The good folks at Make: have been working with open-source homeautomation software OpenHAB to make a touch-screen device to interact with yourhouse.

OpenHAB allows you to control objects in your house with voice commands; tomonitor sensor networks; to set up rules for your devices via email or IFTTT, and awhole lot more. The device this video shows you how to build can interact with upto 150 different smart home products, and provide an interface for control and taskscheduling.

For this project, you’ll be building your own array of neopixels (which are great forkitchen counter lighting and for adding some mood colour to lighting schemes, ifyou’re looking for an excuse to get started) rather than interfacing with a pre-builtdevice, so you can get right into the guts of what’s going on here. Other devices areeasy to add once you’ve got the base model built. Here’s Jordan Bunker to get youstarted.

You can read more about this project over at Make:, where there’s a step-by-stepguide with photos to accompany the video.