Home Automation is anything that your home does for you automatically to make living there more enjoyable or productive. It covers many areas, including remote and timed control of lights and electrical home appliances, distributed media services, and communication. Over the last 10 years, many hardware manufacturers have presented their own proprietary solutions to these problems. Unbeknownst to them, a groundswell of developers from around the world has been providing similar solutions to the free and open source community.

In this introductory article, I will carry out a high-level review of a number of these projects to see what is already available.

Appliance Control

One of the most impressive features of an automated smart home is the ability of a computer to control your lights or to operate the power socket attached to the kettle. Naturally, this requires the addition of hardware, and the most prominent example here (with a good trade-off between cost, longevity, and flexibility) is called X10.

X10 is a protocol that places specifically-formatted high frequency power bursts onto the mains power line. Since the mains cables are connected to every light bulb and power socket in the house, a signal placed onto the power line in one place is seen across the rest of the mains supply. Consequently, a special X10-enabled power socket is able to watch for these power bursts and switch itself on or off, accordingly.

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