Home Automation Made Easy: Do It Yourself Know How Using UPB, Insteon, X10 and ZWave Paperback – 7 Nov. 2013

The book I read to research this post was Home Automation Made Easy by Dennis C Brewer which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. There are apparently 4 million homes in America with at least some home automation. It can be anything from remote control lighting to computer controlled networks that let you view your property via security camera and smartphone. This book mostly deals with the x-10 standard for devices and there is quite a bit on Hal software suite of programs. X-10 can be daisy chained for up to 256 devices and Hal is the industry standard for home automation. Often they have a computer to handle the automation and they may have a server with either Hal Basic Server or Hal Ultra and separate workstation although it can be a partition on the hard drive to handle the home entertainment. Many people have it connected to a large television rather than a monitor and there are devices that let you do that although many televisions double as a computer monitor. They normally use Hal DMC for handling the entertainment media. You can use voice operated commands with Hal that recognize your voice and you have to plug in a microphone into the computer to allow this. There is an add on program called Hal Voices that sends out messages via the computer in a natural human voice. A simple example of this is like if someone phones and you aren't in you can tell them to leave a message. A typical home automation set up assuming you already have a computer can be achieved for a few hundred dollars. There is a standard called zigbee for interacting surveillance cameras with your smartphone etc so you can check there are no intruders whilst out. You can have an automated message sent out when there is an intruder or an alarm is set off. There are monitoring services you can subscribe to who will call the emergency services or check on your property when an alarm is activated. A company called Automated Living make the Hal software and you can download it from their website and purchase it there. I did quite enjoy this book it takes you step by step through setting up the various aspects of the automated network.