Make a Lazy Lamp
Humans are lazy by nature, and for me it’s gotten to the point where the effort of raising my arm to turn on a light is too much. But what if I were to tell you that you can turn on stuff without doing anything.
That’s right, with just the power of your mind you can create a machine that will do these things for you.
What you will need
- Cheap laptop
- An Android phone
- A TellStick
- A remote control plug socket (one of these)
What the TellStick does is provide an interface to wirelessly control almost any remote control plug socket via a computer. That’s pretty pointless when the wireless plug sockets come with a remote, but when you factor in the Android phone the limits are nil.
Tellstick provides developers with an API to Telldus Live, allowing them to create apps that can talk to your TellStick over the internet. These apps can be used with other automation apps on your phone giving you mega-super-automation!
Thanks to Android’s awesomeness we can use an app called Locale, which is a trigger-event automation app, with another app called RemoteStick - the TellStick interfacer. For example, I could set Locale to turn on my lamp when my location is my house, and turn it off when I leave the location, or put my lamp on a timer to turn on at night except when I’m not home.
Telldus do also offer a device which plugs straight into your router and eliminates the need for a computer, but I’ve found it’s cheaper to do it this way, plus you can use the laptop as a media server. There’s also a program called Switch King available for Windows which you can use to schedule appliances.