IoT at home

For the past few years I've played with IoT at home. In the past I've used various platforms and devices and it's never been incredibly straightforward. I wish I could say it's really easy to get a bit of automation going at home but it does take a little effort to get started and a lot more to really leverage. Saying this, there is plenty of support on the web and you can be assured that someone has done whatever you want to do and is willing to share the details.

At the moment I have Home Assistant (2022.6.1) sitting on Oracle VirtualBox, running on a Mac Mini Server that lives in my linen cupboard. The requirements aren't particularly onerous and my 2011 i7 Mac Mini with 8GB of memory copes very well. A newer SSD probably makes the biggest difference to performance on these older Macs and I've installed a 2TB MX500 in one of the two available drive positions.

My default dashboard has a few switches, sensors, thermostats for both heatpumps and location information for the family. Home assistant will natively talk to Daikin (and other) heatpumps, as long as you have a network adapter including the newer Daikin adapters that use SSL for communication. My Daikins both use a REST API and you can actually make GET and POST calls directly. Excuse any lingo errors, I'm certainly not an expert in this space.

I have a few smart switches in various rooms, some light strips and bulbs too. I use the Tuya platform to talk to these via their IoT platform. This allows me to bypass the various white-labelled implementations of their platform and mobile applications from vendors such as Deta Grid from Bunnings.

I use a couple of physical hubs to control RF, bluetooth and zigbee devices.

I also have a Swann camera that I stream video using RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol). I've played with detecting movement, essentially frame to frame changes in certain areas of the images though I haven't been paricularly successful as yet.

One of the best aspects of the platform and integrations is the ability to expose all of my IoT devices over the internet via a nice iOS app and url. I utilise Duck DNS to push my dynamic IP to a URL on a secure port with a username/password. I could lock this down further if needed but I'm reasonably happy with this level of security.

The standard Home Assistant can be "extended" with HACS (Home Assistant Community Store). This has allowed me. to leverage integrations like scheduler. Scheduler allows you to very easily automate daily tasks around the house (and beyond). Some examples of my automations:

• Turning lights off at bedtime
• Coffee machine and grinder on just before I get up
• Gradually turning lights on prior to the family rising for the day
• Smart scheduling for our Roomba

My next automation is going to be turning off the coffee machine, grinder and any lights if nobody is home that particular day. I can either tell if people are home via an integration with Apple's "find my" or presence on the wireless network. Another idea is either utilising an API (not currently available) or scraping a webpage to gather power usage information which I can chart and analyse.

We have four google nest devices around the house, which are cheap and basic "smart" devices which we actively use for all sorts of things like; kitchen timers, alarms, searching for information, recipes, you tube and music. The Home Assistant dashboards can be cast to these nest devices providing an interactive experience which is similar to the web browser or iPhone app.

I'm sure I've only touched the surface of my IoT at home, and definitely only a very small proportion of what's possible. I'll continue to experiment when I have time and nab the odd bit of technology to further automate my house now and them. The only rule I have is that anything I automate needs to make life easier, not harder.