ConnectHome, a new domotic control project

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ConnectHome
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ConnectHome, a new domotic control project

Post by ConnectHome »

Hello guys !

I'm ConnectHome, a French Open Source project in home automation. We are a team of 6 students of an engineering school.

In our cursus, we have a great team project to develop : we chose to add another brick to the wall of domotics.

We are actually working with other teams inside a "cluster" regrouping the other projects working on domotics, like an intelligent valve, an ecologic and intelligent domotic box, or a box able to use a lot of communication protocols simultaneously. You'll find a description of these project at projets-domotique.ece.fr . You can also find us on Facebook "Connect'Home" . We'll be happy to have new likers ;)

Let's talk more about our project :)

The goal is to take control of your home's domotic box, and use it's functionnalities with original and usefull controlers.

The first question we asked ourselves is : "does our project already exist ? Is it usefull to developp something in this domain ?" After many researches, we deduce that there was actually no esay solution to control the services of a house. We found projects allowing the user to use a Kinect or Siri to control its installation, but these projects were not really evolutive. Each one was working in standalone.

There was no solution allowing developpers to add new controllers easily. There comes our project ;)

We chose to use a very modular structure. This way, developpers can modify whichever component they don't like or want to modify. I invite you to read the article "What are we doing for you, dev's ?" on our blog. It will give you more informations on the functionning of the solution.

We understood that with this modular architecture, our project would be very interesting for whoever would like to use our project, and that's why we release it as an Open Source project. The license is still to be determined but it will probably something like a beerware ;)

Let's talk about the structure of the thing. The project is composed of 3 main modules. The first one is a webserver with a database (users, captors, actioncs, scenarios...) but also the code of the web pages (we use a responsive design so it works well on phones, tablets, PCs and TVs), the communication with the domotic box of the house (for the moment we use a Zibase) and the communication with a second module of the project.

This second module is what we call a "communication module". It is in charge of the communication between the web server and the third module of Connect'Home, the controllers.
These communication modules are small computers. We used Linux because we wanted to stay in the Open Source Domain, but of course if you want to use a Windows PC or a Mac, there's no problem.
A communication module is divided into two parts : the first one is the "communication server", and the second one is the "driver" that allows to use a specific controller. The communication server is in charge of the transmission of the messages between the controllers and the Werserver/database. There is a Socket between this communication server and each controller. Each driver must implement a client socket, and use the standard form of message that we provide to communicate and to be understood.

Again, I'd like to emphasize the fact that our project is really modular. If you want to change something, it is up to you and you will still be able to use the reste of the solution when your changes are done. Isn't it great ?

Thank you for reading me, I'd love hear about what you think of this project. Your feedback is wanted :)
Last edited by ConnectHome on Sat Apr 06, 2013 2:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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freedomotic
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Re: ConnectHome, a new domotic control project

Post by freedomotic »

Hi, your project seems very interesting!
We are working on an open source domotic framework in java called Freedomotic.
You can find a white paper describing the architecture at http://freedomotic.googlecode.com/files ... r-v1.5.pdf
Now we are developing a gwt-client for small/embedded systems like raspberry and an android client.
All details are on freedomotic.com.
If you want we could collaborate (I don't know in which way) sharing our knowledge in the spirit of open source.
Good luck||
Freedomotic Open Source Building Automation
http://freedomotic.com
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