I admit that I'm a total geek! I love technology, especially computer technology, and gadgets.
A number of years ago I was sitting on my couch watching TV and got really annoyed at all the commercials I was being subjected to. I thought to myself, "there must be a way that I can watch TV and skip all these annoying commercials". At the time, Tivo was all the rage so I did some online queries about that technology. It was then that I came across a link for MythTV.
http://www.mythtv.org/
Right then and there I began my adventure into the world of Linux and open source software. I built myself a MythTV box and it has been running faithfully ever since (except when I break it by tweaking this or that).
Then one day, around dinner time, the phone rings and it's one of those annoying telemarketing calls. After I blew the person off I thought "there must be a way I can screen these types of phone calls and blacklist telemarketing calls". That's when I learned about Asterisk and FreePBX (formerly Asterisk@Home).
http://www.asterisk.org/
http://www.freepbx.org/
I installed Asterisk and FreePBX on another box in the house, bought an ATA (analog telephone adapter) and before long I had the fanciest answering machine on the block. And, yes I could now screen those annoying calls.
Before long, during my research for these projects I came across discussions in many of the forums about home automation and smart home technology. Again, being the geek that I am, I was hooked on the idea.
The first software program I tried was Plutohome.
http://plutohome.com
This is pretty amazing software that was put together for a commercial hardware product that's meant to be a whole home system that combines media and entertainment, security and telecom control in one easy to use and to install package. The company that created the product decided to make the software open source for individuals which means it's free to use for personal use.
I really liked Plutohome. It was a breeze to install and the web interface and the concepts of Plutohome are very slick and easy to use. But, what I soon discovered is that some of the packages used for Plutohome such as MythTV and Asterisk are quite dated. Because Plutohome was designed to be easy to use and install I also found it didn't offer the flexibility that I was looking for. And, although there is a very nice and helpful community (including Plutohome support staff) it seemed the community isn't that large and development is quite slow.
That's when I decided, what the heck, I’m a sucker for punishment. I’m going to build my own complete system from scratch using the latest MythTV, Asterisk, FreePBX releases and a home automation program called Misterhouse.
http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/
Hopefully, at some point in the future I’ll have them all working together seamlessly.
Misterhouse uses PERL programming and is amazingly flexible and powerful. But, with that flexibility and power comes complexity. Since I’m new to Misterhouse and don’t have any PERL programming experience, and, I’m a relative novice when it comes to Linux, I have to admit, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. I have so much to learn.
That’s the reason for this Blog. I thought it would be a good idea to chronicle my experiences not only as a resource in case I had to rebuild my system but also it might help anyone out there that’s a newbie like me.
Thanks for reading…
Garry
