My home automation project / software

[airox]

Hi mishoboss,

I used a combination of zwave stuff, rfxmeter, oregon, kika. Sensors are mostly kika and oregon. I don't have any automation on shutters or heating. My nefit HR boiler isn't capable of a nice interface, so I left this for the future. I'm still looking for a nice curtain automation hardware. A lot of stuff is also discussed on this forum.

About the database. It's still performing well. I tuned my queries well. Currently I use one table for all device data. One thing I had in mind was to put different device types in different tables. On off switches for example would be far nicer to put like this:

id,device_value_id,on_time,off_time

And temperature values like this:
id,device_value_id,sensorvalue

This would allow for smaller indexes because of the number of items in the index. I can also adjust column datatypes and bytesize which would benefit the index also.

One thing I'm still currently testing is MySQL's possibility to do partitioning. Partitioning by date would stretch the amount of data the server can handle. The number of queries on data older then three months is also low so this would certainly improve speed. Do you perhaps have any experience with it?

[mishoboss]

Well, I'm searching for something cheaper than Z-Wave. The modules I find are about 60-80 Euro and I'm going to put at least 20-25 devices. Also the most modules I find are not for putting behind existing switches and appliances as I want. I'm not familiar of the other technologies you mentioned (rfxmeter, oregon, kika). It seems they're either not available for DIYs or are not available for my country (Bulgaria). Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know.

About the database - I don't have any experience of MySQL partitioning. However I think putting summarized data on different tables for every sensor type is the better approach in long term. At least that works for me since 6 years.

P.S. You should put that project open source. There's a lack of good open source HA projects, especially web-based. Linux, PHP, MySQL - they're all open source and are the perfect base for open source projects. If the software is good and well written (and it seems to be so) there will form a community around it. Then there will be persons like me who are ready to put some effort and add features they need for their own HA system. That's way the software will grow with the help of the people and you could still earn some money for customer support and donations.

Just my 2 cents

P.S.2 Did you use any PHP Framework like Zend Framework or CodeIgniter, or you write everything on your own?

[LostDreamer]

Just wanted to add: it's KAKU (Klik Aan Klik Uit), not KIKA (Kinderen met Kanker)

Both RFX and KAKU are from Holland, you might know the KAKU stuff under the name HomeEasy (the english variant of KAKU).

If you want something stable, I suggest putting in the money and go for Z-Wave, since it's 2-way communication you will allways know the status of your devices, while with 1way devices you allways have to assume their status is in synch with your HA software.

Regards,
LostDreamer

[mishoboss]

Thanks for the info LostDreamer. I want stable solution and that's why I want a hard-wired solution (RS-485/CANbus/anything serial). It's not a problem for me to put some wires. I hoped it would be cheaper too, but unfortunately I can't find the right technology for the right price. If you (or anyone) know anything that could help me, please PM me. Thanks.

[airox]

Hi guys,

I just finished the first prototype of the ipad application. I have defined the climate page.
Look at http://fotoboek.vandulmen.net/domotica/ ... erface.png for the prototype.

What do you guys think about it?

Greetings,

Gijs

[Bwired]

What do you think, looks very good
Is this a real ipad app?

[mishoboss]

Nice! Is the interface configurable somehow? For example if I want to build a page that shows temperature statistics for the last 7 days, another for the last 24 hours, and slider widget that sets the thermostat temperature. Do you have something like drag and drop interface builder or XML builder or all the interface is hard-coded?

[structor]

Airox, looks good. Do you have a mac to develop ipad apps? I want to toy around a bit with xcode but i don't have a mac, i saw that vmware was possible but not an easy route...

[airox]

I do have a Mac, but I didn't developed this with xcode. I've never programmed C or C++ so the step to objective C will take too much time.
I developed it with this: http://www.sencha.com

I developed an iphone app a while ago using jqtouch and wanted to use this for an iPad app but it didn't support the iPad really well so I looked further. The beauty of using sencha (and jqtouch) is that you can test it in any webkit browser (chrome for example). This makes it easy to debug and develop the application. When you save the webpage to your home screen on your iphone or ipad the difference between a real app and a web app is little. All the slide effects, pinch events are supported. Checkout the kitchensink example of sencha. It shows a lot of stuff.

Work is keeping me from doing any more on the project for two weeks (major deadline of a software project 12 january). So I hope to finish the ipad app somewhere at the end of january. I still need to create some wall mount for it ... this is something I will also spend some time on.

Greetings and a very happy christmas!

[structor]

Thanx for the link, i will look into it. My (work) software project just ended, so i have some time to spent . But i will first write some backend stuff.

[mishoboss]

airox, could you please tell me, do you have some kind of interface builder or something? I love Sencha too. I've several projects based on ExtJS. You could easily make the interface configurable.

The deadline you mentioned... what is going to happen then? Do you plan to release the software? I'm interested to see what you've done

[airox]

No, I don't have an interface builder for it. You can just create it with sencha code. The deadline I mentioned is for a project at work. Nothing related to domotica.

I'm still in the progress of creating the iPad interface. I bought a HTC legend a week ago running Android 2.2. I've been a Java programmer a few years ago so I tried the Eclipse ADT tools. I needed to have push notifications on this telephone. Because cloud-2-device-messaging from google isn't really what I wanted I used Xtify for the push notifications and integrated this into the home automation software. I also created a simple view-only interface on all my devices. I now have an android native interface! Yeah!

Will post some screenshots when I know how you can make those

[airox]

It was easier then I thought to create screenshots...

Here they are:

http://fotoboek.vandulmen.net/domotica/android/

As you can see it still needs some nice looks, but that's something for later.

[mishoboss]

Hi, looks really nice. However I think an easy interface builder is must-have for HA software. Do you know OpenRemote? It's an open source Java writen software for HA. They have pretty nice concept - you design your interfaces online via drag&drop (they use GWT for their designer), then you save them as XML. Then there are clients for iPhone, iPad, Android and web client, that loads the XML (from your home server) and visualize the design you made on devices.

It's pretty powerful and smart solution I think. You could implement something like that.

Native apps are great! However now you have Android device, tomorrow you will buy iPad or Windows tablet... or why not WebOS or MeeGo. You can't obtain all platforms. The better approach here is to use HTML5 with Sencha, jQuery or whatever framework you like. Then if you want to have some platform native functions you could wrap that HTML app to a container that is a native app.

I'm very interested in your work and will be very happy if you decide to release it. Also I could help you if you let me. Your software seems very good written and may be the perfect base for a really powerful HA software.

[airox]

Thanks for the input, mishoboss. Well I needed the android native app to run services in the background. Specifically the Xtify service to receive push notifications send from the server. This creates the integration with my phone so when something happens at home I'm fast enough to turn on the webcam on my cellphone to watch whats happening. Don't know if this would be done simply with HTML5. I do agree with you that a HTML5 approach is a better approach, but I don't think it would be feasible to create one HTML5 app which can be viewed on multiple devices.

Some things I have been working on lately and just finished. I created so called "web devices". These are virtual devices which are polled for data (parses a website). Values are saved in the same architecture I'm using for other values. The following web device types I have implemented:
- Current weather (from Google: humidity, temperature, winddirection, wind speed)
- Weather prediction (from Google: max and min temperature)
- Rain prediction for a latitude + longitude (using buienradar)
- Traphic jams totals (length + number of traphic jams)
- Police speed controls (for a certain route)

The data can be fetched as an action to something else which is happening in the house or can be fetched every X minutes.
The data can then be used to trigger other events. I currently enabled the home automation software for the following things:
- Send me a push notification + speak through the speaker about incoming rain.
- Send me a push notification when I'm at work about police speed controls (not that I am hitting illigal speeds though)
- Configured to speak several values over the speaker by pressing a button on a remote.

I also bought a Alecto WS-4000 at conrad (it's only 80 euros right now!) which I'm going to integrate into the system as well. Screenshots:

http://fotoboek.vandulmen.net/domotica/ ... erview.png
http://fotoboek.vandulmen.net/domotica/ ... values.png