Internet Enabled Xbee Sensor Communicator application for raspberrypi, sensor sketches, and cloud service app

home monitor is a 3 layered platform that lets you control sensors and gadgets from anywhere.

The layers consist of

These are arduino + xbee zigbee sensors that emit and receive packets. They can control anything you want. I'm currently using mine to control a thermostat in my home. I'm also working on an LCD screen that can receive any type of text.

The communicator application runs on any linux computer that has an Xbee explorer plugged into it. For my home I'm using a raspberry pi since its cheap and can be on at all times. The communicator acts as the trunk to the internet for all of the sensors that are connected to it. All sensor communication goes through the communicator and up to the cloud coordinator, or to the local rules engine. The communicator will support running local rules, an example could be that you have a temperature sensor on your 3rd floor, but the thermostat is actually on the first floor of your house. The communicator rule would be, when the 3rd floor sensor reaches 70, turn off the first floor sensors heating relay. Note this type of rule can happen on the Cloud coordinator layer as well.

The cloud coordinator collects sensing data from communicators, and creates the interfaces for interacting with sensors. All of the communicators attach to it, and listen for actions. Clients connect to the cloud coordinator to read and interact with thier sensors. The cloud coordinator exposes 4 different interfaces, Browser website, mobile website, json api, and a socket.io interface that communicators, and clients can receive sensor event, and actions from in real time.

The browser and mobile website is protected using session based login.

The json api is OAuth 1.0a and works with passportjs. Users can allow request access to the api from other applications.

The socket.io interface is protected either with session based login for clients, or with a special encrypted key that is requested over the JSON API, then sent in a message over the socket.io connection after initial set up. This is the primarily way that communicators connect and authenticate using socket.io

I wrote a blog post here about it, with a video and some pictures.

www.bryanpaluch.com

Documentation + Extra feature descriptions.