Ohm Sweet Ohm: Outgoing Linux Australia president's hot-wired home

While shopping for new curtains recently, Oxer admits to nearly suffering a heart attack after learning how expensive they can be. So he tracked down some electric motors and motorized tracks.

"It turns out electric curtain tracks aren't that expensive, but they aren't designed to be networked. So I modified the box with an Ethernet cable and a couple of relay buttons and now I have software control over the blinds."

Instead of waking up to a blaring alarm clock every morning, Oxer suggests that the alarm be triggered to slowly open the curtains to let the light in. He is currently working on doing the same thing to his skylight.

But he admits that most of the modifications in his home are "fairly standalone; just little scripts hacked together."

So Oxer has recently started work on a more centralized control environment via a Web interface.

His inspiration for doing so partly stemmed from the marriage of wireless connectivity and touch screen technology in Apple's iPod Touch.

"All I have to do is create a Web interface to trigger these software events and I can have virtual buttons that I could control from anything within a Web browser, which means something like an iPod Touch can suddenly become a touch sensitive remote control for everything in your house."

Oxer says it's as simple as logging into the home wireless network, pointing the device at a Web server running on one of his machines, and then in no time he can have a system that will allow him to open the front door, control lights and heating, close electric curtains and so on, all from the one handheld device.

"My ideal situation would be, for example, to be able to take a video feed from a camera near the front door and have that fed through to the home automation controller, which is a machine running Linux and a whole bunch of these scripts...and if someone rings the doorbell you could pull up a full motion video stream to see who it is and then use the controllers to unlock the door and let them in."

"Once you start linking these devices together and letting your imagination go crazy there are all sorts of things you could do."

Read the full interview here