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Not all is lost... http://www.control4.com/

What about INSTEON? If you have a Mac, you can use Indigo to manage it -- even from an iPhone.

I've also heard about Control4 -- and don't forget X10, even though I can't tell if their home page is advertising porn or home automation products. I'll let you automate my systems, baby!

X10 is a joke. Our company is one of the largest home automation/lighting control integrators in the state, and we wouldn't use X10 if they gave it to us.

These are the big guys, the ones the pros (us) use.

http://www.control4.com/
http://www.lutron.com/
http://www.crestron.com/
http://www.homeauto.com/

They're quality. X10 is... not.

Check out Control4.

They came to our LUG this week to do a presentation. Really cool stuff they've got going. It all runs Linux, pretty hackable, etc. Control your lights, multiple audio feeds all over the house, and plenty more.

I was pretty impressed with it all.

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, take a loook at http://www.control4.com/. It doesn't ship for a couple of months but it works well in my beta home. I have the option of playing from multiple sources simultaneously streamed over 802.11g or Ethernet and can synchronize to any stream playing from a source in any room. General pricing is $1600 for the server (media controller) and $700 for each wireless 4" touch panel client. It is standards-based but proprietary, and "yes", I work for the company. Other competitve options are Yamaha, Sonos, and NetStreams.

While I agree with most of your comments, it seems that some of the major problems with DIY home automation could be a non-issue pretty soon. ZigBee looks to be but on solution and while I haven't read much about it being used as such UltraWideband could also conceivably be used for HA. That being said Wired currently has a nice article about a company that is using ZigBee devices in an attempt to bring HA to the masses, and, I must say, I am pretty impressed. It appears to be one of the first systems that, while prices are not readily available, may make the extra cost of implementation worth it. I know there are a ton of lower cost solutions that just fail in the easy to implement department. Anyway here's the article at wired and here's the company's website.

Control4 looks especially interesting.

-ccm