Way back when I was a kid, I had our whole house wired for intercoms, door alerts, and other fun gadgets.  My Dad always said that if there ever was tornado, our house wouldn't blow away.  Of course I got this liking from my Dad who also tinkered with electronics when he was a kid.

I played with all the latest electronic kits and toys.  I would wire lights and sounds for Halloween and Christmas.  I had intercoms through out the house, a buzzer and light hooked up to our door bell so if I was home alone and had my stereo on or especially had the head phones on, I would know if someone was at the door.  Then I could use the intercom to ask who was there.

I was always trying to make some thing work better or improve on how it worked.  I had strings from my bed through hooks and screw eyes to turn on and off my ceiling light.  Later I found that I could use a small motor from a toy and have that do the trick by a push of a button.

When I would stay at our summer cottage, our current home, it was sometimes scary to be by my self in the woods, and so I wanted to know when some one was coming.  I made a "sandwich" type switch that I buried just below the surface of the driveway.  When a car ran over it a buzzer would go off inside.  There was only one problem with that switch, it went off many times when no one was arriving.  It was just too sensitive and worked even when a robin hopped on it!

Later on, around the early 1980's, a company came out called X-10 and they started developing control devices that worked through the power lines in a home or business.  I started using their mini timer and controlled a few lights.  Then a computer connected device came out for about $60 which I had a lot of fun with.  Now programming was coming into play a bit, but it still was based on times, and days of the week.  Now I automated our yard sprinklers to go on at certain times for certain days.

I now started adding X-10 light switches to a few places in our house.  Now I could have lights go on at certain times, and we could still control them manually.  By the 1990's, home automation was off to a start, but the general public was not too aware of it.  In fact, now, the early 2000's, it is just starting to be noticed and used more in larger hotels and businesses.

By the mid 1990's, I started getting more interested in home automation, and that is when I purchased the Time Commander + by JDS Technologies.  This a summary of my early home automation.