Technology

One of the primary goals when I started Quadomated was to document the building of a “passive solar smart automated home.”  Throughout this journey I showed bits and pieces of the pre-wiring, wrote posts/took pictures of the individual subsystems, and in a couple places even Read More

Seems like a pretty simple concept, but something that has made an absolute profound difference in my life.  To think what it would be like as a quadriplegic without my computer, and particularly without the voice recognition software I use to interact with it so effectively Read More

Lots of people wonder how I use my computer so quickly. They see my hands that don’t exactly work (I am a quadriplegic after all) and wonder how I can get so much accomplished/respond to emails so quickly/write these blog posts with just a little plastic stick in my hand. The Read More

It’s about time! Hey friends! Got some absolutely awesome news about my home automation progress. Go figure, Facebook absolutely saved the day a few weeks ago, when I made the plea for help across my “social network”, and got a response from several friends of a Read More

Maybe a new spin for some of you dog followers out there, but back to some technical stuff. That is after all why this blog was created and is all (well mostly… now that I’ve got Caleb) about! Don’t want anyone thinking I forgot I’m a nerd! Finally starting to Read More

Who would have ever thought that the holidays would be such a great time to get a bunch of work done! My sister and her husband made it home early Wednesday afternoon, and guess what Andrew and I got all sorts of things done. Seems that my brother-in-law isn’t too good at Read More

There has been a whole lot accomplished with the automation system. Major complements to my dad for being the prime mover behind making it all happen. I was a little bit nervous about working with my dad on all this wiring, because we don’t always see eye to eye (I am an Read More

Had a pretty remarkable day working up on the hill with… go figure… my dad! No arguing, father/son back and forth, just put your head down get a bunch of work done type going at it. We actually made quite the team and pulled 1000 feet of speaker wire to several locations Read More

So yeah, it has been a few days, but I’ve just been so busy getting everything ready for the electrical (i.e. the high-voltage and low voltage stuff) that I’ve been focusing in on that. You should see the Excel document with 7 worksheets, one in particular with more Read More

I made some major progress with the home automation system this Saturday with the help of my good buddy Craig. We snipped and stripped a few wires and get everything set up on my test bay so that I could test each subsystem one at a time in a controlled environment. So far Read More