Very simple LIFX bulb control

home automation

As fellow LIFX users may know, there is yet to be an official API supporting easy to use locally-installable interface to control the bulbs. (The last part being important, as my internet connection leaves a lot to be desired). This is my solution to the problem - very simple and lightweight implementation of the LIFX bulb protocol.

Advanced lighting effects development with OpenHAB

home automation

I have been a follower of OpenHAB for a while now and I would like to say that it is a very enjoyable and fulfilling journey. Furthermore, I believe that the ability to abstract over many of the hardware specifics is a necessity for any practical application – not even the best vendor can cover all of the bases well.

OpenHAB has seen integration of most of the smart bulbs (LiFX, Phillips Hue, etc.), which allows us to treat every light as a simple object with a colour assigned to it. This solves quite a big problem of needing to …

MongoDB in FreeNAS jail

home automation

This posts describes steps I took to get MongoDB running inside of a jail on my FreeNAS 9.1.1 setup. All commands issued from @freenas are from the main console, and @homeauto_database are from inside of the jail. This step provided me with a fully functional persistence backend for OpenHAB.