Humorously, you'll find the CEC part (which was designed to do this) the hardest to get working well.

I've done something similar in my woodworking shed, I have a raspberry Pi that controls the dust collector, air filtration, and some other stuff. It also turns on a nice little colored light when my wife IM's me :)

Also i'm sure you know this, so this is more for others reading the comment, but you shouldn't control anything like the AC directly from the GPIO. You should isolate it.

I know very little about hardware hacking aside toying a little with Arduino.

There is a low voltage hook on the AC system that is specifically designed for this sort of use - although it will probably still require some sort of low voltage relay.

The room has been purpose built with remote control in mind so all of the lights etc have separate switches in a specially designed cupboard.

As for the HDMI-CEC, the only thing we really need it for is volume up/down on the sound bar. This is because the TV itself is a Sharp Aquos which has it's own remote control protocol that works over either IP or RS232 and can do power on/off and source changing. The TV's own CEC will control the sound bar volume with the TV's remote but errors when I try it using the IP/RS232 protocol – hence the need for separate HDMI-CEC. I've been diving into libcec which has now added native support for the RPi and it looks like sending volume up/down is relatively simple.

This sounds like an interesting project. I kindly direct your attention to http://code.google.com/p/openhab/

Best of luck to you!

Thanks for the link. Are you aware of similar projects?

https://github.com/dandroid88/webmote I have been working on this for fun in my spare time. Probably not the best fit for what you are doing as my primary focus (so far) has been controlling IR-controlled devices via a web interface. It is still a bit of a hack but it works well for controlling my TV, stereo, xbmc, x10 lights from anything with a browser. I have been hosting it on a raspi and it is pretty fun to play with (turning off my fiance's 'say yes to the dress' from the bathroom). Good luck with your project.

I'm only an interested observer.

This could also be of interest to you: http://simplehomenet.com/solutions.asp?page_id=HomAidPi It uses a Pi too!

Also could be of use: http://www.zigbee.org/

Nice - thank you!

There was an old Perl based project called Mr. House ( http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/ ), though it hasn't seen activity in a few years. It tried to be vendor-neutral and (apparently) had voice controls, too, which sounded cool.

I never had the money to set up the hardware, though, so I have no idea about it's actual abilities...

Do you have a blog with your progress? I am trying to do something similar.

So far I got RaspBMC installed and AirPlay for photos and audio works great (not so much with videos so far). I love it that I can turn on the music real loud in the house from my iPhone.

Isn't it good for HTPC using XBMC?

Menus can be quite slow on the Pi, especially if you have RSS enabled, but the GPU is great.

However, there are more folks working with Pi's for HTPC's than other platforms, so i expect a lot of this will improve there, faster.

To put it in perspective, i also have XBMC running on a pandaboard (and pandaboard ES), and it runs amazing on that. So it's not that you need some huge amount of processor power, but at least right now, a little more than the Pi provides.

Are the menus still slow with the new overclocking firmware?