Subscribe to our newsletter 1 Editor’s note Connecting the residential IoT dots By Pierre Kil OpenRemote has become increasingly popular in the residential space. With more companies offering connected products to consumers, the interest for integration of these products and visualization in simplified user interfaces is increasing. Moreover, as most solutions offer simple ways for integration, it also becomes easier to integrate individual solutions or sub-systems into OpenRemote. In this newsletter, we focus on the residential domain, connecting some residential IoT dots: new controller platforms running OpenRemote, new device integrations, and new residential projects, implemented by our community. Starting with a controller, we are proud to announce the launch of OpenRemote in the QNAP App Center. It makes it much easier for our community to run OpenRemote on the QNAP NAS products. QNAP has prominently featured OpenRemote at CEDIA Denver last month. We like to thank Nate, Shawn, Erwan, and Rainer for their efforts to create both the installer package and home automation demo for CEDIA. On the device integration side, there is a range of new devices recently being added. Philips Hue has been integrated and documented by Patrice Köttig (including video’s). Henrik Gjörloff, has integrated Sonos, which can now be part of your residential automation project. Finally, Keene Electronics integrated their IR solution KIRA and has become an OpenRemote Certified Product. Of course, as always Juha will give you an insight in what’s happening at OpenRemote and the community. Quite a range of contributions and projects have seen the daylight over the last few months. Last but certainly not least, this newsletter also features the platform now offered by Prodrive Technologies. It bundles a controller with a touch panel in one device. As it includes wifi, ethernet, z- wave, and USB, it’s a very cost effective platform for distributors and service providers wanting to use OpenRemote. We hope you will enjoy reading this newsletter and recognize the IoT dots. As usual we look forward to your feedback! NEWSLETTER October - December 2013 Subscribe to our newsletter In this newsletter OpenRemote in QNAP App Center and at CEDIA Integration of Philips Hue Sonos, music to your ears Infrared integration with KIRA OpenRemote news OpenRemote for Professionals Prodrive platform for service providers
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Subscribe to our newsletter 1
Editor’s noteConnecting the residential IoT dotsBy Pierre Kil
OpenRemote has become increasingly popular in the residential space. With more companies offering connected products to consumers, the interest for integration of these products and visualization in simplified user interfaces is increasing. Moreover, as most solutions offer simple ways for integration, it also becomes easier to integrate individual solutions or sub-systems into OpenRemote.
In this newsletter, we focus on the residential domain, connecting some residential IoT dots: new controller platforms running OpenRemote, new device integrations, and new residential projects, implemented by our community.
Starting with a controller, we are proud to announce the launch of OpenRemote in the QNAP App Center. It makes it much easier for our community to run OpenRemote on the QNAP NAS products. QNAP has prominently featured OpenRemote at CEDIA Denver last month. We like to thank Nate, Shawn, Erwan, and Rainer for their efforts to create both the installer package and home automation demo for CEDIA.
On the device integration side, there is a range of new devices recently being added. Philips Hue has been integrated and documented by Patrice Köttig (including video’s). Henrik Gjörloff, has integrated Sonos, which can now be part of your residential automation project. Finally, Keene Electronics integrated their IR solution KIRA and has become an OpenRemote Certified Product.
Of course, as always Juha will give you an insight in what’s happening at OpenRemote and the community. Quite a range of contributions and projects have seen the daylight over the last few months.
Last but certainly not least, this newsletter also features the platform now offered by Prodrive Technologies. It bundles a controller with a touch panel in one device. As it includes wifi, ethernet, z-wave, and USB, it’s a very cost effective platform for distributors and service providers wanting to use OpenRemote.
We hope you will enjoy reading this newsletter and recognize the IoT dots. As usual we look forward to your feedback!
“QNAP announces OpenRemote in it’s App Center at CEDIA Denver to show a flexible open source home automation solution for community and integrators”QNAP at CEDIA
At CEDIA Denver, QNAP and OpenRemote announced an installer package for OpenRemote available in the QNAP App Center, available for a wide range of QNAP products. This allows both community as well as integrators to combine the benefits of NAS and NVR with the controls functionality of OpenRemote, as well as the ability to integrate with other devices, like lighting, entertainment, or any type of security sensors
OpenRemote is a flexible open source middleware solution for the internet of things. It’s very suitable to create a home or building automation project, integrating different devices or systems together and creating a universal control system for the customer. OpenRemote integrates a wide range of protocols and devices. It offers cloud based visualization and automation tools, and allows you to design your own personal user interfaces.
QNAP provides a unique developer's platform for solution integrators to run server Apps on top of the QNAP NAS. Each project will become a private cloud along with server add-on application through our IOT solution. This strategy aims to eliminate deployment cost and increase benefits for manageability, time-to-market, ease of deployment, and enabled cloud connected features. Solution
integrators will only need to focus on their appliance and their own applications without redundant efforts on developing the server platform QNAP App Center
OpenRemote Free Designer is available in the QNAP App Center. An installer package is offered to make it even easier to get OpenRemote running on QNAP. It’s been extensively tested by the communities of OpenRemote and QNAP. Soon we will be offering installer packages for the Professional Designer as well.
The Turbo NAS products of QNAP support features expansion by installing additional App Center apps developed and shared in the Linux open source community. The QNAP App Center incorporates numerous apps listed by categories, including business, content management system, communication, download, entertainment, utilities, and so forth. All the App Center apps can be installed and run right away with just one click.
If you want to know more about the bundling of OpenRemote with QNAP, visit the websites:
- OpenRemote ‘How To - Controller on QNAP NAS’ - QNAP App Center- QNAP Forum on OpenRemote (requires login)
QNAP Networked Attached ServersOpenRemote in QNAP App Center at CEDIABy Shawn Chu & Nate Cheng, QNAP
It was early 2007 with the launch of the Philips LivingColors for decorative home lighting, that I saw great potential for these kind of solutions in the area of home comfort and building automation. It was not long until in Elektor (November 2008), the first hack was published based on a CC2500 chip. Inspired by this article, I was researching the net and got me an Arduino shield with a CC2500. As a result, I now had my own LivingColors bridge, which I connected to my PLC for building automation.
However, this system was only temporary as Philips developed his bulbs and with the introduction of a new generation, changed their protocol to SmartLink (ZigBee). Thus the community was locked again and the price of the first generation of lamps exploded. Many years passed and the prospect already appeared hopeless, until 2012 when Philips introduced the Philips Hue system. Since this was LightLink and building on the previous SmartLink Protocol and had an Ethernet interface, I saw the opportunity for new projects.
So I ordered a starter pack of the Hue and began to analyze it with Wireshark and simulate the protocol frame. It quickly became clear to me that the HTTP frame from Philips is not designed too complicated and Philips will probably also publish this API in a timely manner. Well, since this was resolved, the next challenge was to couple the existing SmartLink products to the Hue bridge. This proved to be a bit tricky, since it is not documented, and possibly something Philips didn’t want to (as the green and blue hue have no deep saturation). After everything worked and there was an official API, I could focus on the porting to other systems using OpenRemote.
At the first attempt I focused on the possibilities of the API and used my own GUI , which I presented in a WebView with OpenRemote on different systems. This was quickly done.
For a generic implementation with the tools OpenRemote supplies, I now headed for the standard HTTP integration as documented by Philips, where the PUT and GET commands are used to write to, and read the lamp states. As additional control elements there are the sliders for saturation and brightness, a color picker for the color and a regular on/off switch. Since the color picker provides an RGB value and the Hue is defined in a HSB definition, the dynamic transformation through "virtual sensors” and rules is realized. As there are the respective values as set by individual HSB and sequences of commands, the OpenRemote connection with Hue is perfect.
Personally, I use the OpenRemote integration of Hue to link it to various predefined scenes via the EIB switches I already have. But it is also the color picker for dynamic adjustments which I’m using on my tablets and phones. The plan is still to add a "Wake Up Light" with a realistic sunrise. The alarm clock GUI is now getting implemented on an eBook Reader with OpenRemote.
So I won’t be sitting still and will keep on integrating the Hue lights as part of my existing home automation project.
See also:- OpenRemote ‘How To - Philips Hue’- My first video on Philips Hue & OpenRemote- TASS video, continuing with Philips Hue- Philips website Meet Hue
Philips HueIntegrating Hue and the friends of HueBy Patrice Köttig
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Hue, Friends of Hue, and Living Colors have been integrated with OpenRemote thanks to Patrice Köttig
A few months have passed since our previous newsletter. Several new developments have taken place since then, some of which have been highlighted with their own article in this newsletter.
Last time we talked about our first US-based user event in Chicago. Since then we already had a chance to do another US "tour", this time to California and to Denver Colorado where the annual CEDIA event was hosted.
At CEDIA, we had the pleasure to demonstrate OpenRemote system running on a QNAP NAS. We have more details about this in a
separate article. In short, OpenRemote is now included in the QNAP package central as a supported add-on, and can be downloaded and installed to a QNAP NAS system directly using the package management interface.
In California, Pierre Kil was presenting OpenRemote at UC Berkeley Swarm Lab and to Open Source IoT meetup. We greatly enjoyed connecting with the community there and hope to have a chance to do this again soon.
GROWING COMMUNITY
Our community has been growing at a brisk pace and this growth is evident in the activity on our forums. Since starting the project in 2009, we've had more than 600,000 unique visitors to our website and more than 20,000 people have registered and tried our Online Designer application. As usual, we'd like to thank everyone who has participated and contributed and we wish to highlight some of the work the community is doing here.
Ryan Kraus let us know about his project Open Alarm which is a Python program made for Linux and designed to be a flexible alarm clock engine for use in conjuction with OpenRemote and similar remote applications. The visual design
OpenRemote NewsWhat’s new at OpenRemoteBy Juha Lindfors
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Examples from the community using the freedom of visualizationMany appealing applications have been shared with us, eg. the flexible alarm clock by Ryan (top left), and designs by Taftek, Rikard and Dinuwan.
for the alarm is highlighted here on this page and you can find the full project information at https://code.google.com/p/open-alarm/. Ryan integrated his alarm functionality with Universal Devices' ISY-99 bridge to his Insteon network using OpenRemote. On his project website, you can find out the details of how he built the user interface in OpenRemote Designer and also where to locate his UI template for reuse.
Other visual design we want to highlight is the Z-wave / Razberry based user interface developed by Dinuwan Senaratne for his project. We've also seen a very appealing design from Taftek in Poland who have used OpenRemote Designer to build a user interface that you can see highliht here.
We are very excited to see the creative UI designs our users have built with OpenRemote. If you have created a design you'd like to see highlighted, let us know by sending an email to [email protected] and give us a little detail on the work you have done.
NEW INTEGRATIONS
On the technical side, new progress has been made in integrating Home Automation Inc (HAI) systems with OpenRemote. Daniel Cunningham has taken the development lead on this integration and with the feedback from Craig Hamilton and Jack McGill has made quite a bit of progress in a short period of time. The work is already available to early technical users and testers who are comfortable building things from source and installing servers by themselves. You can follow the technical work on the forum thread (http://www.openremote.org/x/FYQO) and participate in the discussion. We will be making a compiled and hosted version of the HAI integration available later to get more testers involved in this.
On EnOcean side, Michal Rutka, one of our Netherlands-based certified integrators, has continued to work on integrating more EnOcean equipment with OpenRemote and documenting his work in the process. You can follow Michal on his personal blog at http://mqlservice.net/openremote/blog/.
More on the alerting side, in addition to Ryan Kraus' Open Alarm, OpenRemote users Kenneth Stridh and Stavros Charalambous have worked out a way to send SMS messages from OpenRemote rules using the email interface. You can find out the details by following the forum thread at http://www.openremote.org/x/jgNdAQ. And if you've not yet had enough of notifications, check out Michal Rutka's blog above on how to send Android push notifications from OpenRemote using Notify My Android service.
Also we are finding more ways to make OpenRemote talk back to you! We've mentioned earlier Lawrie Griffiths' development work to add text-to-speech, serial and email functionality to OpenRemote (see http://www.openremote.org/x/ZQhdAQ). This time we highlight a tip from user Michel Drenth who has used XBMC's voice capabilities integrated with OpenRemote to make some more noise. See http://www.openremote.org/x/JhVdAQ for the tip in case you find your house a tad too quiet of late.
That sums it up for this newsletter. If you've built something really cool with OpenRemote, let us know at [email protected]. It is exciting and personally gratifying to see what YOU have done with OpenRemote. Please continue to share your tips, ideas and help on the forums. We will continue to work on integrating your suggestions into releases, and making them available to the wider user community.
Thank you!
"I already have this wonderful
OpenRemote system for
controlling so much in my house,
showing pushed switches, reading temperatures and motion from every
In the same way as broadcasted television and video playback has changed into streaming, IP-TV and “on-demand” watching whenever you like, wherever you like, also playback of music is changing. A music system should nowadays be a part of the home automation system, being able to set-up for different scenarios. It should also be able to be controlled from where ever you want.
OpenRemote gives a good overview of your integrated products, but what was missing was the integration of my multi-room music system from Sonos.
Sonos introduced their first product 2005 as a high-end multi-room music system: easy installation, wireless, with almost no need of cabling. With Sonos your private music collection, radio channels, Spotify and many other music services become available, embedded in only one product accessible and controlled individual for each room.
Sonos devices create their own WiFi network - SonosNET - to share information and stream music between each other without drain the performance of your own network.
It is possible to connect your own amplified speakers, your own amplifier or use wireless speakers from Sonos.
Sounds like a perfect solution- or?
The lack of possible ways to integrate with these products, made many home automation integrators needed to go for other solutions.
The Sonos OpenRemote integration
With the Sonos OpenRemote integration your music solution comes one step closer to a fully integrated home automation system. Now you can control your Sonos music system not only by the dedicated Sonos remote or by your phone.
Sonos OpenRemote integration also makes it possible to control functions like “change track” or “increase the volume” as in my case by KNX devices like physical buttons, or automated by defined events such as “turn of the music when I leave the house”.
The OpenRemote integration adds the most common commands to your own OpenRemote (UI) graphical user interface layout such as play/pause/next track/volume etc, as well as add the possibilities of display information like the current track playing.
Another additional feature, is that it´s now possible to reach the Sonos system outside your local WiFi network.
How does it work?
By installing Node.js which is a platform based on Chrome's JavaScript runtime, you will be able to run the "Sonos HTTP API" server software.
The "Sonos HTTP API" server will do the translation of the Sonos commands to “http” commands that OpenRemote can interpret and execute.
With the API server up and running you can freely create “http” commands in the OpenRemote Designer to communicate with your Sonos devices.
Enjoy your new integrated music system where OpenRemote take care of even one more function in your house.
Also see:- OpenRemote ‘How To - Sonos’- Sonos home page
Sonos integrationMusic to your earsBy Henrik Gjörloff
“Thanks to Henrik Gjörloff Sonos has been integrated with OpenRemote”OpenRemote Staff
Keene Electronics was established in 1988 and we started out by designing and manufacturing nicad battery chargers and dischargers for camcorders. Over the years we have steadily moved our focus to concentrate on the Custom Installation market and Infra Red control products in particular. When launched our first Infra Red over IP product in 2008 we envisaged that they would normally be used in pairs, simply to as an easy means of getting IR from A to B across an existing LAN infrastructure. We quickly found that there is no end to the possible ways to make use of them. We've even had one customer using them to control his satellite receiver in Russia whilst he viewed the output on his yacht in the Med. Many other CI installers have used them for long distance rebooting and configuration of their installations, saving them hours of valuable time in site visits. The continued growth of smartphones, tablets and apps means that these days most of our modules are integrated as embedded devices within complex systems.
The Keene KIRA (Keene IR Anywhere) range was designed from the off to be platform independent with its built in web server although we knew that the on-board graphics would always be somewhat limited for a complex installation. For that reason we have always made the Keene API freely available and it has already been successfully integrated into a number of other control solutions.
We recently became aware of OpenRemote and were really excited by the concept of a truly unified product. The ability to integrate seamlessly with any number of protocols is a huge appeal, and the design flexibility makes it possible for the integrator to produce a very professional and extremely powerful solution. We were also very impressed with the aims of Project Beehive as the IR code database will provide an excellent resource for integrators. The Keene KIRA modules can also learn and convert from readily available Pronto IR codes to minimize implementation time.
The Keene API uses the UDP protocol and so implementation with OpenRemote is very straightforward. A tutorial is available on the OpenRemote "how to" page. Similar integration will soon be available for the IPMSW1 IP controllable mains switch.
The KIRA products have been extensively tested by the community already and have become an OpenRemote Certified product.
Also see:- ‘How To - KIRA’- Keene home page
Integrating KIRAInfrared control with Keene IR AnywhereBy Alan Quinby
Keene IR Anywhere is an alternative for infrared control of any device in your home automation project
OpenRemote also offers commercial solutions for different groups. We started with this program half a year back and have gradually developed it further.
First we have launched ‘Professional Designer’, the product to primarily support our community to realize reliable commercial projects. Both the integrators as well as user interface designers have requested for features and functionality which makes their work more convenient.
Our second product is ‘Designer Cloud Hosting’ which enables distributors and service providers to serve a large consumer client base with their unique product and service
offering. It has a similar feature set as the Professional Designer. However, this product offers additional features, like the ability to brand both the consoles as well as online designer. On top of that unique functionality can be added, ranging from protocols, widgets, scripting, e.a.
Within ‘Designer Cloud Hosting’ we also offer an account management tool, to easily create and manage your own accounts as well as the possibility to link to data storage and analytics in the cloud.
If you are interested to know more about these products, visit openremote.com/solutions or contact us at [email protected]
Professional Designer & Designer Could HostingCertified Integrators create professional projects, combining Professional Designer with Certified Products
OpenRemote for ProfessionalsProfessional Designer & Designer Cloud HostingBy Pierre Kil
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Prodrive TechnologiesPlatform for distributors & service providersBy Tom van de Berg, Prodrive Technologies
The home
automation market has been present already for more than 20 years but was not really hitting the market. Things are now changing as larger companies are working together to define communication standards for this market. With the standardization, different kinds of connected products are emerging in the residential domain. These products need to be controlled in a way they are easily accessible by the end consumer and moreover, ease of installation is key. Therefore, Prodrive is offering an off-the-shelf ODM display and control unit running OpenRemote to companies that are looking for off-the-shelve solutions.
Prodrive Technologies is a 20 years old fast growing company with a core business of designing and manufacturing electronic products. One of the focus markets is the home automation and energy market. Prodrive has designed and manufactured a wide range of products in these markets like a smart thermostat for the Dutch energy company Eneco and a residential gateway as a comfort controller. This is done as an off-the-shelf based product or by a custom design if required by our partners. Due to full automated manufacturing, our products are price competitive compared to manufacturing in the Far-East. For more information please visit our website www.prodrive.nl.
Prodrive is offering a 7 inch touch panel controller with OpenRemote as an ODM (off-the-shelf) product. Depending on the software profiles and configuration this product can be used as a home control unit. It can be used with different profiles for control of lighting, equipment, shades and blinds, and access control. Another profile is the energy manager, controlling your heating system as a thermostat as well as showing the energy usage (electricity, heating) making consumers aware of their energy needs. With the
security profile it is easy to add sensors to the platform to make a complete security system. A combination of these profiles is possible, as are new profiles for other markets like Telecare.
Please contact us if you’re interesting in bringing this product to the market!
Also see: - Prodrive website- Hardware reference platforms
“I have been using the professional version of openremote these past few weeks and I can say that it is much more stable than the free version. I have reached 140 switches up to now, controlling all my KNX home automation (lighting, power, shutters, timers, etc) and I can say that I am having great fun with this software.”
