5 minutes reading time
Technology adaptation comes at a price - a house full of wires. Mine is no exception. My wire mesh/mess included:
A WIFI router to distribute internet
UPNP/DLNA enabled media center in living room (Iomega) to view content.
A music player system to hook up to portable music player via 3.5 mm plug. Often plugged in simultaneously for charging.
Ever ON laptop to keep internet alive (24online/cyberoam - vendor internet sign-in program for Hathway – my ISP ), doubling up as a file server and UPNP media/content download machine
A Nintendo Wii to play arcade games of old times available on Wii store.
Ugliness – Too many wires with power adapters, and a power strip
Way more power consumed due to multiple devices.
Many remotes
Too many devices much space taken
Inability to customize behavior of propriety programs. Eg:
-Watching you tube on Iomega media center was painful: YouTube automatic speed detection and buffering works horribly on my meager 1 MBPS unlimited connection. -The propriety internet client (ccrclient) crashes pretty frequently.
Started exploring alternatives, basically a solution to replace all 5 hardware devices and exploring alternative software which provided equivalent or better functionality.
Open source is a goldmine for people looking for alternatives to propriety software. Some which i discovered on my quest:
Hostapd Enables creation of a Wireless AP using USB adapters. Basically users can “create” and customize their own WiFi routers
Kodi (formerly XMBC) It is difficult to describe Kodi in few lines. However, If i were to make an attempt – Kodi is the most sophisticated media server available to mankind. Plays all possible formats, pulls media metadata/artwork/subtitles on the fly from internet, provides feeds to popular internet channels and lots more. Kodi can be called a “media shell” for Linux just like MATE/GNOME/KDE are for general computing.
Linc Daemon This is a replacement for Cyberoam and 24online propriety clients. This was hard to find and did not compile easily. Managed to find an old project and made some minor patches. The patched sources are on github : https://github.com/codeparity/linc-daemon
Mame An amazing open source project which allows you to play vintage arcade games.
Tested out the software on Intel / Ubuntu laptop worked fine with few hours of reading documentation on internet.
With the software figured out, my search shifted to finding a worthy compact Linux running board capable of keeping up with software selected.
There are many choices in this department with raspberry pi, banana pi, beagle board, ordroid etc. Selected raspberry pi 2 with 1 GB ram simply because of community support and easy availability and ability to increase USB current (This was crucial, i wanted to add a cheap 2 TB storage drive to make a NAS drive). Ordered from RS India. Rs : 2950 ( ~ $46 )
Also needed a USB WIFI dongle for hostapd. Found a WIFI dongle which came alone with iomega media center. It worked with hostapd. No money spent.
Needed a SD card for Raspberry PI. Got a strontium class 16GB, 10 card for Rs 440 ( ~ $7 )
Also bought a 2TB 2.5” portable HDD for Rs 6100 (~ $ 94) for hosting all the media accumulated over the years, to be used with Kodi media server.
Also needed USB keyboard/mouse occasionally to debug any runtime issues while setting up.
Got Raspbian (Distribution for Raspberry based on Debian wheezy) as the base operating system.
Kodi: Pretty straightforward. Complete instructions provided here: http://michael.gorven.za.net/
To control Kodi from your phone, download Kore App from App store.
Hostapd : Available in default raspbian repository.
Linc Daemon : Compiled code from updated repository hosted at : https://github.com/codeparity/linc-daemon
Added the binary in inittab to run it at boot time.
Mame : Available in default raspbian repository.
Some additional packages to put cherry on top :
Transmission Daemon: An open source torrent client. It has a web interface to add/remove torrent jobs.
FTP server: For moving mp3/audio/video/photographs from your household smartphones phones to and from your media servers. There are plenty of FTP servers available in raspbian. All work great.
Samba server: For making my drive accessible from PCs on Linux and Windows.
DynDNS client : A dynamic DNS client for making my rapberry PI accessible from internet.
Dropbox Client : To make a backup of files on cloud
After a day spent in setting up hardware and software configuration, I have the following
A internet enabled cloud backed up NAS drive
A future proof Media Server with a cool remote on my mobile phone.
Ability to securely access my private files from anywhere on internet
A local cloud to host all the media which is playable on smart phones and other TV s in house
A classic gaming arcade rig running Mario, contra, pack-man, street fighter, king of fighters etc.
A programmable streaming media client which is bandwidth aware.
A WiFi router which never says die.
A neat and green home.
Power bill: The whole setup is running on Xiaomi phone adapter. Uses less than 10W. Total spent: Rs 9500 (~ $148)
Would add home automation to this setup. Considering Zigbee,Zwave, let’s see which is cheaper and effective.
Integrating home surveillance camera setup on raspberry pi.
A kickstarter project? :)
Thanks for reading!
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leveraging-open-source-smarter-home-part-1-ashish-tanwar