Almost 2 weeks of HomeSeer now...

It's been nearly two weeks with HomeSeer, which already puts me beyond the point I lost patience with MisterHouse. There are still a few conditions I need to work out on events so that the setup doesn't annoy my wife so much, but I see these sorts of things as fine tuning that can be worked out over time.

I did manage to find some Big Ben wavs to play on the hour over the speaker client and my 3Com Audreys, and that lasted all of 3 hours before my wife said to get rid of it.

I found a pretty nifty interactive, multi-person alarm clock script. Had a little bit of trouble with it the first couple of nights which caused me to miss taking my parents to the airport (and they ended up driving themselves), but I'm sure they'll understand when I tell them what happened. Fortunately, I know enough about programming to interpret whatever language the script was written in (I think it's VB, but not VB.NET... still not sure what the difference is). I made a couple of changes based on the style the script was written in (i.e., awful!), and it seems to work how I want it now.

Also, I got an alert script for woot.com, especially useful during Woot-offs. I also made slight modifications to this script (definitely written in VB.NET, and the style is much better... kudos to the author) to play the woot alerts over the Audreys. This annoys my wife as well, but less than the hourly chiming. However, unfortunately do to some bad logic (mine), it always plays a Woot alert the first thing after I wake up (and the wife is still asleep). I'll need to put a time condition on it as well.

One thing we're still struggling with is voice recognition. I ended up having to create a new voice profile on the tablet PC and start over with it, since it pretty much stopped recognizing my voice. I'm thinking the new profile is heading that direction as well. If it happens, I'll need to create a new profile and start over again, but turn off profile adjustment every time I speak to it, and only modify the profile when I am training it. We also couldn't decide what our attention word (to let the computer know when we were talking to it) should be. The default was 'computer', but I tend to use that word a lot in casual conversation, and the tablet would often end up activating while I was just talking to my wife. Then, I changed it to 'smart home', but that just sounded dumb. Then I changed it to 'tablet', again pretty dumb. Then my best friend suggested 'Smithers', and now that is the name of our home.

Another minor annoyance at this point is our weather getting script. It will tell me the high and low for the day, but can't for the life of it tell me what the temperature is outside right now, whether outside my house or at the airport. I need to investigate other weather scripts.

I do want to customize the webpages a little as well as expose it so I can access it from outside the house, but those are lower priority. I'm also still waiting for my extra UPB switches to arrive from Austin.

So, in summary, still very happy with everything. HomeSeer is so flexible, it's pretty much what I spend my free time on at this point. And it looks like I'm becoming more active on the HomeSeer forum than on the CocoonTech forum, although I still check both multiple times per day. What I worry about is when my 30 day trial will run out, and I don't know when I will be able to actually purchase the software.

The future is pretty well planned out though. Purchase the software (and appropriate plug-ins), install the UPB switches coming up from Austin, then invest in X10 RF stuff including the ACRF plug-in, the W800RF32, motion sensors, door/window sensors, keyfobs, and stick-on switches.

Plus, I found on the HomeSeer boards a very active discussion of what they caller CheaperRFID, plus a member who is front-ending a site for bulk buying at http://www.wingsnwakes.com/. This will also definitely be a future investment for occupancy sensors and state machines.

OK, time to stop rambling...