Product Description
Take a geek and a PC, add one soldering iron, a home, and a copy of Home Hacking Projects for Geeks, and you’ll give new meaning to the term, “home improvement.” From fearless neophytes to tool-wielding masterminds, the home hacker in any geek will find new inspiration and plenty of hands-on guidance to take on a variety of home-transforming projects once relegated to the world of sci-fi. This fun new guide combines creativity with electricity and power tools to… More >>
Home Hacking Projects for Geeks
Tags: creativity, electricity, geek, Geeks, guidance, hacker, Hacking, Home, home improvement, neophytes, new inspiration, power tools, Projects, sci fi, soldering iron
#1 by Professoran on April 6, 2010 - 10:47 am
I just got this book and I’ll admit I haven’t read it from cover to cover. But the problem I’ve run into is that I want to slowly automate my home but most of the books out there are for electricians or electrical engineers.
Which for me is no help.
But by addressing a step by step approach to most projects you can read through them and get the basics and adapt it to what you are wanting to do.
Also it is written in a very easy to understand style which I like.
For those of you wanting to get started in automating your home, I have yet to find a better place to do so than this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
#2 by rolly on April 6, 2010 - 11:46 am
I thought this was an amusing book that described a collection of neat ideas. Most of them are not too technically sophisticated so that you could have come up with the design yourself if you are a technical person, using web resources, but the value was in the idea itself and the way it is suggested.
Rating: 3 / 5
#3 by David B. Haynes on April 6, 2010 - 2:32 pm
Nothing in the splash page, back cover or anywhere with info letting you know it is almost 100% about the X10 hardware. I already own a house full of X10 stuff, so the fact that I wasted money on this book burns my soul. Not one thing deals with how to set up, rig or configure any of the projects without having to spend money on whichever X-10 product will do the job. If I wanted that I would just buy the product and read the installation guide that comes with it.
The author suckered me into buying the book… don’t let him sucker you!
Rating: 2 / 5
#4 by Jack D. Herrington on April 6, 2010 - 3:06 pm
This is the kind of book I wish I would have had as a kid. A book that sparks your imagination about how you can use hardware and software to do practical and cool things. In this case to build little home helpers, like a TiVo for radio, a home theatre IR controller, a home theatre PC, and more.
The book spends about 300 pages on thirteen home hacks. They are separated into three parts; automation, entertainment and security. Each project starts with a list of materials then walks through a very detailed explanation of building both the hardware and software.
This is definitely a book for geeks. Specifically the type of geek that finds themselves at Radio Shack more than a couple of times a month. Certainly part of the value of the book is in the projects themselves, but a lot more of the value is in it’s inspirational quality.
Rating: 5 / 5
#5 by William56 on April 6, 2010 - 5:09 pm
Since I am a computer engineer I was hoping to find that this book offered some home projects let alone hacks. First let me state that this book doesn’t offer any “Hacking Projects”. To be honest it barely offers any “Home projects”. Fortunately for me I have a friend who is an electrical engineer. This book is extremely misleading. More than half of the projects listed in this book simply can not be accomplished because the projects mentioned severely lack the required information or were never honestly tested to see if the might actually work. A good part of this book suggests you will need a skill set of 3 out of 5 to accomplish a given task. What it doesn’t say it that you will need significantly more money and electrical knowledge than this book will ever provide. Many of the projects listed here are extremely costly and provide little advantage to some running it through a computer. In addition, you will have to know a computer language [Pearl] in order to get remote benefit from any project. Having looked over the Pear scripts I have found some mistakes in the programming. It seems to me that O’Reilly just wanted to sell a book.
Rating: 1 / 5