Home Automation Calendar Integration
One feature of my home automation system is Google Calendar integration. What this enables is two things: (i) the house can record what happened on the calendar so I can see at a glance what's been going on back home and (ii) the ability to put events on the calendar for the house to do certain things.
For
example, we recently bought some new baby chicks and they need to be
kept warm at light. An infra-red lamp in the chicken house is connected
to an X-10 controlled outlet (behind a GFCI, of course since this is
outdoors). The device that controls that outlet is called "Chicken
lights" but also has several shorter aliases (e.g. "Chickens"). Using
the home's natural language engine that outlet can be controlled
remotely by the chat interface, by the email interface, by the voice
interface or by the calendar interface.
In this case, a simple recurring event on the calendar to turn the light on every night for 9 hours is sufficient and I can set the recurring event to stop after a few weeks because by then the chicks will no longer need it.
This complete integration of Calendar and Natural Language Engine functionality certainly makes for a very easy way to control and monitor a smart home!
Net result ... happy chicks:
