Presentation, yet another home automation project: Dromo

[mainakae]

Hello every body!

First things first: congratulations and many thanks for this excellent source of information that is EEVBlog. Thanks Dave, with your videos I've had the chance to recover this old passion of electronics, and take it further than I ever expected.

On my background I must say I'm a 31yr old Computer Scientist (spanish, hence my poor english, sorry for that) with little knowledge on general electronics, but eager to learn. During my university studies I worked for one year in the robotics department where I learned the basics on PCB design and manufacture. I had to manufacture several prototypes from the lab, mainly parts for robots: communications (i2c), sensors and such. I lacked the electronics knowledge identify anything but resistors and caps in an schematic, but started working with micro controllers (Microchip PIC mainly, but also java cards and other stuff), which proved to be as fun as it could get, and also learnt to chemically process PCBs (lytography included) and solder. After I finished my studies, I left back electronics for software, until I found Arduino two years ago. That made me recover my curiosity on electronics and after struggling with many sources of information, I found EEVBlog more than a year ago, which prooved to be the best source EVER. Over this time I've built myself a decent and affordable newbie lab (DS1052, fluke multimeter, hakko soldering iron... ¡thanks again dave!) and pursued some projects with different degrees of success and a hell of a good time.

Now I'm married and had the... "strange" idea to ask my wife if she would be interested in having domotics in our new home (we finished building it a year ago). Interestingly enough, she was really into it, so I had the perfect excuse to spend hours in my lab  working in this popular quest which is home automation. Fun enough, after my wife told some of my friends about the wondrous system I'm designing, many of them asked me to install that same wander in their houses

In the last year I've built several prototypes of what should become the main controller device for the project. Althoug it's an ugly name, and there are several companies named after that, I've got used to call it Dromo. Just to outline the system (and not push  you to the most absolute boredom you are already getting by now) I'll say it consists on a stack of technologies (main domotic server, domotic bacbone, bridges to other technologies and domotic controllers). Till now my work has mainly focused on my weakest spot: hardware (what definitely can make this project fail). On that I've started with a domain of controllers for lighting and window shields, based on Arduino, interconected with CAN. In the future, I plan to integrate other technologies (XBee, bluetooth, wifi and such) in the system, but for now I'm focusing on something cheap and trusty.

Well that's a lot more than I planned to ask. In fact, that's definitely not what I wanted to ask, so I'll have to write another post! hahahaha

Thanks for reading, and see you soon!