Here you will find detailed description of the home automation projects we've implemented in our house. Initially we started by installing one room controller board per room. It has built in RS485 interface, RTC, backup battery, EEPROM memory for settings, 6 relay outputs. It's used for temperature/lighting control. There's one LAN to RS485 board to allow interfacing to the server. Initially there was one Linux PC based server which ran Perl script and also it had www server, ftp server etc. Later we replaced it by a TINI board. Instead of running Perl script we use updated and modified version of Rapture application developed by Alan Moore initially and later modified and updated by us. This application us similar to crontab utility used at Linux based platforms. You can find the modified Rapture application here. It allows the user to run specific tasks at specific times like switching on/off washing machine, dish washer, coffee maker, lights in some rooms, heaters in specific rooms according to schedules of their inhabitants :-) We use 220V electric valves to turn on/off the hot water supply to heaters inside the rooms. Every room has one I2C temperature sensor which is connected to the corresponding room controller.
We also have developed PDA based application to remotely check and control the status of every device/room/temperature. If this application is run on a PDA phone it can connect through GPRS or 3G to the house and check/control virtually everything inside.
Later we will add block diagrams of the whole system.
Today at 1st of January 2008 I found a small bug which was preventing any task being run at the first month of the year. I found it because I use Rapture to turn on/off the heating in my house and after New Year's party I expected some heaters to be turned off in the morning or noon rather :-) which never happened. This is how I found out about this bug, fixed it at once and published a new version. Enjoy it and Happy New Year 2008 to everybody!
Please, go to Downloads page and download the software again.
|