It’s already been a few months since I wrote my last blog post about Thuis. Although the project isn’t moving as fast as it was during the challenge, it did not come to a standstill. Since then the Ambilight has been
Final demonstration Thuis
The challenge deadline is almost there, so it’s time for a final demonstration! In this last post I’ll show you the results of my work in a video and then describe what I did and what I’m planning to improve in the
Home Theater part 3: Plex playback controls
Plex is software which makes it possible to enjoy all of your media on all your devices. When on the server you create a library based on video (and music, photos, etc) files, Plex finds the corresponding metadata and gives you an
Home Theater part 2: controls
In Final implementation UI design you saw our Thuis iOS app, which has a few buttons for controlling the Home Theater. In this post we’ll make sure they work well. For brevity I will describe only the main scene: it makes sure we can
Home Theater part 1: CEC
An important part of Thuis is integration of our Home Theater system. As the integration is quite extensive and consists of several components, this will be a 3-part blog series. In the first part we start with communicating to CEC-enabled devices from
Presence monitoring using iBeacons
One of the goals of Thuis is optimizing it’s own rule engine based on actual activity in the house. Although time is to short to actually start the optimization, with this blog we’ll start collecting presence data using iBeacons. As
Installing a Z-Wave dimmer
One thing I forgot to show you earlier is how to install Z-Wave devices into your house. In this post I’ll install a dimmer module in the bedroom, which will be part of the wake up light. Materials used The
Final implementation UI design
From my holiday location at the coast of Bulgaria I finished up the implementation of the UI of Thuis. It works nicely on both the iPhones and the iPad on the wall. This blog will give you a demo and
MQTT User Interface components for iOS
How useful would a home automation system be where you could only interact through MQTT messages? Not very, so that’s why we’ll start working on the User Interface today. The goal is to create some generic UI elements, which can be linked
Status update
I’ve been busy with a few other things, so that’s why it has been silent on the IoT front. As I also just past half of the blog posts, I thought this would be good time to reflect on the