For a long time now I have played around with home automation; I created my own server for centralize communication, Hacked hardware, Reverse engineered protocols and so on. But it has been a lot of fun, but as usual when I figure out how things work I loose interest and have new projects waiting, so I looked around for an Open Source project so I can continue to automate without hours of development.

Tellstick DUO

The guys at http://telldus.com/ have made several devices for handling the communication between the host and the devices. I have used a Tellstick.Net when a friend wanted the same functionality as my current system, but I didn’t want support my hacks so we used Tellstick.Net. Tellstick.Net worked over my expectation and I have since then wondering if I should drop my own setup to go more agains “Off The Shelf” products.

The difference between DUO and NET is that you need a dedicated computer for DUO, NET is using a live service which is free and you can use API’s. DUO seems to have more options, like you can set up your own software that is using DUO. You can connect your own software to NET as well but then all trafic needs to go to the web and back for every change or update, I would guess that there is less delay when using your own software running on the same machine as DUO is connected to and go directly to the library.

Tellstick Duo

OpenHAB

OpenHAB replaces Telldus own softare, it has several different user interface like Web, Kodi, Mobile phone, but where it shines is that you can connect almost anything to OpenHAB and there are a huge list of plugins for handling events from different H/W which makes it easy to implement a automated Home Cinema where you set up different scenarios where you talk to a lot of different technologies like Zwave, infra red, rest services (e.g. Yamaha).

OpenHAB is built upon Java so it can be deployed everywhere 🙂

Devices

Raspberry Pi 2

I want a small simple computer that I can hide but has enough power to collect data and running the software, but also is reliable and can run on a battery if there is a power outage (of course there is no need to switch on lamps when the power is out 🙂 but a lot of sensors is running on battery and I want to be able to get updates and alarms from the fridge).

Rasberry Pi 2