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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?
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.
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...
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
http://www.linuxha.com/
You know, geocities is closing today, but it lives on at x10.com
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
Cool stuff, and when I buy a house I'm going to run the full gamut with these things.
I wouldn't do that. If you own your house, you can do much, much better than X10.
The great thing about X10 is that it's relatively cheap, and can be retrofitted into existing houses easily.
In almost every other respect, X10 kinda sucks. I don't say this lightly, and it is possible to do cool things with X10, but there are really severe limitations.
I used X10 to fully automate my apartment a couple of years ago. It was quite sweet -- my apartment would send me a text if any emergency situation happened, it would run security cameras, turn lights on and off automatically when people were in rooms, the whole deal. I ran it with a linux box and misterhouse.
I still use X10 now, to automate party lights. My computer turns different effects on and off at preset times during the music. This is using linux, with xmms and a custom plugin to run X10 as the audio player.
So my experience is fairly deep. Here are the problems with X10: slow transmission speed (about .8 secs per command). No error detection/control, so commands can and do get lost and misinterpreted, and if you have multiple sources of commands (motion sensors, etc.) that transmit simultaneously, the collision causes havoc.
There are other solutions that are much better, if you don't mind more installation effort and/or more expense.
This isn't twitter. Any tinyurl domain is assumed to go to goatse or worse.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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