Absolute Beginner's Guide to Home Automation

by Mark Edward Soper

Get the home of tomorrow, today! Absolute Beginner's Guide to Home Automation will help you turn your ordinary home into a high-tech haven. Want to schedule your lights to turn on while you're on vacation? Stuck late at work and want to start the roast you put in the crock pot this morning? You can make it all happen with the help of existing 110V electrical wiring in your home and this step-by-step tutorial. Through simple, do-it-yourself instructions, you will walk through the process of outfitting every room in your home with a network connection that you can control with a few clicks on your computer keyboard. Complete with illustrations and photographs, Absolute Beginner's Guide to Home Automation will have you riding the wave of the future in no time.

366 pages, Paperback

First published June 8, 2005

Reviews

[David Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book I read to research this post was The Beginners Guide To Home Automation which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. This book is great as an introduction to this subject and in particular tells you all about what you can potentially achieve in terms of automating your home. It was published around 2004 so is a bit dated sadly and doesn't cover the latest computer operating systems or things like the raspberry pi or arduino which have revolutionized home automation. These are a kind of very cheap where you can download a proprietary version of linux and get free scripts to do virtually anything from the internet. It also mostly looks at the X10 format in home automation which has largely been superceded by other formats. It looks at software like HALdeluxe & Homeseer which I don't think are used much nowadays. X10 supports up to 16 devices off one controller where a unit code and home code have to be set to avoid a conflict with other devices and normally there are up to 28 different options available for an item to avoid a conflict with something that is already using a particular code. Most items like controllers or timers have a pass through socket so you power something else from the same socket. They are normally rated in watts so if you a running something powerful like a television you need to watch this. It's possible to have curtains, lights, on / off switches and things like cameras that all operating remotely. Often a basic controller is quite cheap but one benefit of using a format like X10 over a proprietary format is it's interconnectable and upgradable. With X10 you can have stuff computer controlled and even controlled via a smartphone. You can even have a hot tub heat up a little bit before you get home or have a heating furnace do the same. For a complex network of devices it needs to be computer controlled. You can also have a security system that will send an automated message to a certain number or even several numbers if an event like a window gets forced open or similar happens and some combine this with a panic switch. I will do more blogs on this subject in particular combining it with arduino and raspberry pi as this is something I am very interested in. I really enjoyed reading this book and think this is a topic that really fires the imagination.

[Eric Allan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly just X-10 system