A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from a guy who rather stays anonymous, but had some really great additional/detailed information about the HRT4-ZW thermostat. There’s some things I missed out, or did configure along the way while tinkering with this device but forgot to mention. So here’s a post about these “open ends”. [...]

A few weeks ago I published the open-zwave Python wrapper. I basically started with a small wrapper suiting my personal needs. After a couple of days I was asked to share the code on Github. Until then I never used Github before. I did not expect anything from that whole social coding thing. But then [...]

About one month ago I ordered a Horstmann HRT4-ZW thermostat. I came across this z-wave thermostat while I was surfing across the web. As far as I know this is the only EU thermostat available right now. Some of the features I like and I was looking for in a z-wave thermostat: Control the setpoint [...]

Having a Python module to control a z-wave network is great, but not really directly useful in practice. I can’t imagine myself switching lamps on and off everyday using a Python script. However, with a nice GUI it will become much more useful. Today I created a GUI around the py-openzwave module, for use within [...]

Today I am releasing py-openzwave, which is a python wrapper around the open-zwave project. The wrapper allows you to control a z-wave network from python. This wrapper is still a work in progress, but the basic skeleton is in place (network scanning, and turning a device on or off). At the same time I am [...]

Open-zwave is a great project, it provides a software interface to z-wave networks. Z-wave is a popular home automation protocol. With more and more devices coming I was interested in adding z-wave support to my own home automation software. Being a python fanatic, I wanted to use open-zwave from within python. The first step in [...]

This post continues upon the last blog post, in the last post we looked at some z-wave protocol basics. At the same time we had a look at a bitwise operation (XOR), in this post some more bitwise tricks will be used to do z-wave node discovery. Node discovery is essential to get information about [...]

I started playing around with my new z-wave kit. I ordered an Aeon-Labs Z-stick (series 2) and a Duwi dimmer module to start with. Here are some images of both devices:

Ok, so my IR controller has been running for a while. Though I was only using it for receiving for now. The range of the IR LED was not sufficient enough to control my devices. Today I had a look into the hardware schematics. I increased the transmitting power by using a NPN transistor (BC549).

Agreed, a breadboard looks nice and “hacky”. But, it doesn’t really fit nicely into my interior :-) It’s time to give the Jeenode infrared sender/receiver a better home! The main ingredients to get this going are: Hot glue (love that stuff) Solder Some wires A Jeelabs carrier board with case A drill A lot of [...]