[Purdue-pm] Next Meeting, Announcements

[Dave Jacoby]

On 2/20/2014 3:28 PM, Mark Senn wrote:
> It would bore me.

Glad to hear it. I might give the talk to the Software Cluster at the 
Research Park, but not again for PPM.

> Ii'd rather hear about Catalyst, Dancer, Node, Numara Footprints Perl
> API, or using Perl for home automation,

I can talk some about Node, but I'm still VERY early in the process.

I don't know much about Numara Footprints. I don't know that I've ever 
heard of it before today, and reading the web page, I don't have a clue 
what it does. Not attacking the idea; just don't know what domain this 
falls under. If anyone wants to take this on, I'm all for it.

The problem with Home Automation and Perl is that Homes don't really 
have an API. There are three classes of Home Automation I can see: Old 
School, New School and Homebrew.

Old School is X10, which generally talks over the power line, and this 
means it doesn't talk between circuits and is otherwise brittle. I have 
one lamp on X10, using cron and bottlerocket, not even Perl, to turn it 
off and on. There's a wireless thing connected to the serial port of a 
very-old Linux box, a big wall-wart with an antenna that talks to that 
wireless thing, and the wall wart connected to the lamp. It's also just 
off-and-on, and getting input into it is not so fun. !pretty.

New School is, at present, too pricy for me. Belkin has WeMo, Philips 
has Hue, and there's SmartThings. WeMo has a motion sensor, and you can 
use IFTTT to glue things together: If your Jawbone Up senses you have 
woken up, your Hue lights can go on bright and at a bluish color 
temperature. Thing is, since here, you're automating through IFTTT, 
you're beyond the reach of Perl. I'm sure there's a way, but without 
IFTTT, there's a LOT of API setup you have to do.

And then there's Homebrew, which means learning Arduino, looking into 
Jeenode or Zigbee or (coming soon, don't have one yet) Spark.io, and 
setting up relays and servomotors for your things, etc. Lots of cool 
stuff, and the more things can talk ethernet and wifi and TCP/IP, the 
more you can do with them and interact with them with Perl. But it IS a 
big topic. Or, a series of little topics we can talk about forever.

I can do Arduino (and have given a talk I can reuse slides for) and know 
a man who has made his own networked thermostat and (I think) has 
connected his curtains and his garage door opener to that system. If 
there is interest, I can ask him to talk to us.

Thoughts?
-- 
Dave Jacoby
     Code Maker, Purdue Genomics Core Lab
     http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~djacoby
         47 days until the end of XP support
         212 days using standing desk