When it comes to home automation there are some unique challenges in the house i live in.
The house is built during the second world war. The Swedish government wanted as many bomb shelters as possible in the country so there were governmental grants for the material to construct the bomb shelter part of the house. I guess that it was tempting to use the material for other parts of the house as well.
They also used chicken wire to reinforce the concrete as you can see in the picture below.
The dense bomb shelter concrete combined with the chicken wire reinforcement makes it hard for radio waves to penetrate the walls. Wireless technology such as Z-Wave does not work very well in this house. To get a decent, but not good, wi-fi coverage we have five (5) access points with a gigabit wired backbone.
Running cables through the house is no easy task either, so we try to use the existing cable canals as far as possible.
To overcome the hurdles I’ve designed and implemented distributed systems. You can find the first incarnation called openDHANA among the projects. The second incarnation is under construction and the GIT repository will be published as soon as the development has reach some sort of stability.