The Home Automation Hub

A converted Livebox

Ever wanted to have intelligent lighting, walk into a room and the lights come on, walk out and they turn off again. Or what about turning things on or off remotely, using SMS, a web interface or even Google calendar. Perhaps you’d like to monitor your energy usage, receiving Twitter notifications when the usage goes above a certain level or a certain door is opened, well now you can, and it’s all thanks to the Home Automation Hub.

The Home Automation Hub project, HAH, allows you to do all of the above and more. I first came across this project on the Automated Home website, and although this might be quite a niche project, I’m surprised it hasn’t been featured on Hackaday yet.

The project takes an Orange Internet router, and converts it into a server. This server allows you to do many things on it’s own, but, if you add the additional HAH kit, you can do so much more. The kit allows you to control the Bye Bye Standby RF plug sockets, control relays and use the 1-wire protocol for temperature monitoring. The implementation of the xAP protocol enables communication and control between all the devices. The HAH is also able to interact with popular web services such as Twitter, Google Calendar and Pachube. Read this to discover how I connect a Current Cost Envi to my HAH and then to Pachube, enabling me to produce the graph below.

Current Cost Live Data Feed from Pachube

Your data can be used in many ways, and part of the fun is thinking about the different things that you can monitor and what you can then do with that information.

Moving Forward

Having got the CurrentCost working, it’s now time to move onto part 2 of my plan, controlling appliances around the home. I ordered a pack of three ByeBye Standby energy saving sockets. These allow you to turn a socket on or off remotely and can be controlled individually or in groups. I also ordered the parts bundle from the HAH website, this will allow me to control devices both remotely but also conditional, based on things like temperature or light level by using the Plugboard scripting that they have designed.