Apress - Smart Home Automation with Linux (2010)- P15: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 2 APPLIANCE HACKING LinuxDC http is an old almost defunct project that has recently seen a small spurt of new life. It is a reasonably complete distribution suitable for web browsing with a BBA movie playback and emulation. This itself is a good hack but there are also cables to provide twoway serial communication either between the Dreamcast and a PC or between peripherals such as infrared IR transmitters and receivers. You can either build this cable yourself using one chip and three capacitors from the circuit shown at http dc serifc. html or purchase a similarly compatible cable which is known as a DC coders cable. There is also Dreamcast emulation software for Linux called LXDream which provides a quick way to verify the working or not of various Dreamcast software hacks. You can find this at which also provides all-important links to prebuilt disc image ISOs of LinuxDC from wiki title Dreamcast_Linux. Note Emulators such as LXDream require an image of the machine s original BIOS. Since these are usually still under copyright they are not packaged with the emulator and must be extracted from a machine that you legally own . In addition to these there are various pieces of stand-alone software that can be cross-compiled and uploaded via the serial DC coders cable to the Dreamcast. Some of these are shown on the pages at http dc. This includes example source code for text graphics sound and serial communications. By avoiding an operating system you can make better use of the comparatively small 16MB of memory and 200MHz processor at the expense of ease of development. Sony PlayStation Sony is now promoting its third generation of PlayStation console imaginatively titled PlayStation 3 PS3 . It is still too new to make it financially viable to turn the whole machine into an home automation device and since it s a very capable media playback device already but you can .
