In Part I, Part II, and Part III, I covered mostly the reasoning behind my home automation project, and its hardware components. Now it's time to conquer the project's most challenging aspect, the software. I suppose the reason that I consider software to be the most challenging aspect is that I'm a software engineer, and as such, I always feel the need to tweak the hell out of any software system I might go with, or even create my own from scratch. Hardware engineering isn't aligned too well with my skillset, which is why I very rarely do any hardware hacking that might involve precision soldering and the like. Therefore, I usually end up accepting hardware limitations as a fact of life (unless they're just too egregious), but I have a hard time accepting software limitations, especially when there's something I can do about them.

Although I'm not 100% done with the lamp topic from Part II, I think it's in a good enough state that I can move on to something else for now. The next topic is controlling window blinds, also known as an exercise in masochism. Existing solutions are obscenely expensive, starting around the $130 mark and going way past $500. I refuse to pay that much for automated window coverings. Luckily, there is an alternative.

Since I have decided to go with Z-Wave at the end of part I, the next step is to determine what hardware I'll need for the features I laid out (again in part I). Some hardware is obvious, like the various Z-Wave modules I'll have to buy, while other hardware is more ambiguous, like what my Internet-accessible controller will run on. Let's get the more obvious stuff out of the way first.

I have wanted to do home automation for a number of years now (see my old post on my legacy blog here), but various things prevented me from experimenting with it, not the least of them being me not owning a house. Now that I actually do own a house, I've been looking at home automation technologies more and more, trying to decide what I can do, what I should do, what is feasible to do, and so forth.