Poor Man's Home Automation

July 20th, 2014 (5th grade)

From a very young age, I wished for a super-automated house, or at least room. I taped straws around the baseboards of the living room and pretended they were pneumatic tubes controlling the giant pistons that would turn our house into a Transformer. I tried to convince my mom to let me install a shop vac in the attic—an important prerequisite to a drive-through-bank-esque pneumatic tube system. I designed a Rube Goldberg-like series of tubes to deliver milk & cereal directly to my bedside with no concern for food safety whatsoever. And after having played Portal, I really wanted to make one of these articulated Portal GLaDOS lamps.

But 5th grade me had none of the tools, cash, or patience necessary for these projects, hence my project Poor Man’s Home Automation. With a $50 budget I automated as many of the appliances in my room as possible, even going as far as to add new ones just so I could control them with my new system. I used as much existing hardware as I could: the main server was called watson¹ and ran on an old laptop. Aside from the computer, one of the of the main interfaces to the system was a somewhat whimsical array of CD drives, floppy drives, and SD card readers into which I could put different “scripts” the Watson engine would automatically execute. Watson also had (somewhat terrible) CMU PocketSphinx-based voice recognition before voice assistants were widespread (to put it in hipster terms, I had a digital assistant before it was cool). All of this was taped onto a wooden stool—bringing a whole new meaning to the term “computer tower”.

I documented the project for the 2014 Hackaday Prize (the first one). I wrote tutorials on how to build each of the physical components (not that they’re particularly replicable, or that one would want to build them how I had). I still regularly refer to the graphic I made of a USB cable’s pinout. I even printed out a daily summary (it was cheaper than a display; young me didn’t understand the environmental implications :P) I made this video as part of my Hackaday Prize entry:

I made an app for my Windows Phone² to control the systems in my room.

My solution to automatically open and close my blinds was a remote control car duct taped to my window…

A fingerprint reader let me turn different devices on & off with different fingers. This was easier than buying and hooking up regular buttons.

The computer host for the software acted as an alarm clock, with extra data on everything from the school lunch of the day (for which I had to parse a terrible, hand-made PDF irregularly published on the Sodexo website) to the weather to the current amount of resources in Minecraft servers I frequented.