There are thousands of different IoT devices on the market. To control them, you currently have a few options:
Use the vendor’s cloud service. This approach has many problems: there is no interoperability between different vendors, so you end up installing 10 different cloud apps for 10 different devices; there are privacy concerns; and anything beyond the basics usually requires paid features.
Use an open-source platform such as Home Assistant, OpenHAB, Domoticz, FHEM, PiDome, or Majordomo. These platforms are powerful but often too complex, time-consuming to learn, and relatively expensive to run—typically EUR 100+ and tens or even hundreds of hours of study.
Currently, there is no simple, easy-to-use, and low-cost solution on the market.
We accepted this challenge and are now designing an open-source hardware solution running Free/Libre Open Source Software. Our goal is a device that costs around EUR 20 for the end user, offers more functionality than typical vendor cloud services, and remains fully open for modification and customization by anyone interested.
After six months of work, we already have a functioning hardware prototype and software that supports basic features.
In this presentation, I will discuss the challenges we encountered, demonstrate our current progress, and highlight the major obstacles we are facing. If others share a similar interest, your help and collaboration are very welcome.