Starting

30. April 2009 by admin.

So I started this blog because I got interested in home automation. After many Google searches I found the current commercial product either overpriced or functional very limited. I had some simple sensors / actuators in mind which could be controlled via a PC application or web page with a smart remote control added later. Obviously those searches lead into multiple directions and soon I realized that it should be possible to build a simple system from scratch.

Since I mostly use Linux at work and home the challenge would be to find/build a complete development system for one of the highly integrated system on a chip on Linux. This includes a CAD program for the electrical circuit including PCB design. A cross compiler and debug environment as well as a programmer.

As a secondary goal I would like to do this completely with free/open content way. There are multiple reasons for this. Obviously this keeps the costs down (as long as I don’t count my time as cost) and second I believe in sharing ideas as a way to create something bigger.

Anyway to cut this short, as a first step I needed to have a place to sort my thoughts and collect information so the easiest way was to just set up a blog on my web hosting account. So here we go.

PS: Don’t expect any working hardware/software any time soon. This whole project is planned as a hobby project and to refresh my hardware skills. Also I can not guarantee the correctness of any information on this site use on your own risk.

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