My COMPLETELY Rethought Voice Assistant Plans for the New House

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

@sparkydave

I would simply wire the lights normally and the light switches in the normal positions however join the wires together (essentially closing the switch) and leave them in the wall at each switch location (insulated of course) but with no actual light switch there. This way the light is permanently ON but you can always mount the light switches later and wire them in if you choose or when selling the house. Simply cut the hole in the wall at the wiring location and mount (and terminate) the switch.

This solves the problem of the potential need to downgrade to a switch but doesn’t give me a local “power kill” option in cases where a bulb breaks and I need to quickly stop the flow of electricity.

Also, I’ve heard THIS is not to code where I live.

We’ll see. The right solution will present itself after talking to the electrician.

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

@Romkabouter

Since you already plan for a Pi + ReSpeaker in every room, you can just as easily install Rhasspy on every Pi as well.
Downside is you have to configure everything, upside is that you can configure room specific.
The latter most probably leading to simpler settings and better accuracy.
You could just say “turn on the light” in every room instead of “turn on the light in the bathroom”. It is possible with sats as well, but that will mean a lot more programming on logic which sat is being activated

I don’t have strong feelings one way or another on this. Yes, this would get me what I need right now without Rhasspy needing to grow to support multi-sat configs, but I’m also 18 months from moving in. I think the multi-sat configuration interests me because I would consolidate the processing in one machine that I can grow as needed.

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

@Guff666

Have you built in default behaviour for failure cases? e.g. partial power failure, internet failure, component failure, and (the big one) YOU failure - i.e. what happens if you aren’t around to keep all of this working?

All things like this are risky. My family has a high risk tolerance for these sorts of things and this is where we landed. I considered taking it further. [maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh]

Joking aside: Good hardware, lots of redundancy, documented processes, an interested teenage son who performs backup duties, regular maintenance, etc. I was a systems engineer for many years and have a good sense for what it takes to keep a complex system up and running 24/7.

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

@synesthesiam

You’ll definitely want wakeword detection happening on the Pi’s themselves, since 36 simultaneous audio streams would probably be a bit much.

Totally agree!

@synesthesiam

Keep me informed of your progress; I’d love to hear how it goes

Will do!

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

@martinjuhasz

one other i wanted to mention to you (as i’m currently using it) is snips.ai .

Thanks! I’ll check this out. The great thing about any of these methods is that I can invest in the hardware and make (and change!) software decisions later, as new projects are developed or improved. Such a stark contrast to closed systems like Google Assistant. As crazy as some of my project sounds, it’s much more flexible and safe IMO vs slapping Google Home Hubs all over the place, which I see more and more people do.

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

@aidbish

i use these for all my rasp pi installs

That’s a great price! Yes, I didn’t actually mean a poe hat. This is the same kind of dongle I’m using to power all my Aeotec sensors and planned on doing the same for the the Pi. I haven’t seen this low of a price (without really bad reviews)!

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

@AaronCake

Don’t use consumer hardware like a NUC if you are going all in. Invest in a real server chassis (ie. ThinkServer) with hot swappable drives, redundant power supplies, redundant RAM, etc. Then run everything in the most universal environment possible which is best for you. VMs dedicated to one or two tasks, or containers, or a combination of both. Run two UPSs, one for each power supply.

I’m embarrassed I didn’t come to this upgraded solution already. Good call. Yes, for sure, this is the way to go. A little NUC is great for a small/medium setup but something much more higher end is in order for this big one.

@AaronCake

And you might want to consider using an enterprise grade PoE switch with redundant power supplies as well. Or just keep a spare switch pre-configured. And without saying, use enterprise grade WiFi.

The plan right now is all Unifi hardware - APs, switches (PoE and otherwise), and router. I’m using all of that now and have been super impressed.

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

@DOttJr

Have you looked into centralizing the switching capability into one or two power locations and using HA to control them? Check out a series of videos from Super House that shows how he implemented his home wiring.

I’ll see if I can dig up those videos but that sounds exactly like what I was planning: drastically reduce the number of physical switches into a few major locations. No, they’re not conveniently placed in the rooms (the tablets are in those locations), but they do EXIST in case they’re needed.

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

@mattch

i agree on the other comments about the NUC, for such an amazing and integral system you dont want to be swapping hardware or containers in downtime.

At least, if cost is concern check out a couple of Dell Power Edge R710, or R620. You get redundancy all around, for sure vmware. For switch, i would end up with Cisco C3560 48P poe, excellent switch for its price with all features you need for L2/L3. I like Unifi, you can make the controller another vm.

Totally agree. As I said to @AaronCake, this was an obvious oversight in planning. I’ll be going with rack-mountable server(s) and container/VM configs for maximum hardware and software redundancies.

@mattch

The only other thing of concern is the lack of manual controls for when something happens, and it will.

Addressed this a few times in some replies - I will have manual controls, they’ll just be in out-of-the-way locations in rooms.

@mattch

You’re going to have one of the most amazing smart homes, with lots of others envy! Great job!!!

Thanks! I’m beyond excited about it all. Been noodling on this for a long, long time. None of this would be possible without HA and all of you. I’m already thinking on ways to, once done, demo all of this in a very professional way and then share that video walkthrough or whatever it turns out to be to help drum up more excitement and development work.

[DOttJr (Dennis Ott)]

Take a look here…

SuperHouse #24: Home automation system architecture

[frkos]

@fishertimj

all Hue bulbs

Hi @fishertimj
Why you decided to use hue lamps? And are going to use any wifi/zigbee relays?
I’m thinking about my project (which is much more smaller than yours ) and I decided to have physical switch and such relay… So I can turn my light manually as usual and remotely from HA at the same time (just as an example https://youtu.be/ssa10rQlMMY?t=409 )
So it will be interesting to hear your thoughts about this

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

@frkos

Why you decided to use hue lamps? And are going to use any wifi/zigbee relays?
I’m thinking about my project (which is much more smaller than yours ) and I decided to have physical switch and such relay… So I can turn my light manually as usual and remotely from HA at the same time

The primary reason to use exclusively Hue bulbs (vs standard LED on a controlled switch) is because I want to change the color temperature all day long to mimic natural sunlight and the way it changes throughout the day. I have a number of bulbs setup like that in my house right now and the family is a big fan of it. Circadian rhythms and all that. I’m using this implementation via configuration.yaml right now but am working on a Node-RED version.

I will also be using more drastic color changes in some more advanced automations. For example, perhaps a security issue (i.e. door opens while locked, window opens between x and y time, etc., etc.) would prompt a number of key lights to turn bright red.

Finally, I’ll also be constantly adjusting brightness based on light sensors all over the house. Yes, this is possible with standard connected switches, but with the color changing needs I also have, there’s just no way to pull it off well IMO with anything other than connected bulbs.

I’m guessing we’re talking about well over a hundred bulbs so I’m certainly going to need multiple Hue bridges. These will all be hardwired back to the mechanical room with all the networking equipment.

I swear I will be documenting all of this along the way, both my configs/automations/etc. as well as video demonstrations, walkthroughs, etc.

[Burningstone]

Instead of multiple Hue bridges I can recommend a single ConBee II stick, this also allows to add other ZigBee sensors like Xiaomi, Ikea, etc. and HA doesn’t need to poll the Hue bridges, which I imagine to cause problems in a huge setup like this. Also Hue motion sensors and remotes push their events to HA when you integrate it throug the ConBee meaning instant detection of motion/button presses.

[creator]

@fishertimj I’m interested to know how you solved the ceiling mounting of the 36 satellites. Do you mind sharing?

[fishertimj (Tim Fisher)]

I actually didn’t solve it. After many (many) hours online and walking around Home Depot and Lowes, I realized that I was going to have to 3d print something to properly house the Pi + ReSpeaker hat and I simply don’t have the skills/time to do it.

All that said, I still had the need for mics in every room. As I got further into this, I decided that I would build a fully custom front-end on the tablets (fully custom CSS and JS) and as I was starting that, realized that my tablet of choice (https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/student-chromebooks/Lenovo-CT-X636/p/ZZICZCTCT1X) also has two far-field mics and they work REALLY well for Google Assistant. So it got me thinking that I could write some custom code to stream audio from the tablet 24/7 to Rhasspy, essentially turning the tablets into remote mics.

I’m not done yet but will share the code on the Rhasspy forums. I have a recent thread here: https://community.rhasspy.org/t/possible-to-use-tablet-as-mic/1756.

None of that could be helpful to you if your needs require a ceiling mount of the Pi+Mic setup, but for me, this ended up being a smarter use of resources in my setup.