Home Automation System

I’ve hinted at this a few times, namely Windows Phone 7 App – HAWP7, so I thought I’d actually tell you what is it.

HA or Home Automation System is a result from visiting this site and wanting a similar sort of system. For a while now I’ve considering doing something like this but never actually getting around to it mainly because of University and moving house every year.

So I started writing a program. This was about a month ago when I should have been doing my Final Year Project but lets forget about that for now. HA started out simply doing stuff I was going via RDP on my Windows Home Server which included executing various scripts to sort TV Shows and backup websites/work/svn etc.

HA is a server and client application where the server does all the work. The client is just a client and tells the server what to do. This was loosely based on two year old piece of work called MD5 Cracker, that was an assignment and was a distributed system to cracking an MD5 hash, I pretty much just copied the network code and updated it to use JSON although it wasn’t the best it worked! This is when Andrew got on board and its become a joint project between us. Andy is doing a programming degree and is probably the cleverest person I know. It has worked some magic and made everything all cool and stuff!

So here is what HA is at the moment!

HAServer

Running on the Windows Home Server HAServer is headless and currently does the following

• Runs tasks and scripts on the server
• Directly controls X10 devices via a CM11u and keeps track of states
• Wakes sleeping computers via WOL
• Some interfacing with XBMC
• Communication via HTTP and TCP using JSON.

Being a month old the system is quite limited in features but we have big plans!

HAClient

HAClient is the main client and control interface for HAServer, its got the following features

• Setup-less (It gets the HAServer IP via broadcast)
• Configures settings on HAServer
• Fully supports all features on the HAServer
• Displays XBMC information and provides audio controls
• Able to switch x10 devices on and off

 

HAWP7

Since getting a developer unlock for my phone I been working on my client for my HTC HD7 Windows Phone Device. It currently support X10 via the HTTP API

HAAndroid

Andy has a Nexus One and wrote a client for it..

 

Still pretty early days but there you go, I’ll try to keep the site updated with its progress.. In the mean time here is an awesome picture Matt took with this new camera.

Update: HASystem got featured in this months “My Automated Home” over at automatedhome.co.uk : My Automated Home: Tom Lawrence – Home Brew X10 Plus XMBC Control