Coach Automation

[davidbrady]

Hi Chuck,

I'm still very much exploring the power of openHab, but it's quickly becoming difficult to justify any of the expensive and traditional approaches, even for the audio/visual.

I spoke of the openHab "bindings" earlier. OpenHab works at the level of 'items' and 'events'. It's meant to operate at an abstract layer where you describe the "logical" things you'd like to operate. Things or items like TV's, Receivers, Lights, Locks, etc. To communicate to these items requires bindings. AV receivers these days can be bound over bluetooth, rs232, infrared, or ethernet. OpenHab doesn't care. The idea is that if a new TV is installed all you change is the binding, none of the user interface, items, or sitemaps change. (Items, events, rules and actions are defined and programmed into openHab by someone like me. It's written in Java, and the programming required is written in Xtend, which is an interpreted Java-based scripting language).

There are literally hundreds of bindings for virtually every conceivable device or communications protocol; it's a very active open source software community. One of the bindings is IR_Trans which provides a communication means for receiving and sending infrared commands and a tool for learning new commands. The transmitters that actually send the infrared command can be remote and bound to openHab via wifi ethernet for example.

In actuality, everything is available to build a complete drop-in replacement of the existing RTI/AMX/Crestron, and it can be done at a very reasonable cost with completely open source software putting the power and convenience back into our hands.

My personal opinion regarding A/V is that TV will eventually be IP. Broadcast, satellite, standalone blueray and dvd players will be with us for a long time, but the growth is in IP TV, and that means compressed video streams. I don't see any compelling reason to duplicate what Vantare has in my bus because I think even with brand new equipment it's a dated philosophy. OpenHab provides a binding for Kodi (formerly XMBC) which is an open source media player. I think a more up-to-date video philosophy is to run ethernet throughout the coach and connect a central media server to thin media clients at each TV. The media server can scrape the internet for channels including realtime sports and news, and paid for services like Netflix. It'll also house all of your DVD, music, and other video files and it'll accept videos in any compressed format. The thin clients receive compressed video over ethernet from the media server, decode it, and display it on the TV. The way things are going I don't see any value in adding separate boxes for dvds, dss, or atsc tuners. My focus is going to be on network connectivity, which means optimizing my cellular and wifi approach and taking advantage of free wifi when I find it and building a system around IP TV. If cable at the pole or atsc over the air falls out easily then so much the better.

Whatever the view in philosophy, openHab doesn't care. From what I can tell the bindings are there for an openHab server to serve up commands over bindings to implement either one.

What a great hobby project!