About

What Is It?

QW Home Automation is a complete set of home automation solution. Currently it supports Insteon based lighting (dimmers, switches, remotes, lamp modules etc) and thermostats (Venstar).

As of 07/18/2011, QW Home Automation becomes partner of Smartlabs Inc. You can find our logo at http://www.insteon.net/alliance-about.html.

History

It is a personal hobby project. I have a sizable house and I installed over 40 Insteon based devices around to control the lighting and air conditioning. The existing solutions are either too expensive (some are priced over $1,000) or doesn't provide the user experience I wanted at all.

I have an entire framework I built for automated trading with direct exchange connectivity and internal latency within the far lower end of single digit microseconds (far less than 5 microsecond), with all technologies including C++, .Net and Java. So it is fairly easy for me to build a home automation solution on top of it.

So I decided to build one and share it with people completely free of charge for all personal and non-commercial use..

Advantage

It seems that there has been several home automation solutions around, what is the advantage of QW Home Automation?

Well, based on information at hand, QW Home Automation is special for the following reasons.

Completely free. Complete support for Insteon based lighting (expecially keypadlinc), Venstar thermostats, IOLinc, RemoteLinc, Motion Sensor, Serial/USB PLM, SmartLinc 2412N and USB Stick PLM.
Supports both Windows PC and Raspberry Pi.
Native android client and general purpose web interface for PC, iOS devices (iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad), WebOS (HP TouchPad) and other smartphones.
Automatic dimmer/switch/KeypadLinc status LED feedback.
Software scene and timer support.
Advanced Insteon device configuration such as memory map and device specific operation flags.
It offers good user experience. Simple, not very fancy but just works as sleek as silk.
I don't want to get too technical here. But QW Home Automation server is built completely in C++, with only two dependencies, boost library and TinyXml. It is exiremely portable. The same source code can compile and run on virtually all platforms including Windows, Linux and OS X. It can be ported to other low cost embedded systems (such as broadband routers), without modifying a single line of source code (just require re-compiling); and offering exactly the same user experience

Current Status

Supported Devices

All lighting devices, especially KeypadLinc
RemoteLinc
Venstar thermostats
IOLinc
Motion sensor, triggerlinc etc
All kinds of PLMs, serial/USB/Stick PLM and SmartLinc 2412N (through TCP port 9761)

Support software scenes. Support for more devices can be easily added.

Insteon is notorious for its complexity. QW Home Automation provides extremely powerful management tool to help user configure, manage and troubleshoot every device in the home automation network.

Online Demo

An online demo of our superior web client interface can be found at:

http://qwhomeautomation.com/webdemo/QWHAWebClient.html

Future Plan

Technical:

Adding support forZigBee and other devices and services (Obhai, XBMC etc).
Adding support for triggers and Lua JIT Script Engine and release remote API. QW Home Automation will offer ultimate programmability.

Business:

So far there is no business plan yet.

At any rate, software is meant for people to use. The QW Home Automation will be here forever with regular updates.

Download

Please proceed to my download section to download the software. User manual is provided online. Further discussion is welcome in my forum.

On The News

07/15/2011 cocoontech.com - QW Home Automation: Control Your INSTEON Network on Your Android Phone

07/19/2011 xda-developers.com - Automate Your Home Via Android With QW Home Automation

07/20/2011 pocketnow.com - Control Your House Lights, Thermostat From Your Android