MisterHouse is a fantastic home automation software with an impressive out-of-the-box feature set, and it only gets better if you know a bit of Perl.

You can conveniently set “modes”, which are settings with states you can define and use. You can then fire events upon state change, and so are they very useful to define some sort of macros.

A few examples :

• the “Security” mode could be “on” or “off” : setting it “on” would close the shutters and activate the alarm system; setting it “off” would do the opposite;
• the “Heating” mode could be “day”, “night”, “frost protection only” : setting it on “day” would set the target temperature to 20⁰C, “night” to 15⁰C and “frost protection only” to 7⁰C
• the “Cinema” mode could be “on” or “off” : setting it to “on” would close the blinds and dim the lights; “off” would bring those back to their former states.

This post will show how to setup a mode, we’ll use the “Heating” mode described above as an example.

read this entry »

I currently manage all my X10 home automation with MisterHouse which is a fantastic tool but is a bit on the heavyweight side. Plus you need to know a bit of Perl to take full advantage of it.

If you are looking for something simpler to use, you might want to consider HEYU. read this entry »