Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms

The Pierce "House On the Internet" Project FAQ

Updated Dec 30, 1999

What's new?

I no longer live there, and the data is no longer live, but I have left this site archived as it might be of use to someone doing a similar project. Forgive me is some of the links to other sites have gone stale.

Who are you?

See Eric Pierce page at www.va3ep.net If you have any comments / questions please send me mail here.

What are you doing with this "House on the Internet" Project ?

The goal of this (ongoing and probably never totally complete) project is to provide read only monitoring of various analog and digital home environment and automation parameters in and around the Pierce house from any Internet web browser in the world.

Eventually control of certain parameters is also planned (security protected of course).

Where is the Pierce "House on the Internet"?

The Pierce house is located in Aurora (about 50 Km north of Toronto), Ontario

When did you start and when will you be done the "House on the Internet"?

I have been thinking about this for a long time (at least the home automation part). In the past few years the components (A/D converters, computers, sensors, etc.) and Internet accces have become so inexpensive that the only real thing holding me back has been time. I'll probably never get done until I can actually virtually walk around my house from a remote location with a start trek style remote emitter like the doc on ST Voyager :-)

Why are you doing the "House on the Internet"?

Ever since I started hacking hardware when I was in my teens, I have been fascinated by hardware, software and real time data aquisition and control, which led to an EE education and career in hardware and software. Even thought I work for a company that produces Internet Software ( http://www.solect.com ), I do mostly consulting / architecting / presales activities and therefore don't do a lot of direct HW/SW hands. The house on the Internet project allows me to hack HW and SW in my homer lab.

You could also look at as an "online resume" of a small end to end architect, design, implement and operate demonstarion project involving analog, digital and Internet HW and SW which I have carried out (I've been hanging with the marketing people too much).

Describe the basic "House on the Internet" architecture

Dedicated "junker" computers connected to the house "intranet" LAN gather digital and analog data and dump formatted html and graphics files to a single web server directory which any computer on the house LAN can see from a browser.

I am currently copying files to my online internet web server for testing. When I get a cable internet modem (or adsl) this data will be live on the net. If there is a lot more delay in getting a permanent connection I may look some of copying the files via ftp via a time triggered event to my "off site" server.

Describe your house "Intranet" LAN

The house LAN "Intranet" is 10 megabit ethernet. There is an (ancient) 8 port thinwire hub and 4 port TP hub in the basement lab with dedicated runs to a scratch/backup lab file server and the dedicated house on the internet systems in the lab, with other runs to my significant other's office computer, my son's room room computer and my office computer, where there is a thinwire to 4 port TP hub for my laptop. Various junker Intel and Alpha sytems run DOS, Win95/98/NT and LINUX depending on application.

The whole house LAN is connected to the internet via internet on cable . I am using Windows98 SE modem sharing to make the internet available to all the systems in the house. ICS acts like a Network Address Translator, with one ethernet card on the cable side and one ethernet card on the home network. Even has a dhcp server for the home net. For a good faq on how to set this up see www.timhiggins.com/ppd/ics.htm

Describe te "House on the Internet" Hardware / Software

Various "junker" 486 and low end pentium computers are used and dedicated to various tasks:

Analog voltage parameter to Digital conversion is a done on a 486-DX4 120Mhz running DOS 6.22 and Microsoft Networking for DOS (for copying the html files to the web server). It has one 232SDA10 analog to digital (A/D) on COM2 ( see http://www.bb-elec.com/product.asp?dept%5Fid=54&sku=232SDA10 ). This provides 11 channels of 10 bit resolution 0-5 volt analog input, 3 digital inputs and 3 digital outputs. The A/D aquisition and simple web page creation is a quick hack in Qbasic. This is what the demo A/D software that I used as a starting point was, and I took the path of least resistance. With Qbasic it is also very easy to read PC I/O, and do quick prototyping.
Office / Aurora cam is P166 with Win95 (also servers as print server and X10 contoller)with color connectix quick cam and stock quickpic sw. BMP to JPG conversion with sw from http://www.efg2.com/lab/Graphics/BMPJPG.htm
Front door cam is a 486-66 running Win95 with an color connectix quickcam. Currently evaluating http://www.gotchanow.com/ for motion triggered image capture.
The graphs are done with GnuPlot, see http://www.fsf.org/software/plotutils/plotutils.html for info and sources, ftp://cmpc1.phys.soton.ac.uk/incoming/gnuplot-beta347pl6-PNG-GIF-Win32.zip for Windows version with GIF support, and http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Foothills/6647/gnuplot.pdf for the pdf manual.

Can I get a copy of the software that you wrote?

At this point, no. There is a possibility that I may actually produce a product, write an article or book so I'm going to hang onto this for now.

What are you currently monitoring/controlling?

Web Cameras

Office / Aurora cam (when pointed out the window) - color connectix quick cam http://www.logitech.com
Front door cam - color connectix quickcam

Current Digital Inputs Monitored:

Channel 1 - garage door up / down. Switch mounted so that door closes it when closed, pulling resistor biased to +5 to gnd to produce 0 or 1 logic level
Channel 2 - future expansion, tied to dip swith for testing
Channel 3 - future expansion, tied to dip swith for testing

Current Analog Inputs Monitored:

Channel 1 - Lab (basement) inside air temperaure using http://products.analog.com/products/info.asp?product=AD590 temperature sensor which produces a 1 MV per degree kelvin output, about $5 each. There is another cheap temp sensor http://www.national.com/pf/LM/LM334.html but I found a local supplier of the AD590
Channel 2 - Outdoor air temp AD590
Channel 3 - Furnace/Air Conditioner plenum temp AD590 (will tell when furnace or air conditioner is on when goes above or below indoor ambient)
Channel 4 - Hot water heater flu vent AD 590 (tells when water heater is on by rise)
Channel 5 - Indoor main floor temp AD590 in cool air return plenum
Channel 6/7 - Barometric pressure using http://www.blueearthresearch.com/msensors.htm $16.95 barometric pressure sensor with linear voltage out. Actually at this point I am using channel 6 and 7 to measure the differential output of this device, am planning to build diff op amp to amplify this and produce a single output with better dynamic range
Channel 8 - future expansion, tied to potentiomer for testing
Channel 9 - future expansion, tied to potentiomer for testing
Channel 10 - future expansion, tied to potentiomer for testing
Channel 11 - Out door sun sensor, 2 * 2" photovoltaic cells (left over from my son's old science fair sun powered fan project :-) pointing south from basement window

Current Digital Outputs Controlled:

1-3: 3 Leds (not very exciting, currently for testing)

Planned Digital Inputs:

I have the design ideas and material for most of the following, time is the gating factor. Digital Inout is easy to do, just use a switch or other sensor that can be sent to a game port switch input or conditioned into a ttl level input to be read by a parallel port. Some of these may be derived from analog, but are recorded as on / off / or count.

front, side, back doors open/closed - single pole single throw switch in door jamb to game port or conditioned to TTL for parallel port
front security light triggered - relay for game port or AC low voltage xformer conditioned to TTL for parallel port
selected interal doors (basement) open/closed - single pole single throw switch to game port or conditioned to TTL for parallel port
selected lights (garage, basement, lab) on or off - transformer across light generating small voltage, rectified and conditoned to TTL for parallel
furnace air conditioner compressor , burner, fan on / off - transformer across device generating small voltage, rectified and conditoned to TTL for parallel
outdoor motion detectors triggered count - transformer across device generating small voltage, rectified and conditoned to TTL to parallel
basement moisture detector - two metal plates with AC voltage across, measure small resulting current when flooded, amplfy and conditoned to TTL for parallel

Planned Analog Inputs:

I have the design ideas, material or pointers for most of the following, I've tried to indicate the most inexpensive sensor that I have found.

indoor, outdoor humidity - http://www.thomasregister.com/olc/ohmic/hsens.htm inexpensive ohmic humidity sensor SC 600 with linear DC voltage output. This sensor also does not suffer from permanent damage if it gets wet like others do (so the vendor says)
wind direction, speed - commercial (or maybe homebrew) weather vane and speed indicator. Ideas: cheapest ($89 US, also have rain guage) at http://www.peetbros.com/peetbrosnofram/part2.htm#windsensor, also see http://www.columbia-center.org/fascinating/obs/instrmnt.html wind speed / direction for less than $100 kit, http://www.davisnet.com has Wind speed, Direction Product Number: 7911 Price: $120, http://member.aol.com/kd6nnm/wsi.htm has homebrew wind speed indicator plans, http://www.gernsback.com/noframe/en/1197/ENcontents_nf.html has solid state wind speed ind plans.
Rain - http://www.rainwise.com/index.html has an $80 "tip bucket" rain guage, generates digital pulse output
mains voltage / current - use an ac to dc voltage mains converter to a/d for voltage, ac to ac current transformer from http://ccontrolsys.com/CTs.htm to dc to a/d for current , compute power in software
Other rotary events - http://www.bourns.com/cat/ace.htm has an inexpensive (< $10) gray code encoder (gray code is an interesting digital code where only one bit changes at a time so you don't get huge jumps from all bits of a binary code not changing exacly at once - a simple logical sw op turns it to binary) that could be used for angle of door opening, etc.
water meter - my water meter generates some sort of analog signal for outdoor accumulating display, need to scope it and figure out what, design interface
water presure - would require commercial water pressure transducer. Know of any???
Call ident - call ident module or Microsoft phone generate ascci of call ID data, interface
Gas meter - I probably won't touch this!!!! Don't want to blow up my house!
X10 events - I have had a computer interface X10 computer interface and a bunch of light modules http://www.x10.com/products/x10_ck11a_1.htm for a long time and use it to control various lighs automatically and from a hand held RF remote. I have found some example software that will pick up signal from X10 controllers and devices and record to ascii file that could then be displayed on an htmp page

Planned Outputs / Controls:

The main issue with outputs is putting in place is security so that someone in Japan doesn't put my garage door up and down! The most practical ones that I can see doing are ones where I look via a browser at my house and see that something has been left in an undesired state and want to change it.

Close (/open) garage door (sometimes I leave this up when I drive away)
Point office / aurora cam
Change X10 light settings

Other Stuff I have that I want to put on the Net:

I have a DEC PDP-8 and a couple of PDP-11's in the lab (panoramic view 1,2,3,4,5,6). (don't ask why :-) that I would like to interface somehow, so people could see what command line computing in the 60/70's was like.
I "jam" semi rgularly (I play drums) with a bunch of friends. Doing live webcasts of these events would be cool.

Do you know of other Private Individual "house on the Internet" Projects

http://www.icepick.com has the most stuff I have ever seen connected by a private individual and has inspired me to get the heck on with my project
http://www.davisnet.com/internet/wwwlink.htm has links to people with Internet readable weather stations
http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Interesting_Devices_Connected_to_the_Net/ has some interesting things (some by private individuals) connected to the net, including hot tubs, refrigerators, wine cellars, etc.
Here is a guy at UofT who has HIMSELF online: http://genesis.eecg.toronto.edu/ , esp see pic at http://genesis.eecg.toronto.edu/steve5.jpg
Not really relevant, but check out www.heartless-bitches.com anyway. She's a friend
Let me know of any others and I'll link them here

Describe Your Home Security (aka burglar alarm) System

For obvious reasons I will NOT supply a lot of detail here. The house burglar alarm system is isolated from the home LAN network described above (except for possible status reporting in the future). It is hard wired, does not use a computer and has separate backup battery. A note to perspective thieves: pick an easier target with a better ROI. I consider the Pierce house resonably secure, there is an active neigborhood watch in the area (and a large dog next door who barks like heck when I come home and causes the neighbor to look out and see who it is), and as mentioned, the systems used for this project are "junkers" that have about $0 value. Not worth the trouble :-)