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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

The first thing I am targetting is semi lame, but useful for me - a batman style lamp. Its for my parents and me to birectionally coordinate on when to come on skype. Right now I first have to call them and then ask them to come online and same the other way around. This way either party can speculatively just push the button and if the other one acknowledges the computers can be switched on.

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If you are looking for a standalone Linux box just to turn on a lamp I think you are over-thinking things. Check out X10 automation kits: here's one for ~$24.

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q=x10+pc+in...

You should be able to control that with a small script (python, perl, etc. anything that can write to a serial port) that you keep running on any computer in your parents' or your own home. X10's advertising is notoriously lowbrow, but the hardware itself is decent and a little googling will find you a lot of hackers that have done crazy stuff with it.

I cannot persuade my parents to keep their computer on 24/7. That is the issue that I am trying to sidestep. However thanks for the X10 link, it looks very interesting.

Wouldn't it be easier to build a standalone voip phone with a rasperry pi and avoid turning on a computer for skype altogether ? I'm not sure if you could do bidirectional video with the pi, but voice should be no problem.

I believe a standalone video phone should be quite easy. My understanding is that the chip can support 1080P encode or decode (so 720P bi-directional video should be fine) and that it will have OpenMAX libraries to allow you to drive the hardware codecs.

OpenMAX code is quite fragile in my experience (from trying to use such libraries on Android phones) so I was wondering about writing a Python wrapper (based on the ctypes module) for the video encode/decode to make it easier to use. (Unless someone has done this already?)

I would also be interested in how this could work. I've tried setting up VLC as a video phone, but the lag time was horrendous and that was when calling localhost.

All good ideas - but it ain't no batman signal.

Nice idea! You could hook it up to a mini projector or something that projects your face/an image of your choice onto the wall?

You could go one step further with that and project a "growl" style wall notification system. When I'm in the kitchen I often miss people trying to get into contact with me via IM or whatever, it would be great to see notifications on a surface or something to say "X has just messaged you!" or whatever

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