Control Hubs: Bringing It All Together - Smart Home Automation with Linux and Raspberry Pi - page 266

User Tools
As I've mentioned several times, the differences between an automated house and a smart home are the subtleties
and extras and make people go “Wow!” These tools generally fall into this category:
hdate : This reports the date in a natural, humanistic manner such as Tuesday the 15th
of December 2009 instead of Tue Dec 15 10:40:03 GMT 2009 . This not only makes it
user-friendly but machine friendly, too, as the output can be sent to a speech processor
where you'll get a better-sounding voice because it understands how to vocalize words and
sentences better than the computerized form.
housenight : This is a simple shutdown script for putting the house to sleep. The default
script says “Goodnight” and switches off a predetermined set of lights. You may want
to extend this to send shutdown messages to secondary PCs (as shown in Chapter 4) or
initiate overnight download scripts.
htime : This reports the time in a natural, humanistic manner in the same way that hdate
does for the date.
vtime : This produces a vocal version of the time using piecemeal samples, as covered in
Chapter 5.
ipcheck : This pings each web site listed in $MINBASE/etc/ipcheck.conf to determine
whether the Internet, as a whole, is currently available.
pmedia : This is a utility script to pause any, and every, media device that is currently playing
such as MP3 and CD. If the media is already paused, then it resumes it. This is a useful
emergency cutoff command, especially when issued remotely through Cosmic, when
you're trying to listen to what someone else in the house is saying. 8
timedscale : This blocking script repeatedly calls a given command, scaling the input
parameters over time. So, a call like timedscale 0 100 60 homedevice default dim e3
will vary the light output from 0 to 100 over the next 60 seconds by appending the scaled
numbered to the end of the command. When the program does not take the value as its
final parameter, you will need to create a small wrapper script to rearrange the arguments.
Topology Ideas
Every house is different. And for the most part, so are the network and wiring configurations necessary to run it. I will
now present a couple of standard configurations as inspiration.
Networking
Figure 7-8 shows the simplest of networks. It uses an off-the-shelf router to hide your Node0 server and your other
machines on a local address range (such as 192.168.1.x). The router is then configured to open specific ports,
redirecting those requests to the main server or other machines on the network as appropriate. The additional
machines can be laptops, media head units, or secondary administrative machines such as file servers.
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