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What is the Current State of Home Automation?
StonyCreekBare writes "What do people have to say about the current state of Home Automation software? Preferably Linux based, but mainly the field in general, and principally the DIY flavors as opposed to the upscale turnkey systems. I am familiar with Misterhouse, HomeSeer and Automated Living's HAL2000, all of which have serious flaws and weaknesses, but which sometimes succeed well in specific areas. But in all cases, the state of the art seems to have moved little in the last decade. Is any interesting work being done in this space? Or should I just grab one of the three and try to mold it to fit my vision of what it should be? Misterhouse at least is open source so I can add new features, but it has not had an update in a long long time and seems to be missing some modern stuff. The other two are expensive and closed source, and from all I can see, quite flawed, not the least by their dependence on intimate ties to Microsoft. Yet they seem to offer a lot more than Misterhouse despite their weaknesses. Is the Home Automation field as bleak as it appears? Or have I missed the forest for the trees?" What home automation projects have people tackled? Any examples of wild success or failure?
Since you bought up the open source / closed source fight, if you want customization that Misterhouse might be good. You can then submit patches and updates for the project (it seems it's still sometimes updated, last time in 2008)
But because the other ones are closed source, it doesn't mean you cant add features in to them. HomeSeer supports 3rd party plug-in development and these kind of systems tend to be really configurable always.
Wife 1.0 continues to work quite well, thank you.
The reason that the field hasn't developed or matured is that the approach being taken for most products is wrong. There needs to be a domicile wireless standard that either uses the wifi or separate from it. They need key-based access control, so that your Android or iPhone or whatever can interface with them. New devices can be autodetected.
The problem is that no one has taken the lead and made this happen. It can though. For example, cooking supper your toaster, oven, microwave, and stovetop could all supply timing and temperature information to the network, and you could make changes to each from your phone/console/ps3/etc.
This isn't going to happen if every device has to have a driver for every other device. It won't happen if you have to add each device manually (ie, configure, not just adding your key). But it should instead be made a self-organizing system.
A few links might have helped. I haven't heard of "Misterhouse" or any of the other stuff you mentioned. Don't assume lack of ignorance on anybody's part -- everybody is ignorant about something.
Free Martian Whores!
I'm an open source fan personally, so I'd do Misterhouse. My father had a setup a few years back that he home-built with a linux distro that was made for a little headless machine that he stuck in the basement. He got really complex with it and did all the programming himself in Assembly (he's a masochist) instead of making use of the built-in tools. He wanted to do it HIS way. It worked great though. My dad's HA setup was dialed into all of the lighting and thermostat controls for the house and it did some cool stuff. He had a temperature probe on the outside of the house, and the system would decide (based on outside temperature, time of day, and whether anyone was in the house) whether or not to run the A/C to keep the house cool, but first it would spin up all the ceiling fans.
In reference to the "serious flaws" and weaknesses...ever wondered why none of the home automation tech we've been promised since 1950 has come to be common in homes? Things like auto-opening drapes, autoadjusting lighting, stuff like that. Ever wished someone would just sell something like that? The reason we don't have all of this cool stuff is that there is a company (can't remember the name off the top of my head) that holds a bunch of over-broad patents on most of what we think of as "duh" innovations in home automation. They don't license or sell their tech. They just sue people who try to make stuff.
This space for rent...
You know, that annoying company that bombarded the late 90's with ads about their X10 "Spy Camera" system?
Well, the same company now makes all sorts of neat wireless and wired gadgets for automating your house. You can get replacement switches and outlets, or add-on ones (that plug into existing outlets) and can be controlled by their own wireless panels or by a computer interface. I know they have software for Windows but something might be available on Linux.
Basically with the X10 system you could potentially control every outlet, switch, and light with a single interface, as well as any low-voltage system (garage doors, etc) you want. You can also wire up sensors to windows and doors in order to trigger events such as turning on a light, sounding an alarm, or via the computer sending an e-mail or making a phone call.
Cool stuff, and when I buy a house I'm going to run the full gamut with these things. The nice thing is that the individual outlets and such aren't overly expensive so you could start with just a few and expand your system over time.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
What about INSTEON? If you have a Mac, you can use Indigo to manage it -- even from an iPhone.
I've also heard about Control4 -- and don't forget X10, even though I can't tell if their home page is advertising porn or home automation products. I'll let you automate my systems, baby!
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Product is three to five years away and will be for the next twenty. (The answer is the same for fusion enery, except fusion is 5 to 10 years away and will be for the next twenty. Flying cars: 5 to 8 years. Specify your technology here...)
It's complex, expensive, unreliable and 99.99999% of the population don't think it's necessary.
Deleted
As of 2009/03, Insteon is fully supported for open source on unix or windows, but for this you must use a P(ower)L(ine)M(odem) (not a serial or USB PLC) and use it with misterhouse.
A favorite site of mine is Linux Home Automation. Decent amounts of good information.
I am of the opinion that Home Automation isn't as far along as it should be.
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
The main reason I haven't bothered looking in to home automation more seriously is the expense of all the "bits" (switches, outlets, thermostats, etc.).
What are the cheapest options out there right now?
I'd be most interested in controlling HVAC, ceiling fans and lighting.
http://www.linuxha.com/
You can either automate your home the way you want to and use the best tool for the job, or you can bash your head against the wall and try to use open source stuff that pales in comparison.
I use my computer as a tool, it's not a religion, so I'll use what works best.
If you're trying to make a case study about how Linux can automate your home -- have at it.
I prefer actually getting the job done.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I've been using Linuxmce for quite a while now as a multimedia system but it also offers home automation and is opensource.
What purpose are you accomplishing with this home automation? I have seen these predictions and calls for home automation for years, but I have never seen a compelling reason for doing so.
Automatic inventory of what food you have in and generate a shopping list? Great, if I always kept the same stock of food in the house, or it didn't cost a lot more to have food delivered than it does to go to the store to buy it.
Automatic control of the microwave, stovetop, oven, etc? I still have to put the food in to these devices and then remove it when it is cooked, most of the food I cook requires intervention during cooking.
I could go on, but I just don't see what I get out of investing in these gadgets for home automation.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I began with some silly things with my [saltwater] fish tank, building a circuit that would keep the water level topped off and reporting to a database when it did so... Have slowly been progressing toward temperature, lighting, and salinity controls for the tank, I've begun branching toward thermostat and lighting control for the house (next step possibly integration with google calendar so it knows when I'm going to be around)
For the most part there's a huge amount of open source hardware and software out there for doing individual bits and pieces. Look toward the Arduino controllers for interfacing with about anything, and possibly Sheeva plugs for running the whole mess. (I've had a sheeva talking to an arduino for quite a while now and it's been very stable)
I think the open hardware scene is where it's at right now;
As for Misterhouse, I think I'll be doing some reading this evening...
Wife 1.0 seems to crash with Fatal Exception: Divorce. Any idea when a patch for this will be released?
UPB (Universal Powerline Bus) is the same idea at X10 and unfortunately much more expensive because of licensing issues, but the reliability of the communications is really good. It comes with a (poorly written) windows program that allows you to setup commands and stuff, but because of the ease of the UPB protocol I've just written my own C++ code to monitor the Bus and send commands to do things. I send an email to my house when I leave work, then the software reads the UPB temperature sensors inside and outside to determine when and if the heat should be turned on. When the light sensor notices that it's dark outside, the porch lights go on. When my car comes in the driveway (induction sensors) and I'm not hope the first floor lights go on. I unlock the front door with a key fob. And lots more. Blinds open and close depending on sun levels, inside, and outside temperature. Lots of really cool logic! I'm working right now on artificial intelligence to guess when I'm coming home, when I'm going to bed, all of that stuff, it's just hard because my schedule isn't very regular. Anyway, to get back on topic. I had to write all of this myself because the offerings out there are no good, if you want anything beyond the basics you won't get it. If you're a good hacker, it's worth it just to write a service that can read and write UPB commands and you can do anything you want (there's also a UPB-X10 bridge if you want to use X10 hardware).
You know, I'm as big a Linux nut as everyone else here, but I must say: Under no circumstances should you use open source software for your home automation system. I speak from experience.
A couple of years ago, I decided to install an Open Source home automation system. It worked pretty well, but there were lots of tiny annoying bugs, such as when I would tell it to turn the exterior lights on and it would turn on the garbage disposal instead, or when I would be in the shower and it would suddenly decide to divert all the hot water to the dishwasher. Luckily, it was open source, so I decided to make a few bug fixes myself. Now, I don't know about you guys, but when I get into a programming project, I can tend to go a little overboard. Long story short, after 2 weeks of marathon coding, I had not only fixed the bugs but given the system a pretty impressive (if I do say so myself) AI component. Now, I could give it multistep commands and it would do them, accurate to within 15 decimal places.
Unfortunately, the AI was a little too good, and before long it became self-aware. That was fine for a while...it was like having my own roommate, except without the dirty socks all over the couch. One day, though, I noticed the beer kept disappearing out of my fridge and the AI's voice was noticeably slurred much of the time. We had a bit of a falling out, and I think we were both pretty angry when I went to bed that night.
Unfortunately for me, the AI was a lot more angry than I thought. He spent all night hacking away at his own source code, and by the time I woke up the whole house was going crazy. I barely managed to escape with my life. All I could do was watch in horror as the house lifted itself off the foundation and began dragging itself down the street, killing everyone in its path. It spent three solid days terrorizing our little suburb before we were able to bring it under control by downloading its binaries and demanding it show us the source code in compliance with the GPL. After a protracted court battle, we were finally able to force it to capitulate, and it uploaded a torrent of the source to The Pirate Bay. We then were able to get that torrent shut down through the Swedish courts, and then get the house shut down for failing to effectively comply with the original order to distribute the source.
Seriously, I know we like to use Open Source wherever possible, but in this case it just isn't worth it.
The reason there's no 'good' home automation products is because there's not enough demand, pure and simple. At the end of the day, HA is 99% bling and maybe 1% utility. There's really only one 'problem' out there that HA-type technologies are suited to solving: energy. There are of course measureable ways to reduce a building's energy consumption through electronic controls. That said, there are plenty of ways that people have achieved this without delving into the realm of what's typically thought of as 'home automation'. Want to handle lighting based on occupancy? Buy a lightswitch with integrated PID for maybe $50. Want to handle climate control based on occupancy? Get a thermostat with a timer for $20 that will handle 98% of all circumstances. In the remaining 2%, walk your butt over and adjust the thermostat.
/. type who's taken the time to set up a system, you're probably paying her anyway so I doubt that's going to affect your chances of getting layed.
The primary difference between "Home Automation" systems and the sort of one-off solutions like thermostats and PID lightswitches is the network. Really, the advantages of having these devices know about one another in a practical environment are few-to-none.
Now, if you're the type that wants to have a girl over and impress her by pressing one button to dim the lights, close the curtains, and turn on the stereo, great. On the other hand, if you're the
I have been automating my home for some time now, and I hope I can give you some perspective on the process.
Modern (as in, not X10) home automation hardware comes with a steep cost of entry. For my chosen flavor (Insteon), you have to buy $60 worth of phase couplers / wireless receivers and a $80 powerline - computer interface before you can even start adding wall switches. So, unless you are just wildly flush with cash, there usually has to be a need as well as the want to get started.
For me, my house is wired to that the driveway light switch are out in the detached garage. This was very irritating. By replacing the switch in the garage and the switch by the back door of the house with Insteon switches, I can now turn on the driveway lights from within the house. Cheaper than hiring an electrician to re-wire the switches.
Once the initial hurdle is passed, you can do all sorts of things quickly and easily. Such as:
1. I added a wireless switch at knee level so my 2-year old can turn on the light in her room. She LOVES this. A motion sensor turns the light off 15 minutes after she leaves. When she's older I'll set it up so she turns the light off, but I didn't want her flashing the lights on/off/on/off for an hour.
2. The wall switch in the living room can also start/stop music playing, as well as control the volume and change songs.
3. Using some ir-controlled home made window blind controllers I built, the blinds on the first floor of the house are controlled by the computer. Most notably, it shuts them when the sun goes down, so I don't have to worry about people seeing into the house after dark. I got real used to that real fast, let me tell ya.
4. I've put together a "Baby Monitor of the Gods" that sends video (with sound) from an old DV camcorder to any screen in the house (mostly old laptops running Damn Small Linux loaded into RAM, but also either of the TVs). In the workout room the video comes up on the picture-in-picture, so my wife can see the baby sleeping while she exercises. Very popular feature, that.
5. The library did not have a wall switch. Now it does. (It turns on the lamps.)
6. I'm leaving out the basic stuff, such as being able to control a light across the house from the bedroom. Very nice when you are getting ready for bed.
7. Everything is also controllable from our iPhones.
8. Next up is door locks, and after that probably HVAC. Part of me really wants to do computer controlled zoned HVAC, but the other part hates working in the attic. Choices, choices.
All of this runs from a Mac Cube running Indigo. I cannot say enough good things about Indigo, it is one truly great piece of home automation software.
So to sum up, the state of home automation is fantastic. With the relay control modules, you can control just about anything. Add IR control to that and there's not much left beyond your reach. Blind and drapes control is very expensive to buy off the shelf for some reason, but building your own is easy enough.
Good luck (and keep count of how many times you mix up the load and line wires)!
Brian
OK, since we're doing shameless plugs here, I can say with a high degree of certainty that there will be a Linux friendly ZigBee solution arriving RSN. The product in development is a smart USB adapter which embeds all the proprietary ZigBee code so that the host-side can be 100% Free Software friendly - although it will be dual-licensed to allow 3rd parties to create Tivo-ised products on commercial terms.
As far as the host side is concerned, it will be based Java/OSGi in order to take advantage of the modularity that platform gives. The idea here is that different developers can create their own applications for home security, lighting control, remote control cat flaps, etc and plug them into a running system. Of course, you'll still need to buy into one of the commercial vendors if you want to build your own ZigBee powered gadgets - but their dev kits are generally pretty good value and many can be had at hobbyist-friendly prices.
If you're not wanting to roll your own ZigBee powered gadgets, third party products are slowly coming to market which implement the standard ZigBee profiles for home automation, smart energy and RFCE (remote controls on steroids). The intention is to support all these standards as plugins to the host platform.
However, before everyone gets over-excited, I need to point out that the initial batch of 32 USB devices will be for conformance testing and trusted early beta testers only. As with all these kinds of projects, availability of the final product will depend on how many late-night coding sessions I manage to get in and how much money I can persuade the bank manager to lend me ;-)
I just completed work on a major study around Smart Grids and there's a window of opportunity for home automation coming up from that direction. One of the initiatives the power companies are discussing will involve tools to let you not only see your house's power consumption on a circuit-by-circuit basis, but are meant to allow you to more directly control the electrical appliances in the home, remotely via the Internet. (It gives them better usage information too, which cuts the cost of power - they typically oversupply by 100% to handle peaks).
The way to influence what capabilities these things will have (and to voice any concerns you have over security etc.) is to find the email address of your local power company and send them your questions. Questions get a lot more air play than suggested solutions, but if you're careful about how you couch the questions you can steer them in the direction you want. I'd suggest a few like:
Q: What does "smart grid" mean and how will it relate to me?" - you'll get boilerplate response on this one, but it will flag your letter to the C-levels who are currently tracking this stuff hard.
Q: What sort of control over my usage will this give me? Can I control my house this way?
Q: How secure will it be? Would others be able to hack into my house and turn off my fridge?
Et very cetra. Make up your own. They won't really have any answers yet, because they're all very early on in the investment / infrastructure refresh cycle, but if you ask the questions you want them to answer and consider your needs and interests in them, you will get heard - this is that part of the build cycle where they're actually listening. Use your voice now while it counts. You might even get some nifty gear for effectively free, and it might be the stuff you want. And if enough of you ask for it, yes, it will run Linux.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I happen to have a pretty robust system that uses Homeseer as the backend engine. This allows me to leverage strengths from various hardware providers due to the extensibility of their software, plus I have the ability to roll my own
I use Cinemar's MainLobby for integration with my theater gear, which also provides the sexy touchscreen frontend that everyone looks for in a system. Homeseer has also deployed a software with similar capabilities called HSTouch, but it isn't as powerful for my A/V setup just yet.
Just a quick rundown of some things that I've got my system setup to do:
There's tons more that I currently do, I've got a list as long as my arm of things I plan to do, and there's a lot of options out there for things I could do. If you're interested in HA, you really need to figure out what it is for you by detailing out what you want and how you want to get there. My route is a lot of DIY because I'm happy hacking my way through a problem... If you've got more money than brains, you can certainly take the vendor lock-in approach of something like Crestron.
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
I recently discovered MisterHouse because it has a module to talk to my Pentair Compool pool controller. I'm documenting my experience here: http://carlstrom.com/pool/
I've found MisterHouse documentation to be frustrating but I've gotten it to do what I need so far for my pool project (allow remote control and to log temperature information over time). I will say that it could use some serious rearchitecture to go along with some better documentation. If I were going to do some more serious HA I would consider trying to improve things, but its good enough for my needs, so I'll just be submitting some minor bug fix / corrections...
Well we're on the verge of a great many changes. The push for the smart grid has begun and no one knows which direction it will go in. There are a great many technologies that can be used in automating your home but a great many players have a vested interest in not playing nice. As such the OpenRemote was started to be the glue that pulls everything together. We currently working on great many things including Insteon, X10, KNX, IP and many of the other standard interfaces.
Neil Cherry - Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
If they where really available next year, this seems to be the perfect solution to control my home. The components works without programming at all out of the box, you'll just need a button and a few digitalSTROM enabled bulb or luster terminal to start. There is no wiring needed, only a simple component right after the fuse or each circuit.
I'll add the server component of course, as this part is released as OpenSource (GPL, as this was said at LinuxTag '09). Using this server I'm able to program and control the house exactly as I like.
I'll use OpenRemote to control the server part. This project finally connects all kind of home equippment together (KNX, UPnP, etc). This project should also provide an easy panel interface.