Launchpad is a project mainly written in ..., it's free.
Home automation and other experiments at the Launchpad
This is a collection of scripts I use for home automation experiments. This code is most likely not fit for general consumption, but feel free to play around with it anyway.
The server communicates to a set of temperature sensors via its serial port. Temperature data is collected at 5-minute intervals and stored in a database. There is a munin plugin which provides the last known temperature to the munin daemon so it can be graphed.
The server in the closet is connected to the CM11A X10 controller on its serial port. There is a great linux command line utility that handles communicating with the device over the serial line. This script is a daemon that listens for incoming UDP packets and interprets them as X10 commands and passes them off to the linux command.
Dependencies:
This script watches the DHCP logs from the DHCP server and uses them to infer when devices and people are present in the network. This ends up working pretty well as a way to tell when someone is home or not. Most mobile phones try to latch on to nearby known wifi networks as soon as possible so they will often get a DHCP address as you approach before you actually get inside the house.
Visits are written to the database for both individual devices as well as people, since there is a mechanism to link devices and people in the database.
When someone enters, the bot constructs a greeting to welcome them home, tailored to the time of day and whether they have been there before.
I found it much more convenient to store my DHCP configuration in a simple set of MySQL tables rather than in raw config files. It allows a few fun things like enabling DHCP presence detection since new devices that get DHCP addresses from the server are added to the database dynamically. There are a few utility scripts for generating the dhcpd config files from the database tables.
Copyright (c) 2011 Aaron Parecki
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