Hi everyone,
I’m Paul from Northern Ireland. A Software Engineer by trade. I have written my own heating automation system in Python. It’s multi-zone, presence aware, layered schedules, demand based and logs to RRDs and display with Cacti.
I had a short spell at “the other forum”, but when I mentioned I wrote my own heating control system, fanboyism took hold and to cut a long story short, stones started to fly and I was told that I accept their software or leave. So I left. I hate fanboyism.
So why am I here if I have my own system? Well, I have my own heating system, which I’m happy to share, but there is more to home automation than heating. There are also layers to these systems that I am not so great with, such as UIs and integration with proprietary APIs.
I prefer to go down close to the metal and build automatons from scratch where possible. If something is either ON or OFF then I would ultimately like to boil that down to where I have a boolean True/False value for it that I control. I can then build the intelligence on top of that. Being able to turn a lamp (etc.) on from my phone does not impress me, that is just a remote control, it’s not smart, it’s dumb, there has to be be more.
Luckily I have both software and electronics experience and am not afraid of some low level bit banging in C++ or at the same time, writing high level abstractions in Python, or if provoked Java.
I think the first thing I want to look into HomeAssistant for is as a control UI to manage configuration and profile values for my heating system and provide an easier way to alter things like target temps. Also a means to envoke overrides on the system by raising manual demands.
The thing is these integration layers don’t quite exist yet in my system. Demand overrides exist by publishing JSON to a UDP socket, but control over config and target temps doesn’t. At present I am thinking of adding some form of Python REST API mechanism onto the main data hub and working from there.
So I should probably start by looking into Home assistant UDP, REST integrations and would love pointers to the best place to start for these. So far I have only really found “TCP Sensor” and “Binary Sensor”, but I am hoping there are REST integrations too.
It will be struggle at first so bear with me.
Paul