SuperHouse #24: Home automation system architecture
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- čas přidán 25. 08. 2024
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I've been lucky enough to have worked with an electrician to totally rewire my house for home automation, so it works in a very different way to a normal house. This episode traces through how power arrives at my house, is distributed to a pair of sub-switchboards, and from there goes out to loads such as lights. It also covers the important pieces of the system including MQTT and OpenHAB.
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Jonathan, I know these videos take a huge amount of time & energy to do. Thank you massively for taking the time and putting the energy and your expertise and passion into providing these as they are invaluable.
Best MQTT explanation I have seen.
Just re-watching this episode for the umpteenth time... I think this really should be considered the definitive reference video for home automation.
The world's best teacher thanks
Good to have you back 👍 new season episode 1 😊 perfect length and very inspirational !
Great work and presentation you sir are the reason I got into home automation! Love the show and your wisdom thank you!
The work you've done with your home is incredible, and it's fascinating following how you've done it! Keep up the amazing work Jon!
Guy on the phone: "Cut the red wire...". Guy looking at the switch board: "Which one?"
Followed your architecture to automate my entire house!! Flawless!!
Excellent content. I am also going down the rabbit hole right now and starting to automate my house through bespoke programs/devices I am making. I will definitely go back through all your other videos for some inspiration, keep up the great work!
Just stumbled upon your channel whilst I started planning my home automation journey. Glad I did as your explanations have been excellent and really we presented.
Well done
Awesome Jonathan. A great effort and will be useful to a lot of people!
thanks - this is really revealing about a different but fairly straightforward and very easy way for anyone to do, and very clearly mapped out like a recipe. Legend. Thank you thank you thank you !
As usual, brilliant video and explanation. For my home automation system, I'm also using MQTT since 2015 to communicate between my 2 Raspberry Pi's, this to my big satisfaction. It's an easy, reliable and very sturdy protocol with very few overhead and lightning fast! I have switches downstairs that have to activate relais upstairs and the flow goes like this:
On my RPi downstairs, a switch state is detected by I2c via an IO expander (MCP23017). Then a Java program converts that I2c result into a MQTT message. Then this is published to the broker which will send it "out" to all subscribed clients.
My upstairs RPi is subscribed to it and grabs the message in a Java application. That application converts it back to I2c which controls again an IO expander, sets a pin and through a transistor circuit finally sets the relais.
So, quite a "long" way but you can't even see a delay with the naked eye. It's that fast...
That sounds very similar to how I'm doing it. My next episode (up in a few days) will show more detail about how my light switches work. The major difference is that I'm not using a Raspberry Pi with an IO expander to read the light switches: I use a Freetronics EtherMega which reads them directly using digital inputs, then publishes to MQTT. More details to follow :-)
Looking forward to read it... :-)
Excellent work..! Very educative and clear information
Thanks for going into so much detail. Great stuff!
Thanks for taking the time to explain all your systems and the way it works. I am looking forward to making a system at home also
Amazing explanation of how MQTT can help us and deal with events. How it can be hooked to physical wiring and software defining rules. Thanks a lot.
Great video...nice to see you back
Add IoT in your descriptions and you will get more hits....
Another awesome video, thank you Jonathan
You really made my day... even its a white board well explained
This was truly helpfull. MQTT has always been like a swamp to me. I wouldn't go there unless I really had to. This video made it much less intimedating.
That's awesome! I really appreciated the way you made the tour. The thin I really want to know are the ones you are focusing on. Thank you!
Definitely gonna subscribe to see more stuff!
Awesome! I was looking info/projects related with home automation and I found you. I will start working on my project. Thanks for share your projects, cheers!
Excellent and Brilliant
Great stuff John, thanks for the video.
So many questions!
MQTT: can you publish a JSON object so that you can see the humidity and the time it was reported for example? {"humidity": 47.0, "update_dttm": 1506086799679}
Power: how do you handle a power outage? How do you make sure things spool back up in the proper order so your sensors can connect to the network after the network is availalbe?
Redundancy: Do you have a mechanical backup to your software solutions? Can there even be a mechanical backup?
Wireless Frequency: Why did you choose 433MHz, why not z-wave?
I cannot rewire my house to be centralized so I am having to figure what wireless range I'll be using that won't interfere with my WiFi that will give me mechanical switches with software control. I'm at a loss currently
MQTT: yes! MQTT doesn't care what messages it passes, so it's fairly common to use JSON as the payload. That makes a lot of sense.
Power outages: this is something that possibly deserves an entire episode because it has been a huge pain in the past. My biggest problem was that my router (and hence DHCP server) was one of the slowest things to start up, so in a cold-start situation many devices would end up orphaned and never join the network. My sledgehammer solution to this is to put hardware watchdogs on just about everything, and have the watchdog only reset if the device successfully communicates with a remote service. After a cold start, some devices will sit there repeatedly rebooting until the other things they depend on are ready, then they'll settle down and be fine. It's at the point now where the system comes up from a cold start all by itself without any need to intervene.
Redundancy: this is also something that deserves a long answer, so I won't get into it here. The short answer is no, but there are reasons that it doesn't really matter in practice.
Frequency: That's only because I designed this board while working on a project to control electric blinds that used 433MHz remote controls. I don't have any Z-Wave devices but there's no particular reason for that. I simply haven't come across any that I needed to integrate with. Yet!
That was a very informative video. Thank you for explaining mqtt. Great job.
Brilliant ... this was 2nd video seen after your rubbishbin one ... just started today with openhab ... installed it on a rpi .. but now I understand the bigger picture ... very clear and inspirational ... well done .. look forward to your other and more videos!
Outstanding video
A good reason for this setup is when you have scenarios where your garage needs to have a switch on the door side and the gate side where you might only have 1 switch, they can toggle each other. not simple with traditional switch which you need to rewrite the switch and cabling for it.
Nice to see you back vlogging.
Great video I've only just started my home automation adventure from discovering sonoffs from your channel and having litrally no knowledge about it and coding etc (total noob). This has lead to a new hobby which I'm loving learning about and this video has totally helped me understand MQTT of which before I couldn't find a single video which explained it so well. I've just installed my open hab on to a raspberry pie and looking for ways to implement more home automation into my home. I just wish I had got into home automation before id finished decoration my house and re wiring! thanks for the great turorial look forward to the rest
Thanks Paul! I've found that MQTT has been a very useful tool, and I've had a few goes at trying to explain how it works and why it matters. Hopefully I was clear enough this time.
You need to do an episode about the rewiring. Maybe interview your electrician about how you got ethernet pulled to switch locations which previously had mains. What were the time consuming / expensive parts of the wiring? How did you solve the problem places, where wire runs would require you to tear out a bunch of drywall or flooring? I've just been wanting gigabit ethernet in a couple places in my house, and with a finished basement it looks pretty difficult and expensive.
That sounds like a really interesting idea.
Nice work !! Excellent information! Im starting with Node-red, arduino and Raspberry pi!
I was watching your video and you were talking about your "Rules Engine" and I said out loud at my TV "Dude you should be using Node-Red". When you got there I smiled. This video is a few months old so I am going to assume that you realize that Node-Red can do pretty much all you are doing with Openhab. I'm using node-red-dashboard for my tablet and phone interface. I have a database running on node-red and anything else you can think of. Just streamline your software down to Mosquitto and Node-Red on your Raspberry Pi Zero W like I did and you'll be happy you did. Great videos, glad I found you. Now I am trying to figure out how to dim lights using your switches. I found a ac dimmer module so that is my next project.
Great information on MQTT. Greetings from Andreas on Off Grid Sweden
Offgrid is really good
This is so freaking cool.
Thankyou Brilliant way you Explained. Thank you Very Much
Great video.
Thank you.
Hi Jon, Hope the next episode comes out soon, really interested in how your lighting works
Thanks Sean!
A+ for your effort man
I've come late to the party, but thanks for the insight into hardwiring everything including the mains/DIN Rail Relays in the cabinets. I'd been wondering how to transition from everything wifi/esp8266/5V Relays to this. Fantastic! Now looking forward to receiving my EtherTen in the UK.
It is very clear and helpful. You should be a professor in some university
He is a heart surgeon and does home automation on the side.
Great episode as always, thanks Jon. I've started fiddling with setting up something similar although taking too long on some tedious boring elements of it.
Another aspect I've got planned is to use a time series DB like Influx to store the sensor and state readings of MQTT topic and then possibly being able to explore those with something like Grafana. Be able to plot things like temperature or luminescence or even just how much time I have my desk in standing verses sitting position while I'm in front of it.
I've been using Dietpi for the OS, and increasingly find using Ansible to make it fast to reformat and setup again when necessary the way to go.
I've used a few different time-series DBs in the past, mostly RRDTool but I also use InfluxDB with OpenHAB to store and report data from MQTT. I want to cover this in a future episode.
Excellent video thanks, very informative.
Man, I didnt need to really watch this because ive pieced it together from your explanations on your previous videos but still did because its pure HA p*rn. Absolutely jealous.
You're brilliant and present the information well...a bit geek like dry monotone but informative non-the-less. I look forward to more videos and will be a Patreon sponsor.
Thanks Edwin! I know I come across as a robot, so I'm trying to be more animated. It's strange how I can feel like I'm being very animated while recording, then I look back at the footage and realise I sound like I'm bored.
thank you for you detail presentation ...
Very helpful video.. Thanks a lot
My friend you are at the Top of Home Automation. How about a Power Point presentation instead of the whiteboard. You'll save on green markers and the animation factor is cool. I'd like to funnel all of your knowledge in my brain but it would explode !!! Keep up the great work and get on Patreon to get more funding for more of your "Smart House" videos.
Thanks Edwin! Yes, I could do it with Power Point but that takes much more preparation time. I have used Keynote in a few videos but I've found that it just makes production much more complicated because I have to spend hours preparing the slides, then I have to record the voiceover, then play the slides and match them to the voiceover, then import both the voiceover audio and the screen capture, then synchronise them in Final Cut Pro, and edit it. It takes many times longer than just drawing on the whiteboard and doing it in one go.
Awesome!
This is SO COOL!
Really amazing and informative video
I admire your videos. I would add one "feature" to the sub-boxes. That is a set of DPDT switches (one per relay) to control the 12V relays manually. I don't want to be in the proverbial dark if I lose my network connection or controller. Sure, this is "belts and suspenders," but still..
Yes, it'd be nice to just flick some switches and bypass the relays if everything else fails. However, I don't think I have space left in the switchboard! My experience so far has been it's easy to turn on a couple of desk lamps to have enough light to get around the house with nothing else working, and there haven't been any problems that last long enough to be a big issue. I understand the feeling of needing a backup plan though.
thats why its soo important for "Makers" to buy a new house before it is being built so they can ask for custom features. although its not super hard to rewire everything but it is not as convenient. also keep in mind something like Alexa or Google home integration. build in so you can change, because things change within few years and you need to upgrade or change entirely, dont build permanently. I work in GeekSquad and go to houses that cilent had spent thousands on top of the line features 5 years ago and now they have to spend as much to get it chagnged because things are ran in an inconvenient way and we need to spend half a day breaking into Sheetrock destroying half the wall just changing component wires to HDMI.
Just found your channel and I'm glad I did! Super-informative content
this is priceless, thanks a lot looking for such a video for some time! i would give you more likes than one!
@SuperHouseTV - I'm hungry for two kinds of data:
1. A full hardware BoM for your hardware and cabling, preferably as a versioned Google Doc (so we can follow changes). I'm particularly interested in how well a particular piece of hardware has worked, if you would purchase it again, and if not, what you'd prefer to use instead.
2. The power consumed by all home automation sensors and controls (not the loads), preferably measured using a clamp-on ammeter. In part for UPS sizing, but also to get an annual cost to run the system.
I hope to benefit not only from your experience, but also your future intentions.
I like the idea of the BoM. I'll see if I can put one together in a useful format.
Power consumption will be covered in detail in the future. I have two episodes planned about power monitoring, and one of them has already been partly filmed.
Great work as usual !!!
I'm doing all this with "Home Assistant" instead of"OpenHAB" and it's working great since last one and a half year. Could you point any difference between these two which can force me to shift to OpenHAB ?
Nope! I may even switch to HA at some point. The reason for using OpenHAB is mostly historical: it's what was best at the time, but there are more options now. I haven't used HA yet but I want to set up several systems in parallel so I can compare them. Saving up for a Google Home :-)
I found node-red + Node-red Dashboards suficient for now
Wow, would love to see a control box like that in my place, I would need to rewire everything! I think my next big project is mosquito! Have you ever used this with Particle Photons?
Yes, I have about 200 Photons here from a project a couple of years ago. They're left over from a project where I had them connecting to one of my Brain boxes using MQTT. It's a long time since I looked at it, but I'm pretty sure the MQTT library is available in the Particle IDE.
Long, but very interesting. At this time I am using Domoticz and EspEasy on ESP8266 modules (simple http protocol). I think it's time for change.
It's really cool, but dossent all the different devices and sensors use a lot of power?
Short answer: not much. Certainly not compared to other things in the house, such as TVs. I'll be covering power monitoring in detail in future.
this was very interesting.
I'm curious about what you have inside those wall switches
You don't have to wait long! The next episode will be uploaded this week, and it starts with a history of the different types of switches I used then shows a detailed build guide for the controller that reads the switches. I've been working on this episode for about 5 months but I wanted to upload the architecture ep first so it would have some context.
Great work, but I have a question regarding the way that you automate house, why we need to wire the house again and there are many technologies can solve this issue like Zigbee or Z-Wave. Even the light switch you can use the same technology to communicate with the Hab(no need to wire them because they will use the local wireless that on house). And also from the hab, it can communicate with the device that controls the electronic relays to switch on or switch off, I think this way is much easier! so what you need are more habs to cover the house which can use a cheap raspberry pi with the right adapter of the technology that is used.
This really is a super house. Amazing job! Will you be my sensei?! I want to learn it all!!
Are you keeping historical data? e.g. temperature over time?
Yes, currently using InfluxDB linked to OpenHAB, with "items" representing per-room temperature and humidity receiving their data via MQTT. I want to cover this in detail in a future episode.
The relays you are using are non-latching relays? If yes, if you loose power, you loose the state of them. Right?
The timing of this video is perfect. I spoke to my builder for Drouin yesterday and I'm going to call the sparky today. Really great stuff mate. There's a lot to take in but I'm looking forward to having a chat with you soon and see how I can help. Do you know if there is a network of people that are doing/have done this that I could be put in touch with. It would be great to bounce ideas off them.
Thanks Robert! I don't know of any particular network, other than randomly chatting to individuals on Facebook or CZcams. There are communities around the various home automation hub projects such as OpenHAB, but they're usually focused on the specific project rather than the bigger picture of all the other devices in the system.
SuperHouseTV the great thing about your setup is that I could technically have everything setup on a workbench in advance to make sure it all works then just fit it all in once the house is ready. I'll be talking to the builder again to get a price for the wire if then all I'll need is the green light from my partner. 👍
great overview on the smart home.. but how much power is used (as you know its not cheep anymore in Oz $$$) ito power everything?? I mean a switch when off doesn't cost anything, so to have OpenHAB and MQTT etc etc is all on and running waiting for a message to turn a light on.. that must add some percentage of extra household power cost?
Very good point. I'm going to quantify this with specific numbers in a future episode. I've already partly filmed an episode about household power monitoring.
Greetins from Madrid Jon. I may have missed a step in you very good top down coverage of your system design: once you have configured your OpenHab for dealing with rules, is there any purpose left for node-red? And if there is a division of labor that make sense for what you leave to node-red and OpenHab respectively, how do you deal with potential conflict between rules from each subsystem?
Great question. It would certainly be possible to just use one or the other. However, I can't stand the rules system in OpenHAB which is why I've kept running my own DIY rules engine in parallel with it. Right now I'm not using Node-RED but my general plan is to remove my existing rules engine and use Node-RED instead. I don't have many rules in OpenHAB because they're so annoying to write, and changes cause OpenHAB to reload its whole config.
Thanks for the quick reply. So, in that case, is a feasible end-point to forego altogether OpenHab and do all the controls via node-red (seems fairly lightweight and very scalable)
Yes, and many people do it that way. I started using OpenHAB mainly for its app, but with a front-end on Node-RED you can certainly achieve the same thing.
MQTT kinda reminds me of the old telephone switchboard operators, before automated telephone exchanges. This is a great start into this series, Jon. You use wifi for part of your home automation control. Is that a separate network (like a management wifi network)?
Good analogy! Yes, it is a bit like a centralised telephone switchboard linking parties together. I try to avoid using WiFi for anything critical: I don't want to lose control of anything just because there's a WiFi glitch. Wires beat wireless every time! I do use WiFi for non-critical things, like miscellaneous temperature sensors that provide a source of data but don't really matter much. I'm about to do an episode about building the ultimate home router / firewall, and I also want to do an ep about building a robust WiFi network with multiple APs, avoiding channel clashes, mapping signal strength, etc.
Sounds like a great roadmap for the series. :)
Another question about your video, why did you switch both the hot and neutral with your relays?
Only because the relays happened to be DPDT, and it's just as easy to connect the neutral to the extra pole of the relay as to a bus bar. It keeps the wiring neater because the active and neutral stay together all the way to the relay, instead of splitting off. And finally, it means that anything connected can be absolutely, 100% reliably isolated from the entire electrical system simply by pulling out the relay. But those are weak reasons. It could easily have been done by just switching active and binding all the neutrals to a bus bar.
How would you add like a Philips Hue bulb to your system, that need both power and other things(color, brightness)?
Great job! You have a new subscriber :-)
Thanks for yet another amazing video! This is the video I've been waiting for, to link it all together in my head!
If you're not able to run cables all over your home (e.g. if you rent an apartment), what would you suggest as relays? DIY with Arduinos? Or Sonoff? Or something else?
Thanks Kenneth! Doing a retrofit with minimal changes to the wiring, I think I'd lean to using Sonoffs mounted close to the loads. My system is very much structured like a traditional automation system starting with control from the centre, instead of adding point solutions at the end points. I haven't covered that approach much but I'd like to show more about it in the future.
@@SuperHouseTV We should very much love that
Hello, thanks for all your great content! I was wondering if you can somehow make the lights turn on/off every time you walk in/out of a room automatically. Not using motion sensors but some other way, maybe some sort of wearable near field communication or something like RFID tags with sensors inside the door frame? Something that does not need really close proximity like NFC.
I already do it with motion sensors (see www.superhouse.tv/13-connecting-security-sensors-to-arduino/ and www.superhouse.tv/superhouse-vlog-41-motion-detectors-and-jiu-jitsu-2/ ) but I've also been experimenting with other methods including the BLE positioning system from Happy Bubbles Technology. In the past I've also used volume analysis using a Kinect, and face detection. There's a brief demo of face detection in this conference talk: czcams.com/video/9ZeMeWwE_r0/video.html. Presence detection (and identification) is a big issue for home automation so I plan to do multiple episodes about it in the future.
@SuperHouseTV. Question here- What is the difference between the Rule engine device, NodeRed in your reccomendations to the Openhub? Do you need both or the rules Openhub can run will do?
Thanks
Good question. It could be done entirely within OpenHAB, but I did it separately for 2 reasons. 1: I can't stand the rules engine in OpenHAB. I find it hard to work with. 2: I started this system before OpenHAB existed, so I already had a working rules system in place. I just added OpenHAB alongside the existing system to provide a better UI and state management.
Thanks a lot. This is what I thought. I am trying to think for long term and determine what will not limit me the most. Also, I need my wife to be able to understand that (Just saw the piece on "if you die" :-) ) .
BTW- do you do consulting for architecture? I am building my house and want to be able to add the wiring into the plan, but taking an architect that deal with home automation is always SO much more expensive. I just need help with making sure that I think about all the scenarios.
Thanks
Great informative video! Thank you Jon!
I'm currently in the process of slowly putting an openhab system together, the current debate I'm having is regarding light switches: do I put an Ethernet enabled arduino within each switch, or have a centralised Ethernet enabled arduino and run switching circuits back to it over cat5, like you mentioned in your video Obviously the former would give more I/O options but inherently costs more. I can't wait for your next video!
I really hope to have that video uploaded by late tomorrow. I have to go away for a few days so I'm doing my best to finish it before I leave.
I've been using Node Red for a couple of months now and I'm blown away. I still use openHAB2 (openHABian) for the Z-Wave bindings, Node Red just runs over the top. Which triggers me to say (pun intended), Jon, do you use Z-Wave at all? Have you looked it? It would be great to hear your thoughts on it.
I haven't used Z-Wave but that's just because I haven't needed to use any Z-Wave devices yet. It's quite likely I'll try some eventually.
Hi Jonathan, what is the reason you're use a separate rules engine for managing MQTT, the custom one you mentioned you want to replace with NodeRed? I've gone over to HA and have managed to get it to react to my wall switches/buttons in very much the same manner you are doing it, just without the (external) rules engine using HA's "Automations"
It's an accident of history. My first ever version of the system had nothing but my DIY rules engine (written in PHP, no less) which used Apache as a front end to provide an API over HTTP. It also provided a web interface that I accessed using my phone and tablets mounted on the wall. Then I added MQTT. Then I added OpenHAB, mostly because it has nice apps for iOS and Android, and it tied into my existing system very neatly via MQTT, and I stopped using my DIY web interfaces. If I was starting totally from scratch I'd probably just go all-in with OpenHAB or Home Assistant, although I can't stand the rules system in OpenHAB so I'd probably still supplement it with Node-RED.
Had you ever heard of homeseer or looked In to using it as home controller, it is not free but integrates with a lot of stuff.
I've heard of it, but I've never used it. I can't remember the reason I didn't look into it further: maybe it wasn't open source, which is a deal breaker for me in this particular context. I'm treating my house as a toy, so I want systems I can hack on.
Hi, where can I buy light switch which work over Ethernet?
This week I'll be uploading a whole episode about this. It's already 45 minutes long, I just need to finish recording the last few bits of video and finish the editing.
What kind of relays are you using in your sub mains box. I understand they are 12volt coil and din rail but if they were solid-state /mechanical or possibly a link. Thanks
Would you ever cover retrofitting an existing property with some of these capabilities, without a complete teardown of the property's wiring? I would love to do this to my place, but I'm concerned that it would require a complete rewiring, and would therefore never happen.
I'd be interested to know more about the power overhead involved in your setup... Any idea how much power your house consumes when everything is off? I'm sure it's less than my kids leaving the lights on everywhere they go...
Great question. I have power sensors in various places and I've partly filmed an episode on power monitoring, so hopefully I'll be able to answer that in great detail with exact numbers.
Hi... I have been watching your videos ... very interesting and informative... i have a question ... how to take care of hardware failure, like switch or Pi... if failed then complete home is in darkness?
Hey! Could you please leave a link to the wall switches shop?
ennm100 i need this too
Im pretty sure he made them from scratch , but a list of materials used would be really helpful.
Keep up the good work
I'll be uploading an entire episode about how I made those later this week. It's nearly finished editing.
nice!
www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20171005040629&SearchText=push+button+led
Have you ever thought of adding dimmers and dimming control ?
Definitely. I've already done some work on that, but I haven't shown it in any videos yet. It's a problem that turns out to be much harder than most people realise. There's no universal way to do dimming that works for all loads. It's even harder now, because houses can have a mix of incandescent lights, CFL tubes, halogen globes, and LEDs. Each one of those needs a different type of dimming system.
Yes as an electrician I know this very well, I am very familiar with c-bus home automation and even their "universal dimmer" can be troublesome. Now with all the new led lights on the market and minimum load requirements this becomes even more of a problem. Thanks for the Great videos I have been thoroughly enjoying them.
Hi Jon, how have you mastered the case of your master failing? Do you have a hot-failover running on this system or do you have one spare liying around to install a backup on it?
This is the big question that everyone wants answered! Right now I don't have auto-failover, only a cold spare. I've done quite a bit of work in the past with redundant systems so I want to work on this for a future episode.
A quick question - your control systems appear to be quite binary at present (although I may have misunderstood) - do you have a plan to include more analogue control systems? E.g. dimmable lights, colour changing lights similar to Philips Hue
Good point. I want to cover dimming in a future episode, because it's much more complicated (and difficult) than many people realise. I do have LiFX globes, and I also use addressable RGB LEDs in some places.
Can a MQTT broker be used to integrate a mixed bag of equipment by say crestron, control4, RTI etc.
Thanks for the video. I also use MQTT and openHAB 2. Maybe I missed it in the video, but do you think Node-RED is necessary if you're also using openHAB? I currently use openHAB only to handle the rules and for monitoring the states.
Hi John, great video!! I am from the same opinion than Kevin, is it not Node-Red the 'same' as openHAB? How do you see their collaboration?
They do a similar job, yes, and many people run their home automation system entirely using Node-RED. I could probably do that too. The reason I use OpenHAB is that it provides nice apps for iOS and Android, plus other types of interface for other devices. I've gone through a series of stages, starting with just my own home-brew rules engine, then I added OpenHAB running alongside it and linking to it, and next I'll probably replace my rules engine with Node-RED.
Dear Jonathan. Please would you consider combining a Hall effect 1-inch pulse generator domestic water flow sensor with a Sonoff temperature sensor, using the Tasmoto software and WiFi capability to make a water consumption monitoring system that we can monitor our Air BnB guests. Water consumption with?
Would there be any issues doing a set up like this in uk meeting electrical code?
28:35 It's nice to see someone else typing in DVORAK
Great video, as usual :)
Quick question on the Building Brain board. Is that up for sale anywhere? Also, since you mentioned you are using openHAB 1 as your primary system, did you fully test it out with openHAB 2?
It's not up for sale at the moment: it's really just something that I made for my own purposes, although I could probably sell them. Most people will be happy just running OpenHAB (or something else) on a plain Raspberry Pi and won't need the extra things I added on my carrier board. Right now I have 2 of them running in parallel, one with OpenHAB v1.8.3 and the other with v2.1.0. I need to do quite a bit more work getting v2 working with the rest of the devices in my system.
Thank you for the reply. I think this could be a very useful addition in your store!
Personally I would look for it to also have (maybe a v2 of the board :) an external watchdog circuit (like the one you have for the arduino, a safe RPi shutdown, maybe even a compatible Z-Wave circuit (?) to work with the RPi openHAB...
Again, just my thoughts on what could potentially be a very useful addon board that would a market for out there.
Thanks Moshe! I recently revised the board so that the Pi can reflash the ATmega on the daughter board, and I'm also considering doing a big revision to switch to an alternative board that has onboard power management. I have a few other projects to finish first, though :-)
So does the switchboard in the garage still exist? I remember B-A was in the garage with the modem and firewall.. the B-A board is now in your office..?
Yes, it still exists and the switchboards are in the same location but some things that were inside them have moved. When we switched from ADSL to cable we had to relocate the router to a different part of the house, because that's where the cable terminated. I'm working on an episode now about building the ultimate home router / firewall, so I'll be relocating it again soon.
Excellent video, thank you for taking the time to put it together! I'm wondering about that temperature and humidity sensor you showed in the office. That arduino board looks like one I've never seen before, very tiny! Using a custom design with integrated WiFi, or is it an off-the-shelf build?