Home Management Software for the PC ?

Urgoll asks : "Is there any software/hardware availlable for Linux (preferably) or Windows to control your home environment? I'm takling about being able to control the home temperature , various lights, water heater, etc from your PC, and hopefully with a dial-in interface, so that you can control your house when away from home... Imagine... Coming back from a vacation, and calling your house form the airport to raise the temperature, so you won't freeze when going to bed!" Most people in the know would say *X10!*, but I figured that this was cool enough to run for the folks who AREN'T and wish to do something like this.

Comments

x10 is the way to go

[velkro]

I've just started down this road myself. I grabbed one of those ActiveHome kits from www.x10.com and starting fooling around. There's heyu and xtend for communicating with the kit's CM11A controller, and I've had success with both. I know there is temperature monitoring stuff, a dial up interface and even RF remote controls. At the moment, I'm got a motion-sensor setup to trigger a QuickCam for my webcam, but once the rest of my order comes in I'll experiment some more.

Best part is, I haven't read the manual yet, and it's all done under Linux.

MrHouse

[yzorderex]

mrhouse looked quite cool..... well, the perl code looked quite cool and did a lot of things I'd like a house to do If I had a house :-)

Home automation (Elextrolux)

[TimRiker]

Best I found was this page: Rob's Home Automation Page which mentions a few possible choices. I'm working on some other software to build a computer in my fridge for this purpose. Electrolux has a prototype of a similar design called a Screenfridge Now this would be a cool Linux project! e-mail, ipmasq, firewall, home automation, alarm systems, etc. I use Festival for voice synthesis on mine, I just need a good voice recognition module!