We’re preparing to move into a new house and I’ve discovered that I’m interested in home automation. Well… not really home automation so much as the nerdy aspect of controlling physical things through code. This is a bit scary, as home automation can be quite expensive and if not done with an eye toward quality and usability can be very very frustrating.
Oh well. I was Googling the subject and found several open source home automation controllers. One of those is Open Source Automation. It’s .Net based and has a plugin system for extension. I’m a .Net developer by day (and some evenings and weekends…) so I found it pretty interesting. All kinds of what-if’s entered my brain:
- Can I have it monitor my garage door to see if I left it up after I go to work?
- Can I have it monitor the locks to the house to ensure that everything is locked up at night?
- How about adjusting some blinds relative to the angle of the sun using some math and the sunrise/sunset times?
I talked a bit about it to my boss and employees and one of my employees said he had an older Z-Wave USB dongle and a Z-Wave module for plugging a lamp into. I borrowed these earlier today and am now working through setting up the Open Source Automation controller to see how far this will go. I suspect that the dongle is going to be too old for OSA to use, but we’ll just have to see…
Step 1 Install MySQL – Done!
Step 2 Install Open Source Automation…
Running the Installer, I got the following message: “There is a problem with this installer package…”:
Looking at the log, this is what’s occuring right when the error happens:
[0628:1D6C][2013-09-13T18:08:02]i323: Registering package dependency provider: {DA805477-316E-4344-96EF-180BD76854F0}, version: 0.4.3, package: ServerPackageIdx64
[0628:1D6C][2013-09-13T18:08:02]i301: Applying execute package: ServerPackageIdx64, action: Install, path: C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{DA805477-316E-4344-96EF-180BD76854F0}v0.4.3\Server Installer x64.msi, arguments: ' ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT="1" MSIFASTINSTALL="7" INSTALLFOLDER="C:\Program Files\OSA"'
[0628:1D6C][2013-09-13T18:10:48]e000: Error 0x80070643: Failed to install MSI package.
[0628:1D6C][2013-09-13T18:10:48]e000: Error 0x80070643: Failed to execute MSI package.
Perusing the Open Source Automation forums, I found this post talking about the same issue with the installer. It indicates that restarting the MySQL service may resolve the issue. So I restarted the service and…. same error.
The same post indicated that perhaps something else was running on port 8081 and to use tcpview to check it out. I used it – nothing’s running on port 8081.
I then found this post, which indicated that .Net 3.5 may be needed for the Web Server software to install. I’m running Windows 8, so this isn’t installed by default. Installed it. Ran the OSA installer… it worked! So yeah – .Net 3.5 is a pre-req that the installer doesn’t check for.
Step 3 – Get the Z-Wave USB dongle working.
Reading OSA’s wiki, I found that this particular (older) dongle, the Intermatic HA22, isn’t support by the Open-ZWave library. So much for that.
Guess I’ll have to wait until I get some hardware that works with OSA… or find some other software that might work with the Intermatic HA22. Off to Google for that 
