Smart Home Blog

That cool switch plate offers some kind of unique functionality. You may record a message (up to 20 seconds) that will automatically play each time someone flips the switch. It can easily replace an existing switch plate. Just not sure how to 4 AAA batteries will fit the switch box. Also the Parrot Digital Messaging Switch Plate is cheap (just $9.99). So, you can simple try it to see how it fits your life.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find the possibility to ship that messaging plate to Cyprus. So, I have no idea how it useful but personally I prefer notifications on my cell phone 🙂

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 🙂