When I bought my apartment in a newly constructed building in 2015 it came with smart home functionality: every light, power socket and window blind was remote controlled in addition to push-buttons placed around the rooms. Also all HVAC and bathroom floor heating functions were interfaced as well. Besides the DIN-rail mounted relays and PLCs the heart of the user interface was a wall-mounted tablet: every one of the 128 apartments had a Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 P5210 configured with Android apps for smart home control, apartment doorbell and IP intercom.

We were given a basic user interface manual but no technical docs and no way of controlling any of it remotely. Which is not cool because in some of the apartment sales brochures it was promised or at least teased that remote control via our smartphones would be possible!

I have rooted the Android OS on the tablet, got the SSID and password for the hidden internal network and from there slowly put together the whole picture. Since I enjoy sharing stuff like this, I then developed a simple app that other neighbors can install on their tablets to get the password, remove bloatware and even periodically automatically reboot the aging tablet which has only 1 GB of RAM.

My next goal was to remotely control everything, ideally use the same Android apps that came preinstalled on the wall tablet on my smartphone from anywhere. And if I could figure out a way to share this solution with my neighbors, even better - for that it needed to be a robust, secure and easy to use one and also not needing any modifications of the existing setup as it was done by the vendor - messing with that would mean too much responsibility and liability for myself.

Also, before you ask, the smart apartment vendor did eventually offer their way of adding the remote control feature - but since they have introduced a brand new generation of PLCs just after our building was constructed, it required a significant investment for each apartment replacing them (in the 100s of €s) and updating the firmware for each one (which they would also charge for!). Far from ideal and even quite e-wasteful.