X10 stuff is cheap but pretty easy to tinker with. A number of years ago I bought an X10 Firecracker kit. They occasionally have it on sale for around $5 without warning, so if you keep an eye on that site you might be able to get it really cheap.
I hadn't used it in years but a little while ago I figured it'd be cool to be able to remotely turn my porch lights and other devices on/off from my smartphone (I have an iPhone). Since I have a linux box at home hooked up to a cable modem this was a fairly straightforward exercise. I used the BottleRocket software to control the X10 devices from the linux box then wrote a very simple bare-bones PHP interface to it. Poke a hole through my firewall to allow incoming connections (via authenticated HTTPS of course) and now with a couple of clicks I can do things like turn on my exterior lights when I leave work or a friends house.
For anybody who is interested, I wrote everything up on my blog and posted the PHP code as well.
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X10 stuff is cheap but pretty easy to tinker with. A number of years ago I bought an X10 Firecracker kit. They occasionally have it on sale for around $5 without warning, so if you keep an eye on that site you might be able to get it really cheap. I hadn't used it in years but a little while ago I figured it'd be cool to be able to remotely turn my porch lights and other devices on/off from my smartphone (I have an iPhone). Since I have a linux box at home hooked up to a cable modem this was a fairly straightforward exercise. I used the BottleRocket software to control the X10 devices from the linux box then wrote a very simple bare-bones PHP interface to it. Poke a hole through my firewall to allow incoming connections (via authenticated HTTPS of course) and now with a couple of clicks I can do things like turn on my exterior lights when I leave work or a friends house. For anybody who is interested, I wrote everything up on my blog and posted the PHP code as well.