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!

The recent blog activity brought an influx of new members to our site, from about 20+ registered to 120+ within a couple of days.

I think it's fair to say we weren't quite prepared for it. A number of people came in looking for areas where they could immediately start contributing. We're still busy trying to organize things here and to fully understand where OpenRemote best fits in the domotics field. However, the new member count helped us to prioritize a bit and attempt to set the website up for easier access to ongoing projects and finding the community leads responsible for the current work activities.

What the number of people joining demonstrates to us is the demand for an open platform to address home automation. The industry is filled with proprietary hardware, proprietary software and fake open efforts that are all about customer lock in. As geeks -- and so far what OpenRemote is all about is a geek effort -- we feel unfairly bound by these proprietary products. We want to express our geek creativity at home and come up with new ways to automate our houses.

What we are hearing from the community today is a desire to have an open platform that increases the customer choice when choosing hardware, helps installers integrate different solutions and take an open approach in development to improve the quality of the software. Increasingly our OpenRemote Controller software is shaping up to be the integration platform for the various existing proprietary architectures out in the field. We are currently evaluating X10, INSTEON, KNX and Crestron as the technologies to integrate OpenRemote with. The leads for these projects came from the community and they are scratching their itch in a true Open Source way. Integration of infrastucture is where Open Source excels and that's what we are hoping to see here as well.

There will be many more opportunities to participate in the projects, various user interface and device database tasks come to mind. Right now if reading protocol specs, reverse engineering protocols on the wire or implementing protocol stacks in Java fits your fancy, have a look at the following project pages:

• X10 Integration Project
• INSTEON Integration Project
• KNX Integration Project
• Crestron Integration Project

If you want to do more than talk (we like busy hands working on code, documentation, visual design, testing) feel free to contact the leads directly, leave a comment on their project page or leave a message in the forums. Also, keep an eye on our contribution page where new projects and tasks will appear.

Moving from specification to specification. I recently finished the notes on INSTEON, it is definitely an interesting technology and solid enough a specification to make it interesting for OpenRemote to integrate with. It should be much more robust compared to X10 and on the plus side INSTEON still maintains backwards compatibility with X10 so we're still covered there.

On the downside, INSTEON seems to be pretty non-existent in Europe. Something to do with that 110V vs 220V power I guess (I wouldn't know, I'm clueless on hardware). But the other reason may be there's already a strong contestant in Europe, KNX.

Going through the KNX website it gives me a pretty convincing story. You've got an open standard (ISO, ANSI, EU, even Chinese), a comprehensive membership roster and partnerships with installers, training and certification program and tools to help installers and integrators. On a quick glance it looks like a full ecosystem, maybe bigger than INSTEON? Something worth investigating.

However getting into KNX does require a bit of an investment. We are looking into that. So far despite the cost the technology looks interesting. There's a bus architecture, independent of manufacturers and set of proprietary tools to get installers, systems integrators and software developers on to the platform.

On the software side the good news is that we can integrate via IP stack -- using UDP -- that we will get from Linux on our controller. On top of that we'll need to implement the KNX's telegram. Some products that do this are already out there. The catch: implemented as MS Windows DCOM components and costing a pretty penny.

We'll see if we can do something about that :-)

I've started a page on KNX where I'm currently collecting notes. Feel free to add (please turn on the diffs if you do) and stay tuned. More to come on that page.