Mark J Cox : Converting my Home Automation front end to Android

mark :: blog

24 Mar 2012: Converting my Home Automation front end to Android

When I moved to a new house in 2001 I designed and installed my own home-brew home automation system in it to control things like the heating, lighting, alarm system, and more. The messaging system I picked was to use standard XMPP (Jabber) because most platforms have existing open source XMPP libraries so writing clients is easy. The back-end is just a load of XMPP bots written in Perl. Around the house I had a number of Fujitsu Point 1600 tablets running an interface I designed and wrote using Perl/Tk. The tablets are great, but they're starting to show their age with limited resolution of 800x600 and CPU speed making full-screen video not really possible.

So last year I obtained an Archos 101 10.1" android tablet with the plan being to replace the existing tablets with android powered ones. It was a good excuse to dust off the old skills and learn programming apps for Android. Converting the app was straightforward and tooks a couple of weekends, troubles with the tablet took quite a bit more work.

Finding a way to mount the Archos tablet on a wall proved tricky, the back of the device isn't perfectly flat and it has an annoying desk stand in the middle. I ended up using a PadTab for mounting, but having to custom modify it to handle not being in the centre of the device, and add thick sticky strips (normally used to dampen fans). The build quality of these tablets is pretty poor.

The display panel on the tablet isn't very good either and has limited viewing angles from three sides, so in order to be able to see the screen when mounted to the wall I had to turn it upside down. Android can happily handle a rotated display, the only downside is that the Archos logo is the wrong way up (a bit of black tape covers it up now).

I left the Archos mounted on the wall and running for a week, permanently attached to its charger. At the end of the week I noticed it wasn't sitting straight on the wall, and in fact the internal batteries had both swelled up and burst out of the case. I read online a few other stories from folks who had bought Archos tablets which had failed in the same way, I guess they're really not designed to be left on charge permanently (that's really bad design Archos, this could have easily caught fire!)

I figured I didn't really need to have batteries installed, the tablet is going to be permanently powered on anyway, and it would be safer to leave the house knowing there was no risk of exploding batteries. So I took the tablet apart and removed them. Without batteries the Archos starts its power up cycle, displays a logo, then gets to a certain part of the boot process and powers down. I guess it does a check on the state of the batteries and it fails. This presented a real problem and I gave up trying to use the tablet. Over the Christmas holidays I heard that you could flash an alternative OS, CyanogenMod, and that actually booted and ran just fine without batteries, but it wasn't stable and featured enough for running the Home Automation app I'd written.

So I decided to try to debug the Archos OS, so connected it to USB to get debug messages, and interestingly it powered up perfectly first time. Removing the USB connection caused it to lock up a few seconds later. Strange behaviour! I tried just connecting power to the USB port, and that worked too. So if you want to run your Archos 101 android tablet without internal batteries you can, but you need to splice your power cable and feed 5v to both the power socket and the USB socket.

So now I had a working tablet again I changed the power adaptor so it mounted neatly against the wall:

Here are a couple of pics of it in use:

Created: 24 Mar 2012
Tagged as: android, ha

0 comments (new comments disabled)

Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

pics from my twitter: