1. Start Simple

The biggest obstacle to home automation isn't the technology or the installation, it's the overwhelming amount of information to digest when getting started.  To avoid "analysis paralysis" and get a feel for how the technology works, begin with a starter kit.  Contained within is everything you need to form the basis for your later goals, and will give you the experience to move forward.

2.  Make a Plan

The next biggest issue that people run into is being scattered in their approach to home automation.  While some people enjoy this approach of randomly adding things, for the majority of home automators a specific vision of how you want your house to feel and act can guide you as you expand the system.  Tools like Microsoft Visio (Windows) or OmniGraffle (Mac) can aid in your design, or a good old fashioned pen and paper can work too.  Begin by writing your goals (ie. "Temperature control from anywhere in the house" or "Flash all the lights when the doorbell rings") and then decompose the goals into lists of items needed.  A list of items and categories is available halfway down the home automation review article. 

If you need help with the breakdown of ideas into components, discuss your goals in the comments below and other Live Automatic readers will help out.  

PC World just wrote an article about Google's upcoming PowerMeter which is currently being tested by Google employees and will soon hit the market.  The claims of average power savings of 15% through increased awareness of power usage is an interesting point, however products such as the "Kill-a-watt" have been around for a while now and haven't really saturated the market yet.  Will the Google brand name be enough to increase awareness or convince folks to monitor their power usage more carefully?

The article then discusses how Google's new device may bring home automation to the forefront of consumer's minds.  Perhaps it's just me, but the connection between a power-monitoring device and home automation (which typically has a centralized, monitor-control-respond type motif) is pretty loose.  Perhaps if the device fed the power consumption back into the network for monitoring and aggregate reporting of all household devices I could see the correlation, but currently not so much. 

Link to PC World Article

Just saw this come across from a source: The first iPhone 3G to be jailbroken has been shown at the iPhone Dev Blog.  While it's not officially a release announcement, there is a video of the new 3G phone running custom software and a screencap of the Pwnage tool that did it.  Can't wait!

Link: http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/42344032/not-sat-on-our-hands