The Blog of Ian Mercer.

Smart home energy savings - update for 2010

Smart home energy savings
2010

Here's an updated graph showing the ongoing reduction in energy for our smart home. Driven mainly by continual improvement in the algorithms that control the heating, air conditioning and lighting the overall consumption of gas and electricity has continued to decline throughout 2010. It appears however that I am approaching the limit as to what is possible as the trend lines are beginning to flatten out. Going forward I'll continue to try to improve the algorithms but I'll also be on the lookout for any parasitic power-consuming devices and I'll be dealing with them using techniques like the smart power strip I mentioned here.

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This new technique to compress the time series data collected by my home automation system seems to be working really well.

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Home Automation

I've been working on home automation for over 15 years and I'm close to achieving my goal which is a house that understands where everyone is at all times, can predict where you are going next and can control lighting, heating and other systems without you having to do or say anything. That's a true "smart home".

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Digital Twins are never identical

Digital Twin are an online representation of a real world object, a copy of its properties in the digital world and a way to send updated and commands to it. In effect I've been making them for years but now they have a trendy name.

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Home Automation Sensors

An overview of the many sensors I've experimented with for home automation including my favorite under-floor strain gauge, through all the usual PIR, beam and contact sensors to some more esoteric devices like an 8x8 thermal camera.

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Why smarthomes are hard

Why automated learning is hard for a smart home. The perils of over-fitting, under-fitting and how the general unpredictable nature of life makes it hard to build a system that learns your behavior.

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
Cover Image for Collinearity test for sensor data compression

Collinearity test for sensor data compression

One way to reduce the volume of sensor data is to remove redundant points. In a system with timestamped data recorded on an irregular interval we can achieve this by removing co-linear points.

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Event blocks

Home automation systems need to respond to events in the real world. Sometimes it's an analog value, sometimes it's binary, rarely is it clean and not susceptible to problems. Let's discuss some of the ways to convert these inputs into actions.

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
Cover Image for Logistic function - convert values to probabilities

Logistic function - convert values to probabilities

Another super useful function for handling sensor data and converting to probabilities is the logistic function 1/(1+e^-x). Using this you can easily map values onto a 0.0-1.0 probability range.

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
Cover Image for ATAN curve for probabilities

ATAN curve for probabilities

In a home automation system we often want to convert a measurement into a probability. The ATAN curve is one of my favorite curves for this as it's easy to map overything onto a 0.0-1.0 range.

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Home Construction Advice

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Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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T-Mobile home internet

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Ian Mercer
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Probabilistic Home Automation

A probabilistic approach to home automation models the probability that each room is occupied and how many people are in that room.

Ian Mercer
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Multiple hypothesis tracking

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Ian Mercer
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A state machine for lighting control

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Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Home Automation States

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Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Graphing gigabytes of home automation data with tableau

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Ian Mercer
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iBeacons for Home Automation

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iBeacon meetup in Seattle - January 2015

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Ian Mercer
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Home Automation Systems as a Graph

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Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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N-Gram Analysis of Sensor Events in Home Automation

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Ian Mercer
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Xamarin Forms Application For Home Automation

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Ian Mercer
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The Internet of Hubs (and things)

Maybe it should be called the Internet of Hubs instead

Ian Mercer
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Showing home status with just a single RGB LED

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Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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A wireless sensor network using Moteino boards

The diminutive Arduino boards include a powerful transmitter/receiver

Ian Mercer
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JSON Patch - a C# implementation

Ian Mercer
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The home as a user interface

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer

A RESTful API for sensor data

POSTing data to a home automation system from Arduino devices

Ian Mercer
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The Internet of Boilers

An experiment to measure every aspect of an HVAC / boiler system

Ian Mercer
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VariableWithHistory - making persistence invisible, making history visible

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My talk to the Seattle Quantified Self meetup

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer

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Some new features for my home automation using an Android phone

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer

Before there was the web there was BeebTel

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Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer

My first programme [sic]

At the risk of looking seriously old, here's something found on a paper tape

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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The Internet of Dogs

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Ian Mercer
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GreenGoose Review

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Ian Mercer
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Home power meters revisited

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Home Automation Calendar Integration

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer

Web site crawler and link checker (free)

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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A smart power strip

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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What does a Smart House do at Halloween?

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Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
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Home Automation Top Features

Ian Mercer
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Weather Forecasting for Home Automation

Ian Mercer
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How can I tell if my house is smart?

Ian Mercer
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Home Automation Block Diagram

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer

Elliott 803 - An Early Computer

Ian Mercer
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World's Smartest House Demonstration

Ian Mercer
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Historical note about moving my servers into a datacenter

Ian Mercer
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Future proof your home with a new conduit system?

Running conduit can be expensive but maybe you don't need one to every room

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer

Second Drobo Update

At this point things were looking up for my Drobo

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer

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Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer

Core duo desktop machine runs cool

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New Home Automation Server

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World's Smartest House

Over 15 years of experimentation with home automation

Ian Mercer
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Cover Image for Preparing for death

Preparing for death

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Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer
Cover Image for World's Smartest House Videos

World's Smartest House Videos

A collection of videos about my smart home efforts

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer