Home Automation With Home Assistant

I’ve been interested in home automation for ten or fifteen years now, probably since writing my thesis on home networks access control, quite some time away. My view of a well made home automation is a home that responds to its inhabitants, in some cases even anticipates their wills and wants. Well, anticipate may be a bit of a stretch, but even “infers from” is already sufficiently close to magic.

My first home automation thingy was far from the magic of inference (and to set the expectation, it still isn’t anything magical). In effect, it knew to turn on the garden lights at sunset and turn them off at 23, then turn them on the next morning at 06 and turn them off at sunrise. To make this compatible with the time of year when the sun set after 23 or rose before 06 required some thinking :)

It was, however, a distributed, multi-tenant thingy which switched the garden lights on and off with the solar schedule. It was built using homA, essentially a glorified MQTT¹ framework, running on my home server², an iTead iBoard and a set of relays bought on the cheap from the Internet. It worked, to some extent, fine. It was in no way a refined home automation, but it was mine. And i even think i wrote my first Python script to twiddle some MQTT messages down the bus.

Eventually, i realised that HomA was going to be a bit too unextendable for my skills, so i started looking for some “proper” home automation software. I found some Java thingy (openHAB, i believe) but it was way too heavy. I found MisterHouse but it seemed like an unpenetrable pile of Perl to me, so i let it be.

And finally, i came across Home Assistant. It knew MQTT and it was everything i needed. Well, almost. Home Assistant came with “some assembly required”, which means it did exactly nothing when installed, had documentation that didn’t help me much, and was very finicky about how to spell things out. But i got it running and i got it broken in several interesting ways. I also learned to love git as a way to recover from my configuration updates. It was a wonderfully convoluted system, it knew about who was home from the DHCP reservations from my MikroTik router and it could switch off the car heaters using that information when my wife or i left for work.

For the longest time, i didn’t really extend my system. I did exchange mechanical relays to solid state ones and the iBoard for a Raspberry Pi since i couldn’t find the source code for the iBoard and i know it was hairy enough that i didn’t want to re-write it, but these were incremental updates.

For the longest time, i wanted to add some DIY stuff, or at least, hacked commercial gear, but i just didn’t have the time. That changed a little while back when my wife wanted to buy a LED roof lamp with adjustable intensity and colour temperature. The lamp did not have Home Assistant support, so that was a big no-no. And off i go, the same evening, to IKEA, and finally buy a small bag of Trådfri devices, dimmable, with adjustable colour temperature, one motion sensor and one controllable power socket (shoulda bought more, they ran out just after i bought them and they haven’t been in stock since). The Trådfri lights and gateway were a delight to integrate with Home Assistant and the only thing i’m missing these days is the presence detection my router provided, as i updated my network infrastructure to Google Wifi. More about that in another post.

The entrance lights now turn on in the morning and go out when the home alarm is rigged. The car heater now also takes outside temperature into consideration. And soon, the IKEA lights will change colour temperature with the clock. Sure, it’s not a lot, but it’s something.

I still have hopes to integrate those Sonoff relays and thingies i bought. Otto Winter has built esphomelib (on Tasmota, which i never could get running) with which i have managed to flash two of the simplest relay boxes, but for the more complicated ones, i’m still clueless. Update: I see there’s a module for the 4CH relay box, so maybe there’s one coming for the 4CH Pro that i’ve got too. The Pro has some really weird internal serial protocol to manage the relays, which is just too strange for me to properly comprehend.

Every year, i’d like the christmas tree to have a sensor to warn if the water is running out, and a pump to add some water to it (and a sensor to warn if the water container with the pump is running dry!), but each year nothing gets done. It’s kinda disheartening. At least the christmas lights work on timer (though not connected to Home Assistant yet, since the iTead Wifi to 433 MHz bridge it really opaque to me).

In any case, home automation is still a fascinating topic, and with Home Assistant, i can extend it on my pace, with my skills, on my gear. When or if ever i have the time :)