The beginning

After playing around some years now with various components as described on the homepage of this project, I will try the next year to start building all the blocks into a nice home automation system.
Some background. I am an electrical engineer which have always been passionate at programming and embedded systems. The last few years I therefore have been playing around with:
- Atmel AVR processors (programming in C (not arduino))
- Website programming (mostly joomla and developing components in PHP + MySQL)
- Linux/Debian (Setting up an NAS / LAMP server, using old PC's and finally and old HP MV2120 (see http://www.cyrius.com/debian/orion/hp/mv2120/ )

With the experience from above I have come up with a general idea as shown below

For the different components I have the following ideas.
1) Weather station.
This station is consisting of an standalone solar powered sensor board and a Ethernet connected main station.
In respect to the sensor board I have made my own design based on a ATMEGA AVR and communication via an nrf24l01 module (OSH project: https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/lV876een)
I previously also designed a main station, however for my final project I will switch over to a beagle bone black board.

2) Energy meter
To keep track op the power consumption in my house I have installed an ABB energy meter (type B23 212-100)
This energy meter has an MODBUS RTU link available for communication. I have bought myself a RS485 / Ethernet converter to communicate with the server I am going to use (RS485/Ethernet converter type: USR-TCP232-300)

3) Electrical Vehicle Charger
For charging our electrical car I am expanding my fusebox in the house to charge with 400V 16A three phase. This will involve a Type 2, mode 3 charging station. After some searching I found OPEN EVSE ( http://code.google.com/p/open-evse/ ). An open source project which is using an ATMEGA AVR.. yeah!!
For communication I will use the SPI interface of the Beaglebone Black I am using for the weather station base station

4) NAS/LAMP Server
As written above I did play around with a NAS and a LAMP server and it is actually running ok.
However in the light of this project I wanted to have a bit more power and possibilities in the area of power, power consumption and .. well I just wanted to start fresh.. following components are on their way:
1 - SanDisk SSD - Solid state drive - 128 GB - intern - 2.5" - SATA-600
2 - Kingston - DDR3 - 8 GB - SO DIMM 204-pin - 1333 MHz / PC3-10600 - 1.5 V
1 - SilverStone Precision PS09 - - microtowermodel - micro ATX
1 - Asrock Q2900-ITX - Moederbord - Mini-ITX - Intel Pentium J2900 / 2.41 GHz
1 - Be quiet! System Power 7 450W - Voeding ( intern ) - ATX12V 2.31 - 80 PLUS Silver

5) Web application
This would be my first try to get easy access to all gathered information

6)Control station
Well a small 7" display together with a Beaglebone black should be possible to make a great control station.. but this will be the last on the list of things to do

Well a long list of components and even more things to do.. I think in about 2 years from now all should be up and running on how I want it.. a long way to go

Timescale because.. well time allotted to this project is the time I have available after the following things:
- a regular daytime job
- being a husband
- being a father(soon of two kids)
- refurbishing the house
- enjoy life and friends

So hopefully there will be progress on a regular basis