Hi. Every one.
This is my first step into home automation, although industrial automation has been keeping me busy for the last 15 yrs :-)
I've been playing around with Arduino, RS485 and Modbus. Modbus is an "openly published and royalty-free communication protocol" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modbus), and there are several examples (and libraries) available for Arduino. It alows read / write of both analog and digital registers.
Additionally, there is an open source project, SCADABR (
http://www.scadabr.org.br/) of a SCADA system (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA) that has the Modbus connectivity implemented (in java, I think) from were we might (?) get some code from. The website's in portuguese but I can help you with that.
It'd be great to have open source software, like HG, linked with open source hardware, like Arduino in a Home Automation network.
Best regards,
M