Domoticz on RPi 1 using FreeBSD/ARM

FreeBSD, Rasberry and Domoticz

I decided to create a Home Automation controller from my old Raspberry 1 device. In the past i used Linux on it but now it is supported by FreeBSD/ARM, so i decided to give it a try.

Installing FreeBSD

This is an easiest part. RPi 1 is fully supported, so i just downloaded FreeBSD11 image and put it on the SD card using dd tool. That`s it, FreeBSD boots normally (no installation process required) and is ready to use. I only added ntpd/sshd to the autostart process.

Installing domoticz

Domoticz is an open source home automation system, written on C++. There is a FreeBSD port for it, so first thing i tried to do was to install binary package using pkg tool. Unfortunately there is no binary package, so i had to install ports. To save some time before starting domoticz compilation i would recommend to install all build requirements using pkg manager, compiling them on RPi 1 would take a lot of time. Some tips on getting domoticz compiled on RPi 1:

• Clang/C++ is using a lot of memory, so swap is required. I added swap space on the connected USB storage, with 512Mb swap file.
• Compilation process will take a lot of hours. Probably cross-compilation would be much faster, but then it wont be a normal port build. Anyway, this process is a good crash test for the hardware.
• I found that build failed on a 2 files: hardware/I2C.cpp and hardware/PiFace.cpp. This is the reason why there is no binary package. To fix the build – replace __arm__ with __linuxarm__. This will fix the build process, issue is reported to the upstream and FreeBSD maintainer.

Using domoticz

I did not found anything platform-specific for the domoticz on the FreeBSD. After installation i only imported database from the OSX installation and copied my LUA scripts for the custom sensors + installed required LUA modules from the ports. Despite the ugly build performance domoticz works very fast and using just about 25Mb of RAM. Currently I2C support in the hardware/I2C.cpp is implemented only for Linux/ARM, i am planning to fix that in a few weeks (i do not have any supported i2c devices now). FreeBSD/ARM itself works very stable, i did not had any problems with it.