Free Smart Home solution: OpenHAB

Screen shot of Openhab UI

OpenHAB is a free and open source solution for the smart home.  In the quickly growing smart home market, the industry has come up with a vast number of standards, protocols and products, for example, Apple HomeKit, Amazon Echo or Google Home. They usually don’t integrate well together as there is hardly any interoperability across vendors.  Also, the only thing they connect to is their respective cloud service, which could mean a typical smart home may depend on many remote servers. The openHAB project has attracted a large developer community, which looks at the smart home from a user perspective: This makes features like offline capability, data privacy and customisability top priorities for a smart home solution.

The good: The openHAB project makes features like offline capability, data privacy and customisability top priorities for a smart home solution.

The not so good: complicated initial setup with a steep learning curve. It presumes a level of technical competence to allow for successful setup.

The verdict: This solution for the smart home has clear benefits over current smart home solutions with regard to reliability, latency (that is, the time it takes for a signal to reach and turn on/off a device) and data privacy.


Further information: https://www.openhab.org/

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