Last year, we said
that Mozilla is working to create a framework of software and services
that can bridge the communication gap between connected devices. Today,
we are pleased to announce that anyone can now build their own Things
Gateway to control their connected device directly from the web.

We kicked off “Project Things”, with the goal of building a
decentralized ‘Internet of Things’ that is focused on security, privacy,
and interoperability. Since our announcement last year, we have
continued to engage in open and collaborative development with a
community of makers, testers, contributors, and end-users, to build the
foundation for this future.

Today’s launch makes it easy for anyone with a Raspberry Pi to build
their own Things Gateway. In addition to web-based commands and
controls, a new experimental feature shows off the power and ease of
using voice-based commands. We believe this is the most natural way for
users to interact with their smart home. Getting started is easy, and we
recommend checking out this tutorial to get connected.

The Future of Connected Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become more popular over the
last few years, but there is no single standard for how these devices
should talk to each other. Each vendor typically creates a custom
application that only works with their own brand. If the future of
connected IoT devices continues to involve proprietary solutions, then
costs will stay high, while the market remains fragmented and slow to
grow. Consumers should not be locked into a specific product, brand, or
platform. This will only lead to paying premium prices for something as
simple as a “smart light bulb”.

We believe the future of connected devices should be more like the
open web. The future should be decentralized, and should put the power
and control into the hands of the people who use those devices. This is
why we are committed to defining open standards and frameworks.

A Private “Internet of Things”

Anyone can build a Things Gateway using popular devices such as the
Raspberry Pi. Once it is set up, it will guide you through the process
of connecting to your network and adding your devices. The setup process
will provide you with a secure URL that can be used to access and
control your connected devices from anywhere.

Powerful New Features

Our latest release of the Things Gateway has several new features available. These features include:

• The ability to use the microphone on your computer to issue voice commands
• A rules engine for setting ‘If this, then that’ logic for how devices interact with each other
• A floor-plan view to lay out devices on a map of your home
• Additional device type support, such as smart plugs, dimmable and
  colored lights, multi-level switches and sensors, and “virtual” versions
  of them, in case you don’t have a real device
• An all-new add-on system for supporting new protocols and devices
• A new system for safely authorizing third-party applications (using OAuth)

Built for hackers everyone

If you have been following our progress with Project Things, you’ll
know that up to now, it was only really accessible to those with a good
amount of technical knowledge. With today’s release, we have made it
easy for anyone to get started on building their own Things Gateway to
control their devices. We take care of the complicated stuff so that you
can focus on the fun stuff such as automation, ‘if this, then that’
rules, adding a greater variety of devices, and more.

Getting Started

We have provided a full walkthrough of how to get started on building
your own private smart home using a Raspberry Pi. You can view the
complete walkthrough here.

If you have questions, or you would like to get involved with this project you can join the #iot channel on irc.mozilla.org and participate in the development on GitHub. You can also follow @MozillaIoT on twitter for the latest news.

For more information, please visit iot.mozilla.org.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/02/how-to-build-your-own-private-smart-home-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-mozillas-things-gateway/

Last year we announced
Project Things by Mozilla. Project Things is a framework of software
and services that can bridge the communication gap between connected
devices by giving “things” URLs on the web.

Today I’m excited to tell you about the latest version of the Things Gateway
and how you can use it to directly monitor and control your home over
the web, without a middleman. Instead of installing a different mobile
app for every smart home device you buy, you can manage all your devices
through a single secure web interface. This blog post will explain how
to build your own Web of Things gateway with a Raspberry Pi and use it
to connect existing off-the-shelf smart home products from various
different brands using the power of the open web.

There are lots of exciting new features in the latest version of the gateway, including a rules engine for setting ‘if this, then that’
style rules for how things interact, a floorplan view to lay out
devices on a map of your home, experimental voice control and support
for many new types of “things”. There’s also a brand new add-ons system
for adding support for new protocols and devices, and a new way to
safely authorise third party applications to access your gateway.

Hardware

The first thing to do is to get your hands on a Raspberry Pi® single board computer. The latest Raspberry Pi 3
has WiFi and Bluetooth support built in, as well as access to GPIO
ports for direct hardware connections. This is not essential as you can
use alternative developer boards, or even your laptop or desktop
computer, but it currently provides the best experience.

If you want to use smart home devices using other protocols like
Zigbee or Z-Wave, you will need to invest in USB dongles. For Zigbee we
currently support the Digi XStick (ZB mesh version). For Z-Wave you should be able to use any OpenZWave compatible dongle, but so far we have only tested the Sigma Designs UZB Stick and the Aeotec Z-Stick (Gen5). Be sure to get the correct device for your region as Z-Wave operating frequencies can vary between countries.

You’ll also need a microSD card to flash the software onto! We recommend at least 4GB.

Then there’s the “things” themselves. The gateway already supports
many different smart plugs, sensors and smart bulbs from lots of
different brands using Zigbee, Z-Wave and WiFi. Take a look at the wiki
for devices which have already been tested. If you would like to
contribute, we are always looking for volunteers to help us test more
devices. Let us know what other devices you’d like to see working and
consider building your own adapter add-on to make it work! (see later).

If you’re not quite ready to splash out on all this hardware, but you
want to try out the gateway software, there’s now a Virtual Things
add-on you can install to add virtual things to your gateway.

Software

Next you’ll need to download the Things Gateway 0.3 software image for the Raspberry Pi and flash it onto your SD card. There are various ways of doing this but Etcher is a graphical application for Windows, Linux and MacOS which makes it easy and safe to do.

If you want to experiment with the gateway software on your laptop or desktop computer, you can follow the instructions on GitHub to download and build it yourself. We also have an experimental OpenWrt package and support for more platforms is coming soon. Get in touch if you’re targeting a different platform.

First Time Setup

Before booting up your gateway with the SD card inserted, ensure that any Zigbee or Z-Wave USB dongles are plugged in.

When you first boot the gateway, it acts as a WiFi hotspot
broadcasting the network name (SSID) “Mozilla IoT Gateway”. You can
connect to that WiFi hotspot with your laptop or smartphone which should
automatically direct you to a setup page. Alternatively, you can
connect the Raspberry Pi directly to your network using a network cable
cable and type gateway.local into your browser to begin the setup process.

First, you’re given the option to connect to a WiFi network:

If you choose to connect to a WiFi network you’ll be prompted for the
WiFi password and then you’ll need to make sure you’re connected to
that same network in order to continue setup.

Next, you’ll be asked to choose a unique subdomain for your gateway,
which will automatically generate an SSL certificate for you using LetsEncrypt
and set up a secure tunnel to the Internet so you can access the
gateway remotely. You’ll be asked for an email address so you can
reclaim your subdomain in future if necessary. You can also choose to
use your own domain name if you don’t want to use the tunneling service,
but you’ll need to generate your own SSL certificate and configure DNS
yourself.

You will then be securely redirected to your new subdomain and you’ll be prompted to create your user account on the gateway.

You’ll then automatically be logged into the gateway and will be
ready to start adding things. Note that the gateway’s web interface is a
Progressive Web App that you can add to homescreen on your smartphone with Firefox.

Adding Things

To add devices to your gateway, click on the “+” icon at the bottom
right of the screen. This will put all the attached adapters into
pairing mode. Follow the instructions for your individual device to pair
it with the gateway (this often involves pressing a button on the
device while the gateway is in pairing mode).

Devices that have been successfully paired with the gateway will
appear in the add device screen and you can give them a name of your
choice before saving them on the gateway.

The devices you’ve added will then appear on the Things screen.

You can turn things on and off with a single tap, or click on the
expand button to go to an expanded view all of all the thing’s
properties. For example a smart plug has an on/off switch and reports
its current power consumption, voltage, current and frequency.

With a dimmable colour light, you can turn the light on and off, set its colour, and set its brightness level.

Rules Engine

By clicking on the main menu you can access the rules engine.

The rules engine allows you to set ‘if this, then that’ style rules for how devices interact with each other. For example, “If Smart Plug A turns on, turn on Smart Plug B”.

To create a rule, first click the “+” button at the bottom right of
the rules screen. Then drag and drop things onto the screen and select
the properties of the things you wish to connect together.

You can give your rule a name and then click back to get back to the rules screen where you’ll see your new rule has been added.

Floorplan

Clicking on the “floorplan” option from the main menu allows you to
arrange devices on a floorplan of your home. Click the edit button at
the bottom right of the screen to upload a floorplan image.

You’ll need to create the floorplan image yourself. This can be done
with an online tool or graphics editor, or you can just scan of a hand
drawn map of your home! An SVG file with white lines and a transparent
background works best.

You can arrange devices on the floor plan by dragging them around the screen.

Just click “save” when you’re done and you’ll see all of your devices
laid out. You can click on them to access their expanded view.

Add-ons

The gateway has an add-ons system so that you can extend its
capabilities. It comes with the Zigbee and Z-Wave adapter add-ons
installed by default, but you can add support for additional adapters
through the add-ons system under “settings” in the main menu.

Click the “+ Add” button on any add-on you want to install.

For example, there is a Virtual Things add-on which allows you to
experiment with different types of web things without needing to buy any
real hardware. Click the “+” button at the bottom right of the screen
to see a list of available add-ons.

Click the “+ Add” button on any add-ons you want to install. When you
navigate back to the add-ons screen you’ll see the list of add-ons that
have been installed and you can enable or disable them.

In the next blog post, you’ll learn how to create, package, and share
your own adapter add-ons in the programming language of your choice
(e.g. JavaScript, Python or Rust).

Voice UI

The gateway also comes with experimental voice controls which are
turned off by default. You can enable this feature through “experiments”
in settings.

Once the “Speech Commands” experiment is turned on you’ll notice a microphone icon appear at the top right of the things screen.

If the smartphone or PC you’re using has a microphone you can tap the
microphone and issue a voice command like “Turn kitchen on” to control
devices connected to the gateway.

The voice control is still very experimental and doesn’t yet
recognise a very wide range of vocabulary, so it’s best to try to stick
to common words like kitchen, balcony, living room, etc. This is an area
we’ll be working on improving in future, in collaboration with the Voice team at Mozilla.

Updates

Your gateway software should automatically keep itself up to date
with over-the-air updates from Mozilla. You can see what version of the
gateway software you’re running by clicking on “updates” in Settings.

What’s Coming Next?

In the next release, the Mozilla IoT team plans to create new gateway
adapters to connect more existing smart home devices to the Web of
Things. We are also starting work on a collection of software libraries
in different programming languages, to help hackers and makers build
their own native web things which directly expose the Web Thing API,
using existing platforms like Arduino and Android Things. You will then
be able to add these things to the gateway by their URL.

We will continue to contribute to standardisation of a Web Thing Description format and API via the W3C Web of Things Interest Group.
By giving connected devices URLs on the web and using a standard data
model and API, we can help create more interoperability on the Internet
of Things.

The next blog post will explain how to build, package and share your
own adapter add-on using the programming language of your choice, to add
new capabilities to the Things Gateway.

How to Contribute

We need your help! The easiest way to contribute is to download
the Things Gateway software image (0.3 at the time of writing) and test
it out for yourself with a Raspberry Pi, to help us find bugs and
suggest new features. You can view our source code and file issues on GitHub. You can also help us fix issues with pull requests and contribute your own adapters for the gateway.

If you want to ask questions, you can find us in #iot on irc.mozilla.org or the “Mozilla IoT” topic in Discourse. See iot.mozilla.org for more information and follow @MozillaIoT on Twitter if you want to be kept up to date with developments.

Happy hacking!