Home Automation

[UnknownStuntm...]

So, after mild harassment by Maplin staff at the weekend for merely standing in front of the (4?) manufacturer's displays I have come to the conclusion that home automation is a bit of a warm potato at the moment. None of them look like they work together, and not one system does what I want, entirely.

Particularly interesting for me as I'm soon going to be building a house extension incorporating a kitchen, then also a garage a little bit later. So I'm considering auto opening garage door, swish lighting, perhaps automatic blinds for velux windows, and obviously some kind of security.

So I've googoo'd and see that there's an open source project that aligns to my findings, and aims to stay manufacturer-independent. I like. (OpenHAB, if you're interested).

So, has anyone got any kind of experience with these things? Good or bad points to think about?

[ScaredyCat]

What sort of stuff are you looking at. Proper automation or just a couple of lights?

I used to do a lot of this in my house in Holland, not so much here. Was quite a bit of a faff back then (wasn't even close to mainstream). Personally I wouldn't want any cloud based home automation going on in my place.

X10 stuff can be a good starter but it does have limitations. If you're looking at C-Bus, you'll need deep pockets. Garage doors should be simple if the opener has momentary contact points. Just a case of triggering it. I did that in Holland, little phone app to remotely open/close the door. Came in handy more than once when forgetting keys.

Look at https://laser.com for some products and https://www.automatedhome.co.uk/ for stuff that's available. - It has a nice little article on Amazon Echo + Raspberrypi.

If you're just looking at stuff like Philips Hue then just buy that. It has a nice API.
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Honda CBF125 ➝ NC700X
Honda CBF125 ↳ Speed Triple

[UnknownStuntm...]

[ScaredyCat]

How much do you want to do yourself and how much do you just want plug in and go?

Unfortunately WirelessThings, who I'd have whole heartedly recommended, shut its doors earlier this year.

Hive is a solution to your heating, but it's going to be using "The Cloud" - if you're happy with that it's a good option. They also have lighting and switches and door/window sensors and motion sensors.

Keep in mind that for lighting you're going to have to leave your light switches in the on position all the time so that you can remotely have them come on/go off. If someone puts the switch in the off position, no amount of bashing the phone app is going to help you - you'll have to get out of your chair.

Personally I'd stay away from Nest stuff. Whilst I'm an Android fanboy I wouldn't trust Google to continue offering and supporting a product beyond their own attention span.

This is the key factor with cloud based stuff. You rely on the company continuing a cloud service for your stuff to work. When they stop, your investment is worth nowt.


If you're not looking for an API so you can do things yourself then something like Hive will do. If you're looking at doing some of this yourself then openhab looks like a great option for bringing it all together.

Heating is pretty simple, you're just sampling the temperature and switching your boiler on and off - you might be doing some calculations based on outside temperature too. You can calculate the heat loss from your house and calculate how long the heating needs to be on so that when you get up or get home, regardless of the outside temp, the house is at the correct temperature.

Knowing the door is open is trivial, using magnetic sensors

The garage door will depend entirely on the opener that you are using and what I/O triggers it has. Most will have a momentary toggle so you could just trigger a relay for a second to trigger open/close - Simple arduino + relay would work (Yun for wifi?) . For my install I also had door sensors attached the the garage door and wall so I could tell if the garage door was open or closed and also where it currently was in the open/close process.

Philips Hue looks interesting for lighting, from a developer aspect.
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Honda CBF125 ➝ NC700X
Honda CBF125 ↳ Speed Triple

[331X2]

I was considering starting this thread as I've just moved house and I'm in the (Un?)fortunate position of it needing gutting so I'm in the perfect position to build my house around a system.

Just casual research and playing has nudged me down the road of a dedicated mqtt server on its own network in the house, it seems that most things can be hacked to work with the protocol. Set mosquito up on a Linux laptop and got it publishing and subscribing to topics, just need to get it outputting to some kind of device, probably a sonoff or three for testing.

On a slight tangent, the sonoff switches (£5 each to the door) can be flashed to emulate a Wemo switch to work directly with Amazon Echo's, we've got four working now.

This might not make a lot of sense, I'm down on sleep recently and feel a bit of a mong, future posts will hopefully be more structured!

[dydey90]

It's power that concerns me.
Lights, yes already have a feed.
Garage door, I don't mind pea clipping a wire to the wall in there.
But curtains/blinds? Either dick about with battery packs or chase a wire into the wall just so you don't have to get off your arse to adjust them.
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This post is probably not serious and shouldn't be taken literally.
Past: CBR125,ER6f NINJA 650, ZZR600 Current: VFR750

[331X2]

I play with wires for a living so I'm OK in that regard, the biggest problem for me personally is the fact that some of the gear I like the look of isn't CE marked so if it let's the smoke out and takes the house with it I'd be up shit Creek with insurance.

My biggest downfall will be the coding, if I could base it all around PLC logic I'd be alright but I'm not particularly strong with C based language.

[Pjay]

I'd look at this kind of thing, all web based and could be converted to control anything.
https://diyhacking.com/raspberry-pi-home-automation/

I'd also look at making it smaller by using a Pi Zero's and adding wifi to them. They would work out incredible cheap for what they could do.

We are talking under £20 each, all boxed and setup for each device.

[trevoriv]

The garage door is out of my league but we have hive and Amazon echo doing all of our lights, thermostat, smart plugs and door sensors, in hindsight id probably go nest but hive works okay just doesn't learn like nest.

We also have a video doorbell which actually comes in handy but not really worth the £150.
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Past: '96 Thundercat, '02 ZX636R (A1P), '58 KTM 690 SM LC4 Current: '06 ZX636R (C6F)
Mudskipper wrote: Someone just has to sig that...

[Tarmacsurfer]

"Byron Homeeasy" switches and sockets can be picked up fairly cheaply, they work quite well and can be controlled with a Broadlink RM pro (cheap chinese IR blaster/433.92 controller that can learn on the fly), add in an android phone or tablet running Tasker and you've got a fairly good control solution as well.

As far as blinds and so forth go, unless you want to spend silly money then DIY is the way forward.
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I'm immortal. Well, so far.

[Jayy]

Buy an Amazon Echo, a load of them wireless plugs and voice command it all, piece of piss.

Alexa... open the mo fucking garage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gsw8d1XRZYs

[goto10]

I use Smartthings, Harmony Hub & Nest thermostat/protects and a Yale Keyfree front door - Smarttiles provides a nice dashboard that can be controlled from any web browser - and an Amazon Echo gives voice control (I bought the latter in the black Friday sale - it's actually quite good)
Turning stuff on/off via voice is actually really handy. I'd like to get more Echo dots (for different rooms) - but I think I'll wait for Google Home.
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'12 NC700S & '12 CB600F Hornet [Stolen by some dickless twat] Suzuki GT500 shed

[janner_10]

[ScaredyCat]

This is an old video of a motorcycle garage door opening system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQpBUQ-ZSKw
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Honda CBF125 ➝ NC700X
Honda CBF125 ↳ Speed Triple