Raspberry Pi Installation

Since the majority of the OpenNetHome users are using raspberry pi as platform, I have made it easier to install and upgrade on that platform.
I have now added a plug&play installation script for Raspberry Pi which installs the files in the appropriate locations in the file system, configures serial drivers and installs the OpenNetHome server as a daemon that runs in the background with its own user account. All you have to do is to run this script and then you can plug in a TellstickDuo and start controlling your home!

A complete installation instruction including download of the release is:

wget http://wiki.nethome.nu/lib/exe/fetch.php/nethomeservernightly.zip
unzip nethomeservernightly.zip
cd nethomeservernightly/install/raspbian/
chmod +x *.sh
sudo ./install.sh

Included is also an automated upgrade script, which will download the current nightly build and upgrade the installation to that. This script should be copied to your home directory and run whenever you want to upgrade your installation:

sudo ./upgrade_nethome_nightly.sh

The daemon installation is built on the earlier nhs installation contributed by Peter Lagerhem, but is modified quite a bit, so if you are using that you have to uninstall it according to the instructions in the readme-file before you can do this installation.

The installation scripts are available in the nightly build

Graphs

It has earlier been possible to see graphs in NetHomeServer via the separate Thermometer-GUI.

Now I have added the graphing feature to the main NetHomeServer GUI. Any HomeItem with a LogFile-attribute will automatically get a graph-link in the Room-page and in the Plan-page. When you press that link you will get to the graph page of that Item which will display a graph of the values in the log file. This feature is currently built in to all thermometer and humidity Items. On the Graph page you can view the data over a day, over a week and over a month and you can also move back and forth in the data. The graph is also interactive so you can zoom into the displayed graph by selecting an area with the mouse. This feature is currently available in the nightly build.

RF-Bitbanger

I have been working a bit with T Andersson, who has written rf-bitbanger. Rf-bitbanger is a device driver for Raspberry Pi that allows writing of pulse sequences to the GPIO-pins. This makes it possible to connect for example a 9€ 433MHz transmitter directly to the RPi and control remote switches without any additional interface components (see picture above).
I have now made a first version of a rf-bitbanger-HomeItem which can transmit all protocols supported by NetHome via a rf-bitbanger port. This means that for only 9€ you can turn RPi into a complete home control system!

Home Automation on RaspberryPI

Finally, my RaspberryPi arrived, the $25 Linux computer the size of a credit card. So of course I had to get NethomeServer  running on it.

The only real problem was actually to find a good Java virtual machine to use. The only one I have managed to get going with all needed features is OpenJDK, which unfortunately is a bit slow, but now there is a new start-script  for NethomeServer in the nightly build which will start and run NethomeServer on a RasberryPi with the Raspian Linux distribution!

The only feature that does not work so far is the desktop GUI, but the new WEB-GUI works fine, and that is the preferred GUI right now, so this means that all the home automation features may be run on a $25 box consuming less than 5W!

New fixes and features are constatntly being added to RaspberryPi, so faster Java virtual machines (JVM:S) will hopefully come available soon.