monitoring
Home automation with Perl
Raspberry Pi, 868MHz, FHEM, Redis, Logstash , Kibana and
Elasticsearch

The hardware
▪ Raspberry Pi
▪ COC (868MHz)
▪ JeeLink
▪ FS20
▪ Homematic

The software stack
▪ FHEM (perl!)
▪ Redis
▪ Logstash
▪ Elasticsearch
▪ Kibana

What is FHEM
▪ Home automation system
▪ Written in Perl
▪ Badly documented (mostly German)
▪ Great auto-configure functionality
▪ Has web interface and Android app

What is Redis
▪ An advanced in-memory key-value data store.
▪ FAST!!
▪ Durable (configurable disk-write)
▪ Single-threaded
▪ Lots of fancy features (lists, hashes, sets)
▪ Very well documented
▪ Great perl module
▪ Not very scalable… master-slave possible

What is Logstash
▪ A tool for managing events and logs
▪ Primarily an interface - between sources (redis, files, pipes, …) and
storage (elasticsearch, mongodb, email, …)
▪ Lots of very helpful filters (date, grok, geoip, …)
▪ Horizontally scalable
▪ Fantastic community “If a newbie has a bad time, it’s a bug”

What is Elasticsearch
▪ Elasticsearch is a search server based on Lucene
▪ Very easy to set up
▪ Very horizontally scalable
▪ Written in Java…
▪ Great RESTful API
▪ Great perl module written by the developers themselves
▪ Needs BIG hardware (500 million events/day: 132GB RAM, 16 cores)
▪ Stability….. :-/

The costs (so far…)
Device
Unit cost
Total
RPi + Power + SD card
50
50
COC 868MHz
75
75
JeeLink v3 868MHz
32
32
EM1000 power monitor
34
68
PCA301 remote socket with power monitor
34
34
HMS100TF remote thermometer/hydrometer
25
50
Total
309

Concerns
▪ Security for actuators
▪ Social implications – Big Brother
▪ Catastrophic Corner Cases

Questions…?

Links
▪ FHEM
http://fhem.de/fhem.html
▪ Redis
http://redis.io/ (The little Redis book)
▪ Logstash
http://logstash.net/
▪ Elasticsearch
http://www.elasticsearch.org/
▪ ELV Elektronik
http://www.elv.de/
▪ Busware
http://busware.de/
▪ Raspberry Pi
http://www.raspberrypi.org/