HomeSeer is a commercial Windows-based home automation software package. I’ve seen it demo’d a few times, but I’m not using it myself – nor do I have a license for it (I don’t have a permanent setup running Windows).

The following describes a great new development by Tijl van der Velden, who wrote a very interesting extension for HomeSeer to link into aWSN based on JeeNodes, Room Boards, plus a JeeLink on the PC side.

Tijl just finished his project, which was done as student assignment for Computer Science at the University of Utrecht. He was so kind to send pictures of his setup and screen shots of the resulting application in HomeSeer.

I’m just the messenger in this case, but I’m very happy to be able to report about this on the weblog. For details about Tijl’s project, which has been released as open source on SourceForge, visit the JeeSeer page. The code running on Windows is VBScript, as used by HomeSeer – the software on the JeeLink and JeeNodes are C/C++ Arduino-type sketches.

Here’s his test stup:

You can see the JeeNode with Room Board on top (and the temperature, humidity, light, and motion sensors), as well as an extra LED and small DC motor, driven by a transistor (with the inductive kickback protection diode).

The sketch running on the JeeNode includes some very interesting customizable “decision rules”, which can be configured from HomeSeer. Here’s the customization screen:

The sketch running on the JeeNode looks fairly generic, allowing for different devices, so that you can use the port I/O pins for various purposes – both as inputs and as outputs. From a brief look, it reminds me a bit of Firmata.

The Jeelink is also running a custom sketch, to be able to pass these special requests and replies to a JeeNode and back. As with RF12demo, you can configure the JeeLink to listen on a specific frequency band and filter out a specific net group. This is also nicely configurable from the HomeSeer web interface:

And here is what it’s all about – sensor results and device (i.e. LED + motor demo) control:

Thank you Tijl, for completing this project and for sharing your results and your code on SourceForge. You are making it possible for others to learn from what you did, to plug what you made directly into HomeSeer, and to let people extend things further as the need arises.

It’s great to see the JeeNode – domotics integration becoming a reality!