9 ms·

Creating a Z-Wave Smart Home hub using a Raspberry Pi

78 points by bedros 9y ago

mankyd 9y ago
Uniquely out of date as of today, actually: https://home-assistant.io/blog/2017/07/25/introducing-hassio/ https://home-assistant.io/blog/2017/07/25/introducing-hassio... tldr; Home-Assistant, the system mentioned in the parent article, now maintains their own OS variant for the RPi that they recommend you install directly. You don't have to, of course. You can still install Home-Assistant yourself on whatever distribution you choose.
rdjrthatbuddy 9y ago
With all the bs blog posts about using an rpi to turn on-n-off a light using javascript, this is a pleasant surprise.
payne92 9y ago
I think Z-wave has been or is in the process of being superseded by just using Wi-Fi. I do not recommend investing in Z-wave gear.
- jon-wood 9y ago
  In some cases using WiFi makes sense, for example if you've got a mains powered device such as a camera, smart plug, or similar. However z-wave really comes into its own with remote battery powered devices - a properly configured motion sensor for example will easily last two years on a single 3.3v lithium battery. That's despite waking up every few hours to report its presence, and probably transmitting the presence of motion, temperature changes, light levels, and other data points far more frequently.
- bedros 9y ago
  it's the ecosystem, you can find zwave switches, plugs, everywhere, there is no wifi switch I can find.
  - stingrae 9y ago
    tplink and belkin wemo both make WiFi switches and plugs.
    - mrb 9y ago
      IIRC the Belkin Wemo plug runs a full-blown Linux OS. Disgustingly over-engineered! Complex software & hardware means less reliability. A remotely controlled plug should be running tens of kB of firmware, at most, and that includes crypto libraries. It shouldn't be running the megabytes of code that an embedded Linux OS represents. Yuck.
  - askvictor 9y ago
    Esp8266 based wifi switches can be had quite cheap (sonoff is one of the brands)
    - bedros 9y ago
      looks perfect for my needs, is there any REST API documentation?
      - askvictor 9y ago
        Dunno, but you can flash any esp8266 firmware onto it and roll your own API (or other smarts)
        bedros 9y ago
        I mean write my own script to turn on/off the switch such as using wget or libcurl
        askvictor 9y ago
        Yeah, you could flash a simple Arduino sketch with such an API, and use that, assuming you can't access the in built API
- moron4hire 9y ago
  Not Wifi, but definitely should be BLE. ZWave is notoriously insecure, the available chips are extremely buggy, and the licensing requirements very expensive. I used to work on ZWave products and now work on BLE devices. BLE has been far more pleasant of an experience. And Bluetooth is getting mesh networking soon!
  - JshWright 9y ago
    Z Wave+ addresses many of the security concerns of Z Wave (the licensing costs remain, obviously).
    - mahyarm 9y ago
      A lot of z-wave+ devices do not implement that security portion and it's a pain to set up on top of it. Z-wave's biggest short coming in my opinion is how easy it is to overload the network. Turning off 40 lights at once has half of the operations drop off due to the network getting overloaded and just dropping commands. If you have a few devices reporting their power usage, the network becomes quickly overloaded and you get the same command dropping crap in even simple operations like 'turn on light 2 when light 1 turns on and vice versa'. I have a condo with z-wave everything right now, but after seeing how much of a mess all IoT home automation crap is, I'm going to sit and wait until we have something that works properly that doesn't cost $60-$100 per light switch or require maintaining something complicated. ---- IMO we should have a dual network solution. Something like wifi for plug in devices which also act as repeater networks for the battery powered BLE sensors and such.
      - 725686 9y ago
        Absolutely agree. I have a z-wave alarm, and often times the automation rule will turn the alarm off, but will leave the strobe on. Sometimes lights will no turn on (or off). Sometimes some door sensors will report to be open when they are not.... it is a complete mess.
      - myrandomcomment 9y ago
        I use Insteon. About 100 devices. Plugs, light switches, HVAC, leak sensors, motion sensors, cameras. Their support sucks when you have to deal with them and the programming of this then that is nowhere to be found. On the other hand I have had to deal with support twice and after pulling their heads from the ass they fixed the issues. Otherwise it pretty much just works and works as scale. These guys started with the X10 stuff in the 80s and are not going anywhere. So if you want something that will just work it is the best bet. They have a hub with HomeKit integration but I am not using it as they do not support some of the older door sensors with it yet.
- manyxcxi 9y ago
  Unless you know something I don't, I think you're completely incorrect on both counts. Z-Wave isn't going anywhere, just a few years ago the Z-Wave alliance published Z-Wave+ and more and more consumer devices have been coming to market. They're all over Home Depot (among other large retailers) and backed by very large brands [0]. All major hubs support it, and z-wave offers many specific technical and security advantages over WiFi with respect to automation. Z-wave has a much smaller threat surface area and requires no internet. In fact, it requires no central controller at all, as you can have controllers in every room for scene automation. The internet connected hubs bring a lot of shiny features to the table, but they're completely unnecessary for local automation. Even better, communication forwarding is part of the design so you can have a controller hundreds of meters away from the thing you want controlled and as long as there are a couple of devices on the mesh between them it will work. We've seen how great WiFi repeaters are... plus WiFi on battery is basically a deal breaker, whereas you can have z-wave devices last two years on some AA batteries. Z-Wave and Zigbee are both so much better than WiFi at automation that I can't even fathom why someone would suggest the opposite. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave
  - stingrae 9y ago
    I wouldn't say that it is getting replaced with wifi. But z-wave is definitely getting replaced by Zigbee, 6LoWPAN and Thread. (all of which aren't compatible with z-wave's proprietary hardware.) Also the entrance of the long awaited Bluetooth mesh, will have interesting effects on the market.
  - barkerja 9y ago
    Is there any concern that Z-Wave and Zigbee could/will be reduced to nothing more than a tinkerers platform after both Apple and Google grab more of the market (both of which appear to be building systems backed by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth)?
    - manyxcxi 9y ago
      I don't know if Apple is going to go anywhere with Homekit as it sounds (third hand reports) like it's more expensive to get products HomeKit ready over just using other protocols, or paying a license to Z-Wave or Zigbee. That being said, some combination of BT/LE/Mesh + WiFi and/or some other networking protocol would probably win very quickly if it wasn't encumbered with large licensing costs.
jon-wood 9y ago
If this is the sort of thing that interests you, and you happen to be looking for a job somewhere +/-3 hours from GMT, drop me an email. We're looking for good engineers at Neos to work on our connected home security system (we're also looking for people interested in building backend software for insurance, but that's somewhat less sexy). We've got a Raspberry Pi based hub which sits in customer's homes communicating with z-wave devices, the software on there is currently proprietary but if you do buy a policy drop me a line saying you're from Hacker News and I'll turn on access to the MQTT broker running on the hub so you can play with integrating other things ;)
Klathmon 9y ago
I've been running Home Assistant (the software in the blog post) for a little over a year now. (started out on a raspberry pi, upgraded to an Intel NUC recently for more power, and to do more non-home-automation related things on it) It's by far one of the most well-managed community-driven open source projects i've ever used. All of the "components" are just small-ish python programs that contain mostly "glue" code, and they are required to use 3rd party libraries to actually implement the real work. This spreads the workload out across many repos in terms of breaking changes and help, and makes it much easier to contribute back to (you aren't contributing to a massive monolithic repo, you are contributing to a small 200 line python library with 20 stars on github, much less pressure!). Because of this architecture layout, anything that has a python library that can be consitered part of "home automation" most likely has it implemented already. In my setup alone I have: * chromecasts * 2 different smart TV brands * many zwave switches (run through a vera, not using zwave directly) * many zwave door/window sensors * multiple ip cameras * a wifi thermostat * a few IR controllers for "dumb" IR devices * phone/device tracking (which keeps all the data stored locally) * usps/ups/fedex package tracking and delivery notifications * network speed monitoring * have-i-been-pwned monitoring and notifications * weather * a 3d printer's completion percentage * a google home * an amazon echo * ups runtime monitoring * multiple esp8266 based sensors and switches for various hacked together things * and more that i'm probably forgetting And all of it is processed locally (when possible), stored locally (in a postgresql database), secured via TLS, available on any browser anywhere, and on a server I maintain and manage (with the help of some automations I created in hass itself). And speaking of automations, it's python, so they are basically unlimited. I have an automation that will notify me on my phone if it will start raining at my phone's current location before I can get home, and only while on my motorcycle. It's not perfect (it's pre-1.0 software, so there are still semi-frequent breaking changes, and configuration is mostly manual still via yaml files), but it's been a such an amazing experience. Home Assistant is the reason why I love IoT.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Jayakumark 9y ago
  Just curious on how you use Esp8266 based sensors and switches . Can you list some of your best use cases ?
fooey 9y ago
I've been thinking how much I hate Iris and would love to replace it with something else, and I've also been wanting to play with a Pi It's amazing how awful the state of home automation is on the commercial side right now
knodi123 9y ago
Hey, cool! I've been tinkering together something custom using a VeraPlus [http://getvera.com/controllers/veraplus/ http://getvera.com/controllers/veraplus/] and a raspberry pi for the last couple of years. It stopped working a few months ago, and sadly I replaced my whole vera controller before realizing the problem was that the wall wart had degraded and was no longer supplying enough voltage. D'oh! The Vera doesn't have wifi (well, it does, but it can't join a network!!!), but a regular old raspi can act like a wireless bridge, offering wireless access to the vera, and a sound card, and also a linux environment to run my custom rails frontend. Add in some location reporting via Tasker, and I have an announcement sound whenever an outside door is opened, and I have motion and light sensors that record video and upload it to my personal website, and it's all controlled intelligently based on when my wife or I are at home. I'm pretty proud of it.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  Home assistant works beautifully with the Vera. It's how I have it setup right now, and it was a great way to slowly move away from the Vera (at least as the UI).

78 points by bedros 9y ago

Uniquely out of date as of today, actually: https://home-assistant.io/blog/2017/07/25/introducing-hassio/ https://home-assistant.io/blog/2017/07/25/introducing-hassio... tldr; Home-Assistant, the system mentioned in the parent article, now maintains their own OS variant for the RPi that they recommend you install directly. You don't have to, of course. You can still install Home-Assistant yourself on whatever distribution you choose.

rdjrthatbuddy 9y ago

With all the bs blog posts about using an rpi to turn on-n-off a light using javascript, this is a pleasant surprise.

payne92 9y ago

I think Z-wave has been or is in the process of being superseded by just using Wi-Fi. I do not recommend investing in Z-wave gear.

jon-wood 9y ago
In some cases using WiFi makes sense, for example if you've got a mains powered device such as a camera, smart plug, or similar. However z-wave really comes into its own with remote battery powered devices - a properly configured motion sensor for example will easily last two years on a single 3.3v lithium battery. That's despite waking up every few hours to report its presence, and probably transmitting the presence of motion, temperature changes, light levels, and other data points far more frequently.
bedros 9y ago
it's the ecosystem, you can find zwave switches, plugs, everywhere, there is no wifi switch I can find.
- stingrae 9y ago
  tplink and belkin wemo both make WiFi switches and plugs.
  - mrb 9y ago
    IIRC the Belkin Wemo plug runs a full-blown Linux OS. Disgustingly over-engineered! Complex software & hardware means less reliability. A remotely controlled plug should be running tens of kB of firmware, at most, and that includes crypto libraries. It shouldn't be running the megabytes of code that an embedded Linux OS represents. Yuck.
- askvictor 9y ago
  Esp8266 based wifi switches can be had quite cheap (sonoff is one of the brands)
  - bedros 9y ago
    looks perfect for my needs, is there any REST API documentation?
    - askvictor 9y ago
      Dunno, but you can flash any esp8266 firmware onto it and roll your own API (or other smarts)
      - bedros 9y ago
        I mean write my own script to turn on/off the switch such as using wget or libcurl
        askvictor 9y ago
        Yeah, you could flash a simple Arduino sketch with such an API, and use that, assuming you can't access the in built API
moron4hire 9y ago
Not Wifi, but definitely should be BLE. ZWave is notoriously insecure, the available chips are extremely buggy, and the licensing requirements very expensive. I used to work on ZWave products and now work on BLE devices. BLE has been far more pleasant of an experience. And Bluetooth is getting mesh networking soon!
- JshWright 9y ago
  Z Wave+ addresses many of the security concerns of Z Wave (the licensing costs remain, obviously).
  - mahyarm 9y ago
    A lot of z-wave+ devices do not implement that security portion and it's a pain to set up on top of it. Z-wave's biggest short coming in my opinion is how easy it is to overload the network. Turning off 40 lights at once has half of the operations drop off due to the network getting overloaded and just dropping commands. If you have a few devices reporting their power usage, the network becomes quickly overloaded and you get the same command dropping crap in even simple operations like 'turn on light 2 when light 1 turns on and vice versa'. I have a condo with z-wave everything right now, but after seeing how much of a mess all IoT home automation crap is, I'm going to sit and wait until we have something that works properly that doesn't cost $60-$100 per light switch or require maintaining something complicated. ---- IMO we should have a dual network solution. Something like wifi for plug in devices which also act as repeater networks for the battery powered BLE sensors and such.
    - 725686 9y ago
      Absolutely agree. I have a z-wave alarm, and often times the automation rule will turn the alarm off, but will leave the strobe on. Sometimes lights will no turn on (or off). Sometimes some door sensors will report to be open when they are not.... it is a complete mess.
    - myrandomcomment 9y ago
      I use Insteon. About 100 devices. Plugs, light switches, HVAC, leak sensors, motion sensors, cameras. Their support sucks when you have to deal with them and the programming of this then that is nowhere to be found. On the other hand I have had to deal with support twice and after pulling their heads from the ass they fixed the issues. Otherwise it pretty much just works and works as scale. These guys started with the X10 stuff in the 80s and are not going anywhere. So if you want something that will just work it is the best bet. They have a hub with HomeKit integration but I am not using it as they do not support some of the older door sensors with it yet.
manyxcxi 9y ago
Unless you know something I don't, I think you're completely incorrect on both counts. Z-Wave isn't going anywhere, just a few years ago the Z-Wave alliance published Z-Wave+ and more and more consumer devices have been coming to market. They're all over Home Depot (among other large retailers) and backed by very large brands [0]. All major hubs support it, and z-wave offers many specific technical and security advantages over WiFi with respect to automation. Z-wave has a much smaller threat surface area and requires no internet. In fact, it requires no central controller at all, as you can have controllers in every room for scene automation. The internet connected hubs bring a lot of shiny features to the table, but they're completely unnecessary for local automation. Even better, communication forwarding is part of the design so you can have a controller hundreds of meters away from the thing you want controlled and as long as there are a couple of devices on the mesh between them it will work. We've seen how great WiFi repeaters are... plus WiFi on battery is basically a deal breaker, whereas you can have z-wave devices last two years on some AA batteries. Z-Wave and Zigbee are both so much better than WiFi at automation that I can't even fathom why someone would suggest the opposite. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave
- stingrae 9y ago
  I wouldn't say that it is getting replaced with wifi. But z-wave is definitely getting replaced by Zigbee, 6LoWPAN and Thread. (all of which aren't compatible with z-wave's proprietary hardware.) Also the entrance of the long awaited Bluetooth mesh, will have interesting effects on the market.
- barkerja 9y ago
  Is there any concern that Z-Wave and Zigbee could/will be reduced to nothing more than a tinkerers platform after both Apple and Google grab more of the market (both of which appear to be building systems backed by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth)?
  - manyxcxi 9y ago
    I don't know if Apple is going to go anywhere with Homekit as it sounds (third hand reports) like it's more expensive to get products HomeKit ready over just using other protocols, or paying a license to Z-Wave or Zigbee. That being said, some combination of BT/LE/Mesh + WiFi and/or some other networking protocol would probably win very quickly if it wasn't encumbered with large licensing costs.

jon-wood 9y ago

If this is the sort of thing that interests you, and you happen to be looking for a job somewhere +/-3 hours from GMT, drop me an email. We're looking for good engineers at Neos to work on our connected home security system (we're also looking for people interested in building backend software for insurance, but that's somewhat less sexy). We've got a Raspberry Pi based hub which sits in customer's homes communicating with z-wave devices, the software on there is currently proprietary but if you do buy a policy drop me a line saying you're from Hacker News and I'll turn on access to the MQTT broker running on the hub so you can play with integrating other things ;)

Klathmon 9y ago

I've been running Home Assistant (the software in the blog post) for a little over a year now. (started out on a raspberry pi, upgraded to an Intel NUC recently for more power, and to do more non-home-automation related things on it) It's by far one of the most well-managed community-driven open source projects i've ever used. All of the "components" are just small-ish python programs that contain mostly "glue" code, and they are required to use 3rd party libraries to actually implement the real work. This spreads the workload out across many repos in terms of breaking changes and help, and makes it much easier to contribute back to (you aren't contributing to a massive monolithic repo, you are contributing to a small 200 line python library with 20 stars on github, much less pressure!). Because of this architecture layout, anything that has a python library that can be consitered part of "home automation" most likely has it implemented already. In my setup alone I have: * chromecasts * 2 different smart TV brands * many zwave switches (run through a vera, not using zwave directly) * many zwave door/window sensors * multiple ip cameras * a wifi thermostat * a few IR controllers for "dumb" IR devices * phone/device tracking (which keeps all the data stored locally) * usps/ups/fedex package tracking and delivery notifications * network speed monitoring * have-i-been-pwned monitoring and notifications * weather * a 3d printer's completion percentage * a google home * an amazon echo * ups runtime monitoring * multiple esp8266 based sensors and switches for various hacked together things * and more that i'm probably forgetting And all of it is processed locally (when possible), stored locally (in a postgresql database), secured via TLS, available on any browser anywhere, and on a server I maintain and manage (with the help of some automations I created in hass itself). And speaking of automations, it's python, so they are basically unlimited. I have an automation that will notify me on my phone if it will start raining at my phone's current location before I can get home, and only while on my motorcycle. It's not perfect (it's pre-1.0 software, so there are still semi-frequent breaking changes, and configuration is mostly manual still via yaml files), but it's been a such an amazing experience. Home Assistant is the reason why I love IoT.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Jayakumark 9y ago
Just curious on how you use Esp8266 based sensors and switches . Can you list some of your best use cases ?

fooey 9y ago

I've been thinking how much I hate Iris and would love to replace it with something else, and I've also been wanting to play with a Pi It's amazing how awful the state of home automation is on the commercial side right now

knodi123 9y ago

Hey, cool! I've been tinkering together something custom using a VeraPlus [http://getvera.com/controllers/veraplus/ http://getvera.com/controllers/veraplus/] and a raspberry pi for the last couple of years. It stopped working a few months ago, and sadly I replaced my whole vera controller before realizing the problem was that the wall wart had degraded and was no longer supplying enough voltage. D'oh! The Vera doesn't have wifi (well, it does, but it can't join a network!!!), but a regular old raspi can act like a wireless bridge, offering wireless access to the vera, and a sound card, and also a linux environment to run my custom rails frontend. Add in some location reporting via Tasker, and I have an announcement sound whenever an outside door is opened, and I have motion and light sensors that record video and upload it to my personal website, and it's all controlled intelligently based on when my wife or I are at home. I'm pretty proud of it.

Klathmon 9y ago
Home assistant works beautifully with the Vera. It's how I have it setup right now, and it was a great way to slowly move away from the Vera (at least as the UI).