Google pushing Android for home automation

It's all those damn Canadian companies!

They have infiltrated most of your homes with Blackberries and now another Canadian company wants to change the way you live in the privacy (maybe not) of your own home.

Time to switch back to Yahoo

...ooops... they're Canadian too!

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My apologies if this is not interesting or old news here. I saw this today on Slashdot. Apparently Google wants to push the Android platform as a controller for home automation. A quote:

"With more than 400,000 Android devices being activated worldwide every day and a global community of 450,000 independent Android software developers, Google hopes appliance manufacturers will be willing to embed the company's "Tungsten" control technology in their products, and that consumers will be willing to spend the money to buy Google's wireless control "bridge" that will connect individual appliances to an Android device through a home Wi-Fi network."

No apologies needed. This may turn out to be a significant development.

The article doesn't explain something that should be of considerable interest to DIY HA folks, namely that "The Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) provides an implementation of an Android USB accessory that is based on the Arduino open source electronics prototyping platform".

The Arduino microcontroller platform has one of the gentler learning curves, a robust community and abundant contributed code pertinent to hardware control, DAQ and HA.

Here's more specifics on the google-arduino connection:

Any more information on this? I'm a total noob here--been lurking for a few= days. This is very intriguing stuff. I'm in the early learning phase of te= aching myself Android development. I do a little light weight web developme= nt. I'm interested in this from the angle of "home of the future", sustaina= ble development/renewable energy perspective. Any thoughts or advice from s= altier vets is appreciated.=20

Thanks,

JH