AWS IoT for home automation

How to use Amazon AWS IoT services for home auomation? Finnish blog posting Valoautomaatiota AWS IoT -alustalla (check English translation by Google) about building home lighting automation with Philips Hue, Z-Wave and AWS IoT. The idea is to build a solution where the lights go on automatically on arrival to home and they can be controlled with cloud by hand. As you can guess from the choices, the aim of the project was not the simplest possible solution, but getting hands-on feel for the AWS IoT platform and Z-Wave. Home automation make it easier to find other solutions.

Amazon released last year within the AWS cloud their services IoT platform. The platform is designed to provide an easy way to connect various devices to the cloud, collect equipment data and to control them. Amazon IoT Device SDK is a programming platform that makes the connection of devices painless either using C, Arduino, or Node.js.

AWS IoT is based on the MQTT standard and add it on Amazon a little of its own functionality. AWS IoT’s GUI tool (or APIlla) manage the devices and their accompanying certificates, as well as data processing rules. Each device needs its own certificate and private key, which allows it identifies itself when sending data to the cloud. AWS IoT connects directly to Amazon’s other cloud services. When it receives the device MQTT message, the message can be controlled by, for example, a database or queue, e-mail and micro-Lambda service (Lambda-function event object).

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