| dc.description.abstract | “Solving a decade old problem and helping potentially hundreds of people, while at the same time giving back to the open source community and achieving full control over one's house.” That is a very exciting way to describe the application that is the result of this project.
The main goal of this project was to create an app that works like a bridge between the user’s xComfort system and their home automation software. Until now, there has been no* good third party alternatives to the 13 year old software one could buy from the manufacturer.
And that software only handled the one system.
The application would speak to the xComfort hardware by using a reverse engineered protocol to talk to the Communication Interface (CI), and have the ability to connect to other systems as well.
By a stroke of luck, there was no need to reverse engineer the protocol, and one of the major third party Home Automation systems released an update that allowed using the message protocol MQTT to talk to the back end, removing the need to develop a custom one.
Also, it was confirmed that generic RF devices DO mostly use industry standards for their communication.
*There is ONE, but it’s neither free nor open source. | |
