Home automation has achieved a lot of popularity in recent years, as day-to-day life is getting simpler due to the rapid growth of technology. Almost everything has become digitalized and automatic. In this paper, a system for interconnecting sensors, actuators, and other data sources with the purpose of multiple home automations is proposed. The system is called qToggle and works by leveraging the power of a flexible and powerful Application Programming Interface (API), which represents the foundation of a simple and common communication scheme. The devices used by qToggle are usually sensors or actuators with an upstream network connection implementing the qToggle API. Most devices used by qToggle are based on ESP8266/ESP8285 chips and/or on Raspberry Pi boards. A smartphone application has been developed that allows users to control a series of home appliances and sensors. The qToggle system is user friendly, flexible, and can be further developed by using different devices and add-ons.

Smart home applications are fast becoming a staple of modern houses, leading to an increased interest in consumer electronics which enable the automation of common household tasks. However, high initial costs, complex solutions and closed systems, mean home automation is still out of reach for a large number of potential customers. A cheap, open, extensible solution is therefore a must if IoT is to become a standard option for modern homes. In this paper, we present an innovative solution to this problem in the form of an IoT framework called qToggle: a system for interconnecting sensors, actuators and other data sources based on open source solutions and easily accessible components. To give a practical example of the uses of the new framework, we implemented a smart irrigation system, which can simplify garden care, while reducing water and energy consumption. The article describes details of the design, instrumentation, and software (mobile application) for the real-time control of this system.

The rapid growth of prosumer photovoltaic installations has introduced significant supply–demand imbalances in modern power grids, motivating the development of energy management systems that can coordinate distributed resources without sacrificing local control responsiveness. This paper presents qToggleEMS, a distributed architecture that combines cloud-resident receding-horizon planning with edge-resident bounded-override control for prosumer sites equipped with photovoltaic generation, battery storage, and grid interconnection. The contribution is positioned at the systems-engineering level: a documented partitioning of responsibilities between a cloud planner (forecasting, price-aware scheduling) and an edge controller (sub-second actuation, autonomous fallback) that preserves planning quality while remaining operational under cloud–edge disconnection. The cloud component, powerHub, is implemented as a set of microservices communicating via MQTT and TimescaleDB; the edge component runs qToggleOS on an ARM single-board computer and accesses inverters directly via Modbus RTU, bypassing manufacturer-provided cloud APIs. The system was deployed at a commercial prosumer site for approximately two months using the prosumer-oriented optimization strategy. Compared with a within-period counterfactual baseline (the cost the site would have incurred under its previous flat-tariff contract), monthly energy costs decreased by 14–15%. An analytical projection of the producer-oriented strategy using historical day-ahead prices from OPCOM PZU suggests a revenue uplift of approximately 23%, pending field validation.