DomotiGa is an open source Linux app written in Gambas which I hadn’t heard about until now. As part of any good home automation or any connected project is a way to control it remotely and easily, otherwise it’s easier just to hit the light switch yourself, right? I am using a Ubuntu Virtual Machine running in VMWare ESXi. VMWare offers ESXi as a free version of there enterprise bare metal hypervisor. ESXi can run on most hardware but if you have trouble there are plenty of guides out there to get drivers working.
One of the easiest ways to get a remote interface is a website. It is much easier, universal and platform independent compared to using an app. There are two types of web interfaces available in DomotiGa. I tested both out to pick the best one for my application and decided that since each one serves a different purpose I would leave both active.
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| DomotiGa Simple Web Client |
From the above screenshots I am sure you can tell the difference between the two. The simple web client is well, simple, and it is great for quickly checking sensor data or controlling switches. But for advanced management, DomotiYii fits the bill. I keep the simple web client running in a browser window on my left monitor. It can auto refresh and the changes turn green momentarily.
This would be a good interface to easily setup a Raspberry Pi with a display on the wall as a status display. DomotiGa has a JSON RPC interface so it wouldn’t be hard to grab the data and pipe it into your own front end. There is another system that makes easy to design a UI and interface it with DomotiGa, one is CF iViewer https://www.domotiga.nl/projects/domotiga/wiki/CF_iViewer