Hello gentle viewer,

Apologies for the brief sabbatical, I’m sure you’ve all been eagerly checking the website every day and been bitterly disappointed. Thankfully your days of sitting in with a glass of pinot noir on a lonely friday evening wearing away the lettering of your F5 key are over, we are back!

We had our first meeting for the Dublin Maker event in July and I must say we are very excited. Last year we showed some of our homebrew solutions to… residential automation using various sensor and microcontroller bits and bobs.

Weren’t we lovely!

Anywho so we don’t want to give everything away but we have a plan. It is displayed here in stunning pictorial form:

We’ve broken down the tasks into the following:

Smart Powerstrip - smart power strip that lets us control our devices over the web and see how much power they’re using, cool eh. Victor “I love databases” Muia and Martin “current is cool” Kennedy will be plugging away at this.

Wireless Sensors - extending our sensor bits using low power wireless and have them talk to a Galileo which will act as a gateway for the home automation system. Martin “ZigBee is for wimps” Kennedy and Greg “I work for Intel now” Jackson will be having a go at that.

Rasp Pi cam - Looking at doing image/face detection using a Pi and Pi camera, could stream to android phone and be used for security or to dynamically adjust the feel of a house to the users mood. Colin “I’m just happy to be here” Greene will be selfie-ing himself for the sake of science for the foreseeable future.

Finally we will have a server that will manage the data and make the different parts of the system talk to each other and a web app with whopper user experience to let people use all this kit in an intuitive way. John “AngularJawS” Maguire and Michael “Just Keano” Keane will be knocking this one out of the park.

So that’s us. Stay tuned people, same bed time same bed channel!