Download

Online

Gallery

Blog

Sweet Home 3D Blog

This blog presents news and tips about Sweet Home 3D.

Sweet Home 3D for smart buildings

It seemed logical and natural that some connections between Sweet Home 3D and smart buildings software gradually set up. As more and more users report how they use Sweet Home 3D designs within such software, we decided to write this article to show their achievement.

The Smart home — also named connected house, domotic, or automation — market is quickly growing. An evidence? The GAFA are making expensive acquisitions or develop their own software or devices: Google (Nest, Google Home...), Amazon (Ring, Alexa...), Apple (HomeKit), Samsung (SmartThings), etc. Development for house-hold items like lighting, heating, security systems, voice-actived assistants actually benefits from important investments.

But it is obviously the domotic open source community which interests us today, especially the different home automation platforms which drive devices, like OpenHab, Home Assistant, Domoticz, Jeedom which have the biggest communities, according to different press articles.

Some of the developers or users of these software solutions experimented bridges between such smart home software and free interior design applications in order to propose realistic and customized interfaces for their DIY (Do It Yourself) home automation.

Here are some different approaches they performed with Sweet Home 3D.

- Domoticz interface looks quite simple but this tutorial kindly proposed by Tutomotique, an interesting blog in French, shows the way to install and link Domoticz icons in an image designed with Sweet Home 3D.


Sweet Home 3D plan linked into Domoticz

- A few years ago, following the same idea, an interface contest was organized by Jeedom, a French company which proposes a domotic solution. At least five of the competitors used Sweet Home 3D.


Jeedom contest: Florent306 proposal for an interface for smart security devices

Very recently, was introduced in Jeedom the ability to import a Sweet Home 3D design exported at OBJ format in a zipped file, as explained in this user's guide, in order to navigate in a home and manipulate devices. See also this video on Instagram. Thank you Jeedom team, we hope to watch many new examples soon!

- On Reddit, we found interesting posts about Home Assistant showing the lighted rooms of a home in 3D, with images assembled from different realistic renderings computed in Sweet Home 3D with certain lights on or off. Integrated with smart devices symbols that allows the user to light rooms or not, it gives a very nice interface, like shown in MattTheBrofessor video and Loonysup video.


Screenshot of MattTheBrofessor video


Screenshot of Loonysup video

Still on Reddit, we found another interesting message posted by Aaron Godfrey aka Boralyl, with a video showing interactions in Home Assistant on a two floor house designed with Sweet Home 3D.

Aaron gives more details in his blog where he explains his approach, tips about creating a floorplan in Sweet Home 3D and then how to create an interactive 3D floorplan in Home Assistant. It's up to you now!

- On the forum of OpenHab (developed in Java), we noticed a year ago a more sophisticated use: Yannick Schaus embedded the WebGL 3D view of Sweet Home 3D JS viewer into HABPanel dashboards and customized it to let the user interact with devices shown in 3D.
He distributed the source code of his proof of concept with detailed instructions in habpanel-3dview GitHub repository. Looks promising...

Screenshots of Yannick Proof of concept video

We are happy that Sweet Home 3D contributes to these new connected houses developments and hope there will be more and more experiences like those. According to different experts, the market has to be cheaper, more user friendly and data safer —commitments that we obviously share — in order to really raise.

Many thanks and congratulations to Ben (Tutomotique blog about Domoticz), Alexandre, Domomat and Florent306 (Jeedom), Matt and David (Home Assistant video on Reddit forum), Aaron (Home Assistant video and blog) and Yannick (OpenHab) for their work and their authorization to reproduce it here.



    Get Sweet Home 3D at SourceForge.net. Fast, secure and Free Open Source software downloads
   
© Copyright 2006-2024 eTeks - All rights reserved