JEMMA and OpenHAB: a nice match

This is the first of a series of post explaining the experience of the JEMMA and Energy@home community with the OpenHAB framework. Find below links to all posts of the series:

1. JEMMA and OpenHAB: a nice match (publication date: 18/4/2016)
2. OpenHAB in theory: a short overview (publication date: 22/4/2016)
3. OpenHAB in action: a quick example (publication date: 26/4/2016)
4. The JEMMA - OpenHAB remote binding (publication date: 29/4/2016)
5. The JEMMA - OpenHAB local binding (publication date: 3/5/2016)
6. Conclusions and future work (publication date: 9/5/2016)

JEMMA and OpenHAB: a nice match

With the rise of the IoT vision, the Smart Home domain is thriving with new technologies, offers and services. In such a context, it's likely that a single "good-for-all" solution will not emerge at least in the short term. For this reason, as of today, we need to find smart ways to provide smart home functionalities building upon a set of interoperabile eco-systems.

Open solutions can make things much smoother in such a context and are inherently better in enabling privacy-savvy smart home solutions which leave users more "in control" of their devices e.g. avoiding problems such as customer lock-in (or worse).

As a promoter of open standards and eco-systems, Energy@home has been looking with interest for several months at other open frameworks, trying to investigate the best pragmatic strategies to allow JEMMA and devices compatible with Energy@home specifications (ZigBee HA 1.2) to inter-operate within other solutions.

After a careful study, the JEMMA community has almost immediately found a great match in terms of philosophy, visions and technologies with Eclipse Smart Home/OpenHAB at many levels. First of all, OpenHAB vendor-neutral approach is much in line with Energy@home strategy. Secondly, many of the adopted core technologies are the same (OSGi, above all) are the same. Moreover, both project share compatible device modeling and description approaches, thus making ideally possible to think about ways to automatically bridge access to device properties and functionalities in programmatic fashion.

In the last weeks, Energy@home has co-funded a small activity to learn more about OpenHAB and to verify in practice how much correct our expectations were (spolier: expectations confirmed!).

In the next posts, we'll try to give an overview of the journey we made, starting from the first exploration tutorials to the prototype developments we made to make first JEMMA-OpenHAB interoperability happen.

Stay Tuned!

Authors

This series of posts has been prepared by Sandro Tassone, supported by Riccardo Tomasi(ISMB). Sandro holds a MSc in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino. He is currently collaborating with ISMB and Energy@home on JEMMA and other OSGi-based projects. He is a Software and C++ enthusiast.&; This activity has been partially co-funded by Energy@home. Thanks to IOOOTA for providing initial ideas and support for the jemma remote binding component.