In the meantime, here is a couple of great places for tips on that: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http://ieeex... http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/toaster/
if you want to control the utility down the road too ;-) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=power-hacke...
EDIT : Posted reply above to shrughes.
I hack masonry and plaster! Much more steampunk (and thus maker-like) than mere paint and wiring.
I've been considering putting some of those cheap 7" android tablets into my walls, but I don't own the place, so I guess I'll have to wait.
X10 is a horrible joke, don't go there. Z-Wave is fantastic though.
Here are some zwave links:
http://www.z-wave.com/modules/Products/
He's the most extreme example that I've come across and he even describes how he did it/what tech he uses. If you are looking for inspiration on what to hack, you can't go far wrong using his house as a start!
When I was a kid, I had the Firecracker serial-to-wireless-to-X10 gadget hooked up to a PC running Microsoft Agent/batch scripts. I could voice control my ceiling fan, lights, etc like Star Trek (at least, if the Enterprise had ceiling fans). It was a big hit with the ladies.
I like everything about renting except for how much of a hassle it is to change wiring and put gadgets in the walls.
BTW, I might not represent your potential customer base perfectly, but I would ideally like to see a few more screenshots of the web interface on your website.
As for screenshots, did you check out http://www.dropcam.com/demo? You get there by clicking "See it live" on the homepage. We should probably add links to it from the learn more/product pages.
Did you modify the actual Axis firmware?
Every plasma TV in the house also has a Mac Mini at a minimum, some also have Tivos and Apple TVs.
Intelligent video cameras around the house can detect people or vehicles approaching up the driveway or around other perimeter areas and send me email alerts, video clips and/activate other things via the Indigo/Insteon system.
We have a dual-zone heating/cooling setup. The thermostats are Venstars with an Insteon RF interface. Setpoints are selected based on time of day, outdoor temps, and occupancy (sensed via motion detectors and/or our presence at our other house (eg: if there is activity at house X, we can keep house Y from initiating common events)).
I have a Redeye wifi to IR iPod base station thing for controlling the TV and AV gear we spend most time around. This is mostly accessed through an I* app, but can also be controlled via an http interface.
From a web interface, my iPhone or my iPad I can turn any light on or off, change temperature setpoints, read status of various sensors, or control iTunes, all through the Indigo app. Through a separate web interface I've written, I can see recent events from the security cameras and access control systems, see live video, lock/unlock certain doors and so forth.
There is a Russound multi-zone amp and zone selector in the basement ( though we mostly just use the amp now). A combination of airport expresses and rogue amoeba apps allows me to route audio from pretty much any device/point in the house to any other device or room. There are in-ceiling speakers in the bedroom and master bath, speakers in the garage, and on the back deck, all on separate zones.
I've run about 2 miles of cable (cat5 and rg6) throughout the house to create a communications backbone.
I'm probably missing a few things, but the summary of it is that the houses mostly adapt around us for things like lights and hvac. We can listen to music anyplace we happen to be ( there is almost always music playing at our house).
The current incarnation of the system is the result of hacking around with HA for about a dozen years now trying different things to see what works. When I first started doing this my wife was basically like 'NFW' and now she wouldn't want to live without it.
About a year ago we designed a system/protocol called 'SHET' (https://github.com/18sg/SHET) which consists of a central server that links many clients together. Each client can present many properties (get/set), actions (like methods, that can be called), and events (that other clients can listen for). This was implemented by me in python/twisted and makes controlling/monitoring computers around the house really easy.
About a month ago, someone wrote a system called SHETSource (https://github.com/18sg/SHETSource) which allows us to easily connect arduinos onto SHET. Since we don't all leave our computers on all the time, we have one arduino connected to the 'server' (old macbook) near the switch, which arduinos in our rooms connect to via the spare wires in the ethernet (if you only want 100Mbps, two of the wires are spare).
In my room at least, I have a pir, 3 hacked light controllers, a servo and two switches connected via SHETSource, which allows me to write all the logic in python.
Basically, we've written a hacking framework.
Recently, I've started working on an Arduino-driven thermostat replacement using XBees to get around the problem of running wiring in a house without any conduits (and not wanting to run plenum-rated cabling in the heating ducts). It's actually pretty simple stuff, with off-the-shelf ICs (and I'm no hardware guy) and a little programming. The biggest challenge was figuring out the existing thermostat and HVAC wiring; I knew practically nothing about this stuff previously.
Some folks have gone quite far with this kind of thing: http://diy-zoning.sourceforge.net/Advanced/faq.html
(I particularly like the idea of using R/C servos to provide rudimentary zone control.)
Link to my blog documenting the very simple thermostat : http://undiscoveredfeatures.blogspot.com/2010/08/thermostat....
I had lots of fun with X10 back in college, tricking out my apartment to have voice control over the lights and drapes. The X10 computer interface combined with Homeseer allowed me to create pretty complex "scenes" such as the always popular "seduce" command which would close the drapes, gradually dim the lights to 15% in 1% increments over a 1 hour interval, and start playing a playlist of mp3s that sadly started with Sarah Mclachlan and ended with Barry White.
We use Insteon for the automation system, hooked into a MacMini running Indigo from Perceptive Automation.
I have the system setup so it has "states" that the house is in, ie: home, baby in bed, etc. The "actions" you can do are contingent on conditions. So if my wife and I are closing up the house, but the baby is asleep, it will keep the light near his room from going on.
For whole home audio we have a Sonos, with five zones, including our patio. The Mac Mini system serves the audio. It also has AirVideo transcoding on it for our iPads. We use iphones and ipads to control everything (two of each).
When we bought the house, we put Cat-6 in every room, so most everything runs off hard line Ethernet. We have three dual band Airport Extreme's in the house for wireless.
The thermostat and sprinklers run off the insteon device and are controlled by the MacMini. Our stereo (Denon 3808CI) has a web and socket interface, so that is controlled remotely fairly often.
Our DirectTV's have the "whole home DVR" thing, which uses a MOCA coax adapter on each box to create its own network. We have two DVR's and two regular recievers.
I haven't yet done cameras and such, or motion detectors but we plan on it. Currently for occupancy sensing, I use a hack to get the locations of our iPhones from MobileMe.
Soldered the air conditioner remote to a relay connected to the parallel port on my computer. Whenever the script pulled down new DM's from my username with special commands, it would briefly flip the relay turning the ac on or off. Also set up a scheduler to turn it on 30 minutes before i woke up.
As the lock on my room was a bit crappy I had an SGI Indy with an Indycam pointed at the door taking photos every few seconds, and a script on a FreeBSD box that would check for differences, notify me of any changes (this was before I knew about ZoneAlarm) and string the differing ones into a gif with a timestamp. I caught a flatmate going into my room a few times to 'borrow' some things without telling me.
In my current house we've had the mythtv setup going but have moved to a Mac Mini downstairs with EyeTV. The house is a bit too small to justify X10 everywhere, and I have too many other DIY tasks I'm trying to avoid to be able to get away with putting it in :)
I do have a wireless electricty usage meter though, haven't quite figured out how to log the stats yet.
Now I am back in Europe and I left all that equipment behind in Wisconsin? Is anybody interested? I was planning to sell it on craigslist but maybe a fellow HNer will have a better use.
I actually happen to live in Wisconsin (Milwaukee)
The best hack, imo, is a simple one - running a HD projector and 72" screen. It's only for movies and sporting events, b/c it's too weird to watch anything non-cinematic on a big screen.
Finally, it's not a hack, but i'll throw in a plug for the Logitech Harmony remote - it's the best we've found for set up and control of our HT system. I can't really comment on it directly, though, because my wife is in charge of setting it up;)
I arranged the furniture such that anyone entering the room would have to walk through a narrow space between a dresser and wall, then walk all the way around my bed through another narrow space, before they could get to the open part of my room. I furthermore made sure there were no good places to sit except for my computer chair (by raising the bed to an uncomfortable height, and leaving piles of school papers stacked on my other chair, which I could easily move if I wanted company but nobody else would've moved.)
The best part was, I didn't have to make my room messy, smelly, or uncomfortable for me. I just made it uncomfortable for other people to spend time in the room without my intentionally creating space for them.
Right now it's a typical teen's super messy room. Hmm Where to start? =/
How true! My home office was also my workshop/server room. I got tired of the heat, noise and technorubble, so I gave away the desk, moved the servers to the (much cooler) basement, and stripped the whole room down to just a sofa and mostly empty bookshelf. Now it's in high demand, and I only use it when I'm home alone. But at the same time, I got rid of all our towers and switched everyone to wireless laptops, so it's not too hard to find a quiet corner anywhere else in the house to work.
He's documented some of it on his blog: http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/category/DIY
(I thought he had documented more but I can't find it. :) )
Great resources:
http://www.cocoontech.com (forum dedicated to exactly your question)
http://www.charmedquark.com (the software package I chose to buy, though there are many others)
There's also some coverage on AVScience, but cocoontech has largely taken over, IMO.