After seeing @emrebeyler write a post about his home automation stuff, I figured it was time for me to pull my finger out and finally get round to writing something down about my own setup. It's something I've been wanting to do for a while but I have not been able to work out a good way to present all the information in a post that wouldn't end up being a massive tome with too much information in it. I think I'll start with an overview of what I have so far and then do some more posts on the finer details in the future.
The underlying technology I use for linking all my stuff up is Home Assistant. Their tagline is
Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.
That's pretty much all you would want from something like this if you want to get into the low-level guts of setting up some home automation. I think that if you are a bit less technically minded, you might want to look at some of the all in one hubs like the ZWave or Homekit systems and use their packaged tools and interfaces. Home Assistant can easily integrate into these systems however and gives much more control, so if you wanted to get more involved once you have these kits - no problemo.
Examples of what I've done
So far I have a few things set up, mainly to test out the platform in preparation for a house extension I am having done this year (hopefully). These include..
- Front room light that turns on 15 minutes before sunset and turns off one minute after the TV turns off (as long as it's after 21:30). Can use the Home Assistant UI to control this lamp independently too.
- Outdoor lighting by my front door that I can control using Alexa ("turn on/off the front door lights") or the Home Assistant UI. They also turn off after 5 minutes automatically. I have also previously had these hooked into some cameras that detect motion but that needs more tweaking as it was getting triggered by spiders building webs on the outdoor camera.
- Geofencing of family members - I can tell when there is someone in the house or if the house is empty. I have also geofenced my work and various places on my commute so that my wife knows I arrive safely or leave certain places (as I use trains and cycle)
- Security camera - I have a security camera outdoors that records motion and sends a message to Home Assistant, alerting me to any motion on my front driveway. I use an app called MotionEye to handle the motion detection.
- Phone finder - I can shout at Alexa and she will message my phone even when it is on silent mode.
Technical details
I'll give you a brief overview of what I have set up from a technical point of view and will go into more details in other posts on some of these things
- Home Assistant is running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4G mem and 32G SD using a dockerized container. I manage this container and a few others using
docker-compose - I have a couple of other docker containers running on the pi - Portainer for managing the containers in an easy UI, and Node Red which is a super cool tool for managing automation workflows (in addition to the workflow language that you get in Home Assistant)
- The whole system sits behind a duckdns dynamic IP manager so that I can connect into it from anywhere, certificate management for https is handled by a free LetsEncrypt cert. You need this for the Amazon Alexa integration to work as well. Home Assistant has 2FA to help protect against anyone hacking in... cos turning my lights off is the end goal of any hacker :)
- I backup my config nightly to a Backblaze B2 bucket
- The switches that I use are Sonoff basic switches that I have flashed with Tasmota firmware which gives you full control of the switches using MQTT. This allows me to send messages to them from Home Assistant to get their status as well as change it (ie, turn them on and off).
- Outside I have a couple of Reolink RLC-410 cameras which are great value, have really good night vision and integrate well with MotionEye
- My Motion Eye instance runs on an Ubuntu 18 server (as it's too processor-intensive for the RPI to handle). This has motion detection hooks that call Home Assistant endpoint to notify it of motion. Home Assistant then in-turn sends a message to my phone and/or the television/Alexa etc.
So that's a quick overview of what I've done so far and how I'm doing it. I think in my next post on HA, i'll go into how I have set up some of my basic automations such as my front room light control using Home Assistant YAML as well as Node Red.
Thanks for reading (if you got this far)
Mark