Beaglebone Black Home Automation

So just to update the current situation of the project. The project is currently on hold since I'm on vacations but as of now I still think this project won't get much progress in the coming months since I'm starting university but when I find free time I'll sure work on this and hopefully add new features.

So after all the hard work the project was a success in my computer engineering class, got good feedback from my teacher and a lot of students from junior grades were asking about the project and how I built it and also some students are going to make a better version or a different implementation of this project next year. As I was talking to one student I realized that I made a grave mistake when I was building the web app, I used PHP. Now PHP is a nice and easy language with minimal setup and amazing documentation and resources but it's pretty awful on security and management of code. Now since I was running 2 servers (Laptop and Beaglebone), I decided to run the server on the Beaglebone and use flask to control the pins and the webapp. This will eliminate the 2 servers problem and will also make code easier to manage since Flask has a great way of running things.

As I am experimenting with the beaglebone, I came up with a solution to create applications in any language that will allow you to control the beaglebone. All I needed to do was to create a program that sends get requests to the beaglebone server and we get a response back. This allows the separation of the server and the control application. All you need during setup is the url where the server is running. As of right now I'm thinking about creating an application that controls certain defined pins on the beaglebone as an example application.

So as I was tumbling away with code on the beaglebone, much to my frustrations I realized that the relay board cannot be powered with the beaglebone. It needs a separate power supply. So right now I am using my arduino to power the supply and I need to search through my electronics junk baskets(I have like 10 plus a few at my cousin's place) for a power supply. Hopefully I find one.

I did not get much time to work on the project due to school but now our school board is having a strike and therefore I have time. I have a beagle bone black setup to work as a home automation system. I decided to use python since I am familiar with it and adafruit has written a beautiful library to access the GPIO pins. I also want web control so I decided to use web.py framework which is a micro-framework to develop web apps. Currently I have a webpage that can create, delete and control new output objects. Right now I am working on a database system of logging the activity on the web.py server for access by the admin.