User Interfaces
The User Interface is generally the set of tools used to interact with the nodes of the network, the front-end needed to illustrate and manipulate a model, in our case made up of many independent nodes. an User Interface could also be a 'real' one, like a wall switch to power a device remotely, a thermostat, or a complex software.
The first and official User Interface for Android is SoulissApp, this is an application able to connect to your network using the MaCaco protocol. It gets data using an Ethernet node as gateway to all others in the network.
SoulissApp follow a configuration-less approach, it detects automatically the gateway node and is able to identify all nodes on your network, including the action that they can perform.
SoulissApp allows time and geo-referenced actions, so that you can control your devices based on the information collected by your smartphone, on a higher level of abstraction. Last, but extremely important, SoulissApp uses MaCaco, the Souliss event-based protocol. The time required to notify an event over your network and also event into your smartphone is impressively low.
An increasing interest is around openHAB and it can be used as interface to Souliss using the openHAB Binding for Souliss.
openHAB is a server written in Java that runs on mostly of the operative system and even on tiny nodes like Beagle Boards and RaspberryPi, it can work with multiple binding at same time allowing a centralized control.
Using Souliss you can build a network of Arduino nodes that interact with openHAB and use its functionality. The openHAB interation isn't configuration-less and require a more detailed knowledge of the two systems (Souliss and openHAB) but it opens to a thousand of possibility, including the remote control via web browser and the integration with commercial products.