I’m very excited by playing with openHAB2 these days. There are so many add-ons and great boards (RPi, A64, etc.) and openHABian make deploying openHAB very easy. However, adding ZigBee and Z-Wave modules and antennas will dress the board as a hedgehog which makes the WAF lower
Because I’m working for a hardware company and we are building a consumer home automation gateway product, so I think if I ported OH2 to this hardware, there would be a new higher WAF geek’s toy.
The hardware has a quad-core Cortex-A7 processor @1.3GHz, 1GB RAM, 8GB flash, on board ZigBee/Z-Wave/Wi-Fi/BLE modules, 2500mAh backup battery, mic and speaker, RGB light ring, HDMI slot, and a fancy looking case for high WAF, and internal UART ports for hacking.
I’m still a novice of OH2 and I’m not sure if it’s a good attempt or not. Is the hardware powerful enough to run OH2? Is there anything must be noticed when doing the porting? …
It will be great if you could give me some advice before I jump into it.
Thanks for reading, have a nice weekend.
Yes you should be able to run OH2 on this for a reasonably sized home installation, and as long as you have a Linux distribution w/ Java working on your HW, there’s no work in ‘porting’ OH, you can simply install it (you then of course have to do all the things yourself that openHABian does for you).
Yes, sticks and antennas don’t look nice, but so what ? It’s a SERVER that you can hide. It does not have to be visible or easily accessible for things to work.
WAF is not important on the server but on access devices such as switches and tablet UI, and on automation algorithms.
why is a beautiful peace of aluminium, which does the exact same thing, not a “real” server?
i would recommend not to call this guys idea into question, because there is a market for beautiful devices. Don’t get me wrong, i don’t like apple or something and do like 19" racks, but i’m old enough to see, that this works for many many people!
@mlzy: are there some pictures yet? prototypes or something?
Also take care that probably every serious home automation setup will feature quite a number of additional devices such as your broadband and/or WiFi router, a number of gateways into various technologies (such as a MAX! cube, Chromecast, a Hue bridge, a Homematic CCU etc.), a switch, eventually a NAS, and so on. Most of these neither look nice nor are available in DIN rail or 19" rackmount format.
There’s little point in having a fancy-looking server sit next to a lot of devices, some of which are ugly, and all of different design, with a lot of cables inbetween. You could have a shiny server but in the end, your “data center” doesn’t look nice anyway. Cross-check with this thread.
@mstormi@stefaanbolle Thank you for your opinion. I think I started to understand what is the main scenario of using OH: make it as an automation server. In my mind it was a ultimate gateway for everything
I will try more to find the better way of using OH2.
Well, OH is the ultimate gateway for (almost) everything in terms of home automation, but OH is just software.
You need a complementary device (or set thereof) to have every HW layer, too, i.e. 868 MHz ZWave, 433 MHz RF, 2.4/5 GHz WiFi, 2.4GHz ZigBee, 1 wire interface, digital and analog 0-10V inputs, some Ethernet ports, DSL, DECT and analog phone, space and connectors for SATA or USB storage etc etc. And while no single such device exists today, there’ll keep appearing manufacturers with proprietary systems and protocols that they don’t publicise, so gateway functionality can’t be built into OH or SBC HW.
@spy0r Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally supporting the idea and fancy devices might be good home automation systems.
But being able to mount it on a DIN rail together with the components it steers (Nikobus,…) is a valuable feature for me. I use a Mios Vera and it’s hard to give it a decent place between the alarm panel,… it controls.
@mstormi
I think I can imagine that.
Ten years ago I still have a lots of machines in my house (including real servers as IBM RS6000 and Sun SPARC mounted in a 19" rack, I was a big fan of UNIX). But before my first child was born, I received an order to wipe out every machines because they look very dangerous.
Today the only x86 server I have is an HP MicroServer Gen8 I try to only use wireless and cordless devices and wrap the wired equipment into the wall. For example I use Linksys WRT1900AC running OpenWrt as the main router placed in the live room (because sometimes it needs a reset), except this all of the other Wi-Fi APs are mounted in the wall.
I think my next mission is developing a neatness home automation deployment guide
I try to only use wireless and cordless devices and wrap the wired equipment into the wall. For example I use Linksys WRT1900AC running OpenWrt as the main router placed in the live room (because sometimes it needs a reset), except this all of the other Wi-Fi APs are mounted in the wall.