Star Trek inspired home automation visualisation
- by Zak McKracken
I’ve always been a more or less active fan of Star Trek. During the construction phase of my house I started coding a GUI for controlling the house which has an EIB. Just for fun I designed a version inspired by the LCARS design used in Star Trek TNG and showed this to my wife. I showed her several designs before but this was the only one, she really liked. So I decided to go on with this. I started a C# WinForms application. The software runs on a wall mounted Shuttle Barebone-PC. First plan was an industrial panel-pc but the processor was too slow. The now-used Atom is ok. I started with the LCARS-controls found on Codeproject. Since the classic LCARS design divides the screen into two parts this tended to be impracticable, so I used my own design For now the software is able to: Switch lights/wall outlets Show current temperatures for all room controllers Show outside temperature with a 24h trend chart Show the status of the two heat pumps Provide an alarm clock (e.g. for cooking) Play internet radio streams Control absence Mute the door bell Speak status messages via speech synthesis For now, I’m working on an integration of my electric meter. The main heat pump and the electric meter are connected to my LAN. I also tried some speech recognition, but I’ve problems with the microphone. I't’s working when you are right in front of the PC, but not far away, let’s say on the other side of the room. So this is the main view. The table displays raw values which are sent over the EIB – completely useless but looks great For each floor I have a different view. Here you can see the temperatures and check the status of the lights (the buttons are blinking when a light is switched on) This is the view for the heat pump: Next step would be to integrate a control of my squeezebox server (I use different Squeezeboxes through the house as a multiroom audio solution)
