Smart Home Automation with Linux (Expert's Voice in Linux) [Paperback]

Steven Goodwin (Author)

Book Description

Series: Expert's Voice in Linux | Publication Date: March 1, 2010

Every amateur and professional Linux user in the world has the opportunity to remotely control their home and the gadgets in their home, and this book shows them how!

A practical look by Steven Goodwin, the man behind the Minerva home automation suite. With large numbers of people now using Linux on netbooks in their homes, there is a huge audience for home automation using Linux.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steven Goodwin (London, England) has been involved in science and technology from an early age, and built his first synthesizer while still in his teens. Since then his projects have beenvaried. He has sold over a million computer games, written two books, built robots and has automated house that can be controlled from the Internet. He has spoken at many conferences, including NotCon '04 and the BBC Backstage OpenTech event.

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (March 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430227788
• ISBN-13: 978-1430227786
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #744,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Benefit from the Author's Home Automation Experience, May 7, 2010

By 

Neil G. Matthews (Adelaide, South Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Smart Home Automation with Linux (Expert's Voice in Linux) (Paperback)

You can easily invest a lot of time and money into Home Automation (HA) projects only to find they don't work as anticipated. This book records the extensive experience of the author in HA and a hence could be a good investment to help you avoid or at least reduce frustration and improve your chances of successfully and enjoyably harnessing hardware and software to improve your quality of life. To gain the maximum benefit from this book, you need to be competent at installing hardware and wiring it up as well as doing web page development and scripting. Linux/Open Source Software is the main HA vehicle covered for a number of reasons- the inheritance from Unix of applications doing one thing and doing it well, the ability to use scripts to integrate key applications, and finally the ability to customise applications to your needs due to the ready availablity of source code. While there are plenty of illustrative snippets of code throughout the book, there are no complete examples provided, nor are copies of the source code provided from the publisher's site. You may find this acceptable given everyone's home automation solutions are unique, but I'm sure many would appreciate seeing how a HA solution is integrated. Then again, perhaps the author was concerned about the security risk to his HA implementation! To the author's credit, security concerns are regularly addressed throughout the book. Comprising just 7 chapters, with no appendices and an adequate index, this book still does a commendable job of covering the many aspects anyone planning HA needs to consider before investing in any hardware.

The first chapter jumps straight into how to use X10 hardware to control electrical appliances and lighting with plenty of practical information for those interested in setting up their home using this protocol. Other competing or complementary techniques, i.e. C-Bus, Ethernet and InfraRed are also briefly covered.

Chapter 2 looks at how to hack appliances such as game consoles, Linux powered WiFi Routers and NAS devices (with particular attention given to the Slug aka NSLU2, laptops, Arduino, Lego Mindstorms) and includes links to relevant hacking sites.

Media has chapter 3 dedicated to it; how to source your media, extract, store, distribute and control it.

Considerations on the best way to wire your home and locate servers and access points are covered in chapter 4, based on the more difficult two storey dwelling scenario. Irrespective of your dwelling construction, there are plenty of points raised in this chapter for consideration to help you implement a reliable, non-intrusive and reasonably secure HA solution.

Chapter 5 covers the various communications technologies that can be used to good effect for your HA implementation, with IP Telephony (Skype and Asterisk), email, voice, web access, and SMS all included. Techiques on how to process email, web and SMS based communications are covered, including suggestions on how to reduce the risk of security breaches.

I found chapter 6 on Data Sources particularly interesting, with the author covering ownership and the associated legal issues with personal use and how these become even more restrictive with family use and wider distribution. The chapter then goes on to look at how you can collect useful public data to assist your daily life, such as access to public transport time tables, traffic, weather, TV and Radio content and how you can use these with private data from calendars, webmail, Twitter and Facebook for personal automation.

Of particular interest for those skilled in coding, the final chapter covers how to integrate HA technologies with Minerva, showing in detail how to configure Minerva and its components to provide a secure HA solution that requires minimal maintenance by using device and application abstractions.

While there are no appendices, the book has an adequate index, but the real gems can best be found by reading through the book. Thanks to a reference in chapter 6, I finally found some Linux logging software for my weather station!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, July 21, 2010

By 

Andrei Mouravski - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Smart Home Automation with Linux (Expert's Voice in Linux) (Paperback)

Smart Home Automation with Linux by Steven Goodwin had exactly what I hoped for when I ordered it. This book takes you through the basic process of automating various aspects of your home from scratch. They focus primarily on the X10 protocol for device control while giving a bit of attention to some other alternatives like C-bus. The author then goes on to cover a wide range of topics such as specific devices to buy for an X10 setup, how to architect your installation, appliance hacking, focusing on the software that glues the system together, and systems such as Minerva which can be used to manage a lot of the aspects of home automation.

I found this book to be a great read for filling in my knowledge of what is available and what sort of expertise will be needed for making a good home automation system and I feel like I will get even more out of it when I have the opportunity (and money) to begin automating my home.

5.0 out of 5 stars The fine links between computer and home systems make for a real winner, here!, September 19, 2010

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Smart Home Automation with Linux (Expert's Voice in Linux) (Paperback)

Smart Home Automation with Linux: Learn How to Connect Your Home from Your PC is written for Linux professionals who would automate a home using Linux. Automatic includes reading TV schedules digitally and using them to program a video remotely through email or the Web, and streaming music between different machines. The fine links between computer and home systems make for a real winner, here!