It's the holiday season, it's time to automate!

Yes it's that time of the year again when geeks, nerds and hardware hackers turn their minds to automating their holiday lights. ;-)

It's a busy time for me too as I squeeze is as much work as I can before the end of the year, burn off vacation days before the end of the year & prepare for the holidays. At home I'm busy with family, chores, tuning the home automation network and preparing my HA presentation for the Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) in April. So far I've got quite a bit working with MisterHouse (MH) loaded and running on the Plug Computer (I now have 2, a Sheeva and Guru Plus plug), the necessary device drivers, Insteon and X10 running remarkably well (I've reduced to one system controlling everything), various parts of MH documented on the MH Wiki (the MHT file format & the Floor Plan howto pages). I've also been busy adding functionality to the MH code. And finally I have Perl, Java and Groovy running on MH. I still have a ton of work to do before my presentation. I'll document that work on the Presentation page. I'm also working on adding a Insteon modules EZIO2x4 to MH and I've got a ZBPLM (Insteon, X10 and ZigBee) on the way. I won't have to do anything to support Insteon and X10 but the ZigBee will be interesting. Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on some ZigBee devices next month.