Show HN: KaithemAutomation, the home automation system for coders and artists https://ift.tt/Tv1CeKE

Show HN: KaithemAutomation, the home automation system for coders and artists I've talked about this one on Reddit a bit, and I think it's finally about ready to talk about here. I started this project around 2013 for internal use, and GPL licensed it because I have no desire to own my own software business. Kaithem is, for the most part, somewhere between a SCADA and a Home Assistant clone, heavily focused on easy deployment with minimal tinkering. It allows for Python code based if-then events you edit via the web, along with web-editable HTML dashboards, but also includes loadable modules for more point-and-click style editing. One of these is Chandler, a scenes/cues manager that includes a simple visual scripting language inspired by ladder logic. It saves everything you create in Git-friendly plain text files, and is meant to integrate well with a linux system, with convenience features like using the user account username/password to log in. Device drivers created via an extension API, and can also be used in non-kaithem apps, via the iot_devices library. Drivers should be share-able and installable via pip. There's also basic builtin support for IP cameras, including sub-second latency streaming via websockets, and object detect recording. Out-of-the-box device support is pretty limited at the moment, consisting entirely of stuff I've had a use case for personally, but does include YeeLight, RTL433-supported sensors, SainSmart relay boards, and most anything ZigBee2MQTT can handle. In addition, there are tag points and alarms vaguely copied from SCADA systems, modules can make use of the tagpoint object, which is like a variable that hooks into the tag point system, every point gets a management page where you can set alarms, set up logging, which includes the ability to only log the min, max, or average over time, to save space, and override it's value. It uses only external dependencies found in the Debian repos, and does not include any crazy built in custom feature downloader thingy like some similar projects, nor anything that needs compilation. It does not use a database, separate web server, or any other thing that would require you to specifically configure the system in an unusual way, although some features can make use of MQTT, and it does depend on PipeWire being set up if you want to use the built in audio live mixer(You may also be able to use it with manually started JACK). It's 99% stable, used in real installs, and could probably be called v1.0 already, but there are unmaintained experimental features that will probably disappear(Anything that involves a custom nonstandard network protocol is on the chopping block, as per my philosophy of decustomizing technology, as is HTTPS support as that may be better done externally). https://ift.tt/RLxMbEO September 28, 2022 at 07:11AM