Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson has recently been cleaning up some scripts he’s been using personally for a few years to enhance the integration between the KDE desktop and Home Assistant for open-source home automation. This work has evolved into the KDE Internet of Things “Kiot” and is currently in a pre-alpha state for enhancing the support between KDE and home automation controls.
This Kiot project is a great concept and hopefully it will evolve into much more beyond its current pre-alpha state. At the moment Kiot likely won’t appeal to the masses of KDE desktop users since there isn’t even a GUI yet but relies on hand-editing the configuration files. You also need to have Home Assistant already running on your network, etc. Furthermore, Kiot doesn’t allow manipulating Home Assistant controllers right now but just exposing the state of the PC/preferences so that Home Assistant can then act on them with automation actions.
David Edmundson explained his motivations for starting Kiot:
“I have a script lower my blinds if I turn on the camera during the afternoon as otherwise there’s an annoying glare. My office lights and monitor both have a redder hue at night, but disabling night-mode on my PC automatically disables the main light performing redshift too. I want my screen to turn off not 10 minutes after activity, which is simultaneously both annoyingly too long and too short, but the moment the motion sensor in my room says I’ve left.
Home Assistant, the best open source home automation tool out there supports all of this, but it needs some hooks for the PC to tell it about the current state and invoke actions on the PC.”
The Kiot daemon contains a plug-in system and can hook depending upon user activity, if the PC is in a locked state, system suspend/power actions, if the web camera is in use, accent colors of the desktop, execute arbitrary scripts, shortcuts, and night mode inhibition.
The Kiot code for now is hosted on GitHub. More details on this KDE home automation project via David Edmundson’s announcement of the project via his blog. Here’s to hoping Kiot can evolve into a nice KDE project for better interfacing with home automation systems.
