Home Automation Control

I want to control my homes solar heating simply and inexpensively with my lap top.

Makes me remember what a client of mine said, " I want the best of the best equipments for my plant FREE".

I don't have any personal experience with this but know of some people who play around with this for home automation--->http://www.parallax.com/tabid/441/Default.aspx. I don't think it's going to come with a graphical interface, though.

As far as graphical interface, I saw an ad for this in the new New Equipment Digest. It's from Rockwell Automation so I don't know how cheap it is----->http://www.rockwellautomation.com/rockwellsoftware/performance/viewpoint/

I hope this helps.

its easy. just build your own interfacing to your laptop, and write the pid hvac controls yourself.. thats the cheapest. then all you need is to buy the appropriate sensors, actuators and relays, and wire them up to your custom I/O controller. Its a weekend project and shouldn't cost more than few grand.

A place to start looking might be SCIENCE HOBBYIST (http://www.amasci.com) or a number of other amateur science project sites which can give you some very basic ideas about where to start. Controlling relays will be no problem- this can be done by controlling the control lines on the RS232 connector (IF your lap top is old enough to still have this), or, better the old parallel printer connection (which means your laptop is even OLDER!). Getting the temperature information into the computer will be the tricky thing- I use a DMM with temperature capabilities, which means I need another RS232 or a USB port for this. If you want to monitor temperatures in multiple separate locations simultaneously, then you are talking some serious development work... Any decent programing language (i.e., c, Forth, some versions of Basic) will give you all of the functionality you need, but it will take some research to determine exactly how. This is not a project I would undertake just to save money, but it would be fun to do it just to say that I have.

You guys like to do thing the hard way! Use a crestron single room processor called a QM-RMC. These can be bought through www.tuffsystems.co.uk who are Home Automation specialist and they have 2 x RS232 control ports, 4 x Digi/Analogue IO ports for sensors and an IR output for IR control. Furthermore there is IP connection for your network and after a little programming you can do what you want, when you want, however you want. These only cost £600 so cheap solution I'd say!

It's pretty easy to get an inexpensive climate control without breaking the bank.

There's a company called ICP-DAS USA that specializes in home automation and remote device control. They have touchpad interfaces that connect to your data acquisition units and allow you to adjust and monitor temperature and other. The units come equipped with HMI Works software for the graphical interface you were talking about. (Click on the items below in blue for more info):

TOUCH PAD CONTROLLERS

There's also an array of data acquisition units that convey temperature, power and current, based on your connected sensors. These can plug into your PC for monitoring through either a wired connection or through an Ethernet connection. Both options come with their own free software:

WIRED DATA MONITORING

WIRELESS DATA MONITORING

ETHERNET DATA MONITORING

They've got strong technical support and are helpful.