The year is coming to an end and this will be the final update for OpenRemote in year 2008. Hope you all have had a good year despite all the economic worries going on.

Some OpenRemote highlights in December 2008:

• Infrared Resolved (Finally!)
• Amsterdam Meetup
• HOWTO: Build OpenRemote Reference Implementation
• KNX Update

Infrared Resolved

After a somewhat painful search, we have finally landed on an infrared product we like for OpenRemote RI. It comes from InnovationOne out of Canada. The product is known as CommandIR II. It was the first IR product that passed the muster for us in initial tests and we are looking forward to push it even further with more extensive tests.

A thank you goes to Matthew Bodkin who has been most helpful in resolving some initial issues and helped us feel confident in recommending his product. If you're looking for more details on CommandIR II, you can check our comments in the forums or go directly to CommandIR website.

Amsterdam Meeting

The core EU team got together in Amsterdam this month for our first official get-together. We had a chance to meet face-to-face with people working in home automation field and got an update on what is happening in Netherlands.

Apart from the general fun in Amsterdam, we also managed to put together a few OpenRemote boxes. Last month we were updating our bill of materials and our meeting was the perfect time to get into RI details. We managed to build boxes from parts and put them together so each of us left with a box of their own to take home. There were some interesting assembly variations for sure (it's funny how some things turn upside down in Amsterdam) but everybody managed to get a functional box together.

Special thank you to Jean-Luc van Hulst of Finalist IT in Netherlands who helped us to connect with the local scene.

How to: Build OpenRemote RI

Last month we updated our reference implementation bill of materials and this month we worked further to define the RI platform. In addition to actually assembling it physically, we've investigated a couple of different Linux distributions we might use as the basis of the software platform. At the moment we are focusing on Voyage Linux, a Debian derivative out of Hong Kong specifically tailored for PC Engines ALIX (what we use for HW RI), WRAP and Soekris hardware.

You can find hardware assembly instructions on our website. This should help you get the hardware together. Then follow the software installation instructions to get Voyage Linux, Java and LIRC (configured for CommandIR II) installed on your box. On the software side we are still working to update the instructions further to include our own software (as we get it to a more ready state) and also plan on creating ISO images of the whole thing to make the process a bit easier.

The OpenRemote RI acts as a development kit for us to have a baseline of hardware to work with. We are also looking at alternative hardware platforms that can be used for deploying the OpenRemote software. If you have an extra Linux PC around your house, it's also a candidate for deploying the OpenRemote software.

If you'd rather avoid the process of ordering parts and assembling the development kit yourself, please leave a note here or email us directly and we can get a pre-assembled development kit to you.

Also, keep an eye on our hardware page for further updates on alternative hardware implementations and more updates on software installation instructions.

KNX progress

Our resident KNX technician, Mr. Fleury, has made some progress with his KNX development kit. There's now a working LED lights setup, programmable and controllable from a PC. There's still plenty of work there to be done to get KNX to the 21st century but it's a great start to get KNX supported in OpenRemote.

Marc has done some video editing of his experience in setting up the KNX lights so look forward to seeing that appear soon on the website for all the KNX enthusiasts.

What's Next?

With the first RI in place the next steps for us is to provide more software scaffolding around the hardware in terms of programming APIs. We will also be working towards creating ISO distributions for the software to make it easier to get a RI box ready to go.

On the HA integration side, we will be working on the Insteon and X10 support next, verifying some hardware to work with the RI and further defining programming APIs and tooling around it. KNX will also be very much in the picture as we get further into year 2009. Some client console definition work should start soon as well.

Have a great celebration going into 2009. Happy new year to all!

-- Juha

Time to once again summarize what we have been working on in the past month.

Our latest efforts have largely focused around hardware:

1. We needed to update the hardware reference implementation.
2. We've also been hard at work trying to find a good, reliable infrared transmitter to include with the RI.
3. Playing with and liking B202 a lot.
4. Learning about hardware distribution.
5. Getting clubbed over-the-head by EU bureaucracy.

Read on...

Hardware Reference Implementation

We went over the existing bill of materials and found some of it little out of date. Some parts were not readily available anymore and had been superseded by newer, improved versions. Also, as discussed in last month's update, the idea behind the form factor of the box has changed a little, and we've changed the bill of materials to reflect this. Connectivity extensions like X10 and infrared are now separated from the main CPU unit rather than bundled all together into single box.

The new, improved bill of materials has all the parts listed and linked with details now. We've ordered parts for half a dozen units and we will have a box assembly fest in Amsterdam with our get-together. The hardware reference implementation is an ALIX box with CompactFlash card as storage, AMD Geode chip and 256MB of memory. It is nice and quiet -- having no fan or hard drive making noise -- and can be easily hidden and forgotten somewhere in the room.

We also went through a couple of Linux installations on this box. Ubuntu just out of curiousity -- this box obviously isn't designed to be your desktop. Unfortunately didn't have much luck with iMedia Linux distribution. The Voyage Linux distribution which is more geared towards the ALIX hardware and home automation use case we have in mind seems like a reasonable fit at this point. Installing the latest Sun JDK 1.6 on it was a breeze and it does get our Java runtime going. The box is no speed monster but for your regular home residence automation it doesn't need to be.

Which brings us to another idea we've been toying with and that's the product separation into Home and Pro versions. Home version could exist at low-cost do-it-yourself model based on our hardware RI, or any other spare hardware you may have available, featuring infrared support, X10 integration and so on. We plan on getting detailed installation instructions online for the software and some material on assembling the hardware if you prefer things from scratch rather than a pre-built box.

On the other side the Pro version caters to the professional installer community with features for KNX integration, monitoring, coordinated updates and other larger scale installation features. The hardware requirements may differ from the Home edition -- maybe a rack unit form, more memory and more CPU power. Nevertheless, the idea of designing things in the open remains the same and you'll be able to build anything between those two and create your own mix of features. Think of the two versions more like a guidance towards popular feature profiles.

Where Is My Infrared?

Another area of discovery has been the infrared hardware that is available for home automation enthusiasts. Frankly we've been a little surprised by how challenging it is to find a quality infrared hardware to work in combination with the popular LIRC database of consumer remote controls.

We have evaluated or are evaluating three products so far (documented some of our discoveries in the forums, see Reviewing Infrared: Iguana and Reviewing Infrared: TIRA threads). Each have their own set of little snags. Some LIRC remote codes may not play back correctly on the IR transmitter or the software controlling the hardware just locks up. Some are missing LIRC support for transmitting altogether. None of the IR products so far completely satisfy. Still working on couple of them trying to get issues fixed. However, the effort that has gone into it so far makes it obvious that this is an area where we can bring value to the HA community.

We will keep the forums updated as we make progress on infrared and sort the good from the bad.

Where We Discover Hardware Distribution Is Hard

Last month we were talking about how impressed we were with the Asus B202 box. We started to fancy the box so much we wanted to go and buy a few but couldn't find any in stock in Europe.

Being the impatient sort we are, we decided to talk to friends in Taiwan to help get us a few B202's straight from the source. Buy some and put them on an airplane to Europe. Sounds easy enough to do, what could possibly go wrong?

We had ten boxes bought and sent from Taiwan the next day. There was no shortage over there. Couple of days later the boxes land on an airport in Madrid. So far so good.

Then we hit the European bureaucracy. A big black hole. Where it took 2 days to deliver the boxes from across the world to Europe, it takes no less than ten days to deliver them on the last mile to the final address. And that's all before you start distributing them within EU where another week or two of snail mail is the only affordable way to move a product that originally cost some 250 euros. Sigh.

Multi-tiered distribution model you say? Yeah, now we know why.

What we learned from that episode (besides the obvious lessons of how infinitely frustrating bureaucracy can be) was:

• the B202 really is an excellent piece of hardware with a great price point
• maybe you can get yours by yourself from the local retail store :-)

We will provide the software and instructions on how you can turn your Eee Box into the ultimate home automation controller. Or perhaps even an attractive home theater now that the latest B204/B206 is coming out with an HDMI, remote control and all. We will make sure you'll be up and running with OpenRemote home automation on your Eee Box in no time.

Come Join the Chat

Last month we announced the availability of a chat room to the OpenRemote community. A lot of the hardware discussion has been going on in the Skype chatroom. Please come join us. It doesn't matter who you are or what you want to talk about, just come in and say hello, introduce yourself, tell your HA plans or ask a question. Some of you already have and we appreciate it. Just drop by.

What's Coming Up in December

We will be in Amsterdam on December 17th and 18th for our get-together. Planning to do some, uh... brainstorming, assemble some boxes and discuss deep mysteries of the GWT toolkit. If you are in the neighbourhood, drop a note and come say hello.

Also we will keep documenting our progress on both ALIX and B202 boxes, infrared and how you can get your OpenRemote controller built, installed and running. We are ever more convinced that there's value in providing a verified and community-tested stack of hardware and software for HA. Watch this space and the knowledgebase.

Until next month,

-- Juha

As I noted in the forums a few days back, we have set up a public chat room for OpenRemote community. The idea is to let you participate in our discussions as they happen, real time, to check up on what we are doing on any given day or just say hello if you are a new member.

Our recent conversations have revolved around hardware and Linux distributions. We have been deep in investigating the Eee Box for various boot and BIOS options, installing Linux on it to replace the default Windows XP distribution and seeing how it could be used as hardware platform for a dedicated HA application.

I am the first to admit I am quite attracted to this box :-) It has a great price point at around $300 for what it can do, it is a multi-purpose PC architecture that runs some popular Linux distributions quite nicely with the usual bells and whistles. You get good connectivity with LAN and WiFi, 4 USB ports, and an SD card slot. Plenty of power from the 1.6Ghz N270 Atom to run the latest Java stacks (which some affectionately call 'bloatware'). DVI out to play back movies at 720p resolution. Not the ultimate in home theathers yet but getting there.

It's a great little box -- and apparently selling great too given the dearth of boxes at least over here in Europe.

What we've been doing the past week is trying to validate the hardware in the Eee box for our purposes. We now have it running with Ubuntu and lircd installed including the infrared transceiver from IguanaWorks (however I am debugging some issues with the IR at the moment). I am hunched over this little box next to the TV and manage to change channels from the terminal instead of the usual remote, excited like a little kid. Can't hide my geek genes. My girlfriend thinks I've lost my marbles and tries to give me the old remote back.

Just wait until the iPhone interface and the macros we get going there.

Back to the chat. If you want to follow all this live as it is happening, join the chat. It can be high volume at times so be prepared for it. We are using Skype at the moment. Yes we know some people take issue with that :-) It is a compromise and something we will replace eventually with a Jabber server but for the moment it will do. Later we will support more chat clients, add web based chat and support more operating systems as well.

Time to dig back into the IR drivers...

-- Juha

It's been a while since I last blogged. There's been a lot of activity happening in the forums and some discussions behind the scenes and it's time to summarize some of those here.

Controller Hardware

One of the main things we've been doing over the last month is decisions on the pre-built hardware boxes. As you may know, we have a hardware reference implementation that we have published (Thanks to Mark Spencer!) which has been sort of a baseline for us to evaluate what kind of software we can support.

Some people went ahead and built the box (hey Neil) so it's a real workable thing you can put together and play with.

However we recognize that there's a barrier in ordering parts from separate vendors, putting things together, installing the software and so on. That's why we've been trying to find somebody to put the boxes together for us, we will preinstall the software and you're off to an easier start with OpenRemote.

By the way, if somebody knows a good solid shop who can put together a box, please let us know. We don't require customizations, our parts are off-the-shelf, we are just looking for somebody to do the assembly. What we do need is a shop that is able to support small volumes, pay-as-you-go orders in small bulks (say 25 or 50 units) as we can't make huge order commitments just yet.

Controller Form Factor

The form factor is another thing we've discussed a lot. You can see from the first hardware reference implementation that the box has the capability for infrared, serial and X10 integration.

We've thought about this a bit and realized there are going to be distinct user groups for the OpenRemote hardware. Some are looking for a product to control their A/V setup at home. This mainly involves replaying the infrared commands from the controller box, or if you got lucky with your hardware, controlling it via serial connections.

In addition some people are interested in controlling their homes via X10, INSTEON or KNX -- building scenes and timed macros to control lights, security and so on.

Finally there's a professional installer community who'd prefer as little infrared as possible and rather integrate via serial or low-voltage twisted pair.

Rather than building a single box that can do all of that, we've decided to split things up into distinct extension modules that you can stack on top of the main unit.

We are thinking of a stackable (flat-top) form of a base CPU unit with the mainboard and USB / Ethernet / X802.11 connectivity and then, depending on what you want to do, additional stackable units on top for infrared, X10, serial, KNX, whatever is your fancy.

This way we can keep the cost of the base hardware unit low and additional features become on-demand USB extensions.

Hardware Parts

We are also looking at different options for the mainboard of the CPU unit. The original reference implementation calls for an Alix board with an AMD Geode chip on it. Other options we are considering is an Atom-based mainboard (you may or may not have noticed but the Atom based netbooks are flying off the shelves, hugely popular computers with price tags as low as $250) or VIA C7 based motherboard.

For infrared we are thinking the IR emitters from IguanaWorks or possibly TIRA, both of which seem to be well supported by Open Source community and LIRC. If you got ideas for other IR equipment you're happy with, let us know.

The goal is still to get Linux and Java up and running from CompactFlash. If you have strong background with Linux distros on portable devices, set-top boxes, mini-PCs and such, please ping us here or on the forums (or even in private email if you're shy). Especially curious to hear about experiences with different Linux distros working off of CompactFlash.

That's all for now. There's a bunch of stuff happening on the software side as well which I'll cover a bit later (think about home floor plan images with AJAX interface when configuring your home automation setup, just to whet your appetite...)

TTYL,

-- Juha

The great thing about open communities is the collective wisdom that is available through an active community. About a month ago we had a surge of people coming to the website checking us out and one important thing we got out of it was the numerous pointers on all the technology and specifications that are out there. It turns out the world of domotics is much bigger than X10 and INSTEON after all.

We got some pointers on BACnet which today seems to be very closely aligned with KNX, a set of specifications we were already looking at (you can find the KNX project status page here). BACnet and KNX seem to have a pretty close 1:1 mapping of datatypes providing a level of interoperability between the networks.

Another pointer we got was to OASIS Obix effort, something that seems to have our old dear friend IBM as one of the drivers. It is an interesting effort where one of the goals is to create integration between facilities control and enterprise applications (imagine calendaring application making a meeting room reservation and controlling the HVAC accordingly). We'll see where that effort leads.

Furthermore, Christian Bauer put some time and effort in evaluating xAP/xPL project, another integration effort at device control protocol level. I'm pretty sure there's something useful in there to learn in terms of control protocol message definition.

All of this is useful to us to understand the landscape and where OpenRemote best fits in. In private discussions people have asked if OpenRemote plans to address things like office or workplace environment control and monitoring (I personally recall once walking into an office on a weekend just to find all lights on, all doors unlocked and nobody around) and how much of an overlap there really is between home automation and building automation?

For some, home automation is clearly centered around their AV control. For others, the main benefit comes from security and monitoring aspects. Yet in other discussions people found the idea of assistive domotics extremely appealing (all about the demographic change, your parents getting older and needing increased care). There's a knowledge base we are trying to fill with all the information. Please add, make comments and suggest more things we should be looking at for OpenRemote. And see you on the forums!