I was talking about home automation ("domotique" here in France) with a coworker a few weeks ago and he told me about his friends' project, now it's on HN. Glad to see it get a little more exposure, it looks like a cool project. Home automation has been regularly hyped for close to a decade and presented as the Next Big Thing(tm) but we still don't have complete solutions. Perhaps because there are so many legacy dev…
Knowing the state of a garage door and being able to twiddle it from your phone? A nice feature. Worth $100? Probably not.
Night and away modes for lighting are also nice features, but for most people they aren't worth the hundreds of dollars it will take to set up (never mind the time it will take to make it work reasonably well).
There are of course lots of examples where the value provided beats the cost, and automation is being used for many of them.