Similar to every year since 2006, EclipseCon Europe 2017 (opens new window) took place at the end of October in Ludwigsburg, Germany, and it was packed with great talks and content all around the Eclipse universe.

For the first time, there was also a Smart Home Day (opens new window) colocated on the Sunday before EclipseCon started. The Smart Home Day was hosted by the openHAB Foundation (opens new window) with QIVICON by Deutsche Telekom (opens new window) as a sponsor.

The day was all about Eclipse SmartHome (opens new window), its solutions and especially its community. There were twelve great presentations over the day and a huge number of core community members attended the day. Additionally, live demos and posters about openHAB-related research projects at universities were shown.

The agenda proved to be very attractive: More than a week before the date the event was already fully booked. With more than 90 attendees it was beyond any expectation and the venue had reached its maximum capacity.

The Morning

The day started with presentations around Open Source in general, a technical look into the QIVICON platform and the latest updates from the Eclipse SmartHome framework developments. All presentations were recorded (thanks to Markus Storm) and can be viewed by clicking the image (while the talk titles link to the slides):

Presentation	Video
Welcome and Introduction (opens new window) Kai Kreuzer, President openHAB Foundation	(opens new window)
Why Open Source Foundations Matter (opens new window) Ian Skerrett, VP Marketing Eclipse Foundation	(opens new window)
How Deutsche Telekom Delivers a Mass Market Product based on Eclipse SmartHome (opens new window) Jochen Hiller, Product Owner QIVICON Runtime	(opens new window)
About the Importance of UX in Open Source Projects (opens new window) Thomas Dietrich, openHAB Documentation Lead and openHABian Maintainer	(opens new window)
Eclipse SmartHome turned Inside Out - Updates from the Core Framework (opens new window) Simon Kaufmann, Eclipse SmartHome Committer	(opens new window)

The Early Afternoon

Right after lunch the day continued with some deeper technical insights - the VS Code Extension was shown as a replacement for the Eclipse SmartHome Designer, people learned about the Z-Wave protocol and how it is integrated in openHAB and the internals of the openHAB Cloud were discussed.

Presentation	Video
Using VS Code as a Powerful Editor for Textual Configurations (opens new window) Kuba Wolanin, VS Code Extension Maintainer	(opens new window)
A Deep Dive into the Z-Wave Binding (opens new window) Chris Jackson, Z-Wave & ZigBee Binding and HABmin Maintainer	(opens new window)
openHAB Cloud: From IFTTT, Alexa & Google Home Integration to a Scalable Multi-Cloud Microservices Architecture Mehmet Arziman, openHAB Cloud Maintainer	(opens new window)

The Late Afternoon

After a coffee break, which was extensively used for networking and discussions, a sequence of short inspirational talks concluded the day.

Besides a brief intro to the oneM2M standard and its prototyped integration with Eclipse SmartHome and a praise of the virtues of code reviews, community members presented what they have realized with Eclipse SmartHome resp. openHAB:

It was extremely impressive with what little latency a local voice recognition can score and how well it works if there is a restricted vocabulary. The setup of a whole office proved convincingly that openHAB can easily scale to be the brain of whole buildings and not just private homes - and that it is running smoothly since 18 months without a single reboot. And Markus Storm gave a glimpse into some of his personal, more advanced use cases that help him to deal with automatic mowers, robot cleaners, kids and mothers-in-law alike.

Presentation	Video
Connecting Domains: Interworking of Eclipse SmartHome with oneM2M Andreas Kraft, Telekom Innovation Laboratories	(opens new window)
About the Why and How of Code Reviews (opens new window) Martin van Wingerden, openHAB Add-ons Maintainer	(opens new window)
Experiences with Offline Voice Interaction in openHAB Yannick Schaus, HABPanel Maintainer	(opens new window)
An Enterprise Grade Project with openHAB (opens new window) George Erhan, openHAB Community Member	(opens new window)
Presence Detection and Other Cool Applications (opens new window) Markus Storm, openHAB Community Member Videos shown during the talk: Landroid (opens new window), Hombot (opens new window), TV (opens new window)	(opens new window)

A big thanks to everyone who has attended the event and also thanks for all the positive feedback about it! It is tentatively planned to repeat a similar event next year at EclipseCon Europe - so please make sure to save October 21, 2018 in your calendar!

You can find pictures of the Smart Home Day on Google Photos: