I’m exploring how openHAB could be used in a museum environment to improve both building automation and the overall visitor experience.
Some of the ideas I’m considering are:
Automatic lighting: Turn gallery lights ON/OFF based on opening hours, occupancy, or visitor movement.
Motion sensor automation: Use motion sensors to control lights and ventilation when visitors enter an exhibition area.
Temperature-based HVAC control: Automatically manage AC/fans based on temperature in different exhibition rooms.
Door/window monitoring: Detect when doors or windows are opened and trigger notifications or other automation.
Presence detection: Use staff/visitor presence to control lighting, HVAC, and other systems.
Environmental monitoring: Monitor temperature and humidity to help maintain suitable conditions for sensitive exhibits.
Visitor engagement: It would also be interesting to connect the automation concept with platforms such as PassPlay, which can provide digital membership passes, visitor engagement, messaging, and mobile-app experiences for museums.
Central dashboard: Use an openHAB dashboard to monitor room status, sensors, lighting, temperature, HVAC, and other systems from one place.
I’m interested in finding the best way to combine openHAB-based building automation with modern visitor/member engagement tools in a museum environment.
Has anyone here worked on a similar museum, gallery, zoo, or cultural-building project?
What sensors, bindings, integrations, or automation architecture would you recommend?
I’d especially like to hear ideas around combining occupancy detection, environmental monitoring, energy-efficient automation, and visitor experience in one setup.
Hi and welcome to our community!
Your idea sounds quite interesting, though I have to admit I’ve never done something like this.
That highly depends on the building and your environment.
Is there already some building bus system (e.g. KNX, Dali, Loxone, LCN) installed?
If not, would you rather prefer a wired or a wireless system?
The „physical“ part of the system is where the openHAB community can only share their experience with different systems and vendors, but wrt helping you the focus is on the software side — openHAB.
Occupancy detection, environmental monitoring and energy-efficient automation are what openHAB does a lot and does really well.
Occupancy detection only needs sensors that are capable of talking with openHAB. The exact selection of sensors of course depends on your general approach to the physical part of the system, as explained above.
For environmental monitoring: openHAB supports writing measurements to various different databases and Main UI includes charting capabilities. Alternatively, you can chart the stored measurements with external tools like Grafana.
Automation can be done in various ways depending on your preferences: UI-based, file-based, without code or with code (in various languages).
Visitor experience is something openHAB hasn’t touched (yet). As openHAB provides a extensive and well documented REST API and SSE/WS APIs to connect to openHAB‘s event bus, it should be relatively easy to integrate it into any third party software. Vice-versa, if your visitor experience software provides a documented API, openHAB can be made to talk to it.
I am running openHAB in a small museum. As the museum’s IT infrastructure is virtualized using Proxmox it was easy to create an openHAB containner. It is running for 10 months without a single failure.
As I have Wi-Fi in all exposition areas I’ve opted to use esp based switches flashed with Tasmota to manage lighting.
As Florian suggests you should have some wired infrastructure if you want to use sensors unless you have a local team to replace batteries regularly. If there is an intrusion alarm installed I would suggest to investigate if openHAB can query sensor status from it.
One thing that I’m planning to do is to also manage CCTV, specially line crossing alarms.
HVAC can be a challenge if installed equipments are not IoT ready.
