The most common thing I find myself doing with my current home automation setup is turning my fan and light on and off, but it's still not as easy as it could be. To turn off my fan, I open the site on my PC and toggle it there. For my light, I have a
As convenient as it is to have my home automation hub running on my PC, it's not very stable. My PC is sometimes off, or not connected to the network, so I'd like to have a dedicated PC just for the purpose of home automation. But I don't want an entire PC running… Enter the
Next up on the home automation agenda, is the ability to control my home remotely over the internet. Luckily openHAB has a Cloud Connector plugin which is perfect for this task. Connecting the cloud First off, let's install the Cloud Connector plugin. Next, we need to configure it. We can go to Configuration > Services
tl;dr This process failed! I recently got a WiFi LED smart bulb from China, called the "Fcmila Smart Bulb." It's a nice bulb, but it looks like it can only be controlled through their TechLife app, which uses the internet. That won't work for me, I need to connect it to my openHAB home automation
Next up on my home automation journey, is connecting a smart switch to a smart bulb. I went and bought a couple more items: A Philio Z-Wave dimmer switch A Iotrend Z-Wave smart plug My goal here is to link both the bulb and the smart plug (which will be connected to my computer screen)
Now that openHAB is installed, it's time to add some devices. After looking at the options available, I decided to try out some Z-Wave devices. Z-Wave creates it's own wireless mesh network, so even if my WiFi went down, all my devices would still be able to operate (as long as my PC is still
So last time, we got openHAB installed on a Windows machine via Chocolatey. Today's task is to get it running as a system service. There is a nice guide on the openHAB site which explains how to do this, so this should be easy, right? Registering a system service Okay, so first let's open that
I recently decided to try adding some automation to my home. I foresee a time in my future where I can just walk into my house, and it greets me and turns on my lights for me, it can watch me to see when I go to bed and turn everything off, etc. How cool
