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Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

rootusrootus 5y ago
I think a Pi is great to start with. Then you graduate to a real computer when your HA gets too big and laggy for the Pi to keep up with. I use a NUC. But my brother repurposed an old laptop with good results (built in UPS, and quiet!).
- nomel 5y ago
  At what point does HA get too laggy? Are you doing audio/video transcoding?
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Nope, nothing heavy like that. I don't know what the threshold is for every use case, but for me once I got more than maybe 50 devices, HA started to struggle on the Pi. The NUC is lightning fast, however, and I've grown my HA considerably since. Plus it's nice to be able to run ESXi on the NUC and have VMs for other things too, e.g. Grafana, etc.
    - nomel 5y ago
      Did you try changing the CPU governor settings? I've found that light workloads don't always push the governor enough to push the CPU into higher frequencies. I have mine set to 100% CPU, always, for lowest latency. See: https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/issues/191 https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/issues/19...
sleepingadmin 5y ago
An upcoming project of mine is to setup magic mirror: https://magicmirror.builders/ https://magicmirror.builders/ Then start moving my other stuff onto the rpi as well like pihole for example. I wonder if RPI has a zigbee module or similar for automation. It doesn't seem like it? Anyone ever find anything like that?
- atsmyles 5y ago
  Jeff has it covered (It's coming soon): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJFsZL5CTgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJFsZL5CTgM
- sirtaj 5y ago
  You can use a USB module, or wifi-zigbee bridge devices from vendors like Sonoff are also supported.
- Donckele 5y ago
  I have the ARP1600 board which has an xbee slot plus a bunch of other useful stuff. https://www.waveshare.com/arpi600.htm https://www.waveshare.com/arpi600.htm
- jvlier 5y ago
  Take a look at Zigbee2MQTT. Works on Pi with Zigbee USB sticks. Integrates with Home Assistant.
- cryo 5y ago
  Beside several USB dongle options there is the RaspBee II module for the io header https://phoscon.de/en/raspbee2 https://phoscon.de/en/raspbee2
urig 5y ago
From the contents page this looks like a very cool book indeed. Is there a webpage somewhere that explains what the projects are? For example, what do Photo Hook and Hue Fan do?
kkielhofner 5y ago
Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various device classes so as long as some random tech is supported by an integration you can group them seamlessly. For example - I have Z-wave based motion detectors but I can control Hue lights and Wemo switches for motion detection - but only if I'm home as reported by the zone feature in their iOS companion application. Their supervisor/docker based install for Raspberry Pi is pretty slick[4]. Write an image to disk as you usually would and you get a bare-bones OS with Home Assistant running in docker. Then there are additional docker-based add-ons you can install for stuff like MQTT, Z-Wave, Let's Encrypt, SSH access, nginx, and more. All managed in the web ui. Pretty cool. [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/ [2] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ [3] https://hacs.xyz/ https://hacs.xyz/ [4] https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi
- iamspoilt 5y ago
  I spend my last weekend setting up Home Assistant using VMWare on my spare machine. To say that it has been very rewarding is understatement. I am completely blown away by the possibilities that it enables. For instance, I have all my unsupported devices magically supported in HomeKit via the HomeKit Bridge integration in HA.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  I'm aiming to use a supervised installation to free up the pi for other tasks, but concerned about performance. Will be booting from SATA to help to this end, and to avoid degradation from writing to microSD often (this may be the case when I start recording security footage)
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I haven't had any issues just using the stock image on an SD card - it seems to be fast enough. YMMV especially if you plan to run other things on the Pi, though in this case I'd recommend going for a mini-PC instead and just installing a standard Linux distribution on it.
nerdjon 5y ago
I have to ask others, have people had good luck with this? I have tried to do this multiple times, with multiple models of Pi and every time after 6ish months it just seems to completely stop working. I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card. Am I doing something wrong or does the hardware really not want to be run consistently in this manner? I have since decided to just run some home automation VM's on my media server which has worked flawlessly (minus networking being weird sometimes).
- wjdp 5y ago
  Have had the same problems, though it's always the Pi chewing up the SD card, a new card solves it. These guides really need a warning saying "If you find this useful, switch to using a server that doesn't rely on an SD card after ~6 months" The Pi is fantastic for getting a taste of self-hosting / home automation as it's so cheap but by no means should it be relied on. I moved our Home Assistant install to a docker container on basic PC and it's been rock solid after several SD cards were eaten by the Pi. Though I still have DNS (via PiHole) running on a Pi and that's starting to act up. Only time I've found Pis reliable is when they either don't write much or are running a read-only disk most of the time. We've a network audio player using piCorePlayer[1] on a Pi running for years and never had an issue, it's running tiny core linux and only makes the disk r/w when you're upgrading or changing settings. I'm tempted to move my MQTT server to a Pi using tiny core as that'd keep messaging up while I'm rebooting or doing some other task on my single server. Something like http://akeil.net/posts/mosquitto-mqtt-on-tinycore.html http://akeil.net/posts/mosquitto-mqtt-on-tinycore.html [1]: https://www.picoreplayer.org/ https://www.picoreplayer.org/
  - nerdjon 5y ago
    I have a TV PI that seems to so far be running just fine after about 6 months. But I also have it reboot once a day so maybe that may be some magic. I have PiHole running myself, my original plan was to use a Pi but the last thing I wanted for that thing to die and my internet stop working. An easy enough fix, but a frustrating one. Mine is also running on the my media server. Which... is fun. When I reboot it I have to start things VM's in a certain order or things get really unhappy. I agree that a warning like that should be in place, I am surprised though that a new card worked for you. I have a drawer of Pi's that I never managed to salvage.
haunter 5y ago
I have a home system and tried RaspberryPi several times but in the end I went with an older Mac Mini. Old ones are quite cheap on the used market and also significantly more powerful than the RaspberryPi, that was one of the main reason in the end I rather chose that.
brodouevencode 5y ago
This would be nice if you could find one. Supply it terribly short these days.
- destitude 5y ago
  Yeah.. not sure where there is ANY Pi 3/4s available for sale in USA unless you pay way above MSRP price.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Exactly... I have an order in place that might arrive by mid-summer.
hatware 5y ago
Getting into home automation beyond Google/Apple/Smart things can be a boon, you really have to devote a chunk of time to it. Running useful services at home is one of the fastest ways to learn.
hinkley 5y ago
I still have this dream that some day everyone will have a little stack of SBCs running home services from tracking energy use to running pinhole to running persistent game servers (eg, Minecraft). Every year you pop out the oldest one and pop in a newer one and speed the whole thing up.
djanogo 5y ago
Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version with remote management. Currently running a HP G2 bought on Offerup for $70 with i5-6600T, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD running Ubuntu server with HomeAssistant VM and few containers. It idles at 7w, with <2% CPU for my work load. I tried Raspberry Pi with HomeAssistant with it's piss poor antique storage solution, it idled at 5W, it went straight back to store.
- rnestler 5y ago
  I currently run a home server on a librem laptop where I broke the lid and can't be opened anymore without breaking it further (I tried to repair it, but since some parts broke mechanically I couldn't really fix it) Works kinda nice and is completely silent most of the time.
- mindslight 5y ago
  WHAT STORE DID YOU BRING THE PI TO? IS IT STILL THERE? I'll second the recommendation for real PC hardware. Tinkering is fun up until it's not. When it becomes not fun is when something breaks, takes down a system you have come to rely on, and now it becomes work to recreate the functionality you used to take for granted. Seeing people go for the RPi for something they're going to put a lot of hours into makes me cringe a bit, having had several SD card filesystems get corrupt. If that's what it takes to get you started with self hosting, by all means go for it. But there is much nicer hardware for running servers on. Having said that, I still use RPis for edge devices and the like. PS I really like that idle power figure on your server. I wish there were a list of power consumption figures for integrated hardware, it seems quite hit or miss.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    You can fix that SD problem by booting off a USB SSD instead. Much faster and more reliable.
krnlpnc 5y ago
I find running my home servers on USFF x86_64 systems to be much more reliable. You can find them used for the same price as a kitted out raspberry pi, and they are faster, have more ram, and more durable disks. I like USFF because it's essentially laptop components in a mini desktop case. With power saving features turned on (currently I force all power saving features on using powertop) they don't use many watts. I don't rely on raspberry pi for anything that needs to run 24x7 because of sd card wear and the hassle of downtime and replacing/reflashing/reconfiguring a new card causes.
- justin66 5y ago
  > I don't rely on raspberry pi for anything that needs to run 24x7 because of sd card wear and the hassle of downtime and replacing/reflashing/reconfiguring a new card causes. One can always use an SSD. They work great.
  - krnlpnc 5y ago
    Indeed, my USFF has an m.2 :)
amelius 5y ago
How much convenience does this bring? Is it life-changing, or is it more like nice to have?
- rcarmo 5y ago
  It's very handy to get off work, grab a mug of barley coffee, sit on the couch, say "Siri, let's watch Movies" to your watch, and have the TV turn itself on, the audio routed to the AV system, and the Apple TV set as input. All the above is done by Siri talking to the Apple TV (which is the home hub) and homebridge nudging the TV and inputs via plugins. And _nearly_ all the above happens solely inside your LAN, except for the speech recognition (which may or may not happen on-device if you have a recent iPhone nearby).
  - amelius 5y ago
    Ok, how many % of the time does it work, versus how often do you have to perform admin work to fix it?
    - rcarmo 5y ago
      100%. I only touch it to do updates, maybe once every three months. It’s completely hands-free once you set up all of your devices, and for HomeKit, ZigBee or Tasmania devices, I don’t have to do _anything_.
melenaos 5y ago
I just implemented the foundation of my home automation. I installed NodeRED on a raspberry pi and it communicates with arduino through MQTT. The good thing with this is that i control the hardware parts woth arduino and the automation logic with NodeRED. NodeRED is much easier to use than HomeAssistant because of the extensibility and the use of NodeJs. I have implemented an arduino library that makes the development on that an easy task. I wanted to have everything on the local network and dont depend on the internet. We had some internet outage the past years and i dont want to lose the control of my house for that. Also, everything is much faster. Every arduino can run on its own, that way even if the raspberry pi is out of order, i can open and close the lights using a button or a switch.
- rcarmo 5y ago
  I second this approach. My home automation is 98% HomeKit (via homebridge) and 2% Node-RED (for a few custom MQTT message translations and a dinky little dashboard with metrics).
m4tthumphrey 5y ago
Slightly OT: > Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi If you can get hold of one! I've been looking for a Pi4 for ages to use with PiHole but sold out everywhere, some have back orders for 2023 O_O Anyone got any recommendations of other devices that work well with PiHole? I have a Mac Mini acting as a home server but from what I've read, PiHole does not run great on it via Docker...
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  I tried running PiHole on a Windows box using Docker Desktop. It worked for a bit but it stopped working at some point... and I didn't bother fixing. It had been working fine for so long on my RPi. You can buy fanless celeron mini-computers from Aliexpress for $100-$150. You can also get i5/i7 if you are willing to pay a lot more. Most of them come with pirated Windows (some sellers even say that they'll send it with Ubuntu pre-installed) but you can simply remove it and install Ubuntu Server and then install PiHole, Home Assistant or whatever you want.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  > If you can get hold of one! You don't need any in fact. It's Python so it runs on any powerful enough Linux platform, and there's a boatload of them out there; the Raspberry Pi is just the 1st one to become popular and it's the most advertised. Hoarders depleted all stocks to sell them overpriced? Well, screw them, we're going to the competition instead. Here's a list, updated yearly, of the most known Linux boards available with data and prices. https://linuxgizmos.com/catalog-of-136-open-spec-community-backed-linux-sbcs-under-200/ https://linuxgizmos.com/catalog-of-136-open-spec-community-b... Take a look also at the devices supported by Armbian and DietPi. https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported https://dietpi.com/#download https://dietpi.com/#download Also worth visiting is the Linux-sunxi site, where you can find a huge load of open documentation about hardware and software for Allwinner CPUs used in some of these boards. https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page Also available are Amlogic CPUs docs at the Hardkernel site. https://dn.odroid.com/ https://dn.odroid.com/ Example: here's the over 1000 pages long S905x3 full data sheet. https://dn.odroid.com/S905X3/ODROID-C4/Docs/S905X3_Public_Datasheet_Hardkernel.pdf https://dn.odroid.com/S905X3/ODROID-C4/Docs/S905X3_Public_Da... The public Raspberry Pi CPU data sheet is 166 pages long.
jrm4 5y ago
I'm curious about other people's experiences with this stuff, especially if you're someone who likes simple scripting and found Home Assistant to be too clunky. Basically, I've bought a lot of these little devices, and am much more interested in doing this in a more "Unix Way" way; give me text streams/web APIs and let me figure it out. I think there are things like Huginn and there's a like a Perl one or something? Frankly, I'd really like to do it in Bash or similar? Anyone gone their own way like this? (I end up not getting far because the use cases aren't compelling enough for me to put the time in? I don't know.)
- rustyminnow 5y ago
  You can do both! I run HA for the web gui, but I have a few shell scripts for more automated things. Actually, now that I'm looking at them, they call to an HA api to make changes. So you could run HA to provide a web API for things and script around that?
- piceas 5y ago
  I did. I haven't sorted out proper ventilation for my laundry room yet. Using a pi zero with a dht22 to control a dehumidifier via a tradfri power switch when needed was quick, fun, functional, and offline with no vms or GUIs needed. Logging the data elsewhere to influxdb was a fun little addition for a few pretty graphs. I'm a fan of nats.io but it isn't necessary. A private network via zerotier makes life easy but is also completely optional.
- xconverge 5y ago
  I use home assistant to create my list of "entities", then I do all logic/automation in nodered, but this could easily be bash if you really wanted. This allows me to leverage the communities work on integrations for stuff (python libraries interfacing with xyz hardware/api/cloud/local device), and then put all of my automations in one place (nodered for me) If I add new "stuff" I add it to home assistant, if I want to do things with my "stuff" I do it in nodered. Also, if the "stuff" I want to add is a little sensor or arduino or esp8266, I can just have it send MQTT messages, and then all of a sudden without touching anything in home assistant, I have access all the way in nodered to use these messages to do anything I want.
wyager 5y ago
I've been doing a bunch of home automation work recently. Here are some observations I've made: 1. Most extant home automation software is totally unreliable garbage. Buggy, slow, poorly designed. You want to reduce the amount of code you pull in as much as possible. 2. Raspberry pis are totally unreliable garbage. The hardware is just bad. There's no way to make them reliably operate for long periods of time without crashing, and there's no way to make them automatically recover from a crash (because the watchdog timer, or its driver, in the crappy broadcom chips they use is broken). 3. Most of this home automation software is optimized for users who don't know how to code at all, and is extremely poorly optimized for people who can write basic scripts or whatever. 4. Most of the radio protocols for wireless IoT devices are totally unreliable garbage. After messing around with this on and off for a few years, the best setup I've found is: 1. Use a normal computer or server, not a raspberry pi. It doesn't need to be expensive or anything; just use a decent machine with an x86 processor. There are tons of great industrial PCs for cheap on ebay. 2. Use some kind of containerization setup for separating components. I strongly recommend using jails on FreeBSD, since you can treat jails as physically separate machines for networking/firewalling purposes (using vnets). 3. Make liberal use of VLANs to isolate IoT things from the internet and from each other. 4. Don't use any IoT devices that operate over WiFi. Ethernet is great, and dedicated wireless protocols (zigbee, z-wave, etc.) can be OK with a bunch of work. 5. If you want non-trivial automations, don't try to use some existing "user-friendly" or "low-code" or whatever home automation software. Just write a normal computer program that does the automations. The specific stack I have for most of my automations in my current house is zigbee2mqtt running in one jail (this is by far the most problematic component), mosquitto running in another, and then my program which does the automations running in a third. My program can also do things like send me push messages via pushover. I've managed to get a seemingly stable zigbee network with a not-totally-trivial number of devices (around 25 now) by using CC2652 radios and plenty of zigbee routers, and also turning off all lightbulbs before adding more devices to the network. It's a shit show, and I can't really recommend getting into it right now unless you want to spend a bunch of time doing sysadmin tasks, or you only want very simple automations (in which case maybe use HomeKit or something).
- rcarmo 5y ago
  I would like to challenge that assertion that Pis are garbage. If you use a recent hardware revision you should not have any issues, mine have outlasted the ODROID I had running homebridge for a few years off an EMMC. Also, I git push my automation services to a server using https://github.com/piku https://github.com/piku, which isolates them in (simple) sandboxes. Zero issues for a long time now, and with Docker pull restrictions coming up soon, I can certainly put up with npm taking a while to update Node-RED...
ramses0 5y ago
Also of note is their recent kickstarter / crowd-supply: https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow It's basically an enclosure + some extra integrated hardware for zigbee (and supposedly "easy-to-add" z-wave). The ecosystem is heavily "run it on a rasb-pi" anyway, so you're 99% of the way there just purchasing or repurposing a PI, but it wasn't that expensive to back their crowd-funding and I'm happy to support an attempt at an "official" configuration that can be purchased. I use it slightly for its own capabilities, but mostly as a bridge to bring more devices to HomeKit compatibility. eg: I was able to add my wifi-controllable pool pump to homeASSISTANT and it creates corresponding devices in homeKIT so I can make an iOS shortcut accessible to siri: "Hey Siri, clean the pool" which turns on the pool cleaner. It's kindof like living in the future. :-P I also found recently a "chromecast => airplay" extension/addon which... bam... now the few chromecast devices I have show up as airplay sinks for audio (not airplay2, but airplay1 is convenient for where I've got them put). ...and I just got some Samba-mount thing so I can rip my DVD's and copy them over to `/Media/*.m4v` which I can then blast out via chromecast (nice b/c both my chromecast and home-assistant PI are wired, so it shouldn't be sucking up wifi bandwidth, and keeps me from having to set up a real ). It _really_ needs a complete overhaul of how it's thought about (ie: configuration via yaml, confusing organization of extensions, addons, configs, better update management) ... I'm a developer and I still get lost in the mental model they expose via the UI, but it gets the job done and it's got a good ecosystem and community to help figure out how to get done what you're trying to do.
swayvil 5y ago
It's like that scene out of Brazil. The wall panel is removed to reveal a greasy maze of tightly-packed houseguts. A dizzying complexity of convolving and cryptic organs for... turning on the lamp.
- earleybird 5y ago
  But not without a 27B stroke 6
YaBomm 5y ago
I'd rather use a few ESP8266... at $3 bucks each, they include WiFi... and support micropython.
llbeansandrice 5y ago
Anyone have success with remote cameras? Services like Arlo and Ring seem straight up awful but also rolling my own seems like more effort and headache than it's worth.
- johnl1479 5y ago
  I have had success integrate Ring and Wyze cameras through Home Assistant. If you'd rather not go that route, there is a project that publishes Ring cameras over MQTT and RTSP links: https://github.com/tsightler/ring-mqtt https://github.com/tsightler/ring-mqtt
- rcarmo 5y ago
  I have ESP32 cameras that (mostly) work with HomeKit (there are a few memory issues on the ESP32 side), and a full blown HomeKit camera that "just works".
daill 5y ago
Am I the only one who uses Fhem? From my point of view it‘s extremely robust which increases the wife acceptance factor . I‘m running Hue, Z-Wave sensors, Shelly‘s, Homematic and an Echo connection. Sooooo much potential.
klft 5y ago
The Book "Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi" by Koen Vervloesem is excellent imho. His approach centers around mqtt and he shows how to connect ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth and 433.92 MHz devices. He is very into security, showing how all communication is secured via TLS. He also shows how to setup VPN so you can access your home automation system securely from outside.
boringg 5y ago
Am I the only one who still has yet to understand the value proposition of a smart home [outside wifi + sonos]? The trade off isn't a clear win to me for me to automate everything else. If it was I would try a raspberry pi set up.
- tov247 5y ago
  I concur. I take a Battlestar Galactica inspired approach to appliances in my house. It's fine if they have computers in them, I just don't want them to be able to communicate.
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    So say we all.
- xconverge 5y ago
  I approach it like this. As you go through the next week, try and see if you can identify something that you do every day, almost like a habit, and think if automation could remove that task from your life. A few of my favorite examples: 1. Checking front/backdoor is locked every single night, now I have an automation that turns on the front hall light and sends my phone a notification that the door is unlocked. 2. The "did I close the garage thoughts", just being able to check your phone from the airport or wherever you are and see "yep its closed" is "nice" but not necessary of course 3. Everytime I open the garage door, the light turns on with a timer and some logic so that I never touch that light switch 4. auto turn off air purifier in bedroom in the morning (and on at night too) 5. Anytime the doorbell rings and I am not home, I get a phone notification with a picture of who is at the door. Helpful when worried about missing packages, deliveries, etc. Doesn't necessarily "help" solve the problem, but does do something mentally 6. Recently I added one that nudges the volume on the tv up a few clicks and down a few clicks based on the HVAC turning on/off, it was something I found myself doing habitually and now that it works it is extremely seamless and has been great I have way more complicated scenarios of course, all of which I find compelling, but I really like the automations where you dont know they are doing something necessarily, your brain just forgets they are even automations.
rabuse 5y ago
I've been wanting to create something for awhile that monitors my driveway, and when there's motion detected (through camera or IR) near my vehicle, it turns on a red light in my room, and possibly include a sound.
racl101 5y ago
Can't even find a Raspberry Pi.
tomxor 5y ago
Unless it magically cleans and tidies everything I really don't see the appeal of home automation. Pressing a switch is far more convenient to me when walking into a room than fishing out a smartphone - whether it be through a raspberry pi or otherwise. Same with central heating, I rarely need to adjust it and I don't see the appeal of messing around with some integrated interface, i'd rather an old fashioned radiator dial or an independent reliable digital central heating timer I might have to tweak for 2 mins once a year. None of these things are analogous to the TV remote control, there's a reason why we haven't seen similar precursors such as radiator switches on extension cords, we don't need to constantly adjust these things at high frequency... and when we do, we are literally walking past it (light switch). </rant>
- dchesterton 5y ago
  A well-designed home automation system will still work with manual controls and/or if the system is offline. I have smart devices everywhere yet I can still adjust the thermostat manually, turn on lights using a normal switch, set the house alarm using the keypad etc. However, I also have a 'Night' scene in Home Assistant which sets my alarm to night mode, turns off all the lights in the house and sets the thermostat to night temperature all with a single tap and all over the local network.
  - Narkov 5y ago
    ^ this. You need to have a high WAF - wife acceptance factor. Another analogy is that grandma needs to be able to stay in the house and not need a computer science degree. Your home automation system is a complimentary enhancement to a traditional, switch-on-the-wall and physical TV remote control set up.
- alexk307 5y ago
  You're missing the point. It's home automation, not home connect everything to your phone. The whole idea is to create custom automations using network connected devices; the ability to use your phone as a switch is just a bonus IMO.
- testmasterflex 5y ago
errcorrectcode 5y ago
In ye olden days, you could run your home automation on MisterHouse on any old computer and use a parasitically-powered DB9 serial RS-232 wireless adapter to control X10 devices. http://misterhouse.sf.net http://misterhouse.sf.net
kumarvvr 5y ago
I am a fanatic of embedded stuff and home automation. I love the RPi to death but am wary of wanting it to run its programs from an SD card. Any pointers to alternatives?
- alar44 5y ago
  Any PC built int the last 15 years.
- sam345 5y ago
  Boot pi from SSD. Give it pi specific ac power supply. It will be fine. It has for me for years. Or go with a used low power G3, g2, etc. As mentioned above.
noxvilleza 5y ago
One of the scary things (for me) when it comes to home automation and DIY smart home tech is that there's so many options that I feel totally overwhelmed. For the last few months I've wanted to do a small setup with sensors around my apartment that measure temp, humidity, air quality - and a few more for my upcoming chili pepper growing setup in the kitchen. There's so many options each with their own advantages & disadvantages - even on the air filter side there's pages of discussions about the various filters possible and how some don't collect particles below a specific size. I certainly miss the geeky/tech circle of friends I used to live near which would always have an friend (or a friend of friend) who was an expert on basically any matter!
parts 5y ago
I like the Raspberry Pi, but I would much rather prefer a NUC (or another small Desktop with a non-ARM processor) for a home setup.

I think a Pi is great to start with. Then you graduate to a real computer when your HA gets too big and laggy for the Pi to keep up with. I use a NUC. But my brother repurposed an old laptop with good results (built in UPS, and quiet!).

nomel 5y ago
At what point does HA get too laggy? Are you doing audio/video transcoding?
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Nope, nothing heavy like that. I don't know what the threshold is for every use case, but for me once I got more than maybe 50 devices, HA started to struggle on the Pi. The NUC is lightning fast, however, and I've grown my HA considerably since. Plus it's nice to be able to run ESXi on the NUC and have VMs for other things too, e.g. Grafana, etc.
  - nomel 5y ago
    Did you try changing the CPU governor settings? I've found that light workloads don't always push the governor enough to push the CPU into higher frequencies. I have mine set to 100% CPU, always, for lowest latency. See: https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/issues/191 https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/issues/19...

sleepingadmin 5y ago

An upcoming project of mine is to setup magic mirror: https://magicmirror.builders/ https://magicmirror.builders/ Then start moving my other stuff onto the rpi as well like pihole for example. I wonder if RPI has a zigbee module or similar for automation. It doesn't seem like it? Anyone ever find anything like that?

atsmyles 5y ago
Jeff has it covered (It's coming soon): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJFsZL5CTgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJFsZL5CTgM
sirtaj 5y ago
You can use a USB module, or wifi-zigbee bridge devices from vendors like Sonoff are also supported.
Donckele 5y ago
I have the ARP1600 board which has an xbee slot plus a bunch of other useful stuff. https://www.waveshare.com/arpi600.htm https://www.waveshare.com/arpi600.htm
jvlier 5y ago
Take a look at Zigbee2MQTT. Works on Pi with Zigbee USB sticks. Integrates with Home Assistant.
cryo 5y ago
Beside several USB dongle options there is the RaspBee II module for the io header https://phoscon.de/en/raspbee2 https://phoscon.de/en/raspbee2

urig 5y ago

From the contents page this looks like a very cool book indeed. Is there a webpage somewhere that explains what the projects are? For example, what do Photo Hook and Hue Fan do?

kkielhofner 5y ago

Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various device classes so as long as some random tech is supported by an integration you can group them seamlessly. For example - I have Z-wave based motion detectors but I can control Hue lights and Wemo switches for motion detection - but only if I'm home as reported by the zone feature in their iOS companion application. Their supervisor/docker based install for Raspberry Pi is pretty slick[4]. Write an image to disk as you usually would and you get a bare-bones OS with Home Assistant running in docker. Then there are additional docker-based add-ons you can install for stuff like MQTT, Z-Wave, Let's Encrypt, SSH access, nginx, and more. All managed in the web ui. Pretty cool. [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/ [2] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ [3] https://hacs.xyz/ https://hacs.xyz/ [4] https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi

iamspoilt 5y ago
I spend my last weekend setting up Home Assistant using VMWare on my spare machine. To say that it has been very rewarding is understatement. I am completely blown away by the possibilities that it enables. For instance, I have all my unsupported devices magically supported in HomeKit via the HomeKit Bridge integration in HA.
slothtrop 5y ago
I'm aiming to use a supervised installation to free up the pi for other tasks, but concerned about performance. Will be booting from SATA to help to this end, and to avoid degradation from writing to microSD often (this may be the case when I start recording security footage)
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I haven't had any issues just using the stock image on an SD card - it seems to be fast enough. YMMV especially if you plan to run other things on the Pi, though in this case I'd recommend going for a mini-PC instead and just installing a standard Linux distribution on it.

nerdjon 5y ago

I have to ask others, have people had good luck with this? I have tried to do this multiple times, with multiple models of Pi and every time after 6ish months it just seems to completely stop working. I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card. Am I doing something wrong or does the hardware really not want to be run consistently in this manner? I have since decided to just run some home automation VM's on my media server which has worked flawlessly (minus networking being weird sometimes).

wjdp 5y ago
Have had the same problems, though it's always the Pi chewing up the SD card, a new card solves it. These guides really need a warning saying "If you find this useful, switch to using a server that doesn't rely on an SD card after ~6 months" The Pi is fantastic for getting a taste of self-hosting / home automation as it's so cheap but by no means should it be relied on. I moved our Home Assistant install to a docker container on basic PC and it's been rock solid after several SD cards were eaten by the Pi. Though I still have DNS (via PiHole) running on a Pi and that's starting to act up. Only time I've found Pis reliable is when they either don't write much or are running a read-only disk most of the time. We've a network audio player using piCorePlayer[1] on a Pi running for years and never had an issue, it's running tiny core linux and only makes the disk r/w when you're upgrading or changing settings. I'm tempted to move my MQTT server to a Pi using tiny core as that'd keep messaging up while I'm rebooting or doing some other task on my single server. Something like http://akeil.net/posts/mosquitto-mqtt-on-tinycore.html http://akeil.net/posts/mosquitto-mqtt-on-tinycore.html [1]: https://www.picoreplayer.org/ https://www.picoreplayer.org/
- nerdjon 5y ago
  I have a TV PI that seems to so far be running just fine after about 6 months. But I also have it reboot once a day so maybe that may be some magic. I have PiHole running myself, my original plan was to use a Pi but the last thing I wanted for that thing to die and my internet stop working. An easy enough fix, but a frustrating one. Mine is also running on the my media server. Which... is fun. When I reboot it I have to start things VM's in a certain order or things get really unhappy. I agree that a warning like that should be in place, I am surprised though that a new card worked for you. I have a drawer of Pi's that I never managed to salvage.

haunter 5y ago

I have a home system and tried RaspberryPi several times but in the end I went with an older Mac Mini. Old ones are quite cheap on the used market and also significantly more powerful than the RaspberryPi, that was one of the main reason in the end I rather chose that.

brodouevencode 5y ago

This would be nice if you could find one. Supply it terribly short these days.

destitude 5y ago
Yeah.. not sure where there is ANY Pi 3/4s available for sale in USA unless you pay way above MSRP price.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
Exactly... I have an order in place that might arrive by mid-summer.

hatware 5y ago

Getting into home automation beyond Google/Apple/Smart things can be a boon, you really have to devote a chunk of time to it. Running useful services at home is one of the fastest ways to learn.

hinkley 5y ago

I still have this dream that some day everyone will have a little stack of SBCs running home services from tracking energy use to running pinhole to running persistent game servers (eg, Minecraft). Every year you pop out the oldest one and pop in a newer one and speed the whole thing up.

djanogo 5y ago

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version with remote management. Currently running a HP G2 bought on Offerup for $70 with i5-6600T, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD running Ubuntu server with HomeAssistant VM and few containers. It idles at 7w, with <2% CPU for my work load. I tried Raspberry Pi with HomeAssistant with it's piss poor antique storage solution, it idled at 5W, it went straight back to store.

rnestler 5y ago
I currently run a home server on a librem laptop where I broke the lid and can't be opened anymore without breaking it further (I tried to repair it, but since some parts broke mechanically I couldn't really fix it) Works kinda nice and is completely silent most of the time.
mindslight 5y ago
WHAT STORE DID YOU BRING THE PI TO? IS IT STILL THERE? I'll second the recommendation for real PC hardware. Tinkering is fun up until it's not. When it becomes not fun is when something breaks, takes down a system you have come to rely on, and now it becomes work to recreate the functionality you used to take for granted. Seeing people go for the RPi for something they're going to put a lot of hours into makes me cringe a bit, having had several SD card filesystems get corrupt. If that's what it takes to get you started with self hosting, by all means go for it. But there is much nicer hardware for running servers on. Having said that, I still use RPis for edge devices and the like. PS I really like that idle power figure on your server. I wish there were a list of power consumption figures for integrated hardware, it seems quite hit or miss.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  You can fix that SD problem by booting off a USB SSD instead. Much faster and more reliable.

krnlpnc 5y ago

I find running my home servers on USFF x86_64 systems to be much more reliable. You can find them used for the same price as a kitted out raspberry pi, and they are faster, have more ram, and more durable disks. I like USFF because it's essentially laptop components in a mini desktop case. With power saving features turned on (currently I force all power saving features on using powertop) they don't use many watts. I don't rely on raspberry pi for anything that needs to run 24x7 because of sd card wear and the hassle of downtime and replacing/reflashing/reconfiguring a new card causes.

justin66 5y ago
> I don't rely on raspberry pi for anything that needs to run 24x7 because of sd card wear and the hassle of downtime and replacing/reflashing/reconfiguring a new card causes. One can always use an SSD. They work great.
- krnlpnc 5y ago
  Indeed, my USFF has an m.2 :)

amelius 5y ago

How much convenience does this bring? Is it life-changing, or is it more like nice to have?

rcarmo 5y ago
It's very handy to get off work, grab a mug of barley coffee, sit on the couch, say "Siri, let's watch Movies" to your watch, and have the TV turn itself on, the audio routed to the AV system, and the Apple TV set as input. All the above is done by Siri talking to the Apple TV (which is the home hub) and homebridge nudging the TV and inputs via plugins. And _nearly_ all the above happens solely inside your LAN, except for the speech recognition (which may or may not happen on-device if you have a recent iPhone nearby).
- amelius 5y ago
  Ok, how many % of the time does it work, versus how often do you have to perform admin work to fix it?
  - rcarmo 5y ago
    100%. I only touch it to do updates, maybe once every three months. It’s completely hands-free once you set up all of your devices, and for HomeKit, ZigBee or Tasmania devices, I don’t have to do _anything_.

melenaos 5y ago

I just implemented the foundation of my home automation. I installed NodeRED on a raspberry pi and it communicates with arduino through MQTT. The good thing with this is that i control the hardware parts woth arduino and the automation logic with NodeRED. NodeRED is much easier to use than HomeAssistant because of the extensibility and the use of NodeJs. I have implemented an arduino library that makes the development on that an easy task. I wanted to have everything on the local network and dont depend on the internet. We had some internet outage the past years and i dont want to lose the control of my house for that. Also, everything is much faster. Every arduino can run on its own, that way even if the raspberry pi is out of order, i can open and close the lights using a button or a switch.

rcarmo 5y ago
I second this approach. My home automation is 98% HomeKit (via homebridge) and 2% Node-RED (for a few custom MQTT message translations and a dinky little dashboard with metrics).

m4tthumphrey 5y ago

Slightly OT: > Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi If you can get hold of one! I've been looking for a Pi4 for ages to use with PiHole but sold out everywhere, some have back orders for 2023 O_O Anyone got any recommendations of other devices that work well with PiHole? I have a Mac Mini acting as a home server but from what I've read, PiHole does not run great on it via Docker...

ComradePhil 5y ago
I tried running PiHole on a Windows box using Docker Desktop. It worked for a bit but it stopped working at some point... and I didn't bother fixing. It had been working fine for so long on my RPi. You can buy fanless celeron mini-computers from Aliexpress for $100-$150. You can also get i5/i7 if you are willing to pay a lot more. Most of them come with pirated Windows (some sellers even say that they'll send it with Ubuntu pre-installed) but you can simply remove it and install Ubuntu Server and then install PiHole, Home Assistant or whatever you want.
squarefoot 5y ago
> If you can get hold of one! You don't need any in fact. It's Python so it runs on any powerful enough Linux platform, and there's a boatload of them out there; the Raspberry Pi is just the 1st one to become popular and it's the most advertised. Hoarders depleted all stocks to sell them overpriced? Well, screw them, we're going to the competition instead. Here's a list, updated yearly, of the most known Linux boards available with data and prices. https://linuxgizmos.com/catalog-of-136-open-spec-community-backed-linux-sbcs-under-200/ https://linuxgizmos.com/catalog-of-136-open-spec-community-b... Take a look also at the devices supported by Armbian and DietPi. https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported https://dietpi.com/#download https://dietpi.com/#download Also worth visiting is the Linux-sunxi site, where you can find a huge load of open documentation about hardware and software for Allwinner CPUs used in some of these boards. https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page Also available are Amlogic CPUs docs at the Hardkernel site. https://dn.odroid.com/ https://dn.odroid.com/ Example: here's the over 1000 pages long S905x3 full data sheet. https://dn.odroid.com/S905X3/ODROID-C4/Docs/S905X3_Public_Datasheet_Hardkernel.pdf https://dn.odroid.com/S905X3/ODROID-C4/Docs/S905X3_Public_Da... The public Raspberry Pi CPU data sheet is 166 pages long.

jrm4 5y ago

I'm curious about other people's experiences with this stuff, especially if you're someone who likes simple scripting and found Home Assistant to be too clunky. Basically, I've bought a lot of these little devices, and am much more interested in doing this in a more "Unix Way" way; give me text streams/web APIs and let me figure it out. I think there are things like Huginn and there's a like a Perl one or something? Frankly, I'd really like to do it in Bash or similar? Anyone gone their own way like this? (I end up not getting far because the use cases aren't compelling enough for me to put the time in? I don't know.)

rustyminnow 5y ago
You can do both! I run HA for the web gui, but I have a few shell scripts for more automated things. Actually, now that I'm looking at them, they call to an HA api to make changes. So you could run HA to provide a web API for things and script around that?
piceas 5y ago
I did. I haven't sorted out proper ventilation for my laundry room yet. Using a pi zero with a dht22 to control a dehumidifier via a tradfri power switch when needed was quick, fun, functional, and offline with no vms or GUIs needed. Logging the data elsewhere to influxdb was a fun little addition for a few pretty graphs. I'm a fan of nats.io but it isn't necessary. A private network via zerotier makes life easy but is also completely optional.
xconverge 5y ago
I use home assistant to create my list of "entities", then I do all logic/automation in nodered, but this could easily be bash if you really wanted. This allows me to leverage the communities work on integrations for stuff (python libraries interfacing with xyz hardware/api/cloud/local device), and then put all of my automations in one place (nodered for me) If I add new "stuff" I add it to home assistant, if I want to do things with my "stuff" I do it in nodered. Also, if the "stuff" I want to add is a little sensor or arduino or esp8266, I can just have it send MQTT messages, and then all of a sudden without touching anything in home assistant, I have access all the way in nodered to use these messages to do anything I want.

wyager 5y ago

I've been doing a bunch of home automation work recently. Here are some observations I've made: 1. Most extant home automation software is totally unreliable garbage. Buggy, slow, poorly designed. You want to reduce the amount of code you pull in as much as possible. 2. Raspberry pis are totally unreliable garbage. The hardware is just bad. There's no way to make them reliably operate for long periods of time without crashing, and there's no way to make them automatically recover from a crash (because the watchdog timer, or its driver, in the crappy broadcom chips they use is broken). 3. Most of this home automation software is optimized for users who don't know how to code at all, and is extremely poorly optimized for people who can write basic scripts or whatever. 4. Most of the radio protocols for wireless IoT devices are totally unreliable garbage. After messing around with this on and off for a few years, the best setup I've found is: 1. Use a normal computer or server, not a raspberry pi. It doesn't need to be expensive or anything; just use a decent machine with an x86 processor. There are tons of great industrial PCs for cheap on ebay. 2. Use some kind of containerization setup for separating components. I strongly recommend using jails on FreeBSD, since you can treat jails as physically separate machines for networking/firewalling purposes (using vnets). 3. Make liberal use of VLANs to isolate IoT things from the internet and from each other. 4. Don't use any IoT devices that operate over WiFi. Ethernet is great, and dedicated wireless protocols (zigbee, z-wave, etc.) can be OK with a bunch of work. 5. If you want non-trivial automations, don't try to use some existing "user-friendly" or "low-code" or whatever home automation software. Just write a normal computer program that does the automations. The specific stack I have for most of my automations in my current house is zigbee2mqtt running in one jail (this is by far the most problematic component), mosquitto running in another, and then my program which does the automations running in a third. My program can also do things like send me push messages via pushover. I've managed to get a seemingly stable zigbee network with a not-totally-trivial number of devices (around 25 now) by using CC2652 radios and plenty of zigbee routers, and also turning off all lightbulbs before adding more devices to the network. It's a shit show, and I can't really recommend getting into it right now unless you want to spend a bunch of time doing sysadmin tasks, or you only want very simple automations (in which case maybe use HomeKit or something).

rcarmo 5y ago
I would like to challenge that assertion that Pis are garbage. If you use a recent hardware revision you should not have any issues, mine have outlasted the ODROID I had running homebridge for a few years off an EMMC. Also, I git push my automation services to a server using https://github.com/piku https://github.com/piku, which isolates them in (simple) sandboxes. Zero issues for a long time now, and with Docker pull restrictions coming up soon, I can certainly put up with npm taking a while to update Node-RED...

ramses0 5y ago

Also of note is their recent kickstarter / crowd-supply: https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow It's basically an enclosure + some extra integrated hardware for zigbee (and supposedly "easy-to-add" z-wave). The ecosystem is heavily "run it on a rasb-pi" anyway, so you're 99% of the way there just purchasing or repurposing a PI, but it wasn't that expensive to back their crowd-funding and I'm happy to support an attempt at an "official" configuration that can be purchased. I use it slightly for its own capabilities, but mostly as a bridge to bring more devices to HomeKit compatibility. eg: I was able to add my wifi-controllable pool pump to homeASSISTANT and it creates corresponding devices in homeKIT so I can make an iOS shortcut accessible to siri: "Hey Siri, clean the pool" which turns on the pool cleaner. It's kindof like living in the future. :-P I also found recently a "chromecast => airplay" extension/addon which... bam... now the few chromecast devices I have show up as airplay sinks for audio (not airplay2, but airplay1 is convenient for where I've got them put). ...and I just got some Samba-mount thing so I can rip my DVD's and copy them over to `/Media/*.m4v` which I can then blast out via chromecast (nice b/c both my chromecast and home-assistant PI are wired, so it shouldn't be sucking up wifi bandwidth, and keeps me from having to set up a real ). It _really_ needs a complete overhaul of how it's thought about (ie: configuration via yaml, confusing organization of extensions, addons, configs, better update management) ... I'm a developer and I still get lost in the mental model they expose via the UI, but it gets the job done and it's got a good ecosystem and community to help figure out how to get done what you're trying to do.

swayvil 5y ago

It's like that scene out of Brazil. The wall panel is removed to reveal a greasy maze of tightly-packed houseguts. A dizzying complexity of convolving and cryptic organs for... turning on the lamp.

earleybird 5y ago
But not without a 27B stroke 6

YaBomm 5y ago

I'd rather use a few ESP8266... at $3 bucks each, they include WiFi... and support micropython.

llbeansandrice 5y ago

Anyone have success with remote cameras? Services like Arlo and Ring seem straight up awful but also rolling my own seems like more effort and headache than it's worth.

johnl1479 5y ago
I have had success integrate Ring and Wyze cameras through Home Assistant. If you'd rather not go that route, there is a project that publishes Ring cameras over MQTT and RTSP links: https://github.com/tsightler/ring-mqtt https://github.com/tsightler/ring-mqtt
rcarmo 5y ago
I have ESP32 cameras that (mostly) work with HomeKit (there are a few memory issues on the ESP32 side), and a full blown HomeKit camera that "just works".

daill 5y ago

Am I the only one who uses Fhem? From my point of view it‘s extremely robust which increases the wife acceptance factor . I‘m running Hue, Z-Wave sensors, Shelly‘s, Homematic and an Echo connection. Sooooo much potential.

klft 5y ago

The Book "Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi" by Koen Vervloesem is excellent imho. His approach centers around mqtt and he shows how to connect ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth and 433.92 MHz devices. He is very into security, showing how all communication is secured via TLS. He also shows how to setup VPN so you can access your home automation system securely from outside.

boringg 5y ago

Am I the only one who still has yet to understand the value proposition of a smart home [outside wifi + sonos]? The trade off isn't a clear win to me for me to automate everything else. If it was I would try a raspberry pi set up.

tov247 5y ago
I concur. I take a Battlestar Galactica inspired approach to appliances in my house. It's fine if they have computers in them, I just don't want them to be able to communicate.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  So say we all.
xconverge 5y ago
I approach it like this. As you go through the next week, try and see if you can identify something that you do every day, almost like a habit, and think if automation could remove that task from your life. A few of my favorite examples: 1. Checking front/backdoor is locked every single night, now I have an automation that turns on the front hall light and sends my phone a notification that the door is unlocked. 2. The "did I close the garage thoughts", just being able to check your phone from the airport or wherever you are and see "yep its closed" is "nice" but not necessary of course 3. Everytime I open the garage door, the light turns on with a timer and some logic so that I never touch that light switch 4. auto turn off air purifier in bedroom in the morning (and on at night too) 5. Anytime the doorbell rings and I am not home, I get a phone notification with a picture of who is at the door. Helpful when worried about missing packages, deliveries, etc. Doesn't necessarily "help" solve the problem, but does do something mentally 6. Recently I added one that nudges the volume on the tv up a few clicks and down a few clicks based on the HVAC turning on/off, it was something I found myself doing habitually and now that it works it is extremely seamless and has been great I have way more complicated scenarios of course, all of which I find compelling, but I really like the automations where you dont know they are doing something necessarily, your brain just forgets they are even automations.

rabuse 5y ago

I've been wanting to create something for awhile that monitors my driveway, and when there's motion detected (through camera or IR) near my vehicle, it turns on a red light in my room, and possibly include a sound.

racl101 5y ago

Can't even find a Raspberry Pi.

tomxor 5y ago

Unless it magically cleans and tidies everything I really don't see the appeal of home automation. Pressing a switch is far more convenient to me when walking into a room than fishing out a smartphone - whether it be through a raspberry pi or otherwise. Same with central heating, I rarely need to adjust it and I don't see the appeal of messing around with some integrated interface, i'd rather an old fashioned radiator dial or an independent reliable digital central heating timer I might have to tweak for 2 mins once a year. None of these things are analogous to the TV remote control, there's a reason why we haven't seen similar precursors such as radiator switches on extension cords, we don't need to constantly adjust these things at high frequency... and when we do, we are literally walking past it (light switch). </rant>

dchesterton 5y ago
A well-designed home automation system will still work with manual controls and/or if the system is offline. I have smart devices everywhere yet I can still adjust the thermostat manually, turn on lights using a normal switch, set the house alarm using the keypad etc. However, I also have a 'Night' scene in Home Assistant which sets my alarm to night mode, turns off all the lights in the house and sets the thermostat to night temperature all with a single tap and all over the local network.
- Narkov 5y ago
  ^ this. You need to have a high WAF - wife acceptance factor. Another analogy is that grandma needs to be able to stay in the house and not need a computer science degree. Your home automation system is a complimentary enhancement to a traditional, switch-on-the-wall and physical TV remote control set up.
alexk307 5y ago
You're missing the point. It's home automation, not home connect everything to your phone. The whole idea is to create custom automations using network connected devices; the ability to use your phone as a switch is just a bonus IMO.
testmasterflex 5y ago

errcorrectcode 5y ago

In ye olden days, you could run your home automation on MisterHouse on any old computer and use a parasitically-powered DB9 serial RS-232 wireless adapter to control X10 devices. http://misterhouse.sf.net http://misterhouse.sf.net

kumarvvr 5y ago

I am a fanatic of embedded stuff and home automation. I love the RPi to death but am wary of wanting it to run its programs from an SD card. Any pointers to alternatives?

alar44 5y ago
Any PC built int the last 15 years.
sam345 5y ago
Boot pi from SSD. Give it pi specific ac power supply. It will be fine. It has for me for years. Or go with a used low power G3, g2, etc. As mentioned above.

noxvilleza 5y ago

One of the scary things (for me) when it comes to home automation and DIY smart home tech is that there's so many options that I feel totally overwhelmed. For the last few months I've wanted to do a small setup with sensors around my apartment that measure temp, humidity, air quality - and a few more for my upcoming chili pepper growing setup in the kitchen. There's so many options each with their own advantages & disadvantages - even on the air filter side there's pages of discussions about the various filters possible and how some don't collect particles below a specific size. I certainly miss the geeky/tech circle of friends I used to live near which would always have an friend (or a friend of friend) who was an expert on basically any matter!

parts 5y ago

I like the Raspberry Pi, but I would much rather prefer a NUC (or another small Desktop with a non-ARM processor) for a home setup.