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I’ve talked in the past about Alexa and Ecobee and a little bit about integration with Raspberry Pi but I haven’t told you about my Smart Home journey. Well today is the day I start! Let me begin by saying I’m very frugal, which is to say cheap, when it comes to my home computers. Even though I work with them daily and try to keep my work systems up to date, my home computers don’t get the same treatment. In fact, the computer I’m using to write this is eleven years old and died briefly this week. I was able to patch it up and hope to get a few more years out of it. See, “frugal”!

That frugality influenced my first step into Smart Home Automation. I started tinkering about three years ago but just couldn’t fathom paying $30 to $50 to control a single outlet or switch. I don’t remember if Wi-Fi light bulbs were even a thing then and if they were they were “expensive”, at least to me. Most Home Automation systems required a proprietary hub or controller and I wasn’t ready to get locked into a single manufacturer or standard. Plus being the tinkerer that I am I wanted something I could dig into and make it work the way I wanted. So being that way I gravitate toward companies, products and open source groups that think the way I do. In my search the first product I found was Hook. Hook took a different approach that worked with cheap wireless plugs. The inexpensive technology used in the plug also made the Hook inexpensive. They system simply “learned” the code of the plug by decoding what was sent when the remote button for the plug was pressed. The real brains behind the Hook resided in the cloud so minimal compute power was needed in Hook, again keeping the cost down. So I paid $50 for the hook and $25 for a set of 5 Etekcity wireless outlets on sale at Amazon. Hook also had the ability to connect to Alexa through IFTTT initially and within a short time had an API that worked directly with Alexa. I would amuse myself by saying “Alexa, turn on desk lamp” and wait a second for the lamp to come on and feel like I had built a space shuttle at home! Cheap thrills for a cheap guy.

My next step was trying to really add some control and true automation to my Smart Home. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool to have my lights turn on when I get close to home? Or turn on the porch light when the sun goes down? Or how about a motion detector that turned on the lights when I opened the front door? Now I know that all of these things have been doable for a while without fancy Smart Home gadgets. There have been the old light timers with little switches to turn the lights off and on for decades. Motion detectors for lights are all old school as well. I just mention those because they were good starting projects that I could understand and easily build to test different Home Automation technologies.

So as I moved on in my journey I discovered Home Assistant, an open source system that has over 1000 integrations with different systems and products. So it really checked a lot of my boxes.

  • Free Open Source system – can’t get cheaper than that
  • Runs on inexpensive Raspberry Pi
  • Not limited to one Smart Home platform but integrates with many
  • Can write custom modules so feeds my tinkering nature
  • Integrated with my Hook system
  • Integrated with Alexa using their Phillips Hue Smart Bridge emulator

So I dove in head first with Home Assistant. Now there are those who think all software should be free because Open Source is free. Well, let me share a little sermonette here on software development. It was my livelihood for several decades and it can be long, hard work. So when I say Open Source is free, that isn’t the case. It is “free to use” but it costs the people that make it their time and compute resources. Most Open Source projects have a way for the community to contribute both time as far as development and even money to help support the main developers. Since most Open Source developers loathe the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and his advertising paid, security weak, Big Brother platform, they prefer the grass roots support plan. So sermonette over.

All computer systems have issues because both the hardware and software were designed and built by people. Imperfect world, imperfect systems. Home Assistant is no different. I wish I could say I have never cussed it a blue streak but that would be a lie. I’ve had updates totally crash my home automation platform and cause me to have to roll back to a previous version. It retaught me what I already knew as a developer that backups are imperative. Yes, I did updates without secure backups and had to rebuild from the ground up. I’ve had the system just die from unstable SD-RAM cards. I’ve had random integration issues that I had to tweak and update or at times just turn off. But through that all I have a pretty stable platform now that I can quickly add features. The most recent was to enable one of my original Etekcity plugs to be used for the Christmas tree. I mean, who wouldn’t want Alexa to turn on the Christmas tree for you?

So I plan to share regularly through the new year the details of my Smart Home components. I’ll even share pictures and in some cases schematics and custom code for those interested. I haven’t really built anything that great but I do know that others that shared their home projects online really helped me along the way as I struggled with different parts of mine so I’ll try to share with the maker community my successes and failures. So here is a list of the components and what I’ve built into my Smart Home system over the last few years that I’ll discuss more in the coming months.

This isn’t the end state of my Smart Home by any means. I just got some ESP32 devices for Christmas that open other integration possibilities with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi that I haven’t tried yet. So stay tuned for more!