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Freedom

Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2011 11:45 am
by Esteban
Freedom is an open source building automation software (eg. home automation) distributed under GPL2 license, written in Java and supported by University of Trento, DISI Department (Italy). The project aims to develope an open source extensible framework for intelligent building automation.

http://opensourceautomation.net/



Features:

Freedom is a building automation framework which cuts time and effort to develop your own building automation software. Fredom provides usefull features just like a CMS does for website development.

Open source: GPLv2 license
Distributed & Scalable: can be deployed on a network of cheap peer-to-peer hardware node. It is scalable and provides automatic load balancing across nodes on the network.
Cross-language: it uses a MOM (ActiveMQ) to exchange information between components (JSON and XML text messages)
Cross-platform: Freedom is written in Java so it can run on Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris. Java JRE 6 is required.
Event Based: Every action in the real environment and every interaction with the system (eg: a click on the GUI) is mapped to an event. Events can be intercepted at runtime with Triggers making the behavior of the system fully configurable and not predeterminated.
Modular & Extensible: Freedom is modular and can enrich its features using plugins. API are distributed along with the software to easely create new add-ons. It provides OSGi Framework features in a simpler way, leveraging well known OO programmig inheritance.
Semantic-rich: Freedom provides a semantic-rich knowledge of the environment to implement intelligence and reasoning systems. No coding is required, the environment can be described using our graphical editor.
Hardware Agnostic: Freedom has an hardware abstraction layer to abstract from hardware infrastructure (sensors and actuators) using events, triggers and command.

Re: Freedom

Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2011 12:09 pm
by Digit
Sounds nice, but I think the bottleneck will be hardware support; currently only X-10 is supported?

Re: Freedom

Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2011 12:49 pm
by LostDreamer
Actually I see Arduino and Android in there as well...
And something I would like to have @ home, but cant find anything about on the internet: "DISI Unitn Tracking system"

When you install Freedom, it has a plugin for this tracking system, showing a few persons 'walking through the home' and running events based on there location.... The only thing I can find about it are some publications, can anyone else find anything about this?

Re: Freedom

Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2011 1:28 pm
by Digit
What is Arduino support? As far as I can see it's a HTTP interface to an Ethernet enabled 'thing' to exchange data. Not necesarily an Arduino, but Arduino probably sounds the coolest. Android support, couldn't find it (maybe it's there, but very well hidden).

I like reading about these kind of initiatives, there are a lot of more or less similar projects - some grow to something really usable, but most don't or development stops after some time. I think for now the only thing you can do with it is install it and start creating Plugins for the hardware you have; from a user perspective it's too early to start with.