Components of My Smarthome

This is an overview of my current smart-home and some future things I’d like to try.

Nothing here is sponsored. I get no money whatsoever from big domotica or anyone else.

Brains

The brains of my smart-home are home-assistant. It just works, it is infinitely programmable, extensible and there is a huge and vibrant community. Everything connects directly to home-assistant or through a mqtt broker. Home assistant used to run on a raspberry pi, but the sd-cards wore out and I didn’t want to keep replacing them. Or maybe it was something else, but it failed catastrophically multiple times over 3 years so I moved the installation from a backup to a container in kubernetes¹ in my home server. Home assistant uses a ZigBee plug that allows it to manage my ZigBee devices and I put a esphome bluetooth accesspoint in the house that sends bluetooth information to home assistant too.

Lights

Many people start with lights but I was super poor when I started so I have 4.5 lights that are programmable. One full color lifx light in a standing light in the living room and a set of three full color pre-programmed esphome lights in my office. There is also a smart plug that turns a string of lights on and off.

In the future I want to control living room lights in the ceiling with a shelly but I haven’t gotten around to it. I also want to add a wled light to the kitchen but there is a connectivity issue there that I haven’t solved yet.

Audio and music

I have a collection of ripped dvds and cds and store them on a NAS. I play them on my tv with kodi, and for streaming services I use a chromecast. When Google will inevitably fuck this up and enshittify the chromecast I have to look for a different solution for streaming.

In the future I will investigate music assistant with some small music players, I have several raspberry pis lying around doing nothing so this is an ideal solution!

Sensors

There are cheap bluetooth low energy (BLE) sensors that run about a year on a battery and display the current temp. These things are not calibrated but you can reflash them with custom firmware (you can even turn them into ZigBee devices!) and you can change the settings to recalibrate them to the current temperature.

I have several plugs from athom.tech (pre-flashed esphome devices) that measure electricity and can turn on or off. This measure thing is really useful for determining if the washing machine or coffee machine are done!

For turning things on and off you can also use ZigBee plugs from Ikea.

Speaking about Ikea, their window sensors are useful too! I have a few on windows and doors that I sometimes forget to close.

I have a few sensors on the water and electricity devices, but I don’t actually do anything with that. If I had solar panels I could do more, but alas.

In the future I might make my dumb doorbell smarter by adding a sensor so I can flash lights when the doorbell rings.