Home Automation

I have an ongoing interest in home automation and home media players.

Primarily my research and development (as a home project) revolves around truly distributed, ubiquitous  integrated systems. There are not many of these being developed in the non-commercial market (if you have cash to throw at it, maybe look at Crestron) and the ones that are are really in their infancy.  There’s a pretty good offering if you’re looking for media only systems (Plex, XBMC, Windows MCE, etc) or if you’re looking for home automation (Mr House, VirtualCrib, Z Wave, X-11 etc) but very few systems pull all these things together for the modern smart home.

With the dawn of ubiquitous computing, we’ve been empowered with more computing power than we dreamed of, right at our finger tips (think iPhone/mp3 player/car radio etc) but we haven’t started to use these technologies to interact with out surroundings in a sufficiently advanced manner. My interest is in finding/developing an integrated platform with extensible interfaces that can be used for working with all objects (think fridge, TV, heating, car etc). The next step after that is to help the system understand context; and give it the ability to make context aware decisions (think Jarvis from Iron Man!)

My system of choice is currently LinuxMCE which is a Pluto derivative although in its current embryonic stage (0810 at time of writing) it’s tough enough even to get it installed. LinuxMCE has the capability to operate in multiple physical locations on your network and can be controlled from anywhere you have access to the network (think mobile pads, computers, phones etc).

At its core, LinuxMCE is a universal packet routing device (DCE router) and some software entities that subscribe and publish information. It might help you to think of it in an SOA context as a Enterprise Service Bus with applications interacting over it. The key then is to write wrappers or APIs for your devices that can work on this level. Like I say, this isn’t a user friendly bit of software at the moment (and my God is it ugly!) but with a few years work it could well be the answer to my dreams. Even better than that though is it’s built on Kubuntu – a KDE version of my OS of choice Ubuntu).

As work proceeds, I hope to be able to put some useful updates on here about LinuxMCE, but at present, it’s all I can do to get it installed! If you’re very techie and fancy giving something a bit different a go (and don’t mind loosing many hours of your life!) then head over to LinuxMCE and have a poke around

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