Home Automation Recommendations for Linux?

Richard asks: "I am interested in starting some home automation projects. The only requirement is that it needs to be controllable via my Linux based system. A Google search for ' "home automation" linux ' returns more than 35,000 hits, including some good ones like this one, which just show how MUCH is out there. Are there any recommendations for a good controller with a serial or USB connection to the computer? What about power switches and sensors? Do I want a system that sends control signals over my house's power lines or RF? Any good software recommendations? As a first project I thought a simple controllable power switch would be fun: Then I could ssh to my home system, use the power switch to turn on a computer controlled radio (Ten-Tec RX-320) and use Speak Freely to send back the audio to my remote location. (This works now except that I don't want to leave the radio on all the time)."

Comments

http://www.linuxguru.be/

[sweede]

http://www.linuxguru.be/

Howabout MisterHouse -- It Knows Kung-Fu

[2TecTom]

http://www.misterhouse.net/

Seems to be a relevant, useful & worth project

Some comments.

[drosselmeyer]

What irks me about Linux home automation is the absence of a good speech synthesiser. I mean, I can automate everything, stick sensors everywhere, make control agents, a microcontroller network, but the endearing thing about it was that my computer /talked/ to me. Festival doesn't quite cut it, not because sound quality is bad (it is quite good) but because making new, custom voices for it is a laborous, time consuming process and no good female voices are available. And doing lip synch with it is something I don't have a fscking idea about how to do. On my old Amiga 500 that was just a matter of drawing some sprites and a hundred of lines of AMOS Basic, no more. I switched to Linux for my home server from OS/2 specifically because I wanted to replace my dying Amiga 500 that was the voice agent for my home automation, and figured that I'd have better chance to find good free speech synthesis for a more modern, free OS. That was, like, almost two years ago. Amiga finally died but I /still/ can't pull anything like this off. What I could assemble from public sources is painfully crude even when compared to the ancient Amiga SoftVoice/Nowspeak. Don't even remind me about rsynth...