Home Automation

After experimenting with home automation on Arduino board switching on and off relays based on sensor data, I wanted something more connected. Thus I bought a couple of ESP8266's, which are Arduino compatible boards with WiFi connectivity for as cheap as 3USD! I first started with automating using the Adafruit MQTT broker, which is free, but had a lot of limitations. The server could be down at any time, and it was unreachable if my internet went down.

So the solution was a system running on my LAN. This way, my devices worked together even if my internet was down, and I had control over the server if it went down. More importantly, I owned the data! I could decide who to share the data with myself and had total control over it.

The solution was Home Assistant. To clarify, I'm not associated with the development of Home Assistant. I'm just a user of their platform. Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that acts as a hub for all of your devices. It's probably the world's largest platform in terms of integrations at over 1600 on June 19th of 2020. It's also a local system, which is uncommon in the consumer market. It's not a consumer platform (yet), but it's come a long way since 2017, which is when I started using it.

On top of Home Assistant I have addons for running my ESP8266 devices with custom firmwares. Examples of devices I've built are a lot of multipurpose devices, which is one node that controls light, reports temperature, humidity, door status, etc. I've also made devices like a custom automated watering solution for our greenhouse. This device controls water flow with a servo, reports door status, temperature, humidity, and motion.

The possibilities are endless, and I've only scratched the surface of what's possible. I've learned a lot about IoT technologies, IoT protocols like MQTT, Z-Wave, and Zigbee. I look forward to seeing what Home Assistant evolves to, what new IoT devices I'll make, and contributing to the project myself in the future.