96Boards Consumer Edition, IoT and using sensors

I’ve been playing with the CE version of the 96Boards for more than a year now and I’ve done a few things with it, I’ve controlled relays, valves, I’ve read a few sensors and I‘ve lit more than a few LED’s. What I have not done is done a project from end to end. It’s time to change that, so what I’m going to do is first get a bunch of 1.8v and 3.3v i2c sensors and get them working with 96Boards both CE and IoT boards. I’m planning on using temperature, humidity, air/barometric pressure, ground and air moisture sensors, ambient light detection. Level Shifters, i2c translators, some servo motor control, and maybe some stepper motor control.

I’m going to target Home Automation. From sprinkler control, to HVAC rezoning, maybe some home security, who knows. Now I’m not going to write an entire home automation system from scratch. No first I’m going to get the sensors working, servos being controlled, etc, hopefully you the community will pitch in, we will use a CE 96Board where it makes sense, use a Carbon or other IoT board where that makes sense. We’ll also look at Open Source Home Control software applications out there and see what might make sense for us to use together. Maybe we can add a Google Home or Amazon Alexa control too! So I’ll kick this off with mating sensors to CE and IoT 96Boards, and if everyone pitches in we can build a complete Home Automation System.

First place folks can jump in is short blog entries of sensors you have already succeeded in connecting to a 96Board. We will publish that on the 96Boards web site and give you a chance to talk about it on an OpenHours session. Remember how far we take this depends on your contributions and interest.

Another area you can help is looking at existing Open Source Home Automation software suites/frameworks. Are you already using one? Have you written one because you could not find one you like? Let’s talk about it. I did a quick google search and came up with following:

Software	License	Source Code Type
Calaos	GLPv3	C++
Domoticz	GPLv3	C++
Home Assistant	MIT	Python 3
OpenHAB	Eclipse Public License	Java
OpenMotics	GPLv2, GPLv3 and AGPLv3	Python, PHP and JavaScript
MisterHouse	unknown	Perl
Linux Home Automation		Seems to rely in MisterHouse as it’s core, but has lots of links and interesting info at this site.

I tend to be biased toward C/C++ and some variant of the GPL license or MIT, and I don’t like code that I can’t find a license statement for. But let’s see what else might be out there and if anyone has tried any of the above software I’d love to know what you think of it.

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Don’t forget, if you get stuck, 96Boards offers many helpful resources. Feel free to check out the 96Boards forums, 96Boards documentation landing page, and/or Freenode IRC channel #96Boards (there are many ways to access IRC, this website is one of them). Dig around the docs and website, create a new forum thread, and/or post a question in the chat, myself or one of the 96Boards developers would love to help!

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