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What is the Current State of Home Automation?
StonyCreekBare writes "What do people have to say about the current state of Home Automation software? Preferably Linux based, but mainly the field in general, and principally the DIY flavors as opposed to the upscale turnkey systems. I am familiar with Misterhouse, HomeSeer and Automated Living's HAL2000, all of which have serious flaws and weaknesses, but which sometimes succeed well in specific areas. But in all cases, the state of the art seems to have moved little in the last decade. Is any interesting work being done in this space? Or should I just grab one of the three and try to mold it to fit my vision of what it should be? Misterhouse at least is open source so I can add new features, but it has not had an update in a long long time and seems to be missing some modern stuff. The other two are expensive and closed source, and from all I can see, quite flawed, not the least by their dependence on intimate ties to Microsoft. Yet they seem to offer a lot more than Misterhouse despite their weaknesses. Is the Home Automation field as bleak as it appears? Or have I missed the forest for the trees?" What home automation projects have people tackled? Any examples of wild success or failure?
http://www.linuxha.com/
Cool stuff, and when I buy a house I'm going to run the full gamut with these things.
I wouldn't do that. If you own your house, you can do much, much better than X10.
The great thing about X10 is that it's relatively cheap, and can be retrofitted into existing houses easily.
In almost every other respect, X10 kinda sucks. I don't say this lightly, and it is possible to do cool things with X10, but there are really severe limitations.
I used X10 to fully automate my apartment a couple of years ago. It was quite sweet -- my apartment would send me a text if any emergency situation happened, it would run security cameras, turn lights on and off automatically when people were in rooms, the whole deal. I ran it with a linux box and misterhouse.
I still use X10 now, to automate party lights. My computer turns different effects on and off at preset times during the music. This is using linux, with xmms and a custom plugin to run X10 as the audio player.
So my experience is fairly deep. Here are the problems with X10: slow transmission speed (about .8 secs per command). No error detection/control, so commands can and do get lost and misinterpreted, and if you have multiple sources of commands (motion sensors, etc.) that transmit simultaneously, the collision causes havoc.
There are other solutions that are much better, if you don't mind more installation effort and/or more expense.