Hello everybody!
I know this subject circled around the forum time to time, but I could not find any comprehensive post/tutorial on that.
I understand HA was created for DYI solutions which means most of users would use wifi based communication to control their smart home configuration. I had this possibility to wire my reconstructed house completely with CAT8 ethernet cable, because my goal from the beginning was to avoid wireless technology as much as possible. The are many reasons, one of them is the fact, that the house is in the middle of city with literally 50+ wifi networks available on the location. I just have too many bad experiences with the wifi reliability. Of course I accept single wireless solutions as an addon.
The house has 3 floors, will have around 40 light points and 40 light switches, around 30 switchable AC outlets, 12 heating zones, some with radiators only, some with both radiators and floor heating, some with floor heating only (heating is gas boiler btw). All electricity is configured in star configuration (all cables to each electrical outlet, no matter light or outlet go independently from the technical room).
Heating will be controlled on manifolds with electric valves which, as the lights and outlets, would be powered via typical “aliexpress” relays. This is the easy part i think.
Another story is the sensor part. All the light switches will be “doorbell type”, connected via ethernet cables (there is no typical AC cable for the switch locations) to the technical room. In some locations, together with the light switches I want to put temperature/humidity sensors (just loosely hanging in the switch “hole” behind the switch itself) also connected to the ethernet cable.
I also have to integrate bunch of 1-wire sensors in the heating room, which provide info about the temperature of certain elements of the system.
The big question is how to connect the sensor part to the RPi. At the beginning I thought i can just put them all to RPi directly. Theoretically, putting most of the sensors on 1-Wire should do the job. But what about the light switches? There are just a simply button entity. I experimented using them with I2C and found, what is obvious for more experienced people, that it cannot be regarded reliable on distances bigger than 1 meter. Also, having 40 buttons, I need expanders, another hint found on the Web says expanders don’t work well with button entities, as those should be connected directly to RPi pins.
Then I found that generally people prefer to use Arduinos as a kind of proxy between the RPi and the sensor network using mysensors, as Arduino is much more reliable working with sensors and buttons, and also provide a cheap way to expand number of pins, that can be used for buttons. Arduinos has the another advantage - ability to work independently and do the switches and buttons dependencies itself only updating the state of the whole system to RPi (of course also executing any commands from RPi in that matter) which increases the reliability f.e. when RPi SD card will die.
The wiring and all that hardware is on place, next week I will start my experiments on the site. I assume temperature sensors will cause no problems, as 1-wire is quite reliable and will work on distance with CAT8 cable. But how can I solve the button issue? What is the best way connect them to RPi?
Another question on the Qubino Smart Meter. The only thing a I can found about this device of the forum is that it is faulty and do not work as intended with HA, constantly disconnecting. I do not know if those are just rare situations, and lots of people use it with success (you usually do not start a forum thread to say that something works just right), or maybe the problems are common.
