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Not for a company, but I've embraced it pretty hard for my home automation. It's sort of the hammer I hit everything hard enough with until it looks like a nai
by monocasa 5y ago
Not for a company, but I've embraced it pretty hard for my home automation. It's sort of the hammer I hit everything hard enough with until it looks like a nail by making everything go through the MQTT broker. The website? A static json blob describes interesting MQTT topics, and opens a MQTT over websocket connection to read/write any state. Zigbee, et al.? Translate to MQTT. Reporting? Daemon that listens to all topics and dumps it in a Sqlite database to be queried at my leisure. Events like sprinklers on/off? Python scripts in cron jobs that talk to everything via MQTT.
Basically everything that makes fully event driven architectures difficult is ameliroated because the only consumers are myself and my wife, and we literally built up the whole system. Something appears to be locked up? There's a system of watchdogs to kill stuff, all hardware has been designed to fail off into manual control, and we can pick the pieces up at our leisure like when anything else in the house breaks. The last will and testament messages in MQTT are really nice for at least reporting hard failure conditions.
I'll be the first to admit that I would not look forward to productizing it and supporting someone else's house (to the point that I'll probably never do that). It's so easy for messages to make their way into the bit bucket when setting up a new subsystem, and everything is so loosely coupled because of the event system it's almost like it's all "stringly typed". And being both software engineers, we sort of relish in how awful the UI is, even using 98.css.
- Guest42 5y agoWould you mind describing the parts that became automated? I can think of a number of appliances that could potentially be api-driven but haven’t researched them yet....
- monocasa 5y agoSprinkler system, water pressure and leak reporting, lights, mains reporting that the meter happens to broadcast, host of sensors for the house plants. Right now working on a control plane for AVB (audio video bridge) devices to give myself a sonos++ that includes video too without using sonos (I'm still salty about their "recycle mode" BS). After that either: A) hooking up some cameras to the AVB matrix to give myself a Ring replacement too, or B) hooking all the phone lines in my old house to the AVB bridge and creating a kitsch intercom system with an old phone chosen to match each room. After that, maybe voice assistant, but that seems like a lot. Or maybe hooking a bunch of bluetooth MCUs together on a low latency network to make the house look like a giant bluetooth device so I don't lose my audio when I go outside to do yard work. The end goal is all the smart home stuff but I don't have to choose between Daddy Bezos and Daddy Jinping.
- mattlondon 5y ago+1 to MQTT for home automation. I spent years fiddling with zigbee and z-wave and propietary other things from well-known brands as well as unknown brands from amazon. Nothing ever worked correctly for long periods of time. Now I have binned all that other crap and migrated to esp8266-based devices that can be flashed to tasmota, and have them all talking via a Raspberry Pi running a MQTT server and OpenHab via docker containers. It is now rock solid in terms of reliability - the only failures come when OpenHab's cloud integration dies, and then I have a backup local http server with a javascript based client that just sends commands directly over MQTT. MQTT really was the missing link for me. OoenHab has been a pain to use, but that is a different story. I'd not recommend it and I'd ditch it in a heartbeat, but sonfar I am in a "aint broke don't fix it" position.
- tjungblut 5y agoMQTT at home is a real boon. I have mine chugging away in a raspi in a docker container and that drives everything like the plant watering. I also use it to collect metrics and do alerting with influx+grafana.
- jekbao 5y agoAre there communities on Discord/Reddit for what you're doing? I'm interested in dabbling with home automation during my free time.
- jekbao 5y agoAre there communities on Discord/Reddit for what you're doing? I'm interested in dabbling with home automation during my free time.