nickewing/hacky_hal

HackyHAL - Hacky Home Automation Library

HackyHAL

What is it?

HackyHAL (Hacky Home Automation Library) is in its current form is a small Ruby library meant to control devices through the network or serial ports. The number of supported devices is currently very limited, however hopefully the library will grow to support more devices over time.

Who is this for?

This project is for anyone wishing to write their own custom home automation software/scripts. It is not user friendly and does not have any form of built-in UI.

What devices are supported?

Supported functionality varies greatly with each device.

• Epson Projector (via serial port. Tested on HC8350, though likely also works with other models)
• Yamaha AV Receiver (via network. Tested on RX-A1020. Should work with RX-A2020 and RX-A3020 as well)
• Roku (via network)
• Iogear AVIOR HDMI Switch (via serial port. 8x1 GHSW8181 or 4x1 GHSW8141)
• SSH accessible computer

How can I use it?

HackyHAL is simply a library to be used however you want.

You'll likely want to run a server utilizing HackyHAL on a networked computer (a Raspberry Pi works great). You'd then attach any serial port devices to that computer. You could then create a mobile app to control the server. See the examples directory.

See my HackyHAL remote example repository for example usage.

Can I contribue?

Please do! It would be great to see this library grow to support many more devices. Just fork, make your changes, and send a pull request. Please be sure to write tests for contributions.

Contributors

• Nick Ewing

Special thanks to Mischa McLachlan for the HAL 9000 icon.

License and Copyright

HackyHAL is distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.

Copyright © 2013 Nick Ewing

hacky_hal's Issues

License missing from gemspec

RubyGems.org doesn't report a license for your gem. This is because it is not specified in the gemspec of your last release.

via e.g.

  spec.license = 'MIT'
  # or
  spec.licenses = ['MIT', 'GPL-2']

Including a license in your gemspec is an easy way for rubygems.org and other tools to check how your gem is licensed. As you can imagine, scanning your repository for a LICENSE file or parsing the README, and then attempting to identify the license or licenses is much more difficult and more error prone. So, even for projects that already specify a license, including a license in your gemspec is a good practice. See, for example, how rubygems.org uses the gemspec to display the rails gem license.

There is even a License Finder gem to help companies/individuals ensure all gems they use meet their licensing needs. This tool depends on license information being available in the gemspec. This is an important enough issue that even Bundler now generates gems with a default 'MIT' license.

I hope you'll consider specifying a license in your gemspec. If not, please just close the issue with a nice message. In either case, I'll follow up. Thanks for your time!

Appendix:

If you need help choosing a license (sorry, I haven't checked your readme or looked for a license file), GitHub has created a license picker tool. Code without a license specified defaults to 'All rights reserved'-- denying others all rights to use of the code.
Here's a list of the license names I've found and their frequencies

p.s. In case you're wondering how I found you and why I made this issue, it's because I'm collecting stats on gems (I was originally looking for download data) and decided to collect license metadata,too, and make issues for gemspecs not specifying a license as a public service :). See the previous link or my blog post about this project for more information.