Domoticz on the B3

[Gordon]

Loving the idea of this home automation, but I found that the Tellstick is somewhat hard to acquire. Browsing the web I also ran into some articles that named this device troublesome and obviously I want it to be compatible with the remote control devices I already have. Also it is just a transmitter and I was thinking you could do a lot more if you could also grab signals that are sent from other devices, such as weather stations.

Apparently the best thing out on the market today is the RFXtrx433 transceiver from Rfxcom. It already supports a long list of devices and you can flash the firmware whenever updates become available to support even more devices. At just under €100,- pricing is also reasonable.

Looking for Linux based or compatible home automation software that utilize the RFXtrx433 I stumbled upon the Domoticz project. While not explicitly meant to run on Pi, they do offer a binary download and even a complete configured OS image for this (ARM driven) device. Shamefully the binary they offer does not run on the B3 though, not even after I checked dependencies and added the missing libcurl.so.4. Installing from source was the only option.

At first I couldn't get the software to find my RFXtrx433 and I started worrying that this might be caused by the bad support for the FTDI serial to USB chip in squeeze. Luckily this proved easy to solve by simply installing libftdi1 and it instantly registered the buttons on my remote - fab

If anyone else is interested in this project, you don't have to compile it yourself. I've packaged the resulting file and added this to my repository. It will also pull in the other required packages, so no worrying about that as well. All you need is an RFXtrx433 and/or other supported sensors and you're ready to go.

[DanielM]

Loving the idea of this home automation, but I found that the Tellstick is somewhat hard to acquire. Browsing the web I also ran into some articles that named this device troublesome and obviously I want it to be compatible with the remote control devices I already have. Also it is just a transmitter and I was thinking you could do a lot more if you could also grab signals that are sent from other devices, such as weather stations.

Yes, the original Tellstick is only transmitting. Tellstick Duo (http://telldus.se/products/tellstick_duo) though is both transmitter and receiver. I use it to both control switches and to get weather info into my Homeautomation.

pm me if you want a demo login to my system to check how it works

/Daniel

[Gordon]

Thanks, but like I said the Telldus device is hard to acquire. They don't have a sales representative in my country and webshops that are supposed to have them either show a blank on the page where Telldus links to or state they are out of stock and delivery could be > month.

I sourced the FRXcom device from a dealer in my own country and it was delivered next day. Tried the device first on my desktop machine and the domoticz software instantly connected to it. Didn't get my weather station, but I quickly found out this transmits at 868Mhz, so that's a no go. Registered to the wunderground API, which is implemented in domoticz, so I now get access to weather information that is gathered about 2km east of where I live - many thanks, to whoever shares that with wunderground.

So I am already up and running. A bit of a shameful thing is that they chose to store the gathered data in an SQLite database, meaning you can't get reliable data from it when trying to query that with another tool. Luckily the whole project is actually based around a single API that spits out json in response to html query parameters, so it's really not that difficult to create specialized webpages to display specific information and trigger actions from shell scripts. I already built a mobile page to display current weather information in a single overview on my smartphone.

[Gordon]

Come to think about it: I may have been misled by the title HomeAutomation on this forum, not noticing the missing space in between. It should probably be moved to the Howtos forum - could some moderator see to that?

[DanielM]

Come to think about it: I may have been misled by the title HomeAutomation on this forum, not noticing the missing space in between. It should probably be moved to the Howtos forum - could some moderator see to that?

Either that, or maybe instead someone (with higher permissions than me) change the forum name instead. Wouldn't it be better if this forum was for home automation in general? Johannes?

Anyway, while talking about the project Homeautomation, I can say that version 3.0 (which has been almost finished for years now but that never really seems to get finished) is way more modularized than 2.0 and now supports plugins for different systems than Tellstick, for example we currently have plugins for enigma1_PLi and crestron. So if anyone here likes the Homeautomation web interface but have for example a FRXcom, it's probably a small task writing a plugin for it

/Daniel