I love the idea of home automation. Ever since the early days of Star Trek when they could get back to their room and tell the computer what they want – lights, music … food! This idea was taken to another lever by S.A.R.A.H. (Self Actuated Residential Automated Habitat), the bunker home Jack and Zoe Carter live in on Eureka.

I ways knew I wanted an automated home, not only does it appeal to the geek in me but I’m also fairly lazy and like systems that make life easier. During a recent week off I spent almost the whole time setting up my smart house (which I’m calling GERTY from the 2009 movie Moon).

When I started my project I’d played and experimented with other systems, some worked better than others and some were killed off my the makers, but up till now I’ve been tinkering. There’s never been a fixed design or plan. Now I know what I want. I just don’t know how I’m getting there yet – and that’s the adventure.

At present I’m using OpenHAB. It’s not something I’ve ever played with before and so far I’m liking it. It’s doing what I want and giving me the power I’m looking for.

My plan is over the next few weeks to use this blog as my ‘grail diary’ recording my experiences with results. I found the OpenHAB learning curve was quite high and the examples didn’t always explain anything fully – just copy and paste – and I struggled to find many real world examples. My grail diary will consist of this blog and a git repository the house the working examples.

Thought out the journey I welcome you all to join in and let me know what you think and how you would or are solving the same problems. In my first article I will be looking at presence detection, since one of the most important things of a smart house is for it to know if you home or not.