Painting the New Bedroom 2012

So, after a month of being moved into our new house, we've got some stuff done.

We've concentrated on the bedroom so far. We've removed the built in wardrobes, stripped all the wallpaper off the walls, removed the carpet and generally cleared everything out. The crack in the wall was filled in by Becky's dad and now we're ready to get decorating!

I started some painting on Tuesday and we both finished the 3 grey walls today. I recorded a short time lapse video on my old Canon IXUS 80 but it's not ideal. I would love the fisheye field of view from a GoPro, but never mind.

The undecorating begins!

Yesterday was the first full day for me in the house. It's only taken almost 4 months since putting an offer on it to finally getting in and seeing it during daylight!

Becky spent most of the week cleaning and tidying as much as she could, and during the evenings I helped out. I will post more photos and details soon, but for now here are 2 quick photos of the master bedroom that is Job Number 1.

We dislike the floral decoration, so aim to gut the room and start from scratch. During the evenings this week we removed most of the built in wardrobes. As you can see, it already makes a difference!
All of yesterday was spent removing the last bits of wardrobe and stripping wallpaper. We also got some paint and tools from B&Q so we can start painting today! Last night we were both absolutely exhausted, but pleased with the progress so far.

We aim to get as much bedroom decoration done over the next few days, as well as move small items over to the house. Virgin media is installed tomorrow (Monday). Fridge/freezer and washing machine arrive on Tuesday. Moving larger furniture Wednesday onwards.

Lots still needs doing, but this will have to wait for a bit:

• Electrics need rewiring and a new distribution box fitted
• Gas boiler, whilst almost new and working fine, was fitted badly and needs re fitting correctly
• upgrade 3 radiators, replace 1 in the bathroom with a towel rail, and add a new one on the upstairs landing
• some cracks need filling correctly and sealing up
• lots more decorating!

A new kitchen and bathroom would be lovely, but are much further down the line.

At least we get an extra hour in bed, thanks to the end of British Summer Time! Autumn is here and winter is on its way, and we now have plenty to keep us busy over the next few years!

Before

After

Fresh clean house. Fresh start?

I just read this post on the register and it sounds almost identical to me and my technology hoarding habits

The hoarder's dilemma, or 'Why can't I throw anything away?' • Reg Hardware

But, new house, new way of living. I shall keep all my junk in the garage a.k.a. the man cave (I have no cellars and loft storage is off limits). When there is no more space, I will just have to sort it out and throw some things away!

Now...why did I throw away that broken vintage mac se/30 when I moved house last time?! It would have made a perfect doorstop!

T minus 33 hours and counting!

So, a few months of legal paperwork, solicitors and estate agents, and the end is in sight!

We exchanged contracts last week, and completion is set for tomorrow evening (Monday 22nd October). Then its over to us!

I'm really looking forward to making some visible progress; getting access to the house and being able to measure, plan and clean up before we get fully moved in (my weeks holiday off work doesn't start until Saturday 27th October)

There is going to be plenty to do over the next 2 weeks, but we managed to move last year into our current flat in less than a week.

The geeky technology house related hacks will have to be put on hold while traditional decorating and moving in is done, but I'm planning ahead and thinking of little tweakes that will make future hacks easier and save on time, effort and mess when implementing them later:

- installing cat5 while any potential mains electrical rewiring is done
- fitting extra capacity mains sockets where needed (although this could be hard to predict)
- getting the nice virgin media engineer to put and hide the coax cable where I want it to go (or at least leaving me some spare cable so I can re-route it later)

I'm almost considering some sort of house wide CAN bus installation (as used in modern cars to link all the electronic subsystems) but this would need more research and planning, which is probably best spent on the house move and initial decoration.

Anyway, as I have Blogger on my smartphone, I should be able to post more frequent updates (and photos) quite easily (if I remember to)

Better heating control?

I have a completion and moving date of 22nd October 2012!

Realistically I won't get any of the cool things done straight away, and will probably spend most of my time decorating and getting the essentials done to make the house liveable  This doesn't mean I can't still plot and scheme!

I read another post on hackaday that mentioned using an old android phone as a thermostat to control your heating.

This would be a perfect use for my old HTC Desire mobile phone.

http://androidthermostat.com

Capacitive Phone Charging

Just a quick post to save some useful links.

I'm near the end of my 2 year mobile phone contract, and so far the logical upgrade is from my existing HTC Desire to a HTC One X. I noticed that it has some pogo pins on the back, allowing for it to be docked and charged.

The official HTC media dock is £50! So I did a bit of Google-Fu and found this thread where someone made their own docking case.

I also found a youtube video of someone who used the Palm Touchstone capacitive charger with a custom case that hooks into the pogo pins. There are no instructions for this persons mod, but I'm sure I can make something similar.

A few more home hack ideas

Getting very close to completion of the house purchase now!

On a long drive back from a family holiday in St Ives last month I had the following ideas/thoughts. I forgot to post it at the time, but here it is:

• A house-wide CCTV system. Probably cheaper to use individual ip webcams than a composite video and separate DVR recording system. This would cover the: front door, garden, garage and alleyway behind the garden (where there is access to the back garden and car parking)
• PIR motion sensors in the alleyway, front garden, front door and inside the house in the hallway. This can be hooked into the CCTV and/or security system, as well as detecting people when they come in (potentially hooked into the automatic lighting system).
• Temperature sensors in all rooms and under stairs cupboard. This can be linked to the thermostat/central heating to allow for more efficient heating of the house.
• All equipment to run the hacked house to be hidden out the way in the under stairs cupboard (hence the temperature sensor in the cupboard). UPS compatible wiring, if I wish to add mains power cut protection later.
• Cooling system (probably temperature controlled) to vent from the under stairs cupboard into the adjacent boiler cupboard or out of the side of the house
• Run cat5 and power out to the garage (makes other ideas easier to implement)
• All the living room entertainment systems to be in shelving unit to the left of the fireplace (where the TV is going to be wall mounted). Wiring will be hidden as much as possible. Potential to have virgin media coax hidden through ceiling or floor to the cable tv box on the shelves.
• A 5 channel surround speaker system in corners of the living room and auto calibrated to balance the sound for optimum listening on the sofa, opposite the tv/fireplace.
• TV wall mounted above fireplace.
• 2 additional speakers in the kitchen running off main amp in the living room.
• A Raspberry pi running raspbmc or a silent mini-itx media centre running xbmc in living room (to replace the existing PS3 which doesn't support all media codecs).
• Google nexus 7 tablet as remote control for xbmc. Can control music playback in kitchen/living room. Can also access web based house interface with cctv, temperature monitors, lighting control, etc
• A computer controlled (from server or media pc) IR sender to act as dummy remote control. Used to control amp, tv, and other Ir media equipment in living room to provide seamless media experience

Possible ideas, but not sure about these. Probably best as separate stand alone projects

• Brewing control/monitoring in garage to control my planned micro homebrewery. Could use aebcam and Arduino connected to temperature sensors and boilers to automate the brewing process. It would appear that most of the hard coding work on this project has been started at http://brewpi.com (although this would mean buying another RaspberryPi)
• A modified roomba style Hoover with camera and remote control. Can clean carpets downstairs and monitor house/cat. Another one upstairs? Linked by WiFi to server for out of house control

Very Effektiv Garbage & Recycling Bins

I've seen something similar to this a while ago on the internet, but I can't remember where it was now. Then I saw this on IKEAHackers.net - Very Effektiv Garbage & Recycling Bins:

I have to do this to the kitchen for the food waste recycling. I'm fed up of the small brown plastic bin that Bristol Council provide, and this is an almost perfect solution!

Arduino to Raspberry Pi interface

Via hackaday

What you can do when a Raspberry Pi teams up with an Arduino

This looks almost perfect to control some Arduino led drivers from a central raspberry pi server

Cat warmer for naps

Cat palace with an automatic heat lamp via Hack a Day


Me and Becky would like to get a cat when we're settled down in our new house. This seemed like a nice idea, and automatic heat lamp for a cat to nap under.

Hopefully something like this would stop a cat from napping in unwanted places or on warm electronic items like laptops, HiFis, etc

Arduino + PWM Shield = Easy LED Fading

I'm lazy! Why make my own circuit to control the individual steps fading in and out on the automatic stair lighting when I can use a pre-designed circuit board.

The best way I've found of fading LED strip lights is with Pulse Width Modulation. Arduinos can do this (and have a few pin headers dedicated to PWM), but I'm going to have at least 10 stairs and will run out of PWM connectors on a standard Arduino.

An Arduino Starter Kit from oomlout costs £40.50 and includes an Arduino Uno, breadboard, pre-made jumper wires and other bits and bobs needed to get prototyping.

The great thing about Arduinos is you can connect shields to their pin outs to quickly and easily add extra functionality. There are almost 300 known shields available (a fully searchable list is available at http://shieldlist.org).


If I use a PWM control shield from Practical Maker then it gives me 32 PWM outputs, which are more than enough!

A pre-assembled shield costs $36.75 from the US, but a naked PCB only costs $11.25. If the other components can be sourced from the UK then this would be a lot more affordable.

Simple and easy, and then just the hard bit of coding and wiring up the LED strips!

Adafruit + Raspberry Pi = Home Automation Server

Just spotted this on one of my blogs (I think hackaday).

This looks like a potential tweaked OS to install onto my RaspberryPi so that I can easily coordinate all the other systems I will eventually install into the house

Overview | Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro | Adafruit Learning System:

IKEA hack: Decorating a SPONTAN notice board

Today me and Becky went to IKEA for some inspiration and (as usual) ended up buying some stuff (it's impossible not to in IKEA)

Not so much a technology hack, but I still think this is worth mentioning. We previously bought a SPONTAN magnetic notice board, and this time spotted a little tip tag in the showroom.

We thought we'd give it a try. Becky found some nice CECILIA fabric that was cheap, and with the help of some magnets we stuck it on.

 Before

After

For the full process/instructions

Npower SmartPower Meter Hack

I got a free wireless electricity meter monitor from npower a few years ago and was thinking of ways in which to intercept the signals so I can add electricity usage to my house hack.

It looks like it's just a re-badged Prelude 1 made by GEO

This is a shame, as GEOs "Base Level" devices don't have any way of exporting the data, whereas their "intermediate" devices do.

I was inspired by this hack, but found that they were reading the LED light that flashes when the electricity meter records a unit of power going through it.

At first I thought I could physically open up the case and tap into it's circuitry, but this would be messy.

30 minutes of Googling later and I've found out it uses Wireless M-BUS as a radio standard between the battery powered receiver (attached to my mains electricity meter) and the little black npower reciever (with LCD display).

I doubt I can easily connect to the transmitter using M-BUS as the two devices are paired using encryption keys. Looks like I'll have to open up the wireless meter after all and see whats inside. Maybe there are some data tags I can connect to and steal the data that way, but it's unlikely.

Or I could just go and buy a new wireless electricity meter (defeating the point of a hack) or build one from scratch using an electricity clamp current meter. That would be more fun, but less of a hack and more of a build-from-scratch.

I've bookmarked everything and will shelve this plan for now :)

Initial Ideas

It's early in the morning and I can't fall back asleep, so I might as well start with my initial ideas for hacking a house. (I'll clean up this post and add links later)

Hacking can sometimes be seen as a bit of a derogatory word, but I like its underlying meaning. Wikipedia describes a hacker as follows:

In home and hobby circles, a hacker is a person who heavily modifies the software or hardware of their own computer system. It includes building, rebuilding, modifying, and creating software (software cracking, demo scene), electronic hardware (hardware hacking, modding), or anything else, either to make it better or faster or to give it added features or to make it do something it was never intended to do. Hobby home computer hacking originated around the MITS Altair, yet the spirit of hacking has been embodied in real projects since the advent of simple tools.

I wouldn't describe myself as a creator, more of a hacker/bodger/kludger. I like to fix broken things, but I'm lazy so I usually borrow something that has already been made and adapt it to suit my needs (rather than create something from scratch).

The purpose of this blog is do document my attempts to hack and improve a house.



So far I've only ever rented flats or houses, and I've been unable to make any permanent improvements as my landlords would frown upon my ideas (and I'd have to remove the mods when I moved out anyway). I'm a geek and love technology, so I've tried to bring the benefits of this into places I've lived.

Over the years I have (with help from various geeky housemates, especially Dan) done many hacks and projects. A majority of this happened in a 7 bed shared house in Redland, Bristol:

• We installed a house wide cat5e Gigabit network (dubbed Wonderland)



Circa 2006: At its maximum we had 2Tb of shared music, films and tv across 14 PCs

• Setup a touch screen based HTPC system (integrated with the existing tv and hifi system) with network sharing and synchronization called Nucleus. Dan did most of the hard coding work that made this possible. It was very close to being finished, but we all moved out and the project lost momentum, however it is still available for download at SourceForge!
• Configured a mini-itx based Linux based router to share and monitor/graph internet usage (based on the vnStat project). This was very useful in a shared student house, and I continued to use it for the next few years of house sharing.
• Built a pair of homemade speakers and portable battery powered amp (which, thanks to Dan, sound absolutely amazing!) We made a separate project website at: http://ppamp.dineley.com. This was designed for audiophiles and it had the potential of being a commercial success, but the momentum ran out and the market was flooded with cheap iPod docks.
• And other things (which I can't remember now)

Back to the present. I'm in the process of buying my first house with my fiance Becky. We've not exchanged contacts, so the house isn't ours yet, but I keep on getting carried away and thinking ahead of the potential awesome technology I could add to a house.



Home automation
I've seen some cool projects on the internet (usually via hackaday) and the home automation has always caught my attention. In fact, I've been thinking of automating a house since I was in primary school (I wanted automatic closing curtains in my bedroom).

Below are some of the things I would like to hack in my house:

Floor level LED lighting on the stairs, with automatic triggers when walking up/down. This is ideal for evening/night time (and if I'm too lazy to turn on the light switch).
Inspired by:
Sean's Automated hallway Skirtingboard Lighting
a StarScape customer project
ElJefeUno's Stairway LED lighting with IR trip sensor
Illia's Automatic Led Stairs Controller
Alan Parekh's Stair Lights

LED lighting above work surfaces in kitchen (mounted under cupboards above the surfaces).
Inspired by:
Esterill's How to fit LED kitchen lights with fade effect
DJJules's Build LED Under Counter Lighting that ROCKS!

LED lighting along the tops of cupboards in kitchen, and possibly around the edge of the ceiling in rooms to give nice gentle indirect lighting. Remote controllable from smartphones? 

Inspired by:

dlewisa's LED Indirect Lighting

Integrated LED lighting in garden. Possibly built into the garden/patio itself. 

Inspired by:
cw-kid's LED Strip Lighting Project: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

• CCTV system linked to home server/internet/smartphone
• Keyless entry to house (has major potential security risks, so not too sure about this)
• Fully integrated HTPC/media system in living room which also links to speakers across the house/garden for distributed media playback
• Central media server for all music and video file storage and backups (probably a commercial NAS solution as they are more power efficient than a full PC)
• Computer controlled heating/climate control
• Wireless charging for smartphones on bedside tables. (As I write this on my smartphone I have a micro USB cable wedged uncomfortably against my hand)

And there is probably more. I will try to make a proper to do list of things that is more organised. Maybe install a blogger todo list plugin (if they exist).



Technologies/tools/parts at my disposal
I've done a little research into other peoples home related hacks and the Arduino seems to be incredibly popular. I'm not a natural programmer, but the coding seem to be relatively straightforward and there are plenty of resources and support online for hackers like me.

I also picked up one of the first RaspberryPi Linux development boards. While not as mature as the Arduino, I think this could make an ideal 'overlord' style controller that oversees various independent Arduino sub-systems and coordinates the overall house hack.

LED Dioder strip lights (think IKEA, but cheaper ones available from eBay) are perfect for most of my lighting ideas and saves time on manually soldering and designing a lighting system from scratch (and they're waterproof!)

The Internet! Without Tim Berners Lee's invention of the world wide web none of this would be possible!



Anyway, I've spent far too long waffling on about my ideas. More important things need to be done before I can start (or afford) any of these hacks (like actually getting the house and moving in)!

I am determined to make at least some of these hacks possible. If I plan ahead properly and make the early prototypes in a modular fashion then it should be easier to adapt and link them all together with some form of computer control (and I'll actually stand a chance of getting some of it completed)!

I will add as many links to this post as I can find, and probably share interesting related hacks on this blog until I get started on the house hacking (which hopefully will be in the next few months).

Here are some more links to things that that are useful reference:

• Commercial home control system:
  http://www.embeddedautomation.com/products/mcontrolv2.asp

• LadyADA LED Strip light tutorial
  http://www.ladyada.net/products/rgbledstrip/

• Controling LED lights with a RaspberryPi:
  http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/06/control-led-using-gpio-output-pin/#more-255

• Calculate how to wire up LEDs without blowing them up:
  http://ledcalculator.net/

• http://www.instructables.com/id/Control-Ikea-Dioder-LED-Strip-with-Arduino-16X-P/?ALLSTEPS

• A brilliant guide to using/controlling Dioder style LED strips: http://www.ledlightsworld.com/page.html?id=32

• A good seller of Dioder LED strips on eBay (much cheaper than IKEA): http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261070133115

• Hacking IKEA Dioder lights:
  http://hackaday.com/2011/08/19/adding-usb-control-for-ikea-rgb-led-strips/
  http://hackaday.com/2009/12/29/ikea-dioder-hack/