My wife and I are expecting our first child in May and I've already started the process of wanting to a couple things in our home. One of the things I want to do is implement a Rasberry Pi device to control certain aspects of our home, mainly light fixtures and possibly our central air and heat unit.
What devices would I need to allow me to control these devices remotely, be it with or without the Rasberry Pi device. Additionally, I would also like to implement a touch screen device (think a tablet built into a wall) that allows me to control the primary aspects of my home to where I can be in a central spot to turn off lights, devices and the hot water heater remotely as well as through this console.
Thanks for the input. The first one seems to be just basically rigging up some stuff to remotely manage power outlets, which could be useful in it's own nature but not for my applications. The seconds link looks to be infinitely useful in the basics of what I'm wanting to do.
Well about using the tablet as an interface, you can use a tablet as a monitor for the Rpi using SSH (simple howto here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=18916), though this method only gives you a command line interface with the Pi. If you wanted to add a fancy GUI interface to this then I guess that it would basically be a process of making a frontend for an SSH client in the android SDK - though I have no idea as to how difficult this would be to get working - (some info here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11145142/how-to-make-ssh-client-in-android) to send the commands to the Pi to control the GPIO pins to activate relays and suchlike.
Indeed, the GUI is what I'm having difficulty finding, but thank you so much for the links; they will be extremely useful.
The reason I want the GUI is for ease of use for anyone to come in and control the lights or other devices from a centralized point (think the bedroom because why the hell would I want to get up when I can do it remotely.)