Excellent morphing job you did there Asbo. Those power points are nick named China men by the way.asbo wrote:No I meant that's the first thing I saw in my head when I looked at them, like this:
It might just be my weird mind
Here's one I did for the kitchen renovation I'm doing at the moment. You should be good to have fun with this "highlighted" one.
I'm not a real fan of that type of home automation P.J.. To turn lights on and off and dim levels etc to me would be more of a problem than a saving. I've seen a few setups in houses and to me it seemed it was doing jobs solely for the sack of using it. Don't get me wrong, I love automation but it really needs to be practical. Just to give you some idea what I regard as practical.professor_jonny wrote:Not going to put in c-bus and automate everything ? I use to program e-bos home automation and if I built a house I would put a product like that in it all runs of 12vdc and has power saving options like dimming light automatically at 10pm and lights that turn them selves off if no one is in the room, handy if you are on solar or are into power savings.
This is how I use automation at this house. This is a slide show BTW.
http://s1038.photobucket.com/user/autos ... Automation
The front gate is opened by number pad or key or switch from in side the house or remote control from the cars. Once the gate is opened only by remote or key, do you have 30 seconds to walk to the porch of the house where a sensor sees you and the front door of the house unlocked and swings open. That is why the front door of the house has an actuator above it. My thinking is every car these days has central locking, why does no house have it?. There is more to the system. As I had to make an interface board to tie the gate to the door and house because no company makes off the shelf parts for this, I let my imagination go a bit wild but I still think practical. Here's a couple of other features I made into the interface board.
If the gate is "locked open", if someone walks through the opening it rings the inside house door bell so you know someone has come in the property. This uses the PE beams across the gate opening that reverses the gate if something is in the gate's way when it tries to auto close. If it is dark, I put a CDs cell on the interface board, opening the gate brings on the gate and house lights to light up the front yard. These lights also come on if the gate is in the locked open position when the door bell rings in this mode. Walking though the opened gate does not unlock and open the front door by the way. I also had at one stage the Cds cell backlighting the house number but the local kids kept stealing the blue LEDs I had set in the perspex the house number was lit with so I disabled that. Little bastards. There are also switches inside the house that can open the gate, lock the gate open as well as door control buttons to open and close the door. Both the gate and door have battery backup. Gotta have battery backup. Without battery backup on the gate you are climbing the front brick fence. The front door does have a dead lock that you can use a key on to open the door but battery backup on it comes with it anyway so may as well use it I figured. There is also, not shown in the pics, an auto garage door opener. It is a Roller door. The garage door is operated by the 2nd button on the car's remotes. There is also motorised roller shutters on the front windows of the house. These are mainly for noise suppression as well as bush fire shielding and are just controlled by switches beside the windows inside the house. We are in a bush fire area here BTW.
So as you can see, I do love automation. It has been one of my occupations for some time. Why I would be opposed to auto lighting at the farm would be mainly lights at night attract people at night in the bush. Not an issue while we are there but not wanted when we are not. I do have the outside area lights around the farm house remote controlled. They use the same remotes we use in the city house. It gets real dark at night down there and it is nice to light the place up when you get there at night and it makes it easy to see the door keyhole at night as well as lighting up the paddock around the farm house. Prior to doing the remote lights, I was having to leave the car headlights on till I got inside to manually turn the lights on. I will be using a few forms of automation on the farm though but these will be mainly for water pumping using solar/ battery setups as well as irrigation in the green house. These will mainly be stand alone timer systems but I do want to be able to manually control them if need be via the internet from here when we do get a satellite connected up. I also want to have a few web cameras set up not only for surveillance but also to monitor the automation is actually doing what it is supposed to do. i also have quite a few auto gate actuators I can use. Mainly swing gate actuators like these and control boards for driving them.
With these actuators and some mag locks I have you can do shit like this...
I'd still leave my trusty double chains and padlocks on the front gate but I do have a need for other gates on the property. These actuators aren't only limited to gates though. You can use then to open or move anything that needs up to 250Kg of thrust in a lineal motion and they use 24vDc to operate. They can easierly be solar powered, work on a timer, be remote controller or internet linked.