Nizzies Home Automation Efforts

Nizzies Home Automation Efforts
Participants	Dennis
Skills	1337 Skillz
Status	Active
Niche	Electronics
Purpose	Fun
Tool	No
Location	Niz
Cost
Tool category

Nizzies Home Automation Efforts

Home-assistant.png {{#if:No | [[Tool Owner::{{{ProjectParticipants}}} | }} {{#if:No | [[Tool Cost::{{{Cost}}} | }}

The brain: Banana Pro with Home Assistant

My Pi 2's micro sd card broke very quickly, so I've been working on a more stable replacement in the form of a Banana Pro board. I installed Bananian on the sd card and then moved the installation to a real hard disk (yay spindles o/) connected to the SATA port. Hopefully this will survive longer.

Home Assistant

I followed this Installation instructions. This worked fine once I installed some dependencies for the discovery component (I don't know which one did the trick):

apt-get install build-essential checkinstall python3-dev

To get device tracking with nmap working, nmap needed to be installed and a symlink for arp needed to be made:

apt-get install nmap
ln -s /usr/sbin/arp /usr/bin/arp

To have home assistant autostart after reboot, I put this line in /etc/crontab:

@reboot homeassistant /home/homeassistant/start_homeassistant.sh

With start_homeassistant.sh containing:

#!/bin/bash
virtualenv -p python3 /srv/homeassistant && source /srv/homeassistant/bin/activate && hass

Sensors

NRF nodes

Most probably I will use the hardware designed by User:Zarya as mentioned in NrfSensorNode. They will run the library from https://www.mysensors.org/.

USB webcam

Followed https://home-assistant.io/blog/2016/06/23/usb-webcams-and-home-assistant/ to have Home Assistant look at lastsnap.jpg, a symlink generated by motion which points to the latest image taken. Not particularly useful yet, because of the bad image quality, but maybe I can use it for things like more advanced presence detection in the future. To be continued...

Lights

Philips Hue

Got some Philips Hue stuff for cheap. Hue integrates with Home Assistant very easily: https://home-assistant.io/components/light.hue/. Lights are automatically found once you give HA access to the bridge (push button on bridge when HA ask for it).

Hue Bridge v1

Talks to the lights over Zigbee Light Link and connects to the network over UTP

Hue color lamps

3 LED lights that work just fine, although 2 of them are missing the glass bit. They do whites and colors \o/.

Living Colors Aura

Does colors and whites.

Hue white

Do white light only, but are still dimmable. Got 2 of them.

• 

Automations

Lights on when I get home

I wanted to see things then I get home in the dark, so I pointed one of the hue lights outward such that it illuminated my garden and did some automation. Certain lights, including the one pointing outwards go on when my mobile phone connects to my wifi network and the following conditions are met:

• It's after sunset
• All hue lights are off (which is in itself another check that I was previously away)

In order to have better wifi coverage I extended my wifi network using OpenWRT and this guide: [1]. This works pretty well. The system also sends me an email whenever the automation is triggered, so I'm reminded the lights are turned on.

Links I might need later on

• Banana Pro Pinout