Introduction

The idiotic distributed internet of things inhabitance controller (idiotic) is a clusterable home automation controller that can combine any number of disconnected home automation technologies into a single unified inetrface. Inspired by OpenHAB, idiotic aims to improve over many of its shortcomings. Mostly, it's written in Python and all its configuration is also just Python, so writing more advanced rules is just as easy as writing simple ones and there's no convoluted syntax to learn. Also, it's MIT licensed if you like that sort of thing.

Features

Disclaimer: idiotic is currently in alpha. It might break sometimes! So far it has only tried to revolt once, but don't sue me if it goes crazy and floods your house with coffee.

Uniform Configuration

Every configuration file in idiotic is just a specialized Python module. idiotic provides some basic building blocks that can easily and clearly express many of the most common home automation tasks, and does them using normal Python objects.

Lightweight and Modular

Because of the need for flexibility, idiotic's core does not contain any technology-specific code. Instead, the core is just the scheduler and some built-in generic items. Everything else is done in modules, where you specify which real-world actions your items will have.

Declarative Rules

idiotic supports defining declarative rules. These make it very easy to avoid duplicating logic and keeping track of several conditions independently. With a declarative rule, you define your logic and the action it should take, and the rule takes care of updating the action whenever the result of the logic changes.

# This will let us reference our items and modules
from idiotic import instance as c

from idiotic.declare import Rule

# Items have a 'w' attribute, short for 'watchers', which
# lets us reference the watchable version of some attributes.
# For basic items, 'state' is the main one you'll use.
Rule(c.items.temperature.w.state >= 25,
     yes=lambda: print("Wow, it's super hot!"),
     no=lambda: print("It's kind of okay."))


# Scenes can be used in rules directly
# We can make logic expressions with the bitwise operators
Rule(c.scenes.house_occupied & ~c.scenes.daytime,
     yes=c.items.lights.on,
     no=c.items.lights.off)

You can also use the simpler decorator-based rules.

::

@bind(Change(c.items.temperature) def do_a_thing(event):

if event.new > event.old:

print("It went up by " + (event.new - event.old))

else:

print("It went down by " + (event.old - event.new))

Timer rules can be created, using schedule for nice friendly scheduling syntax.

::

@bind(Schedule(c.scheduler.every().tuesday.at('19:25'))) def timer(event):

print("It's 7:25!!!") c.items.lights.on()

Flexible Web-interface Creation

With the built-in idiotic-webui module, you can create custom, nice-looking, and powerful control panels without touching HTML or Javascript.

Distributed Architecture

Danger! This is not quite done yet :(

If you're planning on adding lots of sensors to your home or you're stuck with some less-than-cooperative technologies, a Raspberry Pi with some stuff plugged in the GPIO pins is about the best you can get. That's why you can cluster idiotic across several devices.

REST API

idiotic comes with an easily extensible REST API. It also has an OpenHAB-compatible API, for backwards compatibility.