RESTful Home Automation

Category: Home Automation Tags: , , | 2 Comments

Here are the general steps to get a REST service going on your Raspberry Pi, using Python. One thing that I’ve learned from blogging over the last several years is that extremely detailed, granular how-tos tend to be the most yawned-at posts. So this is just a quick overview of how you can accomplish the goal without going into a lot of detail. If you want that detail, you can drill into the links I’m providing or else feel free to ask questions in comments or via email/twitter.

  1. Go out and buy these things: USB transceiver, plugin transceiver, lamp module (optional)
  2. On your Pi, install apache with sudo apt-get install apache2.  This is the web server.
  3. Also on your Pi, install web2py with sudo apt-get install python-webpy.  This is the module that makes setting up a REST service a snap.
  4. Install some driver dependencies (I will probably later roll these into what I’m doing) with “sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0 python-usb”.  Here are more detailed instructions from the page of the home automation python driver that I’m using.
  5. Follow the instructions on that page for disabling interfering kernel drivers.
  6. Give your user space account permissions to hit the USB device from the referenced instruction page, but note a typo where he says “sudo nano /etc/udevrules.d/cm19a.rules” and you really want
    “sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/cm19a.rules”.
  7. Now go get my stuff from github and run a web server using python rest.py <port>

That’s all there is to it.  Right now, at the time of writing, you would go to http://<your pi’s ip>:<port>/office/on to basically turn everything from A on.  A and office are both hard-coded, but that’s going to change in the next few days as I grow this service to support adding rooms and lights via PUT, and storing them as JSON documents on the server.  You’ll be able to add a light with PUT, supplying the room, light, and X10 code, and then you’ll subsequently be able to toggle it with http://pi:port/room/light/{on/off}

You can also just install Andrew’s driver and use it as-is.  It even has a web mode that supports query parameters.  The reason I didn’t do things that way is because (1) I wanted a REST service and (2) I wanted to be able to customize everything as I went while learning a new language.