Home Automation Software

I’m doing research on home automation software and would love control my lights, heating and appliances from a remote location and/or from my driod. At first glance, there are a ton of products out there, such as Homeseer software that let’s you control the devices you install, but it runs about $500 and that’s a bit steep for me.

I decided to look for free software to automate the home, something I could run on an old computer and found a number of products that I’ll discuss in detail. Note that there are two ways to do this, one is setting up a server at home or buying a hardware device.

Either way, you can control everything in your home, from the temperature, to security such as motion detection, surveillance cameras, door locks, to lights and sprinkler systems. To do all this, you buy devices and install them throughout the house with everything reporting back to your server.

Automation software that I found to be open source is:

OpenRemote: openremote.org/display/HOME/OpenRemote
Offers a community of people interested in Domotics (another word for home automation software) that all pitch contribute by way of comments or code to the open source project.

Linuxmce: linuxmce.com/
Stands for Linux Media Center Edition turning your computer into a complete command center for total automation. Very popuplar and completely open source!

Virtual Crib is free but not open source. It home automation software that runs on Windows and found at thevirtualcrib.com.

I should note that you want to make sure that all the products, both software and hardware, support the most popular home automation protocols and hardware including X10, Insteon, Z-Wave.

The list above gives you the server software to control all the devices. Below, I list a number of device manufactures that you can buy from.

• insteon.net
• z-wave.com
• kwikset.com/smartseries/smartcode.aspx
• consumer.schlage.com/Products/Pages/RemoteSecurity.aspx

Smarthome.com sells a ton of stuff and I’ve heard they have an excellent return policy but a bit on the expensive side.

I’m new to all this, but until I complete my research and get it all up and running, this will be the place I’ll post my findings. If you have something to add that fits into this, please leave a comment and I’ll look into it!