Robo House

noobmuncher

Hello, so i have begun planning on my masterpiece project which in short is automating most of my house. I want to take care of security, monitor, interact and send preprogrammed commands to my rover robot. That is the first stage, but i eventually want to incorporate controlling user preferences around the house using RFID tags mounted below our watches. By user preferences i mean water tempature, access to only certain rooms via the tags ect.

For security i plan to use:

RFID tags and scanners
Occupancy (or motion) detectors
IR sensors
Light sensors
possibly a soft air gun mounted on the rover

For monitoring and automation:
The above and;
Tempature sensors
humidity sensor

So i am looking for any help or comments you have other then that this is a huge project. This isn`t artificial intelligence or anything though just basic sensors and basic commands, just on a large scale. What micro controller should i use? I am most comfortable programming BS2`s, but i realize that this would probably work best with a Propeller chip even though i have never really worked with it. Also i need some sort of cheep way of communication, because running wires around will work for most but not for all. I am thinking i will need to have a central hub ran by either a BS2 or a Propeller and a couple BS1`s throughout the house for things that need to be wireless.

Mike Green

Like most large projects, you start with an overall concept, then divide it down to functional units. You then make a limited prototype and try things out to find out what about your assumptions may be wrong, then you go back and start again on a larger scale. Some things, like temperature and humidity sensors are pretty straightforward. People sensors are messier and often don't work the way you think they might.

You could certainly use a network of BS2s with an occasional BS1 for something simple. I'd suggest using xBee modules since they're small and low power and can be networked easily.

I'm biased in favor of using the Propeller chip for the central control. At $20 a pop for the Protoboard, the Propeller would work nicely for the peripheral units even though that might be overkill. The only thing cheaper would be to use SX Protoboards for those, programmed in SX/B. You could use those for the central controller, but the Propeller is more capable and it's easy to include a full keyboard and VGA or TV display.

If you can run simple wiring (a pair of wires (twisted pair)), you can save the cost of the wireless modules. Make it two twisted pairs and you can distribute power as well (probably at 6-9V)

noobmuncher

Thanks for the insightful and helpful post as usual Mike. I have to agree with what you siad about the propeller controller, I am just not sure if it is worth me learning a new programming language....it probably is ha ha so i probably will. Although for the sake of my own interest, is it possible to have BS2 communicate with one another wired without taking up too many pins? What i am really going for in the first stages of this project are exactly what you said, learning on a smaller scale so that i can find the weaknesses and fix them on the larger version. So initally i will have to start relatively cheap as well. I will however need to have at least one wireless form of communication between the "robo house brain" and the rover.