Several home automation systems have been rapidly introduced in the recent years. However, the consumer adoption of home automation systems has been immensely slow. Moreover, most home automation systems available in the market are designed for western countries and do not have certain features that are crucial for consumers in tropical countries like Malaysia. Therefore, this paper identifies the possible criteria for this slow adoption and evaluates the potential of Intel Galileo for addressing these problems. Four popular home automation technologies are analysed and surveys are conducted to identify the needs of electricity and water consumers in Malaysia. A low cost, secure, user-friendly, easily installed and flexible Intel Galileo based home automation system that caters the needs of Malaysians is presented. The system is integrated with an Android application and uses a Wi-Fi network. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system, the design and prototype implementation of a basic home automation system based on the Intel Galileo is developed and evaluated based on several tests and interviews. The proposed system can be used as a reference to increase consumer adoption of home automation systems in tropical countries.