HA: DomotiGa Web Interface

DomotiGa is an open source Linux app written in Gambas which I hadn't heard about until now. As part of any good home automation or any connected project is a way to control it remotely and easily, otherwise it's easier just to hit the light switch yourself, right? I am using a Ubuntu Virtual Machine running in VMWare ESXi. VMWare offers ESXi as a free version of there enterprise bare metal hypervisor. ESXi can run on most hardware but if you have trouble there are plenty of guides out there to get drivers working.

One of the easiest ways to get a remote interface is a website. It is much easier, universal and platform independent compared to using an app. There are two types of web interfaces available in DomotiGa. I tested both out to pick the best one for my application and decided that since each one serves a different purpose I would leave both active.



Simple Web Client

DomotiGa Simple Web Client

DomotiYii

From the above screenshots I am sure you can tell the difference between the two. The simple web client is well, simple, and it is great for quickly checking sensor data or controlling switches. But for advanced management, DomotiYii fits the bill. I keep the simple web client running in a browser window on my left monitor. It can auto refresh and the changes turn green momentarily.

This would be a good interface to easily setup a Raspberry Pi with a display on the wall as a status display. DomotiGa has a JSON RPC interface so it wouldn't be hard to grab the data and pipe it into your own front end. There is another system that makes easy to design a UI and interface it with DomotiGa, one is CF iViewer https://www.domotiga.nl/projects/domotiga/wiki/CF_iViewer

La Crosse Weather Station Gateway

Its alive! Last Christmas (or was it the one before that?), I received a La Crosse wireless weather station from my mom who is obsessed with them. This one has just a small display that can gauge inside and outside temperature. What interested me is that it's a simple 433Mhz radio link. So sometime between then and a while ago, I got a 433Mhz receiver from Sparkfun with the intention of capturing the binary data from the outside sensor.

Stock photo from SFE - CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Finally Some Home Automation

With all the busyness of FriedCircuits and with taking a late honeymoon to Europe, there hasn't been very much time left for other just-for-fun projects. It's taken a long time to scale up productivity after our trip. A few weeks ago I finally started to dive into getting some sort of a start on home automation, or domotica, as its called across the pond. Since the failure of the Smart Outelet I decided to start on a smaller piece of the home automation beast this time around. Having been following JeeNodes for awhile now, I wanted to make a custom version in which I actually had done last year and never posted about it. I did some testing with his setup and the HouseMon server running on a Rasberry Pi. I have been toying with the idea of writing my own from scratch but I don't have the time and why reinvent the wheel, right? On my daily travels of the web (Feedly) I have come across a lot of home automation projects, but one piece of software struck my interest and this is what got me back to exploring this space.