I’ve recently started down the path of home automation.  As well as my alarm which I can control from my mobile app, I’ve recently invested in some Lightwave RF switches and sockets, as well as the mood controller, and a PIR controller, however, I wanted to take this one step further.

You can buy a Lightwave RF wifi link, but this is around £70 and I consider this over priced given the technology within it and I expect this cost is related to the web portal you have to use to go with it, so I took it upon myself to build something similar at a cheaper rate using open source hardware.

I’ve got an arduino and a raspberry Pi, and decided initially that the arduino is better suited to this task.  I purchased a RF 434MHz transmitter and receiver, wired this into the arduino, and sure enough, I now have a method to broadcast the relevant RF signals to the various sockets.

This took a few hours to get working correctly but I’ve now got my arduino paired with all my sockets/switches and a serial connection into the arduino to power on/off each of these, as well as a ‘kill’ all off setting to turn everything off without question.

From there, I’ve paired this to my raspberry pi via serial, and then very quickly created a set of PHP pages and shell scripts that allow me to turn on/off the various switches/sockets!

My next steps are to create a mobile app version of this with more functionality, to enable the dim function on the lights and replicate the mood switches in software.

I also need to build the hardware properly – it’s currently in a breadboard now, with the antenna wire stuck in with blu-tack rather than being soldered in!

I plan to document much of this process here.  The majority of the information is scattered around the internet and freely available, but I plan to document the full process here to pull it all together!

My 434MHz receiver does’t seem to be up to the job either, so I need to invest another few quid into a better one.

To give an idea of cost, the transmitter and receiver together cost less than £3, and an arduino is around £20.  So less than a third of the cost of the wifi link, though admittedly, I’m missing the scheduler UI they have, though CRON does me just fine right now 🙂