I’ve recently been considering rolling my own home automation in my apartment lately, but I can’t seem to come up with a good way to control different devices scattered about from a central unit.
For example, let’s say I wanted to create a system to control my lights by creating little devices that used servos to flip my light switches. Nothing insanely complex. But if I wanted to control this all from a central location, we start running into trouble. I could do it wirelessly with ZigBee or Bluetooth or even Wi-fi, but I think that would quickly become prohibitively expensive.
What would be the best option to control all of these devices via a wired solution? USB cables that provide power and signal from the brains of the operation? 9V batteries powering each individual unit and 2 conductor copper cables to provide the signal? A powerful IR transmitter in each room that blasts a 3 bit identifier for each device to get it to change state (totally cool, totally infeasible)? What would you do?