Coming to a Home Near You?

August 17th, 2007

Last night had a tremendous technical dinner with a great friend Gary Howard. It makes me honestly believe that there is hope for Arizona to become a technology hub and that spirit of innovation is alive and well here. Gary is a design engineer that has put a lot of time into home automation and Asterisk installations during the past 18-24 months to see what possibilities exist for opportunity. We often exchange ideas and tinker with components of a system, but the “bug” to really try to develop somethings beyond playing around has hit.

Step one will be to allow home automation control via telephone. That is to start integrating two great home products Asterisk + Indigo. So last night I grabbed Indigo and RubyOSA. There is fully OSA support in Indigo and now I have the full API available. Within 15 minutes or so I am able to control Indigo via ruby in IRB! Yeah!!!! I however have Ruby 1.8.4 installed and it has issues with the bus for such things so I can’t run via Rails until I upgrade to 1.8.6. This means that I can easily control Indigo via a rails application.

I then have the ability to manipulate Asterisk via Rails with the work of Telegraph. Now I can have a single code base to control a home device that interfaces via respond_to either via Telephone or Web Interface (and soon iPhone Interface). So maybe this doesn’t sound cool, but it in under an hour a whole new world has been cracked open that shines light into being able to integrate worlds that have long existed as separate. I think there is going to be some fun stuff coming out of this and hope to show of some samples at future Ruby meetings locally. If you like this space and want to play. Drop me a line!