PLCs in the home?

Just wondering if any of you have used a PLC in a home setting? What project did you complete? Did you use the PLC for alarm purposes or lighting, enviroment control, etc?
I thought of getting a small brick PLC to hook up in a home, but I am having trouble coming up with some ideas for it.
Let us hear what you have come up with.
Thanks,

Well never completed because I keep changing the design.
Planning on using for temp control,temp monitoring. with a little bit of lighting control.
The one big problem is that there are so many types of systems dedicated for the application. They have so many more features (wireless control to the point of dimming)and are easily integrated that I keep wondering should I go that way.
The other hold-up is those systems also carry a nice price tag to get just the basics because of a dedicated pc, once the pc and software is in place everything can be added over time which is easy to do.

Just do a search on home automation.


But given the Monetary limitations of a plc those systems aren't that bad as far as price. But I'm still going to use a plc for my control I just like the reliability of a plc .


Drewcrew6

You could do a jumping water project with just some
simple Asco valves, which I have been pondering for
two years now. With a possible relocation to the
family farm in Cadiz, Ky. I'm REALLY struggling on
how best to do this when spring gets here. I want
to do it right the FIRST time, since there will be
a lot of digging,water,air,and electrical lines.

We had a thread going a few months ago about this.

http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1217&highlight=jumping

One way is use I/O-cards/FielbusCard or ASi-MasterCard with PC and SoftPLC or selfmade software.
I have done aplication where was DeviceNetCard (Bechoff) in PC.
Absolute Encoder, photocell and LightCurtain was in DeviceNet.
My MSVisualC++ application got data from DN-Scanner-Driver
and sent calculated data to SQL-Server with ADO/OLE-DB.
Solution scans matherial dimensions in PaintShop.
I think it is intresting choice also.

Caveman,

There was a great article in Machine Design magazine last week about fountains.

If you don't get the magazine you can check the article out here.

http://www.machinedesign.com/ASP/viewSelectedArticle.asp?strArticleId=55230&strSite=MDSite

or just go to www.machinedesign.com and search the archived articles section for fountains.

I currently attempting to tie a little PLC brick into a Playstation 2 controller. The eventual goal is to be able to record button combinations on the PLC. Maybe if I get really bored, I'll substitute a vacuum motor for the vibration and build myself a cute little chair to sit in.

Right now I'm having trouble selecting an optocoupler which doesn't require too much power from the PS2 console. Once I'm over that little hurdle, I've got to reverse engineer the PS2 message structure. Thankfully, I found a pin-out on the web which provides enough data to start from.

In case you were wondering: no I don't have a life.

AK