Domoticz – Open source Home Automation System | Hacker News Reader

Domoticz – Open source Home Automation System

domoticz.com

76 pointsNicoJuicy18 comments

On a related note, what about hardware? Remote controllable light dimmers, for example. I've been browsing around, but all the options seem to be terribly locked up: "here's our custom switch, here's our custom control box, there's our custom software for the control box, here's our custom phone app, use them together or not at all". Are there any solutions on market that are more hacker-friendly? A switch with documented bluetooth/wifi interface? Or maybe just something that exposes couple digital IO pins and tasks you with getting the correct signal there?

I'd say in general hardware that uses the z-wave protocol isn't too locked down. There are many different companies making hardware and software and for the most part they all interoperate. In my house I just installed a few dimmer switches from Cooper, that I send signals to from a USB dongle by aeotec, which is controlled by a piece of Mac software called Indigo. Also, I think there are some SDKs available if you want to get into writing your own software.

If you can hide some larger hardware, I'd say go with DMX-512. I wrote an open source library for Linux for speaking DMX-512 over an FTDI USB-to-RS-485 adapter[0], and (shameless plug) have some automation hardware of my own[1] that supports DMX-512 using that library.

It's possible to buy a decent quality 4ch DMX dimmer for ~$30 per channel, and you get instantaneous response rather than the terrible lag of most consumer home automation products.

[0] http://sourceforge.net/projects/dmx485/files/

[1] http://www.nitrogenlogic.com/products/automation_controller....

Also, if you're not able to hide thick XLR cables in your home, there are tons of cheap DMX-over-wireless solutions out there, though I don't know how reliable these are in practice.

X-10, Insteon, zwave

Look at misterhouse.

Just some ideas to google for.

Edited to add, also language has not caught up with reality. Anything with house-ish peripherals is called "home automation" even if it is a web interface for out door weather sensors like this article. The relevance is someone looking for automating insteon outputs based on insteon and security system inputs and NTP accurate time using a simple fast and easy to develop scripting language is going to be really unhappy with a very nice looking HTML 5 remote control app like the linked article. Its a cool remote control and a cool graphing system but does apparently no automation at all.

There's about three totally separate markets all called "home automation". There's web page (or sometimes more annoyingly iphone-only app, or app that wants access to my contacts list for spam and resale purposes, etc) remote controlling. There's logging and graphing. Finally there's automation as in remotely controlled devices automatically taking action based on other remote devices or rather elaborate multiple timers or the wall clock time. Also there tends to be issues with the balance of input vs output in that this article does virtually no output at all other than nice looking web pages, compared to other tools in the field. Finally there's the open/closed issue mentioned where in home automation, as in actual automation, closed "solutions" are utterly useless due to the network effect between devices. The usefulness of any individual "home automation" device scales at least quadratically with the number of other devices it can interact with. For example, a web interface to my thermostat would be pretty useless by itself, if it can't network with everything else I own, or worse, anything else I own.

I'm looking into opensource domotics for my future home, here are some other alternatives i found.

1. OpenSourceAutomation: http://www.opensourceautomation.com

2. OpenRemote: http://www.openremote.org/

3. OpenDomo: http://en.opendomo.org/

4. MisterHouse: http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/

5. DomotiGa: http://www.domotiga.nl/

6. Freedomotic: http://www.freedomotic.com/

7. Domogik: http://www.domogik.org/en/

8. domoticz: http://www.domoticz.com/

9. openhab: https://code.google.com/p/openhab/

10. Nodo: http://www.nodo-domotica.nl/

11. FHEM: http://fhem.de/

12. Ago Control: http://www.agocontrol.com/

13. Pytomation: http://www.pytomation.com/

14. Housecream: http://housecream.org/

15. Homegenie: http://www.homegenie.it/

16. Wiseflat: http://wiseflat.com/

17. QW Home Automation: http://qwhomeautomation.com/

18. Homidom: http://www.homidom.com/

19. zVirtualScenes: https://code.google.com/p/zvirtualscenes/

20. rasp485berry: http://rasp485berry.wordpress.com/

21. PiDome: http://pidome.wordpress.com/

22. PiHome: http://pihome.harkemedia.de/

23. pilight: http://www.pilight.org/

Does anyone has any preferences? Have you used one? What's your experience?

Domoticz works well for me. 433mhz lightswitches and a home cinema happily controlled from Roomie Remote.

That's the same as my setup, I don't know how you control the switches but I managed to get an Arduino to control them through the PC:

http://www.stavros.io/posts/control-rf-devices-with-arduino/

Cool :-)

I have one of these: http://www.uk-automation.co.uk/products/RFXCOM-RFXtrx433.htm...

Plugged into the RPi that is running Domoticz.

Domoticz provides URLs that trigger scenes when hit.

Oh, very nice. Seems a bit pricy, though. Looks like the same thing can be done with an Arduino, I wonder if there are any sketches to speak that protocol...

I wrote a little project but it probably pales in comparison to most of these. https://github.com/dandroid88/webmote

Excellent list! I had no idea there was so much interest in home automation software, though ironically Ive considered writing my own more than once.

The next question that comes to mind though is hardware support. Eg, a lightswitch that works with one vendor's software but not another's.

Have tried to find which of those has the widest hardware support?

I would be interested in reading a blog post or article on your adventures in this area.

I had no idea there was so much interest in home automation software, though ironically Ive considered writing my own more than once.

I think this is the root cause of the proliferation of automation software; everybody wants to write their own, and doesn't know about everything else that already exists :-).

This list is really awesome. Every time I try to start these projects, I somehow forget about it. I need to figure out where to find the motivation to actually finish a lighting project or something. Maybe this list will give me that.

24. http://www.osdomotics.com/

Important is the use of open standards, osdomotics uses open 6lowpan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6LoWPAN

I use it to control the humidity of my old piano and to automatically (presence / time) switch on / off my espresso machine, which has a very long heating time. Works very well.

If you're looking for a wired solution (completely renovating my house) I just started using OpenMotics (https://www.openmotics.com). All hardware and software is open source and its pretty damn cheap (which was a deciding factor for me).

http://www.limitlessled.com has low cost, good quality opensource lighting hardware, and a tcp udp API commandset for arduino, linux, pc, ios, c#, vb.net, java. www.limitlessled.com/dev the shipping cost is higher, but it is still worth it. The android and ios software that comes with LimitlessLED is slowly improving, but I am going to use LightBow or NinjaBlocks to control my lighting schedules and scenes, it is a lot better.

Nice to see.

I have integrated an RPi into my SmartThings setup. SmartThimgs seem to be moving really slowly, their device support is lacking, and their developers documentation pretty poor. This could be a nice fallback.

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