New project: Lumia 640 as touch control device for my home automation
The other day I was chatting with Morten Nielsen on twitter about some ideas for home automation. I want to be able to control lights, temperature etc in some rooms in my home. Ideally that would be done with some kind of easy to use touch screen device. The Raspberry Pi came to mind. There are some screens you can attach to it. It’s low power and pretty easy to put inside the drywall and make the screen look nice on top of that.
Morten mentioned he used a Dell Venue Pro 8 is also a nice and affordable device. But when I found out you can switch your Windows 10 Mobile device to embedded mode it sounded that a really affordable Lumia 640 (last one I bought was just $60 on AT&T and I got a free unlock code as well) would be a perfect fit too. It has al kind of sensors, so you can undim the screen when somebody is in front of it. Cortana should work for voicecommands. It runs any Windows 10 Universal App (Morten is working on an AllJoyn solution).
We have provisioning tools to configure the devices, heck, i could use my intune test account to maintain the devices as well.
Plenty of ideas to look into and so I will try to post some of my findings during the way about what I want to do and what the results of these investigations are. Some of the things which needs to be solved are:
- I need an app which is a dashboard which can control my z-wave lights, temperature, perhaps music and intergrate with security cameras
- It need to be easy to configure the devices in every room and easy to update the software as well. So i am looking into writing my own updater app (packagemanager) and provisioning of the devices by using our provisioning tools
- Cortana integration would be cool
- Device could be a bluetooth token which opens some possibilities
- Device could be a IP camera for security purposes
- AllPlay music services, control music playing in the entire home, although i need to hook up some good speakers instead of just the device
Plenty of stuff to figure out and probably never a project which will be completely done.
Comments
Comment by Chris van Zadel on 2016-01-25 00:53:56 -0800
Matthijs, I use fibaro as a service gateway to z-wave devices.
http://www.fibaro.com/en/the-fibaro-system/home-center-2
Good luck !
Greets, Chris (remember me?..)
Comment by Matthijs Hoekstra on 2016-01-27 16:54:27 -0800
Ik gebruik smartthings bevalt ook prima. De hub werkt prima, ik heb betere controllers nodig in elke kamer, vandaar dit project.