Building my smart home with Home Assistant
TL;DR
Recently, I bought a place to call home and decided to invest some time in home automation. In this article, I will go over my choices for smart devices and explain how I integrate and control all of them through Home Assistant (HA).
What is Home Assistant
A little introduction for the non-initiated ones. HA is an open source home automation platform which allows you to integrate and control your smart home devices from a single place. It has a very large community of makers and builders and is one of the most active projects on GitHub.
Why you might want to use it
If you use smart home appliances from a single vendor, like Philips, running HA probably won’t add any value to your setup. However, if your ecosystem consists of devices from different vendors, like Philips, Xiaomi, IKEA and more, then it might make sense for you to want to control all of your devices from a single system or application on your phone. If that got you intrigued, keep reading to find out how I run my setup.
Ho I run my HA setup
You can install HA in several modes depending on your hardware, the features you want to use and how dirty you want your hands to get. I run my setup in OS mode on an old laptop with an i3 processor and 4 GB of memory, similar to a Raspberry Pi.
Running HA in OS mode comes with many advantages over the other ones and is the easiest way to begin with using the platform. These advantages include access to all the add-ons, integrated backups and OS upgrades. Additionally, you don’t have to fiddle with setting up networking, USB pass-through and storage/volume config like in the case of docker.
Each time a new version of HA is out, I get notified about it and can perform the upgrade from the convenience of the dashboard, or my phone, and create backups if necessary.
My smart devices ecosystem
My setup consists of devices from different vendors and a home built weather station. Some of my devices use ZigBeefor communication while others Wi-Fi. Needless to say, HA brings all those devices under a single monitor and control plane.
Philips Hue
Before running Home Assistant, I bough a Philips Hue starterr pack which included the bridge, 2 lights and a switch to control them. Signify has done a fantastic job with the hardware and software of their products. Hue products are not cheap but their price does reflect in their quality. HA has a great integration with Hue products and developers from both companies are working together to maintain it. At the time of writing , the Hue integration in HA is ranked as the 15th most popular one among its users.
IKEA TRÅDFRI
Since Hue products are quite pricey, I opted to use them only in my living room. For the rest of the rooms in my house, I use the cheaper IKEA TRÅDFRI smart lights paired to their respective gateway. Similarly to Hue, these devices operate over Zigbee which allows them to create a mesh network and extend their range.
Smart plugs
I bough a couple of Innr smart plugs, which similarly to be above, use Zigbee and integrate well with the Hue bridge. I use these plugs primarily to automate my dumb devices, a desk lamp and a mosquito repellent based on the time of the day.
HA Dashboard
While most of the time I control my devices from my phone or through the Google voice assistant, I did setup also a dedicated HA dashboard which runs on a Galaxy Tab A7 Lite. I bought this tablet with the intention of using it for reading, however, it turned out that my Kobo e-reader is irreplaceable. I’m working on a case to 3D print and hang it on the wall.
Sonos
I have a single Sonos speaker where I run the Google voice assistant and use for casting music from Spotify.
Weather station
Recently, I started working with ESP Home and built my very own weather station which tracks outdoor temperature and humidity. I added those metrics to one of my dashboards. I’ll write a separate article about the build in the future.
Conclusion and Future work
So far, my use case with HA has been limited to integration and visibility of my smart home devices and I have only scratched the surface of the platform. In the future I’d like to explore its automation aspect and build more custom devices, similar to the aforementioned weather station. Some of my ideas for future work include measuring electricity consumption right from the smart meter, a plant care sensor, a mailbox tracker and more. If only I had more time for my hobbies…
Thanks for reading!
