Calaos: Open Source Home Automation | Hacker News Reader

Calaos: Open Source Home Automation

calaos.fr

55 pointsalbertzeyer10 comments

F-Yeah GPL Home automation! I make an IoT board called Flutter Wireless and this looks like it could be a great software platform to pair with the hardware. Our hardware is creative commons share alike attribution and our software will be GPL (releasing soon). Hardware has a 64MHz arm CPU and runs Arduino code. Plus it includes an 868/915MHz radio with 1km of range, battery charger, and crypto chip. :)

I'm just starting to get my hardware out the door, but I'll have to keep an eye on this... :)

keep us posted of your progress at reddit /r/homeautomation. good luck with production run. thank you for OSH !

Oh cool will do, thanks!

I think the world will need an open source home automation. That's why, I've started to build something like this, Since I am a student and also a part time developer, I could only managed to build a prototype server app that runs on any JVM supported hardware and a simple android app to send commands&files(mp3) to the server. I hope you'll make a complete and open solution for home automation, good luck

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 devices to interface to.

I think it's because the value/cost ratio is still really bad.

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.

Wiki is pretty empty. Is this built on open standards? Can it control hardware that uses MQTT and CoAP? How does it compare with OpenHAB?

GPLv3 might be a slight hinderance for companies to adopt it for their hardware products.

Maybe, just maybe, they don't care about "companies" adopting it. The history is "When the company was closed during 2013, the entire code base was open sourced and released as GPL. A small community started around the project to continue the development."

So I guess their point might be that you don't depend on a company to run your own home automation. Because when the company goes down (or get bought, or "pivot"), you are not stuck.

Assume that if you can't run it yourself, a) you are not the audience b) there are competing products where you are not in charge.

Great. Please translate more wiki pages to English, that would definitely help to increase the audience.

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