Automating Household Appliances

[dynamo135]

I want to be able to turn my household appliances on/off from my computer. I don't have enough knowledge of circuits to be able to do this. What should I learn about to accomplish this? I've read something about using the parallel port of the computer to accomplish this or PIC micro controllers? I am currently writing some voice recognition software. In the end, I want to be able to use voice commands to control the appliances of my house. Anybody have any ideas?

 

[Reloadron]

Forum member and moderator Eric Gibbs has done quite a bit of software to control I/O on the parallel port which can be found here. Naturally this assumes your system has a parallel port. The parallel port has been moving towards extinction as well as the RS232 serial port on newer systems. Another downside is getting software written for the parallel port to work well on systems running Windows Vista & Windows 7 operating systems. All of that said....

Given a choice for I/O communication today I like the USB port. For a project like yours there are plenty of interfaces like this that can be used. That being an example of an 8 channel relay card. They include a .DLL file so you can develop your own software to communicate with the port.

Ron

 

[4pyros]

Have you looked at off the shelf stuff like X10? If you google "Home Automation" You may be over whelmed. Andy