2010-10-25

Speed Record

I have now a new personal development speed record. One of the more active NetHomeServer users (Walter) had bought a pair of smoke detectors with wireless connection (one goes off -> both goes off) which uses the standard 433.92MHz band. He sent me a raw dump of how the protocol RF signal looks (as a ProtocolAnalyzer .jir-file). It proved to be a pretty simple 3 byte space length encoded protocol which simply sends an address of the smoke detector.

And on the standard development time window (between supper and the late news) I managed to implement a protocol decoder for the protocol, test it and build new versions of ProtocolAnalyzer and NetHomeServer which supports the protocol - and which actually worked directly when Walter tested them!

Ok, ok, I know I am bragging now, but this was actually part of the goals with NetHomeServer - to have a framework where it is possible and easy to implement in small increments. To be honest, It took another evening to implement the unit test and the HomeItem which uses the protocol.

So now the nightly builds of NetHomeServer supports the new protocol "NexaFire" and there is a new Item called "NexaSmokeDetector" which can invoke commands when it receives a fire alarm via RF.

2010-10-09

Rising Sun


Now I have added support for a new remote switch on request from a user. Here it is sold under the name "Rising Sun" and it is sold as a set of three plug in switches and a remote (for around 10 EUR). The protocol is yet a variation of the ArcTech based (like Nexa). The system supports four switches per "channel" and four different channels.

The odd thing is that the remote actually supports multiple keys pressed simultaneously. The NetHome decoder handles this, but it sort of assigns its own button-values to the different combinations.

The Decoder is called "RisingSun" and is available in the nightly build now.

2010-10-04

Home made hardware

One of the nice things about NetHomeServer is that it is relatively easy to build your own low cost hardware to control radio and IR devices for home automation via the speaker output of the computer. You can also receive messages via the microphone input. NetHomeServer has encoders which can encode and decode a lot of protocols over the audio channel.

To my surprise I get questions from people that have designed such interfaces. I didn't think there were so many hardware designers out there! I have now collected a few such designs that I have made and some that users has sent to me on a new hardware page. So if you are one of those who have built a nice interface to NetHomeServer (or ProtocolAnalyzer), mail me some pictures and I will publish them too on the HW pages.