Last October I was fortunate enough to attend the FI-WARE Smart City event held at the Palacio de la Magdalena in Santander. Companies, developers and Smart Cities enthusiasts came together to share their latest ideas and thoughts on Smart Cities. Our goal was to take part as developers in the Smart City Hackathon organized by FI-WARE.
We had three days to develop an internet application based on FI-WARE. My teammate Daniel López and I, Antonio Sanchez, decided to start from scratch by thinking about what people need and what we could offer. That's how we came up with Open Alerts.
Open Alerts is an application that allows anyone to automate their home in a simple and quick manner. Our aim was to focus on making it as easy as possible since we wanted people with limited technical skills to be able to adapt their home to their needs, offering them both security and comfort. That is why the whole system can be used from a smartphone, PC or Smart TV.
There are two very important aspects to understand how it works:
SENSOR CONFIGURATION
In this case, users can select what sort of event they would like to control or to establish as a trigger of another action.
ACTUATOR CONFIGURATION
In this second case, users decide what to do if the previous event occurs.
There are many ways of automating all these actions and the only limit is one´s imagination. Consider the following examples:
If it starts to rain, the blinds close.
If there is a gas leak, send me an email and close the gas pipe.
All this is possible if the necessary elements are available, that is to say, the sensors and the actuators that we want to configure. The advantage of our system is that once the elements have been installed any user with basic technical knowledge is able to easily automate their home. All the user needs to do is establish the new rules and to combine the sensors and the actuators they want.
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In addition, Open Alerts can send free notifications to any mobile phone instantly, thus adding an extra layer of security to the user’s home.
And what have we used from FI-WARE?
The FI-WARE platform offers a large number of GEs that can be adapted to most IoT-based projects. We used some additional GEs, but these are the most important ones for Open Alerts operations:
- Orion Context Broker: Based on a publication/subscription system through the NGSI9 and NGSI10 interfaces. With Orion, we can register our sensors, send notifications if changes occur and make enquiries through other sensors.
- Cosmos Big Data Analysis: This GE enables us to analyse large amounts of data. This is important for Open Alerts because it enables us to do the analysis required to reduce consumption in a home.
- IDAS/DCA: This GE allows us to send the commands to our actuators in accordance with the parameters that we’ve established.
For additional information about the project, please contact us by email at: tsptoni [@] gmail.com
The Hackathon code is hosted in: https://bitbucket.org/asanchezpineda/open-alerts
Antonio Sánchez
►Visit our HACKATHON ARCHIVES to read about more apps that were developed at hackathons organized at Campus Party Europe and Santander.
