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I am a college student looking to do a fun project to improve my dorm room. I want to hook up some automation components starting with something simple such as a floor lamp that can dim. I would like to be able to control this using my ipod touch as a touch screen remote.. and it needs to be cheap as I am a poor college student haha.
I would also like this to be expandable to control IR devices like my tv using some type of IR emitter. I want to be able to code all of this myself, prefferably in c++. And i would like to do it without having to buy any new software. I don't know what devices would work well tho so if anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them.

Any ideas or advice as to how to start and how to achieve this would be great. Thanks

My housemate made electronic curtains using a stepper motor and a pully system made from meccanno. It detected the blue tooth on his mobile phone and opened/closed the curtains when he left/returned to the house.

A complete and utter waste of a lot of time. Amusing for about 30 seconds though.

its gonna be quite complex, first of all, your gonna need a mac to develop for Iphone OS(Including touch). Then your gonna need a way for your touch to comunicate to another device, i suggest using an Arduino bord for the control of the lamp, as it uses c++ and comes as a ready assembled board. The only real option i see for comunication to the lamp is over wifi. So i presume you could send some packets over your router to the arduino with a ethernet board(Or something simmilar). You could turn the dimmer switch using a servo quite easily.

thanks for the ideas.. I'll be sure to look into the Arduino board and see if it seems like it could work for me.