Whats a first gen ipad good for?

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menace:
Thanks for the feedback--I like the home automation/central brain idea--I have seen them in luxury houses as a thermostat/sonos sound control unit and thought it was a pretty neat look (even if it is entirely 1 percenter'ish...) May have to delve into this further..I'm sure there are tons of wireless things that can be controlled this way.

Then for fun, I will have it turn evil 1 day of the year and try and kill us all like all those great movies from the 80's LOL

abkaz:
The nice thing is it's no longer a 1 percenter'ish thing to have anymore. Most of the the things on ours are free (skype, lists, calendars, weather, etc...). Music is cheap (a $20 bluetooth receiver attached to an existing sound system + free Google Music cloud storage + Spotify, Pandora, etc...). The TV/video stuff is cheap too ($90 Nexus Player acts as a chromecast and runs XBMC, Netflix, Hulu, etc... can also run emulators). So it's maybe $120 to get a ton of functionality out of an old tablet.

The home automation stuff is the most expensive and it's certainly not necessary: sprinkler controller ($100 - $150), heating cooling ($100 - $250), lighting control ($40 / switch or $15 / bulb), security cams ($250 for an HD 4 pack), and the controller runs on a raspberry pi with a zwave dongle. So there's maybe $700 - $800 tied up there.

It's easy to pick up another galaxy tab (7" for $90, or 10" for $130) and clone all the functionality to it when we want a controller in another room. Plus all of that can be copied to your phone as well. iPads would work too, but you'd lose all the convenience of the widgets and the built - in IR blaster.

dkersten:
There is some cool stuff you can do with automation for pretty cheap these days. I used to do it professionally back in the 90's, and let me tell you, it was expensive. Nowadays you can do 10 times more for 100 times less. I set up some $50,000 home automation systems back then that turned on and off some lights and closed curtains or opened the electric screen for a projector (and of course controlled the house music and televisions).

In recent years, I played around with home automation in my own house and I use my zwave front door lock regularly. I can set codes for each kid, get texts when they come home, and unlock or lock the door from my phone from anywhere. I have a cam in the living room too, although it is more to discourage the kids from doing things they aren't supposed to do while I am travelling than anything else. Since I already have a programmable thermostat that does everything I need, there is no need for a zwave thermostat since the house is already warm/cool when I need it anyway. I don't have a security system so there is no need for any of that. I will likely play with some lighting in the future though. I did add some wifi controlled lighting to my deck/firepit area, but I haven't tied that into my zwave controller, so I need to run a separate app to run that.

I started with a zwave dongle but it just didn't want to work with my other stuff well, so I moved to a Vera controller. A little more money than a pi with a zwave dongle but it actually works nicely without much fuss to set it up and there is a TON of custom apps for it.

My parents recently built a winter home in Phoenix and went all out with the automation. The coolest part is the full lighting control outside that also controls the waterfall, fountains, and hot tub. Funny thing is they have an ipad 2 running it all because they aren't tech saavy enough to put the apps on their latest ipads/phones.

yotsuya:
I've thought about automation briefly, but I really don't see a need for it in my life. I guess the TV remote is really all I need.

jdbailey1206:
I have a home automated system. And if she doesn't listen I give her a black eye. :P

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