Re: [LUG] Home Automation

On 21 January 2018 at 16:23, mr meowski <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

As a lifetime member of the "GUI Control Panel Appreciation Society"
that gives me the warm fuzzies :]

Thanks! This sort of stuff is often very personal and highly tailored, so it's nice to hear positive things :)

I've never come across Dashticz before so I'm going to check it out this
afternoon but your setup is really, really intriguing - I haven't done
anything like this yet but I get asked about it with increasing
regularity as more and more random friends and clients get gadgets like
solar panel inverters (with built in webservers), smart meters, NESTs,
garage door openers... home automaton is fascinating stuff.

It is, but the software side is a huge messy mix of every manufacturer having their own app (often badly written with zero documentation) so your phone ends up with a dozen different apps, all doing god-knows-what. One example is the Xiaomi Hub stuff. The hardware is lovely and extremely cheap, but the app is horrible. You *need* the app to connect the different devices to its hub, and it constantly crashes or logs you out. Plus you must pretend to be in Mainland China or it won't recognise anything, so half of the menu items are in Mandarin. Why they chose to region-lock this is bizarre, and with such a well respected company too (currently bills as the world's most highly valued "Tech Start up"...)

Fortunately Domoticz natively supports this, and once you use the app to add each device, they just appear by magic and you can assign them as you see fit. (Movement sensors, temp/humidity/doorbells/smoke alarms/wireless buttons)

I'm definitely going to have some questions for you a bit later once
I've done some more reading up.

Please do. Like all zealots I enjoy talking. :)

But to get started, how is the control panel getting the information
about TV recordings - is it talking to a Myth box somehow? That's cool.

Actually - that's just a google calendar...Â ÂThat box does have mythtv running freesat, but it's not tied into this. (And probably doesn't need to be)

And what weather API are you using, is it weather underground? Lastly

Yes, WU - but from my own weather station. I run one of those which isn't directly supported by Domoticz ( weather.digdilem.org if you're interested), so I had two choices. One is to gather the data via a script and inject it into Domoticz (Surprisingly easy, I'm doing that for the power monitoring using Currentcost, which also feeds an internal database) - OR just use Wunderground, which is supported by Domoticz, and give it my weather station ID. That means the readings for the external temp are spot-on, and the forecast is partly based on my own data.

and most importantly, is all of this running entirely on your own
equipment without cloud or remote hosted infrastructure? Pulling data

Yes. Ish. The Sockets (Tp/Link HS100s) can be controlled by a simple curl request to their IP. Nest does use their cloud - although the Domoticz interface is webscraping rather than using their API (Not sure why, but it does work). The Xiaomi stuff doesn't need the cloud for local operations, once set up. The rain rader is just an animated gif that's updated every half hour. The CCTV comes from Zoneminder, running locally, and updates once a second.

It runs on my own server, but plenty of people use rpis for this, and that's a fine platform.

from remote APIs for things like weather and TV/Radio scheduling is
obviously fine but for me it's essential that I control everything
locally. You mentioned Alexa for example, which is firmly on the wrong
side of the line for me. Is that also tied in to your system somehow?

Not into Domoticz. I do have an Echo, and I've just ordered the new Echo Spot, but that's for some parallel operations. "Alexa, turn on the light", "Set heating to X". It's absolutely not required, but it's another fun technology. I haven't glued it to Domoticz at all, don't see a need to.

Are you using anything like IFTTT?

I did, for the ventilator before I got the humidistats. Set it going whenever it rained, and turned off after it cleared. There's a lot of cool ideas with IFTTT and Stringify about what to automate, and sometimes that's the hardest bit; Thinking what to do with this stuff.

Anyway, a fun little project and not hugely expensive - depending on how far you want to go.