Editor’s Note – Marty Winston is a fellow journalist and geek. And right now he’s putting new technology to the test, using nextgen technology to build the home of tomorrow today. Marty has offered to chronicle his progress for Tech50+. This is the first in the series – more to follow.
What kind of a homecoming does your house give you? Here’s what I have in mind for mine – and some insights into how I get these tricks to work.
DRIVEWAY DOODADS
My driveway is about 400 feet long, so some of the electronics go into housings on either side of the driveway near its apron; these are disguised to look like stone lampposts (and how I can get in and out of them is a story for another day).
The light on the lampposts is controlled through a wireless link to the house. Buried power and data fiber connections to the house come into an equipment rack. An uninterruptible power supply makes sure the gear is immune to outages for at least as long as it takes for the backup generator at the house to kick in. The fiber comes into a Gigabit Ethernet switch – in fact a PoE (power over Ethernet) switch. 
There’s a connection to a camera and electronics in the mailbox (also for another day). There’s a video camera capturing a look at the driver of any incoming vehicle; automated video monitoring in a control center back at the house includes a motion detection trigger, but we don’t stop there.
Buried coils adjacent to the drive can tell us whether a vehicle is coming or going. So can 2 pairs of infrared beam-break sensors; either alone can tell us when vehicles are there but with two, our automation also knows their direction. Tiny computers (Raspberry Pi Model 3 B and Arduino Primo) gather this info to relay back to the house, but so far, these pieces only tell us that somebody’s in the drive. We really want to know if the vehicle in the driveway is one of the cars that “lives” there.
BLUE BEACONS
There’s an offshoot of the Bluetooth technology you know from your mobile gear that can exchange some very limited info (mostly just the digital equivalent of an ID badge number) without prior pairing between devices. It’s called Bluetooth Beacon. It’s usually used in a way that makes a Smart Phone a receiver, places small transmitters at specific locations, then has an app in the handset respond to the transmitter it sees. Hospitals or campuses, for example, may offer location-specific map apps that can help guide you to a selected destination by using these waypoints. In some retail stores, transmitters at the shelf can send merchandising messages as you approach them.
But we’re turning the concept upside down. We’re wiring small transmitters into our cars in such a way that they’re only on while the engine is running. And we’re programming one of the small computers to report to the house when one of our cars is at the apron. That’s where the fun begins.
3 DOORS, 1 OF THEM YOURS
Ours is a 3-car garage with a separate door for each space and lights at each door. As one of our cars comes home, the lights at that garage door turn on (dimmed at night) and that garage door opens. A second Bluetooth Beacon receiver at the garage gets the inside lights to turn on and the deadbolt on the door to the house to unlock.
ULTRASONICS AND LASERS
Small ultrasonic distance-measuring heads are in the ceiling at five points from just inside the garage door to a point just beyond where the car should stop. Each only needs to know whether it’s measuring the distance to the now-overhead open garage door, or to the car, or to the floor of the garage. From the back wall of the garage, a Lidar (in this case, a single-line laser for measuring distance) can also confirm when the garage door is open and the distance to the car.
A blinking overhead light tells the driver when to stop. And when 
the engine turns off, the automation sends an e-mail message to any drivers whose cars aren’t there saying, hey, I made it home OK… turns off the outside lights… then waits a moment and closes the garage door.
So you’ve made it home without having to push any buttons or reach for any keys.
LEAVING?
The same intelligence is at work when you leave, with a few differences. For example, if you just pull out of the garage but not away from it or out of the driveway (like when you’re washing the car), the garage door stays open and the inside light remains on.
NOT YOU? YOU’LL KNOW WHO
That camera at the apron is just one of 20 covering the perimeter of the house. They are all configured for automatically recording when they detect motion, and all are capable of getting quality images in any lighting.
This isn’t home automation. It’s smarter. It’s an automated house. A Smarty House.
Http://40yearhouse.com can tell you more. So will I – next time.
About the Author
Marty Winston is Editor of the Newstips Bulletin, offers Newstips Bulletin reviews on Computer America, reports on the tech side of his smart house project on Computer Talk Radio, does trend-watcher segments for Let’s Talk Computers, provides occasional segments for WBAI-FM in New York City, is the designer of the project you can read about at http://40yearhouse.com and bought one square foot of land in Scotland so his business cards can say Lord Martin Winston. In his past he’s written for magazines, newspapers, radio and TV, worked in ad agencies, been an HQ exec at Radio Shack and was named unofficial Mayor of CES.
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