Can anyone speak to the difficulty of homebrew automating some very simple processes?
For instance, I have no interest in buying into an ecosystem or any sort of smart appliance - but I would love to have low-watt floor lights turn on as I half-asleep stumble to the kitchen for a glass of water at 3am.
I want my idiosyncratic needs to drive 'smart' home additions - not the shared needs of target population Y.
Is there a community around this sort of thing I could link up with?
I think the safest way to go is to purchase products with open standards, namely Z-Wave and Zigbee. They're open protocols that can be used with any number of HA products; SmartThings, Wink, Vera, etc.
You can purchase Z-Wave thermostats from Honeywell, switches from Leviton, locks from Schlage and so on. I use OpenHAB in my home, which is an open-source home automation server. It can run on anything from a RPi to a blade with just a few necessary additions (namely a Z-Wave dongle and some sort of network connection.)
OpenHAB requires a fair bit of programming knowledge and the learning curve can be steep for some, but overall it's very functional. A few things I do in my house:
- When the garage door opens and it's after sunset, the hallway lights turn on and set themselves to 50% brightness.
- When I start watching a show on PleX, the living room lights fade out. If the show is paused, they'll come up enough for me to navigate around and refill my drink.
- When both my girlfriend and I are gone from the house, the A/C shuts off. When it detects we're within 1/2 mile of the house, it'll come back on so it's comfortable when we arrive.
There's a million other things you can do with OpenHAB. It has hundreds of "bindings" to different HA products and supports HTTP endpoints, etc. Proprietary standards are bound to go away eventually, but open standards with open-source software will always be around.
Its a node.js browser based programming environment that allows you to connect anything to anything. You can run it on any desktop platform, as well as Beaglebone, Raspberry Pi, etc.
There are all sorts of nodes for networking, such as push notifications, social media, protocols like MQTT, or XMPP. You can make system calls, which means you can kick off python, bash, C, or other scripts/programs. That means you can cURL anything, and process it however you want. If you're on a Beaglebone or Raspberry Pi, this also means you can access GPIO/ADC/PWM/whatever you have drivers for.
There is also an interface for Arduino, but this requires a PC to run the actual server, and the Arduino is just a peripheral. The embedded linux boards can run the entire thing by themselves.
For instance, I have no interest in buying into an ecosystem or any sort of smart appliance - but I would love to have low-watt floor lights turn on as I half-asleep stumble to the kitchen for a glass of water at 3am.
I want my idiosyncratic needs to drive 'smart' home additions - not the shared needs of target population Y.
Is there a community around this sort of thing I could link up with?