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 Pi M1 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. This board died on me a couple of weeks later, so I ordered a Banana Pi M1 1GB and inserted the microSD card into the standard SD slot using a convertor, so we're up and running again.

Home Assistant

Running in docker for easier switching of versions. See here.

Sensors

MySensors

Home Assistant has excellent support for MySensors sensors.

Gateway

Hardware

This is a Lolin Nodemcu board.

Gateway function

The gateway will communicate with the nodes using a NRF24L01+ radio and runs the MySensors ESP8266 Gateway code.

Gateway sensors

The gateway also acts as a platform for sensors on it's own.

DHT11

Humidity and temperature.

Pulse counter

Counts pulses coming from LED on my energy meter. This way I can calculate current power draw in the entire house.

Nodes

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/.

LivingColors Aura

Does colors and whites.

Hue white

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

LivingWhites

Also dimmable white light. Got 2.

• 

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.

Opentherm gateway

I have the same gateway as we have in the space. It is not working yet with the new opentherm_gw component in hass. I'm experiencing similar issues as in this issue with Home Assistant 0.81.0.dev0. The gateway and esp8266 with Easpeasy with Ser2Net seem to work correctly. I can see data with otmonitor, or by telnetting to the esp8266,

Links I might need later on

• Banana Pro Pinout