Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part I: Home Automation

Wrapping Up

The modular approach to this project actually ended up making it much

more complex than it needed to be. It’s certainly possible to create a single

C# application that checks the weather, turns on the wireless speakers, and

reads the weather aloud. However, I want you to create your own applica-

tion and have it say whatever you want, so I made it as easy as possible to

replace parts of my solution. Separating the individual components allows

you to replace one or more of the components, as needed for your custom-

izations.

Extensions

If you’re anything like me, you’ll quickly realize that you want more infor-

mation than just the current temperature. Browse through the web services

listed at http://www.xmethods.net/ for interesting data feeds. (Most of these

don’t actually work, though, so test them out before writing any code to

connect to them.) You may also want to switch to an on-demand control

mechanism so that the cold, mechanical voice doesn’t wake you up on

weekends and holidays when you forget about it.

I’ve gotten very excited about the potential of voice synthesis and remote

audio components of this project. For example, you could use these tech-

nologies to do the following:

• Read your email to you in the morning.

• With motion detectors and wireless speakers placed throughout the

house, keep track