I must first make an apology to the forum for my absence. I have been out of the X10 forum loop for quite some time now.
In my working with home automation and AHP, I found many limitations in things that I wanted to do with my setup. Much of my setup is X10, but some of it is not. For instance, I have an RS-485 controlled thermostat that I wanted to integrate into my HA setup. I also had ideas for other things using products from 1-Wire. The problem was first that AHP lacked the ability to work with anything other than X10 devices. That led me to find other pieces of software to handle some of the other hardware, but then the problem was that I couldn't get any of it to mesh with AHP well enough without creating other custom external programs to do the things I wanted. There are automation software packages out there that bring some of this together, but they cost hundreds of dollars.
I now welcome
Open Source Automation (OSA) to my setup. As the name implies, OSA is completely OPEN SOURCE and FREE. Although OSA is still in beta, it has SO MUCH potential. The biggest thing with this software is that it has plugins for a TON of different types of hardware. If you have X10, Insteon, or Z-Wave in your HA setup, it can all be controlled from one piece of software. OSA also supports things like 1-Wire, Phidgets, J-Works for integrating other types of automation capable hardware. It also has support for different thermostats like Aprilaire, Radio Thermostat, and RCS. Got a USB-UIRT, a Kill-A-Watt meter, want to get some weather data to integrate into your setup, got data from an RSS feed that you want to use? No problem, just install the plugins. If you have a piece of hardware or other type of information that you want to integrate into your HA setup that does not have a plugin, request it in the forums and possibly someone will write the plugin for it. If you have programming knowledge, the API for writing plugins is quite simple. I have written and contributed 2 plugins so far to the project. One of them was for an X10 forum user "Melloware" for his lightswitch app for iPhone and Android. The other was for my RCS-TR40 RS-485 thermostat. Check out the
plugin page to see all of the supported plugins.
OSA also incorporates speech recognition and text to speech capabilities adding to it's awesome flexibility. Ask OSA to turn a light on for you. Have OSA tell you when your garage door is open. Tell OSA to read you the current weather data.
OSA allow you to customize screens for all of your data to create your own custom user interface. If you want a screen that has a floor plan of your house to allow you to click on things and control them, you can create it. If you want a screen to display your weather data, you can create it. If you want to create a menu screen to tie all your other screens together, YOU CAN CREATE IT.
The biggest thing with OSA is that it takes ALL of your home automation technology and brings it ALL into one interface. No more installing this piece of software to control this, and another piece of software to control that. It allows all the different technologies to work together in one piece of software for a common goal, FULLY AUTOMATING YOUR HOUSE. Jump on the OSA bandwagon today and make your contribution to this awesome piece of software.
Dan Bemowski
Author
Topic: Open Source Automation (OSA) (Read 10031 times)