Over the last couple of weeks I've been talking to some colleagues at work about making my house smarter than it is (trust me it is dumb..). There are so many cool things I want my house to do and report back to me.

My first, and currently most important thing I want my house to do is to heat up my living room before I get out of bed in the morning and before I arrive from work in the afternoon.

So, while doing all the stuff to get my house up and running (small steps though) I'm having trouble finding resources and the exact help I need online, so my plan is to write small blog-posts for almost each step I take in this process.

What I have done so far:

• Installed openHAB on my Raspberry Pi, using the Razberry card for Raspberry Pi
• Registered my two wall plugs and set up a couple of rules to test things out
• Made openHAB send med push-notifications to my iPhone to tell me when the living room is heated

But there are so many more things I'd like to do:

• Check whether my garage door is open or close (and close/open it from openHAB)
• Start heating my house earlier if it is really cold outside
• Never let my living room temperature go below 15 degrees C
• Give me a notification if my freezer or fridge stops working
• Control my (not yet purchased) home entertainment system
• Know when there are no one at home, so that heating and lights can automatically be shut down
• and more as I learn

The reason for the project not to leap forward very soon is that it is quite expensive, so I'll by one piece at a time. But the positive is that I'll try to write small blog-posts about almost all steps.

So, I can't wait to get started. Let me know if you have any good ideas about what I can test?