Reaching out to the Physical - Drupal 8 and openHAB

markcorben's picture
Senior Support Engineer, Acquia
All levels

The Internet Of Things is here and is Open Source!
There is a growing collection of open source projects that are helping us to connect IOT for populous use.
Part of the need in having these devices is for a central place to manage the array of Things.

One such project that has been setting the framework for this is OpenHAB - Open Home Automation Bus (https://www.openhab.org/). OpenHAB has a pluggable architecture that supports more than 200 different technologies and systems and thousands of devices. This can be run on a number platforms including Raspberry PI as a OpenHABian installation (https://www.openhab.org/docs/installation/openhabian.html#features).

However, the configuration is driven by a text based one which can be confusing to users.
If this can be made accessible through a Drupal 8 site this improves the ease of use as well as use the power of Drupal to collect and present Home Automation data.

I have started working on a module that communicates with the OpenHAB API to bring that information to Drupal 8 with the intention of eventually being able to control IOT items from within Drupal.

I will be talking about the process of creating the module and progress to date.