Shop Automation with Blue Iris, MyQ, ecobee, DSC Alarm and more

[slodat]

I have an IP camera system running on Blue Iris. I also have an ecobee3 lite thermostat controlling my Cadet Hot One electric heaters, a DSC alarm system and three Chamberlain Liftmaster 8500 garage door openers.

Each time I arrive at the shop I was having to change the profile in Blue Iris from Away to In the shop, same with the thermostat and alarm. While it's convenient to do this from my phone, I wanted to push one button. Enter Homeseer, a home automation software package that has available plugins for all of the equipment I am wanting to tie together.

Since my Blue Iris server is running 24x7 and has a lot of headroom (CPU and RAM) left, I loaded Homeseer HS3 and the necessary plugins on the same machine. Using an iPhone app called ImperiHome and it's associated Homeseer plugin, I made a simple dashboard. I push one button in the app when I arrive and it disarms the alarm, changes the blue iris profile, changes the setting on the thermostat and so on. Similar for when I leave.

It is working really well.

This is the ImperiHome dashboard I made. It shows my home and shop thermostat, their current program, blue iris current profile as well as a tile to change profile, buttons to handle the automation described above and the temperature readings from the ecobee thermostat’s remote sensors.

 

[Mongo68]

Thats cool. Have you messed with the geofencing on blue iris? Maybe you can get that to do it all without the manual intervention...

 

[thickhead]

Nicely done and pretty damn cool.

 

[slodat]

Thats cool. Have you messed with the geofencing on blue iris? Maybe you can get that to do it all without the manual intervention...

I run Blue Iris over VPN. This causes BI's geofencing to not work reliably, or much at all in my experience. Homeseer has a geofence setup that looks solid and will work, I think Still setting that up.

 

[Ohmthis]

What alarm panel are you using and how are you getting it to connect to the automation?I used DSC in my last house and it was a good setup. I'm building now (in the rough in phase) and am planning a home automation. I'll add to my original thread and see what other options i get.

 

[slodat]

Envisalink 4 is an Ethernet interface to the DSC-1864 alarm panel. Then there’s an Envisalink plugin for HomeSeer.

 

[ddawg16]

I'm thinking of doing something with a Raspberry Pi....they're cheap...and lots of software out there for them

 

[slodat]

I went with HomeSeer because a plug-in was available for each of the systems I was wanting to work with. I only spent a couple hours getting it going.

 

[pmiranda]

How does it compare with IFTTT?

 

[slodat]

How does it compare with IFTTT?

No comparison. At. All. HomeSeer is a offline (not cloud based) home automation system.