Not-so-official Open Source Home Automation Thread

And here are my reviews of each:

OpenHAB

Clearly the most powerful of the list mainly due to the fact that it has been around longer than all but Misterhouse and a much larger developer community. Installing it on all of my machines was very straightforward and easy and I was up and “running” in no time flat. To see what it could do, I installed the “demo house” like was recommended. I liked the interface that OpenHAB offered and made navigation and control very easy and intuitive. There is even an official OpenHAB mobile app which I also liked. While it was easy to get it up and running, that’s where the “easy” ended. Everything else past that was a challenge at best and frustrating for the most part. I was never able to get it to recognize my Z-wave stick. Even after exhaustive research I found an add-on package (not official OpenHAB by the way) that claimed to help ease the configuration of OpenHAB and Z-wave but in the end, I did not have any luck. I wasn’t too keen on the fact that I needed 3rd party software to make something easy either. I eventually decided against using OpenHAB because as I discovered in my reading, almost everything in OpenHAB is controlled and configured by scripts or config files. I wasn’t prepared or willing to spend the time to learn it all so it was on to the next package.


Home Assistant

I didn’t spend a lot of time with Home Assistant. The reason primarily was that it did not support a Windows installation, only Linux. Even the installation for Linux was not as straightforward as OpenHAB but it wasn’t overly painful. What I liked about it was the user interface. I liked it WAY better than OpenHAB. It was a lot cleaner and way more user friendly. However, there wasn’t a mobile app but the web app was good enough for me to overlook it. Its downfall, again, for me was the fact that everything was script/config file controlled. For anyone that is in to programming I would actually recommend Home Assistant over OpenHAB. Moving on again.


Home Genie

A newer player in the market but I was very impressed with what it had to offer. Installation was supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac. The interface was also very nice and, again, no mobile app but the web interface allowed me to overlook that. It supported all of the protocols that I would need and even had a very nice voice control feature. That feature can be accessed through either a connected webcam or microphone or through the web portal on a mobile device. Different phrases can be set up to access different functions of the system. It even has direct access to the RPi GPIO functions. Adding my Z-wave stick was pretty effortless and it was able to recognize all of my devices right away. Setting up different scenes, automation events, and triggers can be set up using a graphical interface but some of the more complex things I wanted to do required the use of scripting. Not a complete deal-breaker but disheartening nonetheless. The other thing that concerns me is that because they are so new, their support docs are not as well written as I would have hoped and the developer community is not quite on the level as the other packages so I suspect that progress and additional features will be slow. All in all, color me impressed with Home Genie.


Domoticz

Domoticz was one of the packages that just about everyone mentioned and recommended when browsing through all the reviews. Everyone placed it right below if not on par with OpenHab. After looking into it myself, I found that it supports Windows, Linux, and Mac, an extensive developer community, and a wiki that put the others to shame. Installation was very straightforward. Windows was a standard executable and there was even a pre-built image file for installation on an RPi. Installation on a standard Linux box was a little more involved but if you are used to installing anything on Linux, you will probably be ok. There are several mobile apps available that can connect to it and some that give geo-fencing capabilities. There is also an official Domoticz app but I’ll pass on the $20 price tag. Adding the Z-stick was pretty easy as well though finding the devices was not as easy but still relatively pain free. It does give you some scripting options but just about all the automation events I wanted to build was done through a Blockly (check it out here LINK) which I found very nice allowing me to set device attributes, variables, and even trigger alerts through a simple if/then graphical interface. Another thing I liked was that I can run a main controller on one of my “big boxes” and have slave controllers running on an RPi. The only thing I did not like all that much about it was the interface. Though it was easy to navigate and control, it wasn’t as clean or modern as some of the others. However, they do offer different skins but I didn’t get around to playing with any of them this early in the process.


Misterhouse

I honestly didn’t even look too deep into Misterhouse. The website alone just gave me the feeling that it was old and outdated even though from what I read, it can do just about anything that the others can do. It’s written completely in PERL which I have no experience with so I didn’t even attempt an installation. It also appears to be completely script based. Misterhouse is a “no”.


So, in the end, I picked Domoticz and will begin using the Dell XPS for the main controller. Once I get my final installation up and going, I will continue to update.

Thanks for reading.

What kind of coding does domoticz support? Is everything done in the puzzle piece coding?


I have a pi set up with homegenie. I like his ability to do macro coding or scripting in multiple languages.

I've messed with lua before. It's pretty powerful but slightly confusing to me.

I'll be interested to follow your progress with domoticz to compare it to my homegenie setup, once I get around to buying an new zwave stick.

Brings up another question, which version zwave stick do you have?

That's the same USB stick i have/had (can't find it). Curious if it still works with the new Gen5 Aeon Labs devices.

I've gone back and forth between openHAB and home-assistant.io. I was on openHAB for a month but just recently switched back to home-assistant because they now have full support for my SmartThings hub. I really like the chromecast control that home-assistant offers as well.
In my experience, home-assistant was just as easy to install as openHAB. I'm running this on a raspberry pi2 with the quad-core processor and 1GB ram.

Played around with some basic automation events using the blockly. Just scratching the surface.

- triggered a light to turn on when door tripper is opened.
- sent a notification to my phone when door was opened
- set scenes with a variety of light settings

I discovered a pretty useful function in Domoticz - the addition of a "dummy" hardware where you can then add virtual switches and sensors. My initial though for this was for a garage door notification. If its left open for x minutes, alert my phone. I was able to set a switch "on" after x minutes which then triggered the notification. Interested to see what other things I can do with the dummy devices.

Notifications were through an email but I just found that it can also use various apps to push notifications directly to my phone. The apps are Prowl, Pushbullet, Pushover, Clicktell, NMA, and Pushalot. This may be my next endeavor to dig into. I can see some potential applications for this.

I also began looking through the IFTTT channels to see what possibilities are there as well. Busy week ahead.

Right now, the "production" instance is running on the Win10 Dell. For posterity's sake, I'm also installing it on my Ubuntu Server and I'm running into a few small issues with dependencies. May have to revisit that later. The RPi install was a non-issue. They have an image ready-to-go that I just wrote to an SD card and it just worked. I even set it up to see my PiFace that's attached to it to control the relays and GPIO on it.

As for the email notifications, that was also very simple. All it needs is the info entered in the settings as below.




Then go into the Notifications button on the switch




And add a notification




I did have an issue connecting to my smtp server using SSL but being that it uses 26 for the port, I wasn't too concerned by it. I may try to set it up to use my gmail account for testing. I'll let you know what happens.

That suprises me. Most home ISP's block outbound SMTP traffic on their home accounts. I might use that setup on the Pi for another application that I have. It would be most useful.

I just set everything up and I was able to use my gmail account to send a notification. The only downside is that gmail rewrites the from address to my gmail account instead of my home address that I want to use. Small concession I guess.

quote:

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What's the advantage of going this route vs. just using Wink? (I'm a n00b, so this is an honest question.)

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The biggest advantage of using these over Wink/Smarthub is customization. The controllers in a box work, but if you want to do real complex stuff it's better to use software like this.

I'm also not a fan of having to use cloud servers to control my system. I don't want my whole system to become unresponsive if they decide to shut down their servers. You can also control the updates with your own system. No more being forced to upgrade to a version that may or may not break your system.


As far as email notifications, most of these software packages just send smtp email messages to the email server (think like outlook or thunderbird using gmail/yahoo email).
For some reason, I could never get my emails routed through gmail or yahoo, so I added a email server to my raspberry Pi to send out email notifications for me.

Wait, you have to use wink's servers to control things? The wink hub doesn't handle it all??