Absolute Beginner's Guide to Home Automation

Filed in archive Home Automation on June 11, 2005

There's a new home automation book on the scene. The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Home Automation is available for preorder at Amazon.com and the description states:

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.

Preorder Absolute Beginner's Guide to Home Automation

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Rating: 4.33 out of 3 vote(s) cast.

Response from: mark_tar_mark (08/01/05 12:30pm)

I�m looking for a consumer RFID solution. I just installed a Pluto Home (plutohome.com) smarthome/media server system. It has a �follow-me� feature where when you enter a room, your Bluetooth mobile phone turns into a remote control for the stuff in that room, and your preferences will follow you around the house. For example, each family member�s music, lighting, etc., follows them.

The only problem is it requires a Bluetooth detector in each room (which for now still means putting in a pc), and the recognition isn�t instant�it can take 10 seconds or so for the phone to be recognized before your media and other stuff comes on in that room. I�m pretty technically inclined and would like to put some readers around the house and in the driveway so I can have follow-me in every room, and have stuff happen automatically when I approach in my car. It looks trivial to do�Pluto already has all the code to do it, I just need to create a device that fires the same events�a couple hours work. Do you have any ideas where I can get RFID cards/readers with a standard RS232/USB interface?