OpenRemote

[mdavis]

I came across this yesterday and didn't find any references to it on CocoonTech. It is an open source home automation organization that includes among it's members Marc Fleury, from JBoss fame, and Neil Cherry who has been around Linux ha for quite some time, he is a MisterHouse guy. It doesn't look like they are very far along, but they've got some organization, a group of talented people, and a startup funding source from Marc.

OpenRemote

Mick

 

[electron]

I am kind of confused about why they aren't combining efforts to work on MisterHouse instead (unless there is a license issue). But the more, the better!

 

[mdavis]

I think that they feel that MisterHouse is past it's prime and that they want to design and build software that works hand-in-hand with hardware that is designed for the software. They are talking about a reference platform for the hardware and possibly building a small number of units to sell, but making the plans available to the public.

My biggest concern is that they seem pretty down on xAP. I have adoped xAP as my "glue" of choice. I would think that if the OpenRemote guys could work with the xAP guys that they would have a great way to support a lot of devices and gain a community of people who would probably be interested in helping them.

I am glad however that they are doing it open source and multi-platform. I refuse to spend any more money on licenses with Microsoft.

Mick

 

[123]

I learned about OpenRemote while searching Twitter (a neat way to discover what people are talking about). OpenRemote seems to lean towards a developing a hardware reference ... not sure the world needs yet another controller, "open" or not. Sidelining an existing open-standard like xAP is an odd move.

MisterHouse, PlutoHome, Linux MCE, OpenRemote, ... no shortage of projects to eat up your spare time.

 

[paulw11]

This looks very interesting. Hopefully this goes somewhere.
I used to use Misterhouse but while it has a lot of capability, its use of PERL meant that it didn't support multi-threading which limited its abilities in an asynchronous world.

I am not too interested in the open hardware side of things directly, but having open systems support as a basis for the project is very encouraging (I use Macs at home, so anything Unix/Java should be reasonably simple to support). Also the choice of iPhone/iPod touch as the first client device is in alignment with what I have been planning for my home :angry:

I looked at Xap a while ago and remember having some issues with it;
1. Much of the code/modules are Windows based
2. I feel that compromises have been made in the protocol to allow Xap to be implemented directly in small embedded systems which in practice probably never happens. In reality you will probably need a machine to act as the Xap hub and it probably makes more sense to have a driver that can adapt Xap to the native serial/ethernet protocol of the end device than trying to put Xap directly in the end device - particularly as many devices are 3rd party and you have to work with whatever protocol they have.

These are just my opinions of course and I am aware that many people are using Xap today to all kinds of wonderful things . I am just explaining why I think that there is room for another open platform.

Paul

 

[paulw11]

A quick update.

Having read the site further, it seems that they may not have sidelined Xap yet - unless there is discussion in their forum that is newer than the contribute page...

Paul

 

[mdavis]

No, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that they had sidelined it, just that they had negative comments on it and did not seem to be inclined to incorporate it, just learn from it. I was particularly dismayed by the comment about "sloppy work". I still hold out hope and intend to communicate with the OpenRemote folks directly. I'm doing some xAP development now and while I would be happy if it evolved to eliminate some of the "problems" that Christian highlighted, I've gone far enough with my development that I'm not ready to give up on xAP and start over (again). If they would be open (pun intended) to working with xAP then I would be happy to work with them, I'm thinking of offering to help on the taxonomy.

Mick

 

[mdavis]

Paul,

I agree with you on the fact that most of options are Windows based, which seems to be true of most things HA, not just xAP, take a look at all of the new product announcements on CocoonTech... Which is precisely the reason that I decided to write the stuff that I'm doing in Ruby. Java would have been cross platform as well, but I've been coding in Java for the past 12 years and I'm sick of it.

If you're interested in xAP I'm working on several xAP applications. So far I've written a xAP library for Ruby, a xAP connector for the NetCallerID, a xAP connector for Festival TTS (text to speech) and now I'm working on a xAP connector for the TI103. I haven't publically released any of them yet because I haven't had time to document them. I've been running the first three in my house for about the last 9 months or so. If there is interest I could probably spend a little time writing some documentation and cleaning everything up and making it more user friendly.

Another reason that I haven't released anything is that there is a piece of middleware missing, which is the controller or message processor. Right now I've just got a quick and dirty little app that checks for incoming caller id messages and creates speech messages. I'm still working on a design for a message processor, I'm thinking that I want a rules engine and neural net based processor, but that will be some more work.

Mick