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«HomEvenT» is a contraction of “home event”, plus funky capitalization.

I wrote HomEvenT because, while playing around with some home automation stuff, I found that none of the free systems out there fit my needs particularly well, plus they are not talking to each other.

In my home, I have a heterogenous infrastructure: some switches need to be wireless, but i also want to keep the existing wired switches; some devices can only be controlled by infrared, some are in places where nothing except stringing some wire works.

The components I’m mostly concerned with are:

• FS20

This is a German wireless system operating in the 868-MHz range. It’s not at all secure and generally doesn’t use two-way handshakes. Wall switches cost €15, a heating controller is €40, so it’s not too bad.

• 1-wire

This is a two-wire bus system — one of these wires is Ground, so apparently it doesn’t count. ☺ In practice, you do need a separate power supply. Personally, I use a cheap shielded four-wire cable (LIYCY).

The bus can be connected rather haphazardly if your wires are not that long, or you can use special branch controllers if you need to be more careful. It works admirably well in my house.

The downside is that there’s no slave code for AVR or other microcontrollers, but I’m working on that.

• LIRC

I use infrared to control the window blinds. Good motors cost around €110 wholesale (or €210 retail ☹).

LIRC is a reasonably integral part of most modern Linux distributions, so the idea to use it as a simple way to control a couple of Linux programs (“if I turn off the room lights in my living room at night, please pause Rhythmbox and/or Totem, turn off power to the stereo, and let the computer hibernate”) has a lot of appeal… and if the lights are not controlled centrally, see above for the cheap light sensor.

HomEvenT doesn’t have LIRC support yet. Helpers wanted.