Home automation has been an interest of mine for a long time. There is a bunch of bad technology in the marketplace and the products are too expensive so I decided to build my own. I started out with the Arduino microcontroller which was really fun but the code quickly became hard to maintain because it was not object oriented. Additionally it could not do multithreading or real debugging with breakpoints and such. I refactored the code for C# and the .NET Micro Framework. I choose the netduino plus, http://www.netduino.com/netduinoplus/specs.htm, for the microcontroller which has a built in Ethernet adapter for network communication.
Home Automation with Netduino and Kinect - CodeProject®
