[perrylaj]

I work for a company (Inductive Automation), and we build a platform for industrial automation called Ignition. A few years back we created a special free license tier (and some light weight branding) for personal and educational use. It's called "Maker Edition", and there is a growing group of users using it for home automation. Mostly people already in the operational/industrial automation space, but it seems like it's growing more broadly.

We package Ignition as a docker image, an installer, or just a simple zip archive you can decompress and launch, so it's easy to self-host or deploy to a cheap cloud tier. The biggest downsides are that there will be a bit of a learning curve to using it (as with any new tool), the documentation being focused on commercial use cases, and similarly, we don't offer first party drivers for common home protocols (zigbee, zwave, etc). But we have pretty good docs, a free online learning platform, and pretty active forums. 3rd parties have written various drivers for home use.

I'd love for more in the home automation/maker space to know about and use it. We don't monetize maker edition in any way, and so don't really promote it, but I'd love to see the home userbase grow (and hopefully by extension, the hacker/maker community who might be able to help contribute to drivers and other resources).

It's an open platform built on the JRE, with a public sdk and example modules (plugins) and related tools available on github.com/inductiveautomation. The software is in use to automate virtually every industry, so it's fairly well tested (at least to the extent that a toolkit can be).

Maker Edition info is available at: https://inductiveautomation.com/ignition/maker-edition

Disclosure : work for inductive automation, but otherwise don't have a financial interest in people using Ignition Maker Edition or anything of that (aside from any side effects that come from broader adoption in general). My selfish interest is in a larger home use community so there are more cool projects to check out, resources to share, open source modules published, etc.

All statements here are my personal views.