How to Smart Home · A Step by Step Guide to Your Personal Internet of Things

The book explains the key concepts of smart homes and provides a step by step instruction to build an Internet of Things for personal usage. It covers all major technologies and vendors: from Apple HomeKit to Z-Wave, from Google Nest to Bluetooth LE, from OpenRemote to ZigBee. It walks the reader through an actual implementation of a smart home system using state of the art technologies such as tablets, smartphones, a rule engine and the Internet in conjunction with the latest wireline and wireless home automation standards. Technologies and platforms which are used in the projects described in the book are:


Wi-Fi / WLAN

Telnet, HTTP, TCP/IP

Z-Wave

ZigBee

Drools (an open source object oriented rule engine)

OpenRemote (an open source building automation platform)

Operating systems: Mac OS X / Linux / Windows


The resulting smart home control system is capable of:

smartphone / tablet based display of weather and temperature

WLAN / smartphone based presence control

smartphone / tablet based control of lights, heating, power-outlets, consumer electronics

smartphone / tablet based scenario control for scenarios such as Good Morning, Welcome, Good Night, Leaving Home

operation of an audio reminder system with text-to-voice conversion of calendar items

rule based scenario execution triggered by time, date, weather condition, temperature, WLAN/smartphone based presence detection

automatic daily temperature report in CSV format sent via email

heartbeat function to monitor system availability

watchdog monitoring of the heartbeat with automatic alert email