Raspberry Pi and arduino for home automation

aido79

Has anyone used Raspberry Pi for home automation and Arduino as an alternative to the commercially available(and more expensive) products?

I have been playing around with Raspberry Pi and Arduino for a while and am also an electrician so have no problem getting involved in the electrical wiring aspect.

jmBuildExt

Hi aido,
I've used raspberry pi for a few things.
1. Switching lights on and off energenie sockets using the following kit. https://energenie4u.co.uk/catalogue/product/ENER002-2PI

2. I took that a step further by running a wemo socket emulator called fauxmo. There is a built in skill for amazon alexa for wemo sockets, which means I know in the raspberry pi code, via fauxmo, when someone has said e.g. switch off the kitchen light. So I can then use number 1 to switch the energenie socket on/off. (I used that setup for my xmas tree lights, probably cheaper to buy a wemo socket but it lead to other things).

3. I'll be re-wiring my house shortly. Ive got my hands on an 8 channel relay set up. I will connect each relay to a gpio on the raspberry pi. The relay will control various on/off lights in the house. Ones I dont intend to make dimmable, e.g outside lights, hall/landing, some wall lights about the place.

4. I've also played around with an mqtt "broker" and have been able to control the lights and gpios via it. Nice thing about this is - you can get generic mqtt publishers on the play store and can switch stuff via your phone. It is also easily implemented in javascript too - so you can edit it via a website.
I have half a notion of wiring my alarm sensors etc to raspberry pi gpios and control it via mqtt. The panel can be displayed on a tablet displaying a website in kiosk mode from a webserver on my local network. The web page can read/set things to do with the alarm via mqtt. You could use online messaging alerts. Numerous security concerns with this idea of course

tigger1962

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a combination of a zwave/rftrx433E and a philips hue. This combination allows me to control a range of sockets including some older x10 sockets, easyhome sockets, lightwaveRF/zwave devices and lights from ozram/philips/inni (via the hue). Most the equipment i got from a uk home automation site or I had them already. I even have an Aldi/Lidl weather station hooked up to it and and owl power meter. I'm using Domoticz to control them on the pi. and them either via web/app to do the monitoring. I have an arduino hooked up to an older alarm system with a wifi shield to control the alarm but i added some zwave/x10 wireless sensors too

It all started as a hobby but over the years its got a bit more complicated. I use the 433Mhz stuff mainly for power sockets for tv/xmas lights. I have a few x10 sockets still too but I've moved away from them as they were causing interference. I hope to add a heating control device in the near future but to me honest its more me tinkering and seeing what works best.

rkdub

I'm just set up openhab2 on a pi.

the intent is to :
1. simplfy my old vera (zwave controller) setup - have it as controller of zwave only; migrate logic and dsc alarm management to openhab2
2. use mysensors .org sensor setup to connect wider set of sensors.
3. openhab to be main controller - occupancy -> light & heating control over zwave/vera

openhab2 is a bit more time consuming than expected, but we'll get there.

niallb

I use Raspberry Pi too. Central controller for heating and some lights and experiments.
I use OpenHAB2 and it was time consuming to get z-wave running on it first time,
but haven't had to touch that end of configuration in months.

@rkdub, if you're using the same configuration you had with Vera and have a USB z-wave controller,
you might not have had to reconfigure your devices at all - have you reset them yet?

witnessmenow

There are WiFi enabled Arduino that I think are perfect for this kind of stuff, they are called ESP8266.

They come in a few different shapes or size, my favorite are the Wemos D1 Mini, as they are nice and small and come with everything to start working with them straight away. Genuine ones can be got from Aliexpress for about $4.50 and clones can be got for about $3 (i've never has any issues with the clones)

If your objective is something like control a relay from something else, these are the things to get (imo). You might use a PI as a centeral hub ok, but these would be the work horses.

A few things I've done with them so far:

• Controlling my Immersion switch using Telegram Messenger - Physically flicking the immersion switch
• Controlling my Christmas Lights using Alexa - Relay on an extension lead
• Controlling LED lights using a webpage - Mosfet on the low voltage side

Some other projects I built with this device (not home automation, but kind give an idea of what these can do):



A traffic display - Goes Red/Yellow/Green based on traffic conditions got from Google Maps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPT5jIOUyNQ

Commute checker - similar to above but checks several routes at once and lights up the fastest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB7G0QnkwgI

Social Stats Display - Displays your stats from several different social media sites

rkdub

niallb wrote: »

I use Raspberry Pi too. Central controller for heating and some lights and experiments.
I use OpenHAB2 and it was time consuming to get z-wave running on it first time,
but haven't had to touch that end of configuration in months.

@rkdub, if you're using the same configuration you had with Vera and have a USB z-wave controller,
you might not have had to reconfigure your devices at all - have you reset them yet?

thanks Niall.
i have about 20 zwave devices. I haven't touched them - and don't really intend to they work right now! I don't really want to get into resetting them all. The only reason I want to move the logic of the vera is due to its limited capabilities - cpu and integration. There's a strong vera plugin for openhab - openhab should be able to run more of the logic, and offload control to vera.

aido79

Thanks for all of the replies. These are exactly the responses I was hoping for in terms of compatibility with other devices and uses.

I had never heard of Openhab so will look into that. I was actually considering learning Python but if Openhab does the job I will go with that.

I am also thinking of moving into this line of work in the future. How user friendly is this type of stuff and is it possible to install it and just walk away without having to worry about being called back because someone can't figure out how to turn something on or off?

wasim21k

I have my home heating running on raspberry pi with remote relay for zone control and boiler, all temperature sensors are arduino based running on battery using mysensors library for all wireless communication. Sorry can’t post pictures from mobile.

wasim21k

here what i have done this, would love to this project public but dont know where to start with this.

jmBuildExt

Looks cool. What software are you using for the graphs etc? Also interested to know what hardware you using for the relays?
I was thinking of switching lights etc using relays but I was intending to use cheapo chinese yolks off ebay - Although they seemed grand and safe once they were stuck in a hobby box, I just didn't think they were appropriate for something permanent.

wasim21k

this all is written by myself, mostly php with some java, python script to communicate with remote temperature sensors and remote relays, i m using mysensors library for relay and temperature sensors, charts are again open source flot charts.
all is running on raspberry pi 3 as controller of this with arduino for remote sensors/relay.
make sure you use proper power supply with arduino and dont use those cheap chines power supply. you can use cheap arduino boards and relay modules.

Metric Tensor

Fair play. That's impressive!

What brand/model of relays are you using?

wasim21k

Metric Tensor wrote: »

Fair play. That's impressive!

What brand/model of relays are you using?

all relay modules and temperature sensors are from aliexpress and some laptop battery cell to power temperature sensors.

4 relay module to control motorised zone valve.
1 relay module to control boiler.

i m trying to make this project public but need some help to do this.

woidoi

wasim21k wrote: »

i m trying to make this project public but need some help to do this.

Looks like a great project. If by 'public' you mean sharing for other people to emulate or even improve your project, then you need to write it up and put it on a blog/website somewhere. Take a look at www.hackaday.com to see what you could do, and drop them a line when you have something ready to show the world.

Kudos!

jmBuildExt

Fair play. Looks great!
That's v similar to what I had in mind for my lights (Im renovating and rewiring a new house atm), I've the same relays and I've played about with them a bit. I was going to wire all lights up to the relays, then just have logical switching at the physical light switches and smart switch through the raspberry pi.... I just felt if I ever went to sell the house a potential buyer looking at it would be put off by what might seem to them to be an "odd ball" set up.

What you have there is grand though because it would be relatively easy to wire that back up to something "conventional".

woidoi wrote: »

Looks like a great project. If by 'public' you mean sharing for other people to emulate or even improve your project, then you need to write it up and put it on a blog/website somewhere. Take a look at www.hackaday.com to see what you could do, and drop them a line when you have something ready to show the world.

Kudos!

Look at the URL at the end of his message

wasim21k

my current setup is wired but i n trying to make it wireless, if i had choice i would get cat5 or 6 cable to every socket in the house.

jmBuildExt wrote: »

Fair play. Looks great!
That's v similar to what I had in mind for my lights (Im renovating and rewiring a new house atm), I've the same relays and I've played about with them a bit. I was going to wire all lights up to the relays, then just have logical switching at the physical light switches and smart switch through the raspberry pi.... I just felt if I ever went to sell the house a potential buyer looking at it would be put off by what might seem to them to be an "odd ball" set up.

What you have there is grand though because it would be relatively easy to wire that back up to something "conventional".



Look at the URL at the end of his message

wasim21k

i have put up demo at http://www.pihome.eu if you want to have look, this project will be available to download by end of this month.