So today I spent some time working around the house with my family, my parents visited us for the holidays. After cleaning up the xmas decorations my wife headed off to ride her horses and my dad and I worked on a few things.

I received a few Insteon devices for xmas this year so we worked on getting those wired up in the house. We now have two Smartlinc Insteon Dimmer Switchs hooked up, one in the living room, and one in our bedroom.

My trial license of mControl expired, so I am going to have to figure out what to do about software to control the switches, I still think I would like to write my own, but we’ll see how that goes. I have enough other projects to keep me busy without trying to start up my own open source home automation application.

The Signalinc is now installed in the breaker box downstairs, and now X-10 signals in my house work from my testing no matter what outlet the devices are plugged into.

Well it’s now officially the day after Thanksgiving, that means Christmas Lights need to go up over the next few days. With that in mind, and following my blog post from earlier, I decide it was time to get the Insteon and X-10 equipment I do own working together. I ran across the mControl Software on Smarthomeand then decided I would look into it more. I found a trial copy and have that up and running on my Windows Home Server. I must say, it is pretty sweet that I can control the lights from nearly any computer in the world now. Over the next few days I’ll go through and hookup all the hardware I have boxed up currently. It is mostly X-10 controls, but I do have a few Insteon controls as well.

Here’s a screenshot of my test setup running in the Windows Home Server console.

One of the projects that we will be following here  at Domoticsblog.com will be the move of Christopher and Natalie Hammond over at www.going2colorado.com. They will be moving to Colorado in the summer of 2009 and part of their moving process will be to configure a house with a home automation setup. Stay tuned as that process unfolds!