OpenRemote Controller as the Integration Platform

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.