for the research project of a charitable non-profit organisation concerning the possibilties and consequences of “assisted living by IoT” I would like evaluate the adequacy of OpenHAB for the utilization in a living lab.
Because the focus is more on psychological and social impact of IoT for people with handicaps than on technical research, it is important to have a feasible solution for an average single-household with the conventional technical fittings.
The following list describes the main features that are necessary but the mentioned devices/manufacturers are just samples and the final solution should be as cheap as possible and easy and non-destructive to install if possible.
I would be very grateful if you could give me advice which devices providing the requested features running merely out-of-the-box with OpenHAB are available.
Of course any alternative ideas and any questions are welcome!
I also would appreciate if any of you developers would be willing to support the project by creating bindings for those devices that have not been included in OpenHAB so far.
Finally I’d like to say that I would be glad if - with the help of the community - an open source solution will be chosen since this project will probably become very prominent and go global quickly.
I don’t have a lot of specific advice. I know Zwave has devices that hit the majority of your requirements. I’d recommend standardizing on a smallish set of different technologies like Zwave, Zigbee, etc over using dozens of different technologies.
That is going to require:
a developer who actually has this technology or device
the device has a published API
the developer has the skills and time necessary to actually code it
the developer is willing to donate their time and skills to code it
It is rare that one finds all four. This is an open source project. We can’t force anyone to work on anything. And 2 is really really important. If it doesn’t have an API then it is unlikely that a binding is even possible. And even when you find all 4, depending on the complexity of the API, it can take a very long time for a binding to be developed and merged into the baseline (months).
You would be far better off choosing technologies that are already supported by OH.
You are absolutely right and I’m well aware that finding one or even several developer/s here is very unpropable. I will mainly browse the local IT- and hacker crowd and the other charitable tech-projects. But I thought it would be worth mentioning
But I hope I can realise the projet with devices that are already working with OpenHAB.
I would favour standardizing on a smallish set of different technologies like Zwave or Zigbee but it might be possible that some functionalities required and only provided by a few devices that may use different technology.
It is my preferred approach to choose technologies and devices that are already supported by OH.
Therefore I thought it might be good idea to ask your community if some of you could recommend devices that are of similar type to those I’ve listed and running merely “out-of-the-box” with OpenHAB.
One of the main topics is the door lock. It is important that is it non-destructive to install and that there is no attachment on the outside of the door. Therefore YALE is not an option.
If anyone of you has a door lock similar in design to NUKI or DANALOCK running I would be thankful for sharing experience.
Another important topic is the peephole-camera. It might sound a bit weird to us, but people with handicaps have to be very cautious about their security and a camera solution for securing the flat and give relatives the possibility to check who’s in front of the door before opening it is essential.
Since there shall be no attachment outside the flat NEST doorbell with camera (https://nest.com/de/doorbell/nest-hello/overview/) is no option.
I can mention that pretty much all the add-on deadbolt controllers have terrible security. If you can’t replace the whole lock with a new controllable deadbolt that supports zwave or zigbee secure I’d recommend against deploying them at all.
In regards to the camera, OH doesn’t have great support for cameras systems. It can be done but nothing just works out if the box.
