Ever since I bought my own home nearly a year ago, Iāve
become increasingly interested in making it smart.
Right off the bat, I feel like I should clarify what that
means to me. The ability to turn some lights on or off with an app is not
smart, in my opinion ā the smart way of controlling lights is by flicking a
switch conveniently located in the room you wish to illuminate.
A smart home needs to be much more intelligent. Itās about
automation. Itās about the home being able to notify me if something is
happening that I need to know about. Itās about being able to accomplish things
with minimal difficulty, not adding complexity and more steps.
Thatās where off the shelf āsmart homeā solutions really
started to fall down for me. I could spend hundreds or maybe even thousands of
dollars, for what? The ability to turn on my living room lights while Iām still
at the office? Why would I ever need to do that?
Nevertheless, the lack (in my opinion) of a pre-packaged,
useful, holistic solution that accomplished my vision of what a āsmart homeā
should be didnāt deter me from tackling things bit by bit. It started with our
burglar alarm. It has internet connectivity which sends me alerts in the event
that something unexpected is happening, and lets me arm or disarm the system
from my phone ā which I actually do find useful.
Next up was our thermostat. The one that was installed when
we bought the house was an old-fashioned one with a simple mercury switch
inside. You set the temperature, and that was it. We replaced that about a
month ago with something programmable (it doesnāt need to be as warm in here at
night as it does during the day; it doesnāt need to be as warm if nobodyās
home), and I took the opportunity to get one with WiFi so I can set the
temperature remotely. Thatās not useful in and of itself, but if you take that
functionality and look at it in the context of my wider vision then the
thermostat is certainly something Iād like to be able to programmatically
control.
It was around this same time that I discovered home assistant, and now my dream is
starting to come alive.
Home Assistant is an open-source project that runs on a
variety of hardware (I was originally running it on a Raspberry Pi, and Iāve
since switched to running it in a Docker
container on our home
server). It has a ton of plugins
(ācomponentsā) that enable it to support a variety of products ā including our
existing alarm, thermostat, streaming media players, and others (including,
somewhat ironically, the colour-changing lightbulbs we have in our family
room). It includes the ability to create scripts and automations, it uses our
cellphones to know our locations, and can send us push notifications.
My initial setup was all about notifications. If we both
leave the house but the burglar alarm isnāt set then it tells us (and provides
an easy way to fix the issue). If we leave one of the exterior doors open for
more than five minutes, it notifies us (or just one of us, if the other is
out). I also created a dashboard (that you may have seen in my last post) to display some of this stuff on a monitor in my office.
Since installing the thermostat Iāve added more automation.
The time we go to bed isnāt always predictable, but when we do go to bed we set
the alarm. So, if itās after 7pm and the alarm goes from disarmed to armed, the
thermostat gets put into night mode. If nobody is home then the temperature
gets gradually turned down based on how far away we are.
If nobody is home at dusk then it turns on some lights and
streams talk radio through the family room speakers to give the impression that
someone is.
This stuff meets my definition of smart, and Iām barely
scratching the surface. The open nature of the platform not only means that Iām
not tied to a particular vendor or technology, but also means that I can add on
to the system in a DIY way.
Which is exactly what Iām going to do. Iāve bought some NodeMCU microcontrollers which are
WiFi enabled, Arduino IDE-compatible
development boards designed to the basis for DIY electronics projects.
Watch this space, because over the coming months Iāll be
connecting our doorbell, garage door and laundry appliances to Home Assistant.
Iāll be learning as I go, and Iāll share the hardware and software.
