| * From the garage to the living room, Geek House provides hackers with 10 PC-based hardware hacking projects that are not for the faint of heart!
* Taking the DIY mentality to a whole new level, this book teaches techies how to hack, customize, and modify everything-from their sprinkler systems to the temperature of their barbecues
* Adventurous readers will feast on such projects as installing a bar code inventory system for DVDs or CDs, converting RS232 to wireless, scheduling recording from any television in the house, and creating a remote control finder
* Companion Web site includes the custom software and source code needed to power these geeky creations
You’re a geek, and to you a conventional house is boring and inadequate. The commercial market isn’t really up to offering you what you want directly, so you’re going to have to build and install it yourself. That’s where we come in—we’re here to help you imagine and create the computer-driven electronics you’d like in a house.
In that respect, this book is similar to our previous Extreme Tech book, PC Toys, helping you design and build your own electronic minions. Geek House differs from PC Toys, however, in that the projects in Geek House demand more from you—more know-how and more time. You could duplicate many of the projects we built for PC Toys by following our instructions, but we’ll be quite surprised if your versions of the Geek House projects don’t vary considerably from ours. Not only will you end up using different parts in many cases, you’ll end up customizing the projects to match your own preferences or to do things we didn’t envision or didn’t choose to implement.
Geek House includes the projects listed in Table I-1. The common thread is that they all automate something useful (or annoying); nearly all of them have a PC at the core. |
