Motivation and About the Project

As the name suggests, my project Grand Home Automation using Home Assistant is all about making life easier using home automation systems. Earlier days, when I was a Raspberry pi and Arduino beginner and knew about basic components and their capabilities. I thought of automating my room to be more efficient at work. The ready-made home automation products were very costly but I kept browsing until I found out about OpenHAB. It was a game changer for me as it was open-source. Without wasting time, I bought the components and set up my first automated light. It worked fine. I started studying OpenHAB and fount out that it was way too complicated for large scale deployment. I started looking for alternatives and found out just the thing I was looking for. Home Assistant or HASSIO. It was perfect and had all the features of OpenHAB and even more. It was also way simpler than OpenHAB and had an addon just for esp-based devices. That was when I designed my first node. Later on I found out that it was only limited to lan access and had and paid verson for cloud. Then I designed another node which would receive the data from my cloud channel process it, send it to another node which would then send it to Home Assistant.

Working of the Project

Ok. So, my project works on Home Assistant server that is flashed into a Raspberry Pi 3B. There is a redymade app for Home Assistant that works on lan through which I send commands like turn the light on to the server. The server then reads the command and send a signal to the corresponding node which then turns on the light. It also has a cloud feature for which I made an app in MIT App Inventor that sends the signal to my thingspeak cloud channel which is then received by an Wemos D1 mini. Wemos processes that data and then transfers it to another Wemos through UART connection which then goes into the Home Assistant lan server and the server responds to that signal.

Future Scope

In future, I will add a Raspberry Pi zero w attached with a camera to the mesh and will record and save it to Google Drive.

Images

Raspberry Pi (LAN Server)

Node - 1 Appliance Controller (Esp8266 NodeMCU, DHT-11 Sensor, 4-Channel Relay Module, 220v to 5v Convertor)

Wemos D1 mini (Cloud Server)

Cloud Server Analytics