In my old flat I had a couple of simple radio-controlled switches, which allowed me to toggle power to a pair of standing lamps - one at each side of the bed. This was very lazy, but also really handy and I've always been curious about automation..

When it comes to automation there seems to be three main flavours:

X10

The original standard, with stuff produced by many vendors and good Linux support.

X10 supports two ways of sending/receiving commands - over the electrical wiring, and over RF.

Z-Wave

This is the newcomer, which despite that seems to be well-supported and extensible. It allows "measurements" to be sent/received in addition to the broadcast of events like "switch on", and "switch off".

Other systems - often lighting-centric

There are toy-things like the previously noted power-controlling things, there are also stand-alone devices from people like Philips with their philips hue system, but given how Philips recently crippled their devices to disable third-party bulbs I've no desire to use them.

One company caught my eye though, Osram make a smart lightbulb and mini-hub to work with it.

So I bought one of the osram lightify systems, consisting of a magic box and a pair of lightbulbs. The box connects to your wifi, and gets an IP address. The IP address is then used by the application on your mobile phone (i.e. the magic box does the magic, not the bulbs). The phone application can be used to trigger "on", "off", "dim", "brighter", and the various colour-changing commands, as you would expect.

You absolutely must use the phone-based application to do the setup, but after that the whole point was that I could automate things. I wanted to be able to setup my desktop computer to schedule events, and started hacking.

I've written a simple Perl module to let me discover bulbs, and turn them off and on. No doubt it'll be on CPAN in the near future, once I can pick a suitable name for it:

$ ol --bridge=192.168.10.136 --list
hall       MAC:8418260000d9c70c RGBW:255,255,255,255 STATE:On
kitchen    MAC:8418260000cb433b RGBW:255,255,255,255 STATE:On

$ ol --bridge=192.168.10.136 --off=kitchen

$ ol --bridge=192.168.10.136 --list
hall       MAC:8418260000d9c70c RGBW:255,255,255,255 STATE:On
kitchen    MAC:8418260000cb433b RGBW:255,255,255,255 STATE:Off

The only niggle was the fiddly pairing, and the lack of any decent documentation. The code I wrote was loosely based on the python project python-lightify written by Mikael Magnusson. Also worth noting that the bridge/magic-box only exposes a single port so you can find the device on your VLAN by nmapping for port 4000:

$ nmap -v 192.168.10.0/24 -p 4000

The device doesn't seem to allow any network setup at all - it only uses DHCP. So you might want to make sure it gets assigned a stable IP.

Anyway I'm going to bed. When I do so I'll turn the lights off with my mobile phone. Neat.

In the future I will look at more complex automation, and I think Z-wave is the way I'll go. Right now I'm in a rented flat so replacing wall-switches, etc, is something I can't do. But the systems I've looked at seem neat, and this current setup will keep me amused for several months!

Tags: automation, lighting, osram lightify | 2 comments