electronics seems full of cynics all-too-ready to scoff at the idea of having an internet-connected toaster than looking into the innovation and interesting/useful stuff that can be done.

Rasperry Pi 2 released, looks really cool, and should make the thing usable as a standalone computer. Hopefully should be picking one up soon to pretend I'm gonna actually do something with while instead just reading about other people's cool projects.

Ordered one yesterday just for grins, will be interested to see if they can finally run MAME games properly

Mine arrived today. I see it will also get windows 10..

Have also just got a Yun

I posted this on the Android thread but it may be something that someone on here has already looked at:
Any suggestions for a tablet, doesn't matter how poor the spec or screen, with wireless charging or a docking station? Will mainly be used for controlling lights, tv, htpc, etc through a few apps so very few challenging things

Any suggestions for webcams?

Either something standalone that uploads images/a stream when movement is detected or Windows (or raspberry pi) software to work with a USB webcam.

Would particularly like something that can be turned on/off by an email or similar. I envisage getting home and tasker detecting I'm at home (it already does this to turn wifi on/off) and emailing the webcam to turn off and the opposite when I leave.

Any generic webcam works well with RPi I think. I've got an old microsoft one, and all it took to start taking pictures with it was to download a package someone had written. I was looking into motion detection too and again, it looks as easy as downloading the package and configuring it. (I think the package I was reading about is called 'motion')

Are you particularly interested in turning the webcam off while you're at home? Or just stopping it taking photos when it detects motion?

I think I've read somewhere that a fairly easy way to do all of this remotely is to host some kind of webpage on the Pi, and send it requests from any browser, which it interprets and acts upon. No idea of the details of that though.

Yes, for RPi/Windows it's more about the software.

Mainly just looking at it stopping taking photos/mailing me notifications when it detects motion when I'm at home. The plan is to use it partially as a burglar alarm, partially so I can check my flat hasn't burnt down, when I'm away.

Maybe I'll look more into the RPi solutions.

http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

That's the page for the Motion utility. It's listed somewhere in there that it has 'control over simple web interface', so that fits what you're after pretty well.

If you have any programming experience maybe you could write a script which monitored the network status, and when your phone attaches to the network (you've arrived home (or whatever arrived home condition you wanted)), it disables/stops the Motion service, and then when the phone goes out of range, restarts it?

Cheers, motion is looking like a decent option. Controlling it via http doesn't look too complicated (I can do this using tasker easily) or there does seem to be an add-on script for detecting if a phone is connected to wifi.

Google is looking for someone to add music to the Nest system.

Given they already have Play Music which works pretty well for home audio via a chromecast I guess there must be a lot more to this.

Maybe music following you from room to room as you walk around your house or something.

A player which detected the people in the room and found something agreeable to play for them all would be something special

Yes, I can picture Google coming out on top on this over companies like spotify due to the amount of experience they have in data mining and then analysing that data from a perspective of what do people actually finally go with.

I've been considering getting an Arduino or a RPi for a while now - basically to turn my existing speakers into a wireless music system (because the aux. cable now doesn't reach to where the sofa is and I'm lazy and I don't want to shell out for a Sonos), and a few of you seem to know what you're talking about so I thought I'd ask here...

Which platform is better off for this kind of thing? I'm guessing it's an Arduino because in order to achieve this I'd only need to program a micro-controller, right? But then again the RPi is basically a plug-n-play, or is that overkill?

And how, then, would I go about programming said controller/computer to play music from my laptop/phone over the wireless?

Any help is greatly appreciated!