For my new house, I wanted to go with an unobtrusive, "no controls" style. There are no thermostats, no pool controller, no security panels, and no standard toggle/paddle switches for the lights. Instead, I'm going for a designer style piece of colored glass with capacitive touch sensors behind it. Think of your smart phone's touch capability, and that will be my light switches.
The "switches" are really just sensors, as the signals are delivered to the main house controller where the actual lighting management occurs. The sensor pad can detect touches, gestures, and multi-taps to provide different lighting requests, based on time of day and ambient light. The switches also include optional hookups to an IR/motion sensor, temperature measurement, and all switches have RGB backlighting.
All my work will be Open Source, so I've started the documentation for the wall switches. I have a couple custom PCBs that I'm working on, and (eventually) a whole mess of microcontroller code for the PIC16F688.
I'll keep updating the wiki pages, and committing changes to my repository. I don't have commit emails going anywhere, but Google Code supports feeds for wiki and source changes if you'd like to track the changes. Of course, I'll keep posting here when interesting milestones occur!
