openHAB 1.0 - Home Automation For Geeks
After 2.5 years of development, openHAB 1.0 has just been released – a big thanks to everybody involved!
What comes to your mind when you hear the term Home Automation?
Turning off your iron at home while you are on the road?
Automatically closing your rollershutters at night?
Many commercial offerings concentrate on such use cases, which do not sound very exciting at all. Even worse, they constrain you to the use cases the product managers had in mind and do not allow extending the (usually very expensive) system on your own.
The open Home Automation Bus (openHAB)is different – first of all, it is Open Source and comes with a very modular (OSGi-based) architecture, so that it is easy to extend or customize. By connecting it to e.g. your KNX installation, you can of course do the mainstream things like switching lights, sockets and rollershutters. openHAB offers you two different web interfaces as well as native Android and iOS clients for doing so.
But everybody who lives in a Smart Home knows that Home Automation is not so much about controlling things, but rather about monitoring states and handling events. And that is where openHAB shows its strengh – let me give you a few examples:
XMPP (Chatting with your house)– Receive notifications as instant messages through XMPP (e.g. GTalk or Jabber) – on your PC, smartphone or tablet. Just add your house to your buddy list or block it, if you do not want to be disturbed. Alternatively, you can initiate a chat and actively check the situation at home or send commands to your devices.
Google Calendar – Maintain a Google Calendar for your automation tasks (heating control, shutters, alarm clock, etc.) and define them right in the calendar entry („send Shutters DOWN“). If necessary, you can even define complex scripts right in your calendar. openHAB will make sure that they are executed at the right time.
Persistence and Charting – Store your values and states anywhere you like: In a local database (classic or round-robin), in dedicated log files or even in an Internet-of-Things cloud service. Use the persisted data for defining complex automation logic or for dynamic chart generation.
Presence Simulation – Combine Google Calendar and persistence support into the ultimate presence simulation: openHAB uploads events for dedicated devices (e.g. corridor lights and window shutters) to your Google Calendar throughout your daily life – but not for the date they occurred, but e.g. for a week later. If you now leave your house, simply activate the presence simulation; and all devices will be automatically operated through your calendar entries. No need to train or extensively configure the system, and you always have the chance to do manual adjustments by simply accessing your calendar.
Powerful Rules – Easily define even complex logic: Home Automation use cases can be tricky – there is no way around that. Graphical tools for mouse operation and drag&drop support very quickly show their limitations. That is why openHAB counts on textual descriptions for your rules. But it does this in a very comfortable way: The syntax is defined by a tailored domain specific language (DSL) using Eclipse Xtext. As a consequence, it has a very simple and concise syntax and comes with full editor support like syntax highlighting, validation and code completion. This way, you have almost the full power of a programming language at your fingertips, while not exposing it to non-technical users for simple use cases.
iOS Push Notifications – Receive push notifications to your iPhone: There are situations in which you want to be sure that you receive information from your house right away. Apple offers the iOS push notifications for this case. With the help of the Prowl app, openHAB allows sending such messages easily from within any rule.
Dropbox – Use Dropbox to have your openHAB installation always under control. Synchronize log files to your Dropbox to view them from anywhere you are. Conversely, edit your configuration, your rules and your UI declarations directly in your Dropbox and synchronize it back to the openHAB installation.
These are just a few examples of where openHAB provides functionality beyond the ordinary. Many more are in the pipeline for upcoming releases – go and check out the homepage at http://www.openHAB.orgfor more information!