Apress - Smart Home Automation with Linux (2010)- P14:Linux users can now control their homes remotely! Are you a Linux user who has ever wanted to turn on the lights in your house, or open and close the curtains, while away on holiday? Want to be able to play the same music in every room, controlled from your laptop or mobile phone? Do you want to do these things without an expensive off-the-shelf kit | CHAPTER 1 APPLIANCE CONTROL In this way you can use an IR remote to interact with other arbitrary applications including media players on other machines. Additionally you can adopt the same ideas as Cosmic mentioned earlier and covered in Chapter 7 to develop a state-based control mechanism using very cheap IR transmitters. Conclusion Each device in your home should have the ability to be controlled remotely either through the power lines with X10 or C-Bus with an Ethernet socket or through basic Infrared. This is the first step of a two-stage process. The second is when you have a computer able to issue control messages to those devices. At that point they can be used seamlessly from anywhere in the world. When the device doesn t support such functionality you have to hack it. And that s where the geeky fun begins 48 C H A P T E R 2 Appliance Hacking Converting Existing Technology There are three classical forms of hacking software hardware and wetware also known as social engineering . More recently firmware hacking has become prominent because low-cost hardware utilizing embedded Linux has opened the door to software hackers unable to build hardware. It is hardware hacking and its associated software that I will cover in this chapter. Software Hacks For most developers software is an easier hack since the chance of breaking something irrevocably is much reduced compared to hacking hardware. In fact when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were building machines at the Homebrew Computer Club they reasoned that for every one hacker who was interested in hardware there were 100 who were keen on software so they focused on the software capabilities of the Apple computer. Linksys NSLU2 This device also known as the Slug is a small embedded Linux device intended to function as a network addressable storage NAS device. You plug in power a network cable and up to two USB hard drives and you re able to retrieve the data stored on it from any machine on the same network subnet .
