Linux Home Automation

mister house
Mister House is a long standing open source home automation project. It’s written entirely in Perl and works on almost any platform. It also supports many different home automation devices like X10. Control is driven through a web interface and has voice feedback and recognition. Lots of extra modules have been developed for this project so you’re sure to find something unique: from voice announced caller ID, to GPS vehicle tracking over FRS.

[thanks Clu]

13 thoughts on “Linux Home Automation

  1. cool site – i was recently thinking of trying to tie in my thermostat with my computer, maybe via x10 if they have a thermostat. the electric bills have been so high this summer and my ac is so old, i thought it would be nice to be able to tweak it a little.

    iirc, gps position reporting over frs is only legal with the garmin rino’s – they got some sort of exemption. otherwise, transmitting data over frs is not allowed.

    the only thing i see on the misterhouse site about gps is vehicle tracking via ham radio (aprs). it would probably work equally well when plugged into an frs radio, aside from the very short range.

    regardless, it would be nice if the ac could turn on when i got within 10 miles of home, or something like that :)

  2. hey i remember checking out this project several years ago, seems like he has done some improving on it, i just downloaded the latest program (have yet to check it out). i’ve always been interested in home automation and think that this is a valuable contribution towards the community. basically i think that everything should be controlled by computer so that when skynet does take over, we’ll at least have a challenge when our blenders and toasters etc try to kill us!

  3. i looked at this some time ago and gave up as it was way over complicated (and i’m a programmer in perl/php!).
    i just wrote my own bits and pieces together, and bought an ippower9212 device which gives you 8 input and 8 output connections, directly linked to cat5 (with web interface too). v neat unit and does a lot of what most people are after (you can also write a nice udp client to talk to the unit/get/set status of i/o).
    (more info on my website if you’re interested)

  4. “down already? was this posted on /.?”

    not yet, but from a look at the urls he is using port 81 to hsot http and he is using a w3 subdomain. This suggests to me that he is running on a home cable or dsl connection, and a link from hackaday would be enough to kill most of those.

    A traceroute appears to confirm this. Here is line 20
    20 24-159-193-24.static.roch.mn.charter.com (24.159.193.24) 753.519 ms * 1091.624 ms

    Looks like a cool project, i’ll bookmark it and have a closer look when it starts responding a bit better

  5. Hey you stole my site’s name! OK so that was a lot like advertising :-). Any way, the http://www.misterhouse.com/ site is still up and running. I think there have been a number of problems with DNS lately (hey I can’t get to Cisco today, 8/19). But sometimes Bruce is busy doing work on it. And yes it’s kept updated. Bruce has a very active mailing list (see http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/).

    BTW, yes I run the Linux HA site and right now I’m busy writing software for the Insteon hardware. I don’t know how reliable it is but I’m hoping for better than X10 (it looks really promising). Next month I’ll be purchasing some more hardware and we’ll see where this gets us.

    To HackIreland, if you get a chance you might check out http://www.realsoftware.com/ (RealBasic) supposed to be pretty good (never used it). I program in other languages (just about everything else).

  6. Misterhouse is awesome but would get much better adoption if you wrapped a friendly installer around it or provided rpm packages. Many non-linux-more-hardware-type-geeks are interested in using it for their HA but are put off by the aura of shell scripts and such.

Leave a Reply to Insteon vs X10Cancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.