My Home (Google home + Unifi + Rainbird + Tuya)

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Here’s my home automation project merged with my home network.

About me and my family:
I am an IT professional, who is very time-poor. My wife is an Administrative clerk, we have two young boys, two hyperactive fer-babies and a big 700m2 block.

Goals and results of this project:

  • Put more hours back into my week by automating the common things
  • Reduce energy costs by identifying workloads that are not needed or a way to minimise the financial impact
  • Increase comfort in my house
  • Low physical maintenance using stable infrastructure
  • Leverage common technologies (Ethernet, Wireless and Zigbee)
  • Cost-effective residential technologies for a medium to high installation skill level
  • Low-level technical skill level for maintenance and modification

Key underlying protocols:

  • Ethernet 1GbE
  • Wireless AC + N
  • Zigbee (proprietary locked via Phillips Hue Hub)

Network Devices:
1x Ubiquiti Unifi Access Point AC Pro
1x Ubiquiti Unifi Access Point AC Long range
1x Ubiquiti Unifi Access Point AC Wall switch
1x Ubiquiti Unifi POE Switch
1x un-managed 5PT switch for additional capacity in lounge room
1x un-managed 8PT POE switch for CCTV
1x un-managed 5PT POE switch for CCTV

Control Devices:
1x Windows 10 Hyper-V (Lenovo SFF PC i5-8500 32GB 1TB(m2 ssd) + 3TB RPM (WD RED)
1x Ubiquiti Unifi Cloud Key
1x Ubiquiti Unifi Security Gateway

Cleaning Devices:
1x Ecovac Deebot 900 for house
1x Ecovac Deebot 600 for shed/office (removed in late 2021, after its 3year life)

Speakers
1x Google home max
2x Google home standard
4x Google home mini

Lighting
1x Phillips Hue bridge
8x Phillips Hue lightbulbs
3x brilliant Smart light bulbs
4x DETA fluro tubes
1x Mirabello garden lights

Cameras
6x Mirabello / TUYA cameras technically inplace but, not used due to lack of RTSP or HA support
1x Jaycar wireless camera technically inplace but, not used due to lack of RTSP or HA support
1x Door cam generic (XSH Cam) (removed early 2022)
1x Door cam TUYA / Kogan
7x IPcams
1x BlueIris host with DeepStack

Misc
2x TP-Link Smart switch HS110 /w energy monitoring
1x TP-Link Smart switch HS100
4x Brilliant Smart Smart switch /w energy monitoring
4x Arlec-grid Smart switch /w energy monitoring
2x Sensibo Sky Aircon controller
1x TUYA Aircon controller, built-in to a Kogan Aircon … it’s not great
1x Rainbird reticulation
1x car garage roller door TUYA / Kogan

Misc (not connected to smart set up)
1x Delta PV solar inverter → adding a DC1 monitoring module
3x security floodlights (IR only) → replacing light switches to be used as part of the automated routine with blueiris/deep stack

Gaps

  • centralise control panels for home assistant
  • routine buttons
  • complete Power monitoring
1 Like
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Original Smart Management apps:

  • Ecovacs app
  • Google Home app
  • IFTTT app
  • Phillips ‘MeetHue’ app
  • Rainbird app
  • Sensibo app
  • TP-Link Kasa app

While the Google Home is integrated to all other apps, except the Rainbird app. There are some key limitation associated with Google Home app.

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Sadly I still haven’t got time to setup Home Assistant yet. Failed QNAP Nas, but Hyper-V is up and humming on my PC to my next steps is to bring this ecosystem away from the limits of Google Assistant and to Home Assistant.

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Step 1.
For me the first step in my automation journey was to get a stable wired and wireless network.

5GHz is great but all smart stuff currently on the market is 2.4GHz. So a simple Ubiquiti UniFi setup with some network prioritisation did the trick

Screenshot_20210330-213225_Docs
Screenshot_20210330-213225_Docs1080×2280 327 KB

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Step 2.
Get the bulk of the hardware needed to fix known problems

  • robo vac running twice a day
  • lights to turn on to wake me and the kids up in the morning
  • the right YT Music playlists cranking at the right time
  • AC on when it’s hot
  • lights go off when I leave
  • AC goes off when I knock off for the day
  • Lights go on 30mins before sun down
  • lights go off at bedtime

Screenshot_20210330-215421_Home
Screenshot_20210330-215421_Home972×5818 761 KB

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Step 4.
Deal with Google Assistants annoying quirks, IFTTTs constantly breaking APIs, Genio and other guys products getting broken/fixed by the vendors for almost 2 years.

Rage out and do something about it.

Build a PC with Hyper-V and thing about moving to Home Assistant

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Youll find using Home Assistant to be extremely fantastic. Im surprised you put up with using google home at all.
Just know that the ecovacs integration for your deebots is gonna be a mixed bag. I have a deebot 661 and just cant get it to work at all. Im waiting for my server closet to be setup so I can deploy a docker machine and run Bumper for the deebot, but for now, Im using google assistant to manage the deebot.

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I know right, I’ve disabled ecovacs addon. Either the API or the servers it connects too is dreadful. Really sad as it’s an awesome vac!

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Step 5a.
Disconnect all devices from Mirabella Genio, Arlec Grid Connect, Broadlink, Brilliant Smart and re-onboard them to Smart Life. This was a bit of stuffing around but, worth it!

Step 5b.
Disconnect my accounts from all Tuya-clone providers

Step 5c.
Sign-up as a Tuya developer

Step 5d.
Get the Tuya v2 connected on Home Assistant HACS

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Step 6.

Onboard all other important apps:

Essentials

  • HACS

Supervisor Essentials

  • Auto Backup, Home Assistant Google Drive Backup
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Samba share
  • Let’s Encrypt
  • MariaDB
  • Nginx Proxy Manager

General

  • Tuya v2
  • TP-Link Kasa Smart
  • Sony Bravia TV
  • Philips Hue
  • Meteorologisk institutt (Met.no)
  • Sensibo
  • Google Calendar

Nice-to-haves

Power Management

  • CO2 Signal
  • Solar Forcast

Reticulation

  • Rainbird

Security

  • BlueIris

Installed but, have no idea what I’m doing

  • MQTT → Mosquitto broker
  • Node-RED
  • Grafana
  • NGINX Home Assistant SSL proxy
  • Google Assistant SDK

Removed

  • Ecovacs
  • moved passwords from configuration.yaml to secrets.yaml
  • disabled external access

CONFIGURATION.YAML

Configure a default setup of Home Assistant (frontend, api, etc)

default_config:

Text to speech

tts:

  • platform: google_translate

SSL

http:

ssl_certificate: ssl/fullchain.pem

ssl_key: ssl/privkey.pem

use_x_forwarded_for: true
trusted_proxies:
- 192.168.1.0/24

Themes

frontend:
themes: !include_dir_merge_named themes

retic [Rain Bird - Home Assistant]

rainbird:
host: 192.168.1.188
password: !secret rbpw
trigger_time: 360

sensibo

climate:

  • platform: sensibo
    api_key: !secret ac

vac [Ecovacs - Home Assistant]

ecovacs:

username: !secret vacu

password: !secret vac

country: AU

continent: WW

logger:
logs:

homeassistant.components.ecovacs: info

homeassistant.components.vacuum.ecovacs: debug

sucks: debug

Google Calendar [Google Calendar - Home Assistant]

google:
client_id: 34158longurl34l80.apps.googleusercontent.com
client_secret: !secret gcalp

group: !include groups.yaml
automation: !include automations.yaml
script: !include scripts.yaml
scene: !include scenes.yaml

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Ask for help!

Error log for NGINX Home Assistant SSL proxy

[s6-init] making user provided files available at /var/run/s6/etc…exited 0.
[s6-init] ensuring user provided files have correct perms…exited 0.
[fix-attrs.d] applying ownership & permissions fixes…
[fix-attrs.d] done.
[cont-init.d] executing container initialization scripts…
[cont-init.d] done.
[services.d] starting services
[services.d] done.
[10:41:00] INFO: Running nginx…
nginx: [emerg] SSL_CTX_use_PrivateKey(“/ssl/privkey.pem”) failed (SSL: error:0B080074:x509 certificate routines:X509_check_private_key:key values mismatch)
[cmd] /run.sh exited 1
[cont-finish.d] executing container finish scripts…
[cont-finish.d] done.
[s6-finish] waiting for services.
[s6-finish] sending all processes the TERM signal.

What I have done in Cloudflare:

  • Setup a Cloudflare account
  • Migrated domain to Cloudflare, which copied my DNS or zone file, Amazing!
  • Setup SSL (Domain → SSL/TLS)
    – Overview
    — SSL/TLS encryption mode is Flexible
    — SSL/TLS Recommender is enabled
    – Edge Certificates
    — Edge Certificates is on wildcard *.mydomain.org
    — Always Use HTTPS is enabled
    — HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is enabled, including subdomains
    — Minimum TLS Version is 1.2
    — Opportunistic Encryption is enabled
    — TLS 1.3 is enabled
    — Automatic HTTPS Rewrites is enabled
    – Client Certificates
    — Created New cert for my domain home.mydomain.org for 15-Years (this is free)
    ---- downloaded certfile and private key, saved to Home Assistant in \config\SSL folder
    ---- receiving error in HA !!
    – Origin Certificates
    — Origin Certificates is home.mydomain.org for 15-Years