The COVID quarantine came with its terms. Everyone is stuck at home 24 hours; tired, frustrated, easily fatigued with daily chores. Mine is no different. Eventually, I decided to invest myself into some new domains. I started with very basic ESP modules to set up some IP cameras, and motion sensors around the house. Even I went and hooked them up with platforms like Motion Eye to have a working alert system. All of these came with an intense hunt for how-to and DIY tutorials and things just worked.

Not to mention the bugs, false trigger, and hell lot of instability. The try, adapt and the re-flash cycle was too tiresome. That's when I started looking out for ad hoc solutions. To my surprise, the community around Home automation is no joke. There are much open-source community maintained platforms -

But don't take my word. Go, have your own research and then settle on something which suits your need. All of them have some pros and cons which I am not going into. After considering all options and devices at my end, I went and choose to go with Home Assistant - for ease of installation, integration support, and dashboard customizability. To boast a little, this is how my dashboard looks with few files of YAML.

The best thing about getting onboarded to Home Assistant in 2020 is that it has already gone through criticism for the past seven years. All those reviews have yielded a product so fine that most of your daily needs would have some readymade integration to it. If not, you can spend some time and create your own. Like, I had one of those cheap rgb led strip which came with an IR blaster. And also I have had purchased some ESP 8266 modules earlier for some other pet projects. Combine them and voila! you have your own generic IR blaster, which seamlessly integrates to the Home Assistant ecosystem. You can control it from anywhere in the world. Heck, throw in some extra hours and it's available in your google home now ❤️

I saved around 2000 INR (~ 25 USD) by utilizing what was at hand. For comparison, here is an equivalent one on amazon.in. Also, no need to remove the old strip. If you have worked on one, you would know how difficult it would be to.

Now I can control it either by IR remote, my cool HA dashboard, or just shout -

"Okay google, turn my window led to red!"

And, all the goodness can go mobile.

Lovelace - the default dashboard of Home Assistant is built on responsive principles. All the cards align themselves based on how much space is available. But why go with the web, when you can just have their app. The official iOS and Android apps are already available.

They come with some extra benefits like presence detection, geo-location-based automation, and the best - push notification! With some simple scripts, I built an automation to push notification on my device whenever my backyard sensor picks up a motion. Cool, isn't it?

Raspberry at it's heart.

Okay, so I knew what to do after playing with it for few days on my desktop. But I needed something which can be always on as well as power-efficient. I had a beagle board, but that was not powerful enough to run the whole suite. Finally, after going through the open forums, and community adoption ratio, I settled with a Raspberry Pi 4. Also, wrapped up this cutie with a transparent case and a fan for active cooling.

Pi 4 is one of the officially supported stacks. Also if you are comfortable in Linux, you can go with supervised install. That will allow you to retain your access to the host system if you have other things in mind 😉

Rise with Node Red

Writing YAML and custom c++ code is fine, but no match to Node-Red. With simple drag and drop, you can achieve complex reactions to almost any events happening within your home assistance.

For eg, here is a simple flow to announce on your Google Home speaker - that your battery is running low.

Or, some complex flow to turn on / off lights, when a motion is detected. Additionally, I have a variable to control this automation from my home assistant dashboard.

Be it controlling your devices, turning off the television when no one's around - the possibilities are endless. You can implement anything that you want. I have seen the community building complex automation and reminders once you get how services work in Home assistant. I would be leaving a few resources to read more if you are interested.

Overall, I found out HA to be the one-stop solution for everything smart in our house to communicate and behave. It's like a little jarvis in there, controlling your dumb home. Not there yet, but hey better than reaching out to the wall socket every time.

Github - @tanaykumarbera/homeassistant-config

I have opened up my configs to anyone who would like to have a peek into mine. Also I am planning few follow up blogs on few custom components. Follow me on @twitter to get latest updates.

Thanks! Few references that helped me -