[ILUG] home automation

[Paul Barry]

I have a home-automation system based around a linux box. When I first
built it about 5 years ago, I used a picoweb to do digital i/o controlled
via its embedded webserver.
http://www.picoweb.net/
At the time this was state of the art cheap embedded http server, and fun
to work with. Laughable underpowered, painful to work with, but does the
job. My heating system controlled by webserver - how geeky is that.

Anyway, I'm thinking of extending this a bit over Christmas and looking
for another web/ethernet controlled device for i/o. I took a look around
and cheapest devices are expensive when dev kit is included.
Buying kit from the US seems to have become more difficult and expensive,
so I'd prefer easily sourced (EU based) kit.

This thing looks ideal
http://www.ipio.nu/
but seems very expensive (>EUR300) if I got my conversion right.

Now I'm wondering if I could use something like a cheap Linksys firewall
and hack the i/o lines onto it, using a version of the replacement GPL
firmware. I've never toyed with these before, so don't know how tricky it
is to recompile and never looked inside one. Anyone know more?

Good links for HA at
http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lightsey/52/index2.html#HLinks
but didn't see anything about hacking an existing device.

BTW, not interested in X10 solutions and I have Cat5 and 230v running to
the point where I want control.

Any other suggestions for ethernet controlled I/O?