My friends say I’m a control freak and detail oriented. I’m not sure whether to be insulted or not but whatever.

We have a cottage in the woods that we bought in early 2010 and spent the next 4 years essentially rebuilding the house. We knew we would have to renovate it when we bought it but the further I dug into it, the further I discovered I was going to have to go. Now that I’ve learned a lot about building science, I won’t waste money on a house inspection in the future. But that’s for a separate article.

While working on the renovations, we also lived in the building on weekends.. This was a valuable time to learn about the building during the various seasons and gain an understanding of how we wanted to use it. The bright sunny places to sit at various times of the day, the oppressive heat in the summer, and biting cold of winter. Bug ingress season, Bug egress season. What I also learned was the various things that I needed to keep an eye on. When you put as much money into a place, you want to do whatever possible to protect that investment. But there’s also an opportunity to reduce maintenance and weekend effort. It is, after all, a retreat, not a gulag.

During my day job, I do embedded firmware. This means I write software for small microcontrollers in various applications; specifically interfacing them to the real world. So while working on the cottage, I saw many opportunities for automation and data gathering. When you own a home that you live in, you’re able to take care of things in the home because you’re always there (or you have neighbors who can do things while you’re on holidays)… Things like watering the grass or flowers, fixing leaky pipes, fixing the furnace, fixing windows. When you live in the city, many things are taken care of. Fresh water comes in under pressure for you, sewage leaves automatically, and your furnace turns on/off at the whim of your thermostat. You likely find out pretty quickly when something goes wrong. Not so much when you have a building a couple hours away that you don’t visit during the week, or might not visit for weeks at a time.

Out in the country, there are frequent power failures, or someone can notice that your driveway isn’t plowed and so decide to break in, leaving doors or windows open. Pipes can freeze or burst and before you know it, your basement is full of water. It’s easy to turn off the water when you’re not there but then you can’t automatically water the plants in the garden.

There are also some nice-to-haves… In the winter, it’s nice to be able to set the thermostat before you head out so when you arrive, everything is nice and warm. There’s a lot of heat mass in a building. So your furnace might get the air temperature up to 70F fairly quick, but all the walls, dishes, tiles, appliances, bedding, etc, are all still cold. It can take a few hours before the whole house is at a comfortable temperature. Same goes for summer. There’s nothing quite like driving out after work to discover the inside of the house is over 90F and you have to wait until after midnight before it’s comfortable enough to sleep.

There’s plenty of home automation stuff but was simultaneously horribly expensive while also not offering me the flexibility that I wanted. I know that I can buy a bunch of cheap Arduino hardware and build a whole shwack of custom sensor and control modules, each of them having custom firmware to do a single task. But coordinating them all can be a lot of work. Then the overriding logic is also higher effort than I wanted.

Around the same time as this, my buddy Jeff was wanting some generic sensor/control hardware to control his greenhouse. We quickly realized there’s a need for people to automate their hobbies. My building was my hobby.

My feeling is that the easier you make it for people to write code the more they’re able to accomplish. My dad can hookup relays, thermocouples, and that sort of thing but he can barely program a VCR.

When my son was in Grade 5, he was taught how to use “Scratch” https://scratch.mit.edu/ and that was the first thing that came to mind when I thought of simplifying device automation. After some research and experimentation, I found the reimplementation called “Snap!” http://snap.berkeley.edu. Thus my idea was born.

In the next article, I will go into some detail about what I’ve been working on.