I Hold All Of The Power In The World
It was about 7:30 pm last night, give or take a couple of hours, and I was hard at work attempting to wrap my feeble mind around the shroud of mystery that surrounds home automation. Deep in its bowels I toiled for well over 10 minutes while I read the manual of the Intermatic Master Controller and how to assign a Z-Wave lamp dimmer module to a particular channel on the master controller. A couple of button presses later, BAM, the level 1 boss that had thwarted me in the most basic of HA tasks had been defeated. That is correct, I wirelessly controlled a light. Even better, it was from another room.
*Technical Note* – Although the Z-Wave USB adapter can be used as a primary adapter, it is recommended to get a master controller that is used as a primary adapter to setup your network. For security reasons, you have to be within 6′ of your primary controller to set a Z-Wave module up. Who wants to take a computer around to each module for setup:)?
Level 2 promised not to be as easy. There were programs to install, devices to sync, zones to program, and scenes to produce. Really the procedure here was installing mControl on my WHS machine and doing a basic setup to confirm the local and internet server was running for future expansion. I admit, I fumbled my way through the setup for a few minutes. I had forgotten about the Zwave setup utility that should be used before attempting to setup mControl itself. All that was really involved in this setup was syncing my primary controller with mControl. This sync captured the fact that I had one lamp module connected to the setup and was now available for use within mControl. From there, I simply setup a zone and added a new device.
After that, I went to testing out various methods of controlling this one light. Since this is a WHS install, I simply logged into my WHS server http://whsserver/. With that you are taken to a webpage for mControl. It can be viewed on mobile devices as well by going to http://whsserver/mcontrol/mobile.aspx. Just like that, I am able to control this device via my mobile phone, iPod touch, and any internet connected computer.
Tomorrow I will throw up a few screen caps of the process and provide a little more detail on how I arrived from point A to point B As well I should be able to share the process of connecting VMC and 7MC clients.
In summary, this accomplishment is only rivaled by early man’s successful attempt at taming fire. My next step is world-domination with one button press from my cell phone. A Windows Mobile cell phone no less……..