Home Automation Recommendations for Linux?

Richard asks: "I am interested in starting some home automation projects. The only requirement is that it needs to be controllable via my Linux based system. A Google search for ' "home automation" linux ' returns more than 35,000 hits, including some good ones like this one, which just show how MUCH is out there. Are there any recommendations for a good controller with a serial or USB connection to the computer? What about power switches and sensors? Do I want a system that sends control signals over my house's power lines or RF? Any good software recommendations? As a first project I thought a simple controllable power switch would be fun: Then I could ssh to my home system, use the power switch to turn on a computer controlled radio (Ten-Tec RX-320) and use Speak Freely to send back the audio to my remote location. (This works now except that I don't want to leave the radio on all the time)."

Comments

http://www.linuxguru.be/

[sweede]

http://www.linuxguru.be/

Howabout MisterHouse -- It Knows Kung-Fu

[2TecTom]

http://www.misterhouse.net/

Seems to be a relevant, useful & worth project

Re:Howabout MisterHouse -- It Knows Kung-Fu

[chevybowtie]

Misterhouse is built on top of PERL and is very configurable. It will work with Text-To-Speech as well as Voice-Recognition engines which really make it fun. It also has the ability to create webpages that allow interation with the whole system.

I have tried many, buit this is the one I use and like best. Plus, it is updated often (2-5 weeks between new versions) which was not the case with most others.

X10

[bobbozzo]

The X10 stuff is fairly cheap and easy to find. Dunno about the rest.

You can apparently do a whole automation/security system for under $3000... alerting you when someone enters the property, turning on lights, TV, whatever; schedule A/C, ...

Home Automation solutions

[Black Perl]

This was a fairly vague question. I moonlight as a home automation consultant. Most people, when they think of "home automation" they are really thinking about "home theater" or whole-house audio and video. There's a lot more to it, from structured wiring to control of lights, appliances, HVAC, and other items via relays, IR, etc. There could be many ways of doing what you want, depending on issues such as desired price, reliability, and how you plan to expand your system in the future.

I'm going to assume you want a simple starter solution that allows you to control an appliance (your radio), and uses a Linux box as a controller. You need at minimum two devices: A PC-to-powerline interface, and an appliance module.

For the powerline interface, pick up a CM11A which interfaces with a serial port. This is one of the few X10-the-brand devices I recommend*. Other companies make far superior X10-the-protocol equipment.

For the appliance module, pick up an ApplianceLinc. You can get one with two-way communication so that you can also request a status response (on/off) if you need to know that. Believe it or not, most of the time you don't need two-way X-10, and it's better from a signal-strength standpoint to minimize the number of transmitters on a circuit.

The simplest Linux software is heyu. This is extremely easy: just ssh into your machine and type 'heyu turn radio on', where radio has been set up in heyu as an alias for X10 code A1, or whatever X10 code you configured the appliance module to be.

The reason I said "at minimum" above is that this may work, but for a truly reliable X10 infrastructure you may need additional hardware, particularly if you decide to expand your system. In this case you'd need to get a coupler (to bridge the two 110V phases in your house) or better yet an amplified coupler/repeater such as the ACT CR230 I recommend, available at Home AutomationNet. There are others on that page as well. If you're not electrically inclined, there is a plug-in coupler.

With the above, you're almost there. Some electrical equipment attenuates X10 signals. Some computer power supplies, laser printers, and some TVs can affect signal strength. To isolate them, you may need to use some plug-in filters such as the FilterLinc or the ACT filters on the bottom of this page. If you want to get serious about obtaining a rock-solid X10 infrastructure then you can use an ESM1 signal meter. Also a new plug-in amplifier has been getting good reviews by early adopters.

* An alternative to the CM11A interface is the PowerLinc USB. Currently, the only linux support for this is in the wish project. This project seems VERY cool. Set an X10 address by just writing to a /dev device. You can also read status this way. Any shell script or language can therefore control your X10 stuff. The only downside is that it currently requires recompiling your kernel sources, except for a couple of specific RedHat kernels for which RPMs have been built. Man, would it be great if this project made it into the kernel source tree...

Hope this helps

-bp