Welcome to SWB Labs Displaying: Home Automation

One of the capabilities that is missing from the Amazon Echo is the ability to initiate spoken notifications even when the user hasn't addressed the Echo. Although Amazon will likely address this at some ... [More]

The Amazon Echo can be extremely useful for triggering home automation. This ranges from custom homebrew devices to widely used devices like Insteon, Wink, etc. I happen to have a mixture of devices including ... [More]

In my last post, I explored alarm monitoring using the Raspberry Pi and Arduino.  I thought I'd give the Electric Imp a try as well.  The Electric Imp is a WiFi module and Cortex-M3 processor built into ... [More]

I spotted a post by Lior Hass on Hackaday a little while back where he described his Alarmino project where his alarm system now connects with an Arduino and a custom board to simulate the phone line and interpret Contact-ID ... [More]

In order to monitor our power consumption at our house, I set out to install a  TED (The Energy Detective) system.  The system monitors current flow into the house using inductive taps.  In our case, we ... [More]

The Tweet-a-Watt was one of the first projects I built from an article in Make magazine. I've since built many more.  It also introduced me to Limor Fried and her company Adafruit.  It turns out I already ... [More]

In December I received and mounted the Moore Pattern Kinetic Sculpture that Jeff Lieberman designed (from a KickStarter sponsorship). Although the motor is very quiet, I used an X10 module and motion sensor ... [More]