[Shane] is building a new house and wants some, “subtle home automation” as he calls it. His first project is hooking up a small heater to the Internet, and judging from his demo video everything is going swimmingly.

[Shane]’s project is built around an mbed microcontroller that connects to the Internet via an Ethernet connection. The mbed has a temperature controller and a solid state relay to turn the heater on an off; simple enough, but we really like how easily [Shane] connected his project to Google Calendar.

After looking over the Google API, [Shane] was understandably overwhelmed. He figured out that by syncing the mbed’s clock to network time and sending a GET request for one minute in the future, the mbed would always know what was scheduled with a minimal delay.

Now, all [Shane] does to turn on his heater is schedule a time and temperature in Google Calendar. He can do this from across the globe or country and makes for a really slick part of a home automation system.

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