Nice writeup! Aand tinkerforge is pretty interesting, never heard of it. Wrote something for my own home that I use everyday. It mostly controls my IR/X10/XBMC/etc. but it has scheduling and a UI to build custom remotes. I host it on a tower connected to my tv and/or one of my raspi's and use arduino's to farm out the work. I have found that reliability is not too too hard to get down, but understanding state is where things get messy. Especially with IR beacuse it's one way. Contemplated a camera or stick on light sensors. Still haven't come up with a satisfactory idea. It was my first django app with jquery mobile on the frontend. I find that serving it up via a raspi is a bit heavy though. Maybe some simple profiling would fix. https://github.com/dandroid88/webmote