My first attempt at home automation started in late 2009 in my previous apartment. After looking for something on the internet i came across the swedish company Telldus who had made a very simple and basic power management device. At the time they only had one singel USB dongle (Tellstick), with the simple ability to communicate with electric switches.
Telldus certainly did one thing right from the start when they used a standard that many manufacturers make products against, making their product vendor-independent. The price on the products supporting the 433.92 MHz standard was also acceptable when compared with competing standards at the time. But one of the main reasons I chose telldus was that their software was open source!
So i went dont to my local Clas Ohlson store and got myself one Tellstick USB dongle, some wall mounted switches and a pack with 2 plug-in modules and a remote
Shortly after I came home I started to remove the existing wall switches and connecting the waveman devices. The unit was made to break two wires but since this was a house built sometime in 60ths there was only one course in the wall, but with my singel year of electrical education I solved this problem fairly quickly 
After testing with the remote i started playing with the computer to see what it could do. At first i used the main software from telldus. Then I went on with a lot of scripting, making scheduled tasks turning the lights on when i woke up in the morning and so on.
A few months with this system functioning normally i came across the application Eventghost that was compatible with the Tellstick, with their software it became possible to make triggers by almost countless different types of events and then trigger a series of scenes. Lets say the time was 06:00 in the morning it triggered the “all lights on” scene, sending commands to the Tellstick turning on every switch and then at 07:00 when i had left for work it would have turned all the lights off.
When you start with home automation is always the question of what more I can automate. I had a projector connected to a decoder which served as the television, after searching the interwebz i came across USB UIRT, this is a Universal Infrared Receiver Transmitter.It both recives and sends IR signals, making it compatible with almost every IR device on the market. It’s also supported by Eventghost after completing the setup i made a scene in Eventghost to power on the projector, changeing the channel on the decoder and adjusting the lights.
this was all well and good but I started to think about the possibilities for remote control. I made a lot of php code and got it to controll the Tellstick, but i wanted to trigger scenes like I had i Eventghost and after a bit of trolling i found a webserver addin for Eventghost After a bit of basic HTML coding, and a little setup in Eventghost I made this:
Since the 433.92 Mhz standard only has transmitting opportunities you will never know what state the unit is in. I solved this in Eventghost with setting the state value at the end of a scene and then checking the state value from my HTML script, but if I manually used the wall mounted switch the value would be wrong.
Problems with this setup:
Tellstick, first it was the transmission range, I had to tape the unit up agains the wall to get it to reach all the switches in my 50 square meter apartment. The Telldus forum had a whole pile of complaints on this, with people modifying the unit to make the range better. I’ve noticed that Telldus in later versions of the Tellstick changed the Tellstick by adding a external antenna to solve this problem.
The secound problem with the Tellstick was that i had to have a computer online to make it work, today this is no longer a problem with the TellStick Net or connecting the Tellstick to a raspberry pi or some sort of mirco computer.
The same goes for USB UIRT, you have to connect it to a computer that is close to your television, this is no longer a problem with products such as SQ blaster
The waveman devices are not stable at all, two of my wall mounted unites just died even when they was connected correctly. On several of the units the plastic lid on the switch just broke of and on one of the units it didnt turn on / off the power. I belive more then just me have experienced problems with waveman and thats maybe why Clas Ohlson does not have these products in their store any more.
But i have heard that other 433.92 Mhz products like the Nexa products that i see as more robust / stable have their own set of problems, with such problems that the devices does not respond at all after turning the power on and more…
The 433.92 Mhz standard is remarkably cheap. The strong focus on the price, does result in low manufacturing quality. It has only one-way communication possibilities making the reliability of the communication very poor.The transmission traffic is not encrypted, making it easy to hack. The 433.92 Mhz frequency is shared with baby sitter radio or CB transceivers malfunctions are therefore typical and the behaviour of this equipment becomes unpredictable
When I early in 2011 had to sell the apartment, I decided because of all this to remove the whole solution and put everything back the way it was
But very soon I will probably start up again with something new and better in my new apartment
