Gordon Meyer - Smart Home Hacks: Tips & Tools for Automating Your House

Ido Bar-Tana is a microprocessor design engineer by day and a home automation hacker by night. His web site ( and welcomes any home-automation-related questions and comments.

Matt Bendiksen's mission is to bring intuitive home automation to geeks everywhere. Over the last 20 years, Matt has been using computers to monitor and control home environments. In 2002, Matt founded Perceptive Automation and has received rave reviews on Indigo, its Mac OS X home control server. Visit http://www.perceptiveautomation.com to download a free trial version.

Edward Cheung was born and raised in Aruba, where he started his hobby of electronics as a young boy. After high school, he continued his education in the United States. After completing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Yale University, he joined NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center, where he currently works on the Hubble Space Telescope Project. Edward enjoys developing hardware for space flight and his hobby of home automation.

Dean Davis operates AfterTen Software (http://www.afterten.com) and is the author of WeatherManX, CIDTrackerX, and other Macintosh programs.

Arthur Dustman has been doing home automation for about three years. He has expanded from the X10 standard package to a 5 x 5 room to hold all his equipment. He uses HAL2000, Adicon Ocelot with C-max, nine Secu-16s, one Secu16-IR, 94 Relays, one scm-810 mixer, nine pzm-10 microphones, nine Xantech keypads, nine custom wall panels, and much more. He has created many custom circuits and devices to automate devices that have no "factory" interfaces. His motto: "There's always a way to automate anything."

Michael Ferguson (http://www.shed.com) is the principal author and designer of XTension for Mac OS. Michael began experimenting with electronics in 1955, began writing code and designing computer systems in 1964, and has done nothing more useful since then.

Bill Fernandez is an avid electronics hobbyist, home automation aficionado, do-it-yourselfer, home handyman, fine-art photographer, martial artist, husband, father, and all-around nice guy. Bill is known for having introduced Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to each other, and for having been Apple Computer's first employee. Professionally, Bill is a consulting user interface architect.

Dan Fink is the technical director of Otherpower.com (http://www.otherpower.com), which is a web site dedicated to alternative-energy enthusiasts and their experiments. Dan has lived in the remote, mountainous area west of Fort Collins, Colorado, for 13 years, with no grid electricity or phones, and generates his power with solar, wind, and hamster. He administers the company's servers remotely from home over VSAT satellite Internet, which leaves extra time for experimenting with homebrewed wind turbines, weird science projects, and silly ideas such as hamster-powered night lights. Dan's publication credits include articles in Home Power, Back Home, and Zymurgy magazines.

Richard Gensley is a founder of HomeTech Solutions (http://www.hometech.com), a home automation products company in Cupertino, California. He currently teaches seminars on lighting control and automation including the use of X10 and related technologies. He authored a number of "Mr. Module" feature articles in Electronic House Magazine, which addressed subtle and clever applications of the X10 technology. His automation experience includes work as an automated flight controls engineer and serving in key management positions with computer and industrial automation firms.

Mark Kelly

David A. Kindred () is a richly blessed home automation enthusiast who resides in Kemptown, Maryland, with his sons Andrew, Kit, and Josh, and his loving and understanding wife, Pam.

Robert Ladle is a retired electrical engineer living in the Seattle area. He is a self-taught computer nut who has been using Mac computers since Apple's Mac SE model first came out in the late 1980s. Bob has been interested in automation of all types, beginning with radio control models in the early days to his current home automation activities. He first started using XTension in 1991 and continues to develop and experiment with new uses and applications to enhance the field.

Guy Lavoie currently works for a telephone company doing software support. He has been involved in home automation since 1998 and enjoys working with Applied Digital's Ocelot and Leopard controllers. He holds a degree in Industrial Electrotechnology and enjoys programming microcontrollers in assembler.

Reynold Leong (http://www.kjsdoghouse.com/autohouse) is currently in year 10 of his never-ending home automation project. He spends a lot of time automating stuff so that he can have more time to be lazy. "Laziness is our inspiration." Donations are encouraged and welcomed.