Chapter 11
Future Designs

The majority of this book has focused on real home automation projects that you can build inexpensively today. This chapter takes a look at the exciting, rapid evolution of microcontrollers, smartphones, and computers and then forecasts what’s on the horizon for these technologies.

We will take a look at the near-term prospects of Arduinos, Androids, and computer operating systems and then extrapolate these developments out roughly a decade to see how these products will help form the foundation of high-tech residential living in the year 2025. Looking back at how sophisticated mobile technology has become over the last ten years, the ideas in this future setting may not be as farfetched as they sound. In fact, most of the proposed scenarios could be implemented today, with the projects you learned about in this book helping to point the way. But first, let’s take a look at what’s coming up in the next year or so.