Nine Open Source Home Automation Projects

by | Oct 21, 2015 | Smart Home

 

Home automation is all the rage for consumers. However, the more technically minded consumer may want to own all the technology behind their home automation & not rely on a big company. Here is a list of 9 open source home automation projects that consumers should evaluate more to see if it fits their needs.

 

OpenHab

The open Home Automation Bus (openHAB) project aims at providing a universal integration platform for all things around home automation. It is a pure Java solution, fully based on OSGi. The Equinox OSGi runtime and Jetty as a web server build the core foundation of the runtime.

It is designed to be absolutely vendor-neutral as well as hardware/protocol-agnostic. openHAB brings together different bus systems, hardware devices and interface protocols by dedicated bindings. These bindings send and receive commands and status updates on the openHAB event bus. This concept allows designing user interfaces with a unique look&feel, but with the possibility to operate devices based on a big number of different technologies. Besides the user interfaces, it also brings the power of automation logics across different system boundaries.

Github Link: https://github.com/openhab/openhab

 

 

Domoticz

Domoticz is a Home Automation System that lets you monitor and configure various devices like: Lights, Switches, various sensors/meters like Temperature, Rain, Wind, UV, Electra, Gas, Water and much more. Notifications/Alerts can be sent to any mobile device

This system is designed to operate in various operating systems. The user-interface is a scalable HTML5 web frontend, and is automatically adapted for Desktop and Mobile Devices.

Additional Information:

  • Hardware: RFXCOM Transciever, Z-Wave, P1 Smart Meter, YouLess Meter, Pulse Counters, 1-Wire, Philips Hue and a lot more….

  • Extended logging

  • iPhone / Android push notifications

  • Auto Learning sensors/switches

  • Manual creation of switch codes

  • Share / Use external devices

  • Designed for simplicity

Github Link: https://github.com/domoticz/domoticz

 

Home Assistant

Open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

Examples of devices it can interface it:

Built home automation on top of your devices:

  • Keep a precise history of every change to the state of your house

  • Turn on the lights when people get home after sun set

  • Turn on lights slowly during sun set to compensate for less light

  • Turn off all lights and devices when everybody leaves the house

  • Offers a REST API and can interface with MQTT for easy integration with other projects like OwnTracks

  • Allow sending notifications using Instapush, Notify My Android (NMA), PushBullet, PushOver,Slack, Telegram, and Jabber (XMPP)

Github Link: https://github.com/balloob/home-assistant

 

The Calaos Project

Calaos has a long background in home automation and is built in several different layers. Low level as well as uniform and powerful user interfaces. It knows how to talk to hardware, and gives you the power to rule your home easily. Calaos is full solution for home automation. It was first a system developed by a french company of the same name. When the company was closed during 2013, the entire code base was open sourced and released as GPL. A small community started around the project to continue the development. Hardware Support includes Wago PLC, Raspberry Pi, Zodianet's ZiBASE, Cubieboard, Squeezebox & CCTV

 

Home Genie

Designed on a multi-standard basis, HomeGenie can interface to various devices as X10, Insteon, Z-Wave, Philips Hue, UPnP, RFXCom, KNX, communicate with external web services and integrate all of this into a common automation environment. So even if based on different standards, inside HG, all "modules" can be controlled and automated to work all together. With a modern web-based user interface, HomeGenie can be enjoyed from any  pc, smartphone or tablet.

 

ago control

ago control is a framework for device control. The aim is to provide a complete home automation solution. It can also be used in other areas, like agriculture.

Features

  • ago control uses an AMQP Enterprise Message Bus as communication backend

  • lightweight protocol, readable by humans and machines

  • modern and modular architecture

  • it comes with cloud features

  • device schema defined in YAML

  • great performance – also runs on embedded devices like the Raspberry Pi and multiple plug computes like Sheevaplug and Guruplug

  • Easy to extend

Support for devices and protocols includes:

  • Z-Wave

  • KNX

  • EnOcean

  • 1wire

  • Asterisk PBX

 

Openmotics

After many years of development with a team of 5 engineers and a lot of installations of the OpenMotics stuff in Apartments, houses, villas and industrial buildings, the team behind the project decided to fully Open Source their firmware, hardware and software. Their experience with a multitude of projects in the past made the OpenMotics system ultra stable and almost bug free.

The list of available functionality related to the following elements is listed on their Wiki page:

  • Control from everywhere in the world

  • Lights

  • Outputs

  • Inputs

  • Thermostats

  • Environmental

  • Power Measurement

 

Mister House

MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. It's fun, it's free, and it's entirely geeky. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 95 or newer and on most Unix based platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX.

Github Link: https://github.com/hollie/misterhouse

 

Freedomotic

Freedomotic is an open source, flexible, secure Internet of Things (IoT) development framework, useful to build and manage modern smart spaces. It is targeted to private individuals (home automation) as well as business users (smart retail environments, ambient aware marketing, monitoring and analytics, etc).

Freedomotic can interact with well known standard building automation protocols as well as with "do it yourself" solutions. It treats the web, social networks and branded frontends as first class components of the system.