Recently, I have been all about turning our home into a smart home. Thatās mostly because Iāve discovered Home Assistant: a little piece of software that runs (in my case) on a Raspberry Pi and pulls together data from all the sensors and smart devices you own.
Apart from a new WiFi thermostat that I was going to buy anyway I havenāt yet spent any money at all in my quest for this – Iāve merely connected together the devices we already owned (Chromecasts; family room lights; our burglar alarm), added in some data available through various APIs (weather; internet speed; server status) and pulled location information from our phones using an app that publishes the information to my own server.
Anyway, now that I have all this information in one place I wanted an attractive way to display it in my office. Happily Iād already bought a monitor with a built-in powered USB hub from a surplus equipment sale a while back, with this kind of project in mind.
So, my Friday afternoon project today became hooking up another Raspberry Pi to this monitor and crafting a HTML dashboard for it to display. Not everything works yet, but I think itās pretty good for an afternoonās work.
(Since I didnāt remove the clock from the frame when I shot the video, I canāt pretend this thing is quick to boot. I may have manipulated the video speed at a couple of points. But anyway).
Oh, and watch this space for some home-brew smart home devices, coming soon!