Developer Spotlight: Brett England, Derek Kennedy, and Home Automation Hub

Meet our friends Brett and Derek, the men behind Home Automation Hub, which can be purchased here with Pachube connectivity built-in.

Tell us about yourselves. On a scale of 1-10 how much of a geek are you?

We are a two man project team. Some time back, we worked together at the same dayjob IT company and quickly found that we had a shared interest in hacking commonly available consumer electronic goods. Brett is the (US based) software guru. Derek (UK based) does the hardware/mechanical and donkey work. We both keep users fed with answers on the project forum and work on the project documentation and roadmap.

Suppose that we’re both kinda geeky but we don’t use iPhones so an average of the geekiness score of 7.



Tell us about your device. What is it, what does it do, and why did you make it?

The Home Automation Hub (HAH) is a WiFi router that has been re-purposed as a flexible Home Automation (HA) controller. In particular, we’ve worked to make the HAH an easy way to get data streams pushed up to and down from Pachube.
The HAH interfaces to electricity usage monitors, controls RF devices, accepts commands via its web UI and Twitter/SMS/Google Calendar. It pushes data to Twitter/email/Google Calendar and, of course, Pachube. The custom hardware includes switchable relays/temperature monitors/switch inputs.Internally it uses xAP as its communications protocol. This a broadcast based protocol so any other xAP device that you have on your network can also use the HAH to feed data to Pachube. The HAH now becomes the xAP/Pachube gateway for all your xAP devices.

We started off the project because we had always wanted a decent HA controller, but didn’t want to pay the high prices that are charged for commercial units (and we didn’t want a PC running 24*7 either). That and it’s always a lot of fun to build something yourself, I think we mainly did it for the fun value.

Why Pachube?

The project needed a datastore and we initially toyed with having a RRDTool server and building our own data storage facility. Then Brett found Pachube, and rather then re-invent the wheel we simply integrated and reaped the benefits. The rest is history.

Pachube makes it easy for HAH users to get feeds up and running. The HAH web interface allows users to associate HAH connected devices, and indeed any xAP device, with a Pachube feed. Being able to visualize your data is very important to understanding what it means and Pachube, along with its community, are doing great work in making this easier all the time.

How was the development process working with Pachube and do you have any advice for other Pachube developers?

The development process was done by simply reading the Pachube API documentation and then writing code that adhered to the calling conventions. The advise given to up and coming developers would be to read the documentation first BEFORE asking lots of questions. Development was a little more difficult in C as there were not any ready made libraries to use. Brett used the samples on the Pachube development pages to understand how things worked and this gave a good foot hold.

What does the future hold for Home Automation Hub? Any other projects in the works?

We are never short on ideas but time is currently in short supply. Having said that there are some neat things on the horizon; Programmable RF to control a myriad of RF devices around the house, increasing the number I/O ports, and adding RF receiver capabilities allowing the HAH to work with wireless PIRs and door sensors.

What inspires you about the Internet of Things?

The really inspiring piece is the ability to aggregate several different datastreams in order to decide when something else needs to happen. We have a Rules and Actions engine inside the HAH this uses Lua scripting, so you need to be able to roll some code in order to make use of it.

Any idea how to pronounce "Pachube"? What's the word on the street in London on what it means?

We say ‘patch-bay’.

If it was a matter of life and death, who would you trust with your API key?

Derek would trust Brett. Brett would trust Derek.

Open or closed?

OPEN! All of the HAH software and firmware is up there for the taking on google code. Full documentation is on the project Wiki editable to those who ask. We encourage HAH users to make their Pachube feeds available for the benefit of the community.

There are many happy HAH users out there who have written up their own blogs and experiences too.