Maintenance

The development activity has been low on this project lately, but I get reports that the servers keep running out there... The web sites however were in kind of a bade state due to missing upgrades. This has been fixed now, so http://opennethome.org/, http://wiki.nethome.nu and http://forum.opennethome.org are up and running again!

More MQTT

I have been receiving feedback and requests for more MQTT-Support in OpenNetHome. After some discussions and feedback rounds I have ended up with two new Items:

MqttCommander
This is item has four command-actions and when an action is triggered a corresponding MQTT-Message is sent to a configured topic.

MqttLamp
The MqttLamp behaves like a standard lamp, and controls a lamp/switch via MQTT. You configure the topic of the device you want to control and the messages used to turn the device on or off. The MqttLamp will also listen on that topic for those messages to update the state if it is changed from another source.

These Items makes it possible to include devices controlled via MQTT as Home Items.

As usual, the Items are available in the nightly build

IKEA Increases security

In the latest firmware update of their gateway, IKEA has increased security by introducing DTLS Identities which means that each client (such as OpenNetHome) has to use its own client identity and has to request its own pre shared security key from the gateway.

Unfortunately this change is not backwards compatible, so as soon as you do a firmware upgrade of your gateway, the old IkeaGateway-Item in OpenNetHome stops working.

I have now implemented the needed changes in the IkeaGateway-Item, and it is available in the nightly build. When you upgrade, the IkeaGateway-Item will automatically request the client security key from the gateway. According to IKEA's recommendations the IkeaGateway-Item no longer stores the original security code once the client code is generated.

The new ClientName attribute does not normally have to be changed from the default value when you create a new IkeaGateway-Item, but if you have multiple Items connecting to the same gateway, each Item must have a different ClientName.

I think it is good that IKEA takes IoT-security seriously and works actively to increase it in their solutions.

NetHomeServer 3.0

I am happy to announce a new official release of NetHomeServer! Originally the plan was to call the next release 2.1, but now so many new things has been added since the last release, so it made more sense to call it 3.0. All new features are listed in the release notes here, and the major additions are the Raspberry Pi installation, the REST interface and the support for IKEA Trådfri. As usual, the features have already been available in the nightly build for a while.

A new part of the WEB-Site is the Feature Index. This is a way to try to visualize all the features that are available in OpenNetHome, and to guide you to the proper HomeItems to use that feature. Welcome in to browse around the features!

Customizing Plan View

I have for long time had requests to be able to change the Icons for Items in the Plan view. A typical example is that a remote switch may for example control a coffee maker, but the Item used is actually a NexaLamp (which in reality is a remote switch) which has a lamp bulb as Icon.

I have been a bit reluctant to add this, because it is a bit of work and other features has always felt more important. Now I got requests to customize other aspects of the plan view as well, and then I realized that the easiest way to be able to customize anything is to allow a custom css file to be added. This is now added in the nightly build.

So, to change the Icon for a specific Item to a coffee maker, you first upload the image file (coffee32.png) to the media library (in settings). Then you find out the ID of the Item by looking at the Item details page (Id is 44 in this example) and make a small css-file that looks like this:

#ID44 li.icon.lamp_off {
    background: url(coffee32.png) no-repeat center;
}

#ID44 li.icon.lamp_on {
    background: url(coffee32.png) no-repeat center;
}

You upload the .css file in the media library, go to the plan page, click "edit this page" and select the css-file.

This is just one example a what can be changed this way.

Custom Lamp

I have got some vacation hacking time, so I have also added an other HomeItem on a user request. A number of users use OpenNetHome partly as a GUI front end for their own implemented hardware, which is exactly what one of the goals with the project is. In this case the user had connected a number of relays which are controlled via shell scripts, and wanted them to be presented as Lamps in the GUI.

I added the CustomLamp-Item, which behaves like a lamp, but you can configure the on- and off-actions in the Item. Those actions can be to call actions in other Items or as in this case to call external shell scripts.

The CustomLamp-Item is in the nightly build

Prologue Thermometer

Since Clas Ohlson in Sweden has a sale on Prologe wireless thermometers (http://www.clasohlson.com), I added support for their wireless sensors in OpenNetHome. It is in the nightly build and the Item is called PrologueThermometer. It supports auto create, so as soon as a sensor is detected it pops up on the Detected Devices Window ready to use.

Unfortunately, Telldus has not (yet) added support for it in the TellstickDuo firmware, so it can not be used if you are using TellstickDuo as RF receiver.