My life in Home Automation, Organization and Gardening

This is an attempt to share what I have done over the years with a online community that has been extremely valuable. I guess its time to give back. I do not have all the source code online but if you want it I can get it to you.

What I am running

  • HASSIO on a RPI 3 with Zwave USB device with GE Zwave wall switch for outside lights, a power strip, few outdoor zwave switch, tilt sensor for garage, door monitors, two thermostates
  • two echo: one echo dot, one echo spot . Hue emulator works well.
  • Many DIY devices
    • Two Arduino with Dragino Yun. One to control 4 zone sprinker for the raised bed garden and receive signal from wireless compost thermometer. The sprinkler start via a dedicated HASS google calendar that tell each bed system when to turnon. Off is conroled by a input slider in HASS and sent to the arduino via mqtt. So I don’t have to rely on google to turn the sprinkler off if network communication is a issue. Weather API tells me when I have two much ran to delay the schedule.
    • the other arduino/dragino for capturing signals from two Accurate temp monitor. One on the porch the other a portable greenhouse I use in the winter.
    • the wireless compost temp is on a nano with a battery that wakes up every hour and sends a signal RF to the arduion+dagino.
    • NodeMCU to wired to a magnetic sensor for outdoor gate open/close sensor
    • the zwave power control a heat pad, fan and grow light for indoor garden seed starting. In alabama you can grow stuff all year long depending on what it is. SO I start it inside early and get it out when it gets warmer.
    • nodemcu w/ relay to control garage doors remotely
    • TV in the kitchen hooked to a RPI3 and wired with buttons. Can page through weather , google calendar and hass screens. Also has buttons to page through calendar pages . I have 4 kids , two of them college age with jobs so we have 5 calendars between us to keep it straight . This RPI also run room_assistant . My two school age kids have Tiles so I know when they get home Room_assistant gets the signal and relays it to HASSIO via mqtt. This also has MPD for TTS from Hass although I don’t use it much.
    • all non zwave communication is done via mqtt
    • I still have a v1 smartthings running 3 devices that I really don’t want to replace. But it uses the MQTT bridge to communicate to HASS. I transition from smarthing to hass zwave USB last summer.
    • 4 iphone that do location tracking and presence tracking for for of us. The other two are on tiles.
    • nodered addon - most of my automation are in zone red
    • mqtt addon, lets encrypt/duckdns add on for remote access, dropbox syn to back it up

Ubuntu 17/10

  • Zoneminder for 3 camera - One for the back garden, one in door for our internal garage door, a generic IP doorbell camera. This is running on a old Ubuntu 17.10 box. Linked to HASS
  • Kanboard- I use this to organize my to list for both work , home and the charitable organization I am currently in charge of. I have nodered talking to kanboard via mysql query and api calls . example of this if hass shows that one of my temp sensor has not been updated it puts a task on my kanboard . The DB exported and backed up to dropbox.

Router is a ASUS 1900 running Merlins customer firmware. I have another cert regisetered with Asus that I use for the ubuntu box to securly access zoneminder and kanboard

I am a programmer so I like to tinker my diy stuff is pretty cool and would love to share the code if I can find to the time to get it to gitlab.

I would like to get another camera and maybe add my own weather station with a rain gauge down the road. I have looked at RGB LED strips but i have not found something that passes the wife threshold.

1 Like

Hi @faspina

Really nice job!!

I’m interested in how you managed the sprinkler based on google calendar events.
Can you share some more info?

Thanks

I use google calendar integration with hass.

I have a event in google calendar called Water 1. it puts a entitiy called calendar.watercal_1 that is either on or off. WHen it change to one the automation in nodered triggers the mqtt mesage to the arduino that turns on the valve wired into the relay . It is currently set for 10 minutes via a slider in hass, when I change that slider it post a mqtt topic to change the timer, Google doesn’t control how long the sprinkler stays on just when it come on. Because I post the message with a retain flag, when Arduino reboots it gets the latest message and set the timer.