About the Site

My name is Rick LaBanca. I don't even have all that much automated, just a little. You might expect someone starting a site like this to be the ultimate automator, but I'm not... yet! It's very entertaining.... home automation can be somewhat of an observer sport.

Many people find it fascinating to read about homes of the future, fancy home theatres and automatic systems in the home. Anyone into gadgets can't resist... turn your home into one big gadget!

But it's hard to explain to your wife that the house crashed. (In fact it did once!)

In looking around the net, I found that most sites related to home automation were commercial, or small user sites. comp.home.automation is an above average news group, but I've always liked good moderated forums too. So I started this up. A central place for everything.

I remember first getting excited about it years ago when Popular Science had an article on a house that had voice recognition. I had a Radio Shack Model I (and others) running x10 wayyy back before 1980... with voice recognition and speech synth. But it was just for fun, it would never work in a practical way. The best I did then was have it blast my lights on and say "wake up" then times in the morning. I've had a few modules and x10 computer interfaces for a while but not done too much until recently.

My real hook into this new level of interest was getting HomeSeer, an excellent Windows based program for automation via your computer. This program does so much, for such a small price, Rich Helmke, the author, is doing a great service by raising the bar on this much functionality.

Me being cheap, just couldn't spend upwards of $200 for software, and leave my PC on as well. With the advent of power saving, it's practical to do so now, and software is going to be viable. Smart controllers are a good solution too, with those coming down in price as well.

So now I got seer running, cable modem (so I can get to it via the slick web interface), voice recognition and output, and x10. Lots of fun for little! I've got scripts for the weather, caller ID and detecting hackers on my PC's firewall, fun!

There was such a good group of guys on the HomeSeer support board that I thought why not a general discussion for all?

Enjoy the site,
Rick