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My new home automation micro server

lowfat

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Raspberry Pi 2B (overclocked to 1GHz) w/ a 120GB SATA SSD over USB2.0 :biggrin:. Enclosure was printed on my Prusa MK3.

System runs Raspbian Stretch Lite. It is running 3 major apps that I use for home automation.


Home Assistant
. Which IMO is the most powerful smart home controller + supports by far the most devices.

Mosquitto MQTT. MQTT is a protocol that allows simple communication for IoT and other devices. 95% of my IoT uses MQTT. I also use Owntracks on my phone so HA knows if I'm home or not. Owntracks uses MQTT to send my location.

And Node Red. A ridiculously awesome tool that allows for flow-based programming. This cuts out so much YAML that is normally used for Home Assistant.

The Home Assistant UI.
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The Node-RED automations. I use a 'flow' (a plugin) that interfaces Node-RED w/ Home Assistant as well as my Harmony Hub.

These are all my automations that work based on if I'm home/away, the time of day, sunrise/sunset, as well as controlling stuff for my 3d printers.

An example how this works, for the first automation. It is an event that will trigger if my phone leaves/arrives a 100m around my house. On = home, off=away. So lets say I arrive home @ 5:30pm. It will trigger 'evening' and 'sun is up'. It sends a request to turn on all my living room lights, as well as turn on my desk RGB lights to red. If I arrived before 5PM, a few less living room lights would be on and my desk RGB would be red.
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And my Alexa automations. I use a flow in Node-Red that creates a emulated Philips Hue light. Then I created a command phrase for each automation, that will show up as a Hue light in the Alexa app.

So if I say to Alexa "Computer watch Netflix". It will turn off all my living room lights. Turn my hall lights to red (over a 30s transition period, which looks sick). Turn on my TV & AVR via the Harmony Hub. Then open Netflix on the Roku via the Harmony Hub.

The 'Good Night' command will also tell HA that I'm sleeping. Since I often to go bed before sunset in the summer, this prevents HA from turning on the lights normally come w/ sunset.
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Still lots I want to do.I plan to add monitoring of other computers here soon. As well as being able to shut down/ restart systems. This is sorta difficult tho.

Also will be implementing more safety stuff for the 3d printers. Like automatically killing power if something on a printer is running too hot.
 

Lysrin

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Well, I always figured but that settles it... YOU ARE FROM THE FUTURE!!

That is very cool stuff lowfat. I'm still waiting for you to integrate the "Earl Grey, hot" command ;) It is pretty impressive how granular the control is in some of those flows and the different options for triggering. And the custom 3D printed enclosure is just slick!
 

Shadowmeph

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Aldergrove British Columbia
Well, I always figured but that settles it... YOU ARE FROM THE FUTURE!!

That is very cool stuff lowfat. I'm still waiting for you to integrate the "Earl Grey, hot" command ;) It is pretty impressive how granular the control is in some of those flows and the different options for triggering. And the custom 3D printed enclosure is just slick!

hehe

that is really cool if I had a place that was large enough ( live in a tiny Bach suit) I would check out doing such a thing just for the cool factor
 

zoob

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Toronto, ON
Awesome stuff! Recently switched to HA as well when my OpenHab SD card failed - this is probably the worst thing about moving a setup to an RPi vs on a VM. Will be taking notes from your setup and do some copying :)

Have you tried linking in Google Assistant or are you purely Alexa based?
 

lowfat

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Awesome stuff! Recently switched to HA as well when my OpenHab SD card failed - this is probably the worst thing about moving a setup to an RPi vs on a VM. Will be taking notes from your setup and do some copying :)

Have you tried linking in Google Assistant or are you purely Alexa based?


If you have any general questions ask. I've done quite a bit of researching for this. Although if its questions about supported devices I probably won't know anything. Almost everything I use is an ESP8266 device w/ Tasmota firmware plus Hue + TPLink as they both allow complete local control.

I use to use GA for the automations, using webhooks. But GA is slower and I got sick of her always responding w/ a bunch of dialogue I don't need to here :whistle:.

There is a 'Google Action' node available to download for Node-RED. I've added it but haven't played w/ it yet. As I don't use my GAs for in areas where I generally need to call an automation.

EDIT: Tried the Google Action... Ya I have no idea what a Google Action is. https://developers.google.com/actions/overview
 
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Entz

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Kelowna
That is very impressive. I really gotta set this up. I have a few sensors I built around the house but nothing is integrated lol.
 

Chris

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Looks like a great project to start soon. But, I don't have a 3d printer, and I don't have a RPi, altho I always wanted one. Just wondering if there are apps like this for a regular desktop linux running debian?
 

lowfat

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Looks like a great project to start soon. But, I don't have a 3d printer, and I don't have a RPi, altho I always wanted one. Just wondering if there are apps like this for a regular desktop linux running debian?
It isn't special hardware / software. All the software runs fine in debian. I ran it in a Ubuntu server VM for the last 10 months prior to last week.
 

Chris

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Thanks, lowfat. I’ll run it on Debian, and then slowly build the RPi, and may be buy a 3D printer (which has been in my wish list for a long time). I do have a insteon hub and a harmony hub. That should give me a head start.
 

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