Sensoration
The smart house aspect (SHAC or Smart House Adaptive Controls) of the solar house is run by a team of 2 people basically (with the help of an advisor whose helping us out with communications with other teams). I am the “team leader”, which means squat in a 2-person team 
This past saturday, Anthony (the other guy on the team) and I sat down and went through a bunch of sensors and made sure they worked. A lot more stuff will happen in the next few weekends, but it was still pretty fun sitting in a room filled with wires, chips and adapters of all kinds (there you go nina, just to satisfy the perv requirement for my posts :silly: ).
We now have a functional humidity and light sensor. I can also dim my table lamp from my PC! We need to get a better interface for the light dimming, but we know it’s possible now and how to basically do it.
How do all these work? :nerd:
At the heart of everything is the Temp08 and a class of devices called 1-Wire devices (Wikipedia Article). The Temp08 allows the PC to talk to these 1-Wire devices through a serial port with some fairly nice commands. The biggest advantage over other more well packaged sensors (or sensors that work right out of the box) is that these 1-Wire sensors are CHEAP … and SMALL! A lot of the parts, you can even order for free from the Dallas Maxim site as samples. I order about 10 temperature sensors and several voltage sensors (they sense voltage potentials at their inputs).
These sensors plug directly into the Temp08 with a telephone cable (any cable would do fine, but telephone cable is easy to find and it has 2 pairs of wires inside a nice sheathing, three of which we use – Data, Voltage+ and Voltage-).
The lighting is a done using an interface that talks to DMX devices and acts as an adapter between DMX and a PC serial port. DMX in itself is a very simple protocol. Lights are grouped into channels. Each channel gets 1 bit of data (0 – 255). If the channel gets a 0, all the lights in the channel will go down to 0, if the channel gets 255, all the lights are at their brightest, and if they get 100, somewhere in the middle, etc. So a DMX packet is basically a string of n numbers, where n is the number of channels you have. Each packet is delineated by some start and stop code. The lights usually talk to dimmer modules/racks/packs that actually take the DMX signal they are getting from the DMX controller (in our case, the PC) and fiddle with the voltage each light that’s connected to it, gets.
Hmm… Well another long ass post for Aditya. Hope it was enlightening ^_^