Hi all,
My name is Sean, I'm a pilot and flight safety analyst, and someone with huge technolust! - Yes, I'm a Hak5 fan!
- While flying is my passion, I have always had a strong interest and truly second passion in engineering, computers and robotics. I happened to stumble upon this site during my explorations of AppleScript coding and found some truely inspiring ideas. So now that my project is beginning to mature (actual daily use), I thought it was about time I join up!
About 5 months ago I moved into a fabulous apartment in the heart of Downtown Montreal and in setting up my ideal home media center, it has begun to expand into my passions. I have in the last month been extending its influence throughout the rest of my apartment, linking it into the lighting, the HVAC and whole apartment sound system. While certainly people can achieve a lot of this now-a-days simply by opening their wallets, I'm on a rather tight budget being a fledgling pilot, so I have been doing as much as I can through my own ingenuity and over the counter parts.
I've only really been working on the automation aspects of my system for a couple weeks and in this time also teaching myself the AppleScript programming language as my system's base, connecting into other languages when needed for functions I can't achieve within the scope of AppleScript. While I am sure it is often quoted here as an inspiration for their automation project, a lot of my vision for what I would like to achieve is seen in JARVIS from Iron Man. So far I have managed to provide my system with connection into the local weather from a personal weather station, my iCal calendars, an aviation accident monitoring site (partial implimentation thus far), my Plex media center (partial integration, only control of, no detection of state yet), integration with push notifications for my whole system out to my iPhone and iPad, partial control of the front door access system to my building (as much as I obviously can when it is not my own personal building) and finally my favorite achievement, rather reliable presence detection. This is also integrated with my Harmony remote I am using for my media center, which now sends commands to open the front door as well as full one button Skype call logic during use of the Plex Media Client (for those not aware, there is no existing integration of Skype into Plex, hence my work to achieve it). While so far my lighting is only using motion and timing, I have a perl API that I am working on implementing into my scripts to allow the Mac to control it directly, but I am still learning how to get this online and controlled through AppleScript (proven to work, but waiting for the API developer to write a little documentation). There is still a lot more that I would obviously like to achieve, as half the fun of such a project for me is the creation. So far this is all being run through my old Aluminum MacBook 13" (pre-Pro), however I am slowly investing in the parts to buildup my own powerful mini-ITX based Hackintosh server to eventually take over the whole system and provide ultimately more flexibility, reliability and capability.
Anyways, I have shared a decent amount here for my first post I believe and while no where near a full description of what I have achieved so far in my project or probably even very clearly explained (I am writing this late at night before going to bed after a very sleepless week), I think this gives you all a good idea of where I generally am right now in my project and where it is headed.
Cheers,
Sean "190EAMG"
