Belphanior Home Automation System

About

The Belphanior Home Automation System is a communications protocol and set of programs that create an automation framework for home use. Belphanior is designed for ease of maintenance and testing, with communications via HTTP protocol.

Design Philosophy

In Belphanior, multiple servants are commanded and controlled by a butler. Servants are individual programs that perform very specific tasks, such as controlling lights and entertainment systems, telling time, and sending messages. A butler coordinates the behavior of the servants via scripts that you create.

Features

Modular

Servants and butlers can be run on different machines around the house. Your home network can be made as big or small as you choose.

Easy To Test

Belphanior communication protocol is built atop HTTP. Easily tested with standard web browser and command-line tools.

Easy To Control

Servants are self-documenting. Command scripts can be written in Ruby or Blockly.

Easy To Extend

Butlers use standardized protocols to communicate with servants. A framework exists for writing new servants in Ruby with Sinatra, but any language with libraries supporting HTTP can be used to build a servant.

Built with Ruby

The canonical Belphanior Butler implementation is a Ruby on Rails application, and has been tested on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Servants are written using a framework on top of Sinatra and have also been tested on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (Kirkwood, on the SheevaPlug hardware platform).

Get Belphanior

To try out Belphanior, head over to the Getting Started section.