I've been thinking a lot about home automation lately. Turning lights on when you enter rooms, turning the television on and off from your smart phone, making sure the doors are locked when you're not home - there's a lot of use cases I'm interested in.
I've read a number of articles where people will do one of the above. The order is usually the same:
- Get an Arduino/Raspberry Pi.
- Wire it up to power.
- Turn it on and off with a simple switch.
That didn't excite me very much. Some people went through the trouble of giving it a web front-end, so you could open http://192.168.12.34/
to view or change the device. That's getting closer, but it's a little... user hostile. I don't want to remember random IP addresses, especially if I'll have more than one device in the house ("Was that the garage door I just turned on, or the coffee pot?").