Home automation tools make our life more convenient by connecting various home appliances together and allowing us to control our home remotely. However, the adoption of connected home solutions is slow and the main reason for that is security. The development of open source home automation tools is the first step to make smart home solutions more reliable.
What is so specific about the open source home automation?
Purchasing any technology, we use it without giving a lot of thought about how it is programmed and what code does it operate on. Why should we?
A lot of people nowadays worry about the security and privacy implications of connecting home technologies to their smartphones, laptops, and world-wide-web. Yes, it gives you the possibility to control remotely your home devices but, at the same time, is it really only you who has access to it? As it is not that hard to hack someone’s computer, connecting it to dozens of other vital home appliances may open your private life to an unauthorized public.
This is one of the reasons why smart home suppliers (and technology developers in general) created open source software. As a consumer of a particular open source software license you have a right to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. The ability to fully understand the software that controls your smart home devices gives you the possibility to view and modify, if necessary, the source code running on your gadgets. Therefore, making it not only more customizable but also more transparent and secure.
The best open source home automation tools
The first step in establishing open source home automation projects is to make sure that the main device that connects all your appliances together is based on the open source technology. Luckily, there is a big choice of open source home automation tools already on the market.
Among them an award-winning solution for smart home and the Internet of Things, OpenHUB. Available on any device that is capable of running JVM, OpenHUB integrates and creates interactions between different home automation technologies.
You should also check out Domoticz, an excellent lightweight home automation tool that monitors and configures lights, switches, sensor and other home devices. This technology is designed with HTML5 frontend and, therefore, is compatible with any browser and accessible from any device.
Home Assistant is another perfect home automation solution, which is running on Python 3. After a quick and easy installation, Home Assistant connects to a wide variety of open source along with commercial smart home technologies, allowing you to track your home devices even from a smartphone and without any need to store your home data in a cloud.
There is also Calaos, a full-stack home automation platform that combines server application, touchscreen interface, web and, native mobile applications for iOS and Android, as well as a preconfigured Linux operating system to run underneath.
Last but not least, OpenMotics, a complete home automation platform with both hardware and software under open source licenses.
