The Blog of Ian Mercer.

Programming a smart home with a fluent, domain-specific language

Programming a smart home with a fluent, domain-specific language

In response to a question I received recently, here is an example of the fluent extensions to C# that my home automation system uses to define how it should behave. In effect this is a domain specific language for modeling home automation behavior as a finite state machine. Note how you can use either a purely declarative sequence or you can use procedural code within a Do() block.

Living.FloorSensor
	.Then(Entrance.HallBeam, 30)
	.Provided(Time.Bedtime)
	.ProvidedNot(Home.DinnerGuests)
	.PulseStretch(10 * 60)                   // don't announce it too often - every 10 minutes
	.Do("Garage doors warning", () => 
	{ 
		if (Garage.GarageDoors.AreAnyOpen) 
		{
			FirstFloor.Kitchen.AllMediaZones.AnnounceString("Excuse me, I think you may want to close the garage doors."); 
		} 
	});

In many ways this is similar to the Reactive Framework from Microsoft except my work on this predates the availability of Reactive Framework and unlike the Reactive Framework my 'sequential logic blocks' include persistence logic so the entire state can be saved to disk (as it is every second). This is important because some transitions in the state machine might be several hours or even days long and you need to be able to restart the system and carry on exactly where you left off.

One key benefit of the declarative approach over the procedural approach is that the declarative approach can explain itself. So, the log entry for a light going on can show that the light was turned on because 'it was dark' and 'we had visitors' and 'someone came into the room'. Compared to traditional home automation systems where you either have no logging at all or you have a log of what happened, this kind of logging is invaluable for figuring out what went wrong when the logic gets complicated. So in this example I should have moved the test for Garage.GarageDoors.AreAnyOpen out to a Provided clause which would allow it to be part of the reverse-chain logic explanation.

Partial results can be captured at any point in these logic chains and then reused in other chains because each partial result is itself a Sensor device that implements the full fluent interface.

Ultimately I plan to hook the logging for what happened back up to the NLP engine which will allow users to ask the home 'Why did you put the driveway light on last night around 9pm?' and ultimately I plan to allow the logic itself to be defined using natural language.

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