my name is mwd

For the last two years (give or take) Laura’s been working away very hard at AlertMe as their head of engineering, designing the next generation of home monitoring kit. This week we got to be one of the first batch of people to get access to the kit!

The AlertMe kit comes with a hub, that connects to the Internet over your home broadband connection, and a set of wireless sensors and buttons that you install around your home and on your keychain. The kit is currently geared to home security monitoring, coming as it does with a set of contact sensors and motion sensors, but that’s just the beginning of what it can do. For now I can receive email and SMS alerts of events in my home – has my partner got home okay? has anyone left a door open? has someone broken in? – but in the future the kit will be able to tie that to other web services and allow many other possibilities.

As tradition requires, we captured the unboxing and install process in pictures. The kit is well built and easy to install (thanks to all the sensors being wireless and coming with magic, easy to remove, sticky pads). Now my house is all monitored, and I can easily enable/disable the system using my keyfob when I come home/leave.

Currently it’s all fun, but what I really look forward to are the plans AlertMe have to make a web API available so I can query the system from my own programs or other web services. For instance, in the future I’d like it to turn on and off the wall mounted CODA display in the kitchen based on whether someone is home or not. AlertMe could be the system that I use to auto power on and off the house in an energy conscious way as people come and go.