| 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
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 autoupdate and 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 && pip3 install --upgrade homeassistant && hass
Or if you do not want to update automatically:
#!/bin/bash virtualenv -p python3 /srv/homeassistant && source /srv/homeassistant/bin/activate && hass
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/.
Sensors
Dallas temperature
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.