Smart Home Blog

My dear readers. Now you have an option to receive blog updated not only via RSS but from Twitter too. Just go to Smart Home Blog Twitter page and press Follow button. As result you’ll read announces of new posts on that page, your IM or SMS. Hope it’ll be helpful for you.

I already wrote about energy meter Kill-a-watt which might help you reduce your electricity bill and improve our environment. Creative engineers from MAKE hacked it to add WiFi connectivity and possibility to post measurements directly to specified Twitter account. As result the information from the Kill-a-watt can be received quickly and can be shared with followers. The new device is called Tweet-a-watt

The Tweet-a-watt was designed for the Core77 Green Gadgets competition and its source, schematics and the idea was released as an open-source hardware project. I suspect that we will have such devices in the production soon.

[via SlashGear]

Here is another useful application of Twitter – Media Center Health Monitor notification. Now you can see the status of your Media center in your Twitter account. Don’t forget to create a separate, private account to avoid showing some private information for all your followers.

[via eHomeUprgade]

If you continuously forget to watering your plants Botanicalls Twitter is what you actually need. Using a simple electric parts and a bit knack you’ll get an intelligent system which will measure moisture level and notify you via Twitter (in case of connecting the system to the Internet) about necessity of watering. That’s really cool, it’s it? But maybe that irrigation system would be more useful because you need just put the water into tank time by time. The rest will be done automatically.

Twitter – one of the coolest sociable web application, can be used not only for sharing your minds. You can receive there messages from your home automation system. It sounds amazing but it’s true. An article Twittering Your Home from O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog contains example for XTension – Mac based smarthome system. The idea is following. You have to create two Twitter accounts – one for you and another – for your smart home (you probably need to select the “protect my updates” option so that your notifications aren’t available to the public area) and choose it as “friend”. You also can specify options in the your Twitter account to receive messages to IM or via SMS. Smarthome system uses Twitteriffic – a Mac OS X 10.4 application to communicate with Twitter.

Sure the same approach can be used in the other home automation systems (I’m going to try it with Plutohome). The advantage of Twitter is that it offers many ways for communication. So, its using is limited by your fantasy only