I’m looking for a good solution to integrate a lot of wired sensors into my HA.
In my new house there will be 2 appartments and an office on the ground floor.
For each of the floors I’d like to gather quite some information about temperature, motion in a lot of zones to automate all the lighting, humidity, door sensors, etc.
Below you can see each of the dots representing a sensor.
I’m not a fan of wireless, because there will be a lot of sensors, lights, screens, etc so after wiring all these sensors and lights there will be still a bit room to use wireless applications for the unreachable or forgotten sensors.
Is there anyone with experience with this kind of sensor acquisition devices?
This example works with 32 digital input sensors like door, or motion sensors.
My first thought seeing this was industrial modbus interface - and that’s exactly what you chose. I think it’s the right thing to use on such a large setup. Normally these devices have inputs that can handle noise and interference, which can easily happen on longer runs of wires from the sensors to the module. You can even get high induced voltages on the sensor lines if they run close to 230V lines (which is technically against code, but induction can still happen even when following procedure). I would stay away from DIY stuff.
You also mentioned temperature and humidity probes, these are not simple binary on/off. How do you plan on handling them ? Ideally, they should share a common architecture. I assume you plan on wiring Ethernet all around the house anyway. That could be used as a common sensor backbone, where the modbus → Ethernet gateway (or multiple ones, maybe one per apartment ?) can plug into. Just keep it physically separate from the Ethernet cabling available for the tenants if you plan on renting out the apartments.
Oh and KNX would be another alternative. It’s a more integrated building automation targeted all-in-one system, but it’s more expensive. It’s an industrial standard though that could also work without Home Assistant, if in the future this would be relevant.
Just brainstorming a little. I envy you so much being able to wire all your sensors
Thanks for your reply.
I’m indeed looking into different modbus solutions, these could suit my needs and are relativly inexpensive.
This item also seems very interesting:
It has RS485 and ethernet capabilities which makes it very useful and eliminates the need for a rs-gateway.
However as you stated this module wouldn’t be useful or used for analog inputs as temperature, humidity, and everything else with a voltage level. For those sensors I would use another module like the one below:
Here are Digital and Analog inputs, and also has some digital output channels. I could use those for controlling my exterior louvres maybe?
If there’s anyone who has any experience with these kind of setups please let me know cause I’m very interested to know how your experience is.
As you mentioned the KNX solution is also a valid wired option but will cost considerably more, and I have no experience in that field so I would have to get an installer for this.
Personally I’m going with DALI to control my lighting in a wired manner for all the floors and common spaces. This is in my view a good and stable way to control everything in a wired way, with a moderate budget. Also this allows me to have the lighting more as a stand alone system, so that if HA goes down it the lighting can keep working with hardwired buttons.
With the wired sensors I would like to add a lot of motion sensors (among other kinds) to get a good indication of what’s going on where to build my automations on top of. This would depend on HA to be up and running for the full features… but when HA goes down the lighting all the lighting stays functional.
