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Our mission: To develop, create and maintain a very cheap, reliable, opensource domotica system without 3th party domotica products.
Now, this will be pc-based 'cause that's the best way to go I guess, a fully hardware solution would cost much more than an old pc and wont have as much possibilities. For the operating system, our choice goes to linux, for it is much more reliable than the erhm... commercial OS's (we don't want to come home and find all our lights blinking, windows (!) open, heaters and fans on, doors unlocked and an alarm siren yelling).
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The pc controlling your house doesn't have to be some beast ticking away megaflops... I use an old 386-40 which really is all you'll need... Just make sure it has enough serial, parallel and gameports (mine has 2 serial, 2 parallel and 2 gameports) because you will need 'em if you wanna do cool things.
Domotica is COOL |
As I said, interfacing to the outside world will be based on the i/o ports of the pc, parallel for switching appliances and lights, gameport for the sensors, serial for the IR remote control and modem/terminal/dimmer. And later on the keyboard port for wall switches and other non-continous inputs. A soundblaster is also nice for voice feedback (or recognition if you've a fast pc). And I strongly advise hooking it to the network/internet since this brings much more functionality (and of course allows hackers to haxxor your leeto domotica server and do funny stuff with your house) |
Now for the good stuff, we are experimenting on 2 systems, mine (necroman) and unidog's. Both have different servers and linux distro's... but that makes almost no difference... if any. There's even (limited) support for FreeBSD nowadays. |
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There're also some differences for the swithing. I use solid-state relays, because they can be hooked directly to the port, so don't need external power (a pp can't bring enough power to power a normal relay), can do more cycles/s, and have no mechanical components, so they are more reliable and last longer + they don't make noise and don't get hot after weeks of being on. Unidog uses the mechanical relays because they're cheaper than solid states. For the electromechanical relays you need to make a separate board for powering them. I would advise you to use ssr's.
Here are some pictures of my system
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