You can easily invest a lot of time and money into Home Automation (HA) projects only to find they don't work as anticipated. This book records the extensive experience of the author in HA and a hence could be a good investment to help you avoid or at least reduce frustration and improve your chances of successfully and enjoyably harnessing hardware and software to improve your quality of life. To gain the maximum benefit from this book, you need to be competent at installing hardware and wiring it up as well as doing web page development and scripting. Linux/Open Source Software is the main HA vehicle covered for a number of reasons- the inheritance from Unix of applications doing one thing and doing it well, the ability to use scripts to integrate key applications, and finally the ability to customise applications to your needs due to the ready availablity of source code. While there are plenty of illustrative snippets of code throughout the book, there are no complete examples provided, nor are copies of the source code provided from the publisher's site. You may find this acceptable given everyone's home automation solutions are unique, but I'm sure many would appreciate seeing how a HA solution is integrated. Then again, perhaps the author was concerned about the security risk to his HA implementation! To the author's credit, security concerns are regularly addressed throughout the book. Comprising just 7 chapters, with no appendices and an adequate index, this book still does a commendable job of covering the many aspects anyone planning HA needs to consider before investing in any hardware.
The first chapter jumps straight into how to use X10 hardware to control electrical appliances and lighting with plenty of practical information for those interested in setting up their home using this protocol. Other competing or complementary techniques, i.e. C-Bus, Ethernet and InfraRed are also briefly covered.
Chapter 2 looks at how to hack appliances such as game consoles, Linux powered WiFi Routers and NAS devices (with particular attention given to the Slug aka NSLU2, laptops, Arduino, Lego Mindstorms) and includes links to relevant hacking sites.
Media has chapter 3 dedicated to it; how to source your media, extract, store, distribute and control it.
Considerations on the best way to wire your home and locate servers and access points are covered in chapter 4, based on the more difficult two storey dwelling scenario. Irrespective of your dwelling construction, there are plenty of points raised in this chapter for consideration to help you implement a reliable, non-intrusive and reasonably secure HA solution.
Chapter 5 covers the various communications technologies that can be used to good effect for your HA implementation, with IP Telephony (Skype and Asterisk), email, voice, web access, and SMS all included. Techiques on how to process email, web and SMS based communications are covered, including suggestions on how to reduce the risk of security breaches.
I found chapter 6 on Data Sources particularly interesting, with the author covering ownership and the associated legal issues with personal use and how these become even more restrictive with family use and wider distribution. The chapter then goes on to look at how you can collect useful public data to assist your daily life, such as access to public transport time tables, traffic, weather, TV and Radio content and how you can use these with private data from calendars, webmail, Twitter and Facebook for personal automation.
Of particular interest for those skilled in coding, the final chapter covers how to integrate HA technologies with Minerva, showing in detail how to configure Minerva and its components to provide a secure HA solution that requires minimal maintenance by using device and application abstractions.
While there are no appendices, the book has an adequate index, but the real gems can best be found by reading through the book. Thanks to a reference in chapter 6, I finally found some Linux logging software for my weather station!
