DIY Home Automation:controllers,sensors,software

rolion

Hello,

I'm starting few projects for my home.
Basically,controlling,monitoring all around the house,all that includes digital and analog world.

Currently,looking at the LattePanda and at RaspberryPi as the main brain behind the projects.
lLattepanda looks better as it has main Windows10 interface where i can drop Jarvis and do a bluetooth control and with Arduino build on-board is easy to manipulate the external world.But,not enough resources,documentation available yet...
RPi is new to me,i bought a Pi3 from Radionics and playing around now with Webserver,PHPmySQL and GPIO code from Google.

There are tons of youtubies clips with people sharing their setup.

Anyone here interested in sharing the work/design,hard work ,highly customisable and not lasty,rewarding ?

ShRT

rolion wrote: »

Hello,

I'm starting few projects for my home.
Basically,controlling,monitoring all around the house,all that includes digital and analog world.

Currently,looking at the LattePanda and at RaspberryPi as the main brain behind the projects.
lLattepanda looks better as it has main Windows10 interface where i can drop Jarvis and do a bluetooth control and with Arduino build on-board is easy to manipulate the external world.But,not enough resources,documentation available yet...
RPi is new to me,i bought a Pi3 from Radionics and playing around now with Webserver,PHPmySQL and GPIO code from Google.

There are tons of youtubies clips with people sharing their setup.

Anyone here interested in sharing the work/design,hard work ,highly customisable and not lasty,rewarding ?

Just getting into something similar myself. I would look at MQTT as the protocol for sharing statuses and updates between your different devices. There are libraries already there for arduino and esp8266 which makes it easier. Lots of good resources out there for it and most of the home automation servers (openhab, domoticz, home assistant etc) support it which makes it easier for scripting

wallaby72

I agree with ShRT. I'm also using Home Assistant currently and building sensors that will use MQTT. There's a lot of useful info on https://www.mysensors.org/

rolion

Thanks for sharing.
I will prefer as much possible to keep the brain inside the house and connect via VPN on the mobile device and/or a secure htps connection or dumping the dashboard with stats only (no commands) to a third party hosted websit.

I began looking at the project from the brains perspective,as the core element,then getting the sensors and the protocols.

I have few iot in the house that in event of been compromissed, it can make my life miserable (heating for water and radiators,power for sockets an switches).Imagine some nasty guy turning the heating and power whole home.

LE:
It looks like OpenHab works here on the RasPi !

wallaby72

I have Home Assistant running on a server locally and access to it from outside can be restricted as desired. You can use SSL or Tor with it if you wish.
It will run on a RasPi as well.
I did hop around quite a bit on which central application to go with. I played around with Homeseer, Openhab1, OpenHab2 and Domoticz.
I looked at OpenHab2 quite a bit beforehand and I like a lot of its features but found that documentation wasn't great. I may switch back to it at some point when OpenHab2 is out of beta.

Someone else on boards tipped me off about Home Assistant and no complaints so far about it.

dazberry

I've been working on a few bits with some Raspberry Pi zeros (PiZ).

It all started as a Pi B in an old R2D2 pencil case (camera, PIR and a few LEDs), once the PiZ came along I realised I could fit more in - so the current iteration has the camera, an external switch, PIR, MCP3008+LDR, 2 LEDs - loads of wires, vero board and blu tack.

But a combination of the Pi2D2 thing being a bit tricky trying to squeeze everything in, and the PiZ being relative cheap (+ sdcard + wifi dongle etc.) I decided to start building much more simple devices and mesh them together over some sort of network.

At this point I've built

• USB Relay (for USB lights etc),
• PIR + Camera,
• LDR+Temp,
• LDR + 433mhz TX (for maplins rc sockets) WIP

These are all contained in single gang white electrical socket boxes. Have dremel-ed out and sugru-ed back in whatever external connectors (Female micro-usb to pi, status LED, and whatever else needs to be surfaced).

The big thing is now to start writing all the interconnecting software. Originally I was thinking of using something like RabbitMQ as a backbone for all the devices, but I'm now looking to split it where applicable into three modes:

• Local autonomous (e.g. per device - PIR turns on Camera etc)
• LAN (all devices communicate together on a local network, thinking of having some device stepping up to act as a co-ordinator for the group and to the cloud)
• Cloud - the idea is to have devices across different sites that can influence each other, i.e. taking LDR reading on one site to turn on/off lights on another etc.

Looking at writing all the Pi side in Python and cloud side in C#, using RESTful json calls flask/asp.net WebApi - have the architectural part more or less decided upon, just need to get cracking on it - just hard to get the time these days.

D.

Graham

dazberry wrote: »

I decided to start building much more simple devices and mesh them together over some sort of network.

Have you looked at the Particle Photon? Cheap, tiny, WiFi enabled, IFTTT support and an out of the box backend/api.

Only got my hands on one this evening so early days yet, fairly impressed so far.

reklamos

Hi all,
I've started looking into home automation myself over last month or so.
My idea is to use IoT devices based on esp8266 and use MQTT protocol.
So over last week I've built first sensor to monitor air(Temp, Humidity and CO2).
Have not decided on MQTT broker yet but I'm playing with Mosquito also installed Home Assistant it has it's own broker or can use Mosquito.
The broker and Hone Assistant are running as a VM on my server in the attic but it can also be installed on Raspberry Pi.
I've installed Grafana as I really liked how it visualizes data.
Here is a screenshot of one bedroom over last week.

So far I'm pleased how monitoring is working and just finished building one more sensor for other bedroom.

mervifwdc

Hi Folks, Great thread! I just found it.

I'm using a Raspberry pi to monitor all the light switches (all momentary) and to turn on or off lights.

I'm using a python program running as a service for the software.


hmmmm.... Flickr does not want to share the photo.... Till I figure out why, search for merv colton on flickr. Sorry!

laugh

reklamos wrote: »

Hi all,
I've started looking into home automation myself over last month or so.
My idea is to use IoT devices based on esp8266 and use MQTT protocol.
So over last week I've built first sensor to monitor air(Temp, Humidity and CO2).
Have not decided on MQTT broker yet but I'm playing with Mosquito also installed Home Assistant it has it's own broker or can use Mosquito.
The broker and Hone Assistant are running as a VM on my server in the attic but it can also be installed on Raspberry Pi.
I've installed Grafana as I really liked how it visualizes data.
Here is a screenshot of one bedroom over last week.
So far I'm pleased how monitoring is working and just finished building one more sensor for other bedroom.

What Co2 sensor did you use?

reklamos

MH-Z19 a bit expensive but could not find anything cheaper.

reklamos

mervifwdc wrote:

Hi Folks, Great thread! I just found it.
I'm using a Raspberry pi to monitor all the light switches (all momentary) and to turn on or off lights.
I'm using a python program running as a service for the software.

Looks neat and tidy. I assume the house was pre-wired during build so that all switch cables get to single point.

mervifwdc

reklamos wrote: »

Looks neat and tidy. I assume the house was pre-wired during build so that all switch cables get to single point.

Hi,

Yes - it was a rewire job in that part of the house, so I figured i might as well go for a centrally controlled system. Other than what's in the photo, everything is simple and old school.

I went with heavier (Std lighting wiring) cables to the switches instead of lighter cable like cat 5 in case I had to revert to a simpler system (I could have put in regular switches, and connected them direct to the relays). But so far the Raspberry pi is flying it. It's running since last may or so.

I liked the momentary switches as I can use one switch to control any number of relays, and also I've set it that if the switch at the door or at the bed is held for more than 3 seconds, it turns off every light in the house.

In the older part of the house it's a traditional wiring system, so I'm enjoying reading what others have done. As I said, great thread.

reklamos

mervifwdc wrote: »

Hi,

Yes - it was a rewire job in that part of the house, so I figured i might as well go for a centrally controlled system. Other than what's in the photo, everything is simple and old school.

I went with heavier (Std lighting wiring) cables to the switches instead of lighter cable like cat 5 in case I had to revert to a simpler system (I could have put in regular switches, and connected them direct to the relays). But so far the Raspberry pi is flying it. It's running since last may or so.

I liked the momentary switches as I can use one switch to control any number of relays, and also I've set it that if the switch at the door or at the bed is held for more than 3 seconds, it turns off every light in the house.

In the older part of the house it's a traditional wiring system, so I'm enjoying reading what others have done. As I said, great thread.

Had a look at UNIPI. Pretty simple piece of kit with bunch of relays which is nice. I have no need to do lightf switching also would need to rewire the whole house for that. If I to go that route I would probably switch to 12/24V DC power for LEDs in order to have dimming lights. Sure dimming can be done with AC but it is much simple with DC.

Anyway installed another 2 sensors in the house.
The sensors highlighted that there is air quality problem CO2 in the rooms. I knew about it before but this really shows that extend of it. I like the way sensors are working and they do pickup very quickly when there is someone in the room/the doors and windows closed or opened/when the heating is on etc.


Have couple more sensors that I need to scatter around the house and then will have to start doing smth with that data.