Tech Diary

Version 1 of my smart home design. My house has 4 rooms, 1 living room, a kitchen and a balcony. Project room is actually a converted storeroom/toilet to become my work area for future 3D printing and electronic projects. Let's break down the materials needed, Phase 1 Smart Switches - 3 Smart lights - 8 Raspberry PI - 1 Phase 2 Temperature Sensors - 8 Aircon Controllers - 5 (To be designed together with the temperature sensors) Smart Lock - 1 Not Planned WIFI Cameras - 2 TV controller box - 1 Google Home - 1 Remote Control Bind - 3 Auto Watering setup - 1 Looks like I have quite a bit of work to do.

My family is moving to a new home soon. I was thinking of setting up a smart home system for my new home. After looking at some of the commercially available solutions, either they are very expensive or I do not trust their security, so I decided to assemble and build one myself. In order to make the smart home modular and can cater for expansion, I have decided on the following considerations and design parameters when building up the smart home. The hub software has to be Open Source. The switches, lights and sensors can be either open source hardware or the devices must be using 1 of the open IoT protocols such as MQTT, CoAP RestAPI. Open and easily available SoC (System on Chips) hardware such as Raspberry Pi.  Open and easily available software/hardware based on common IoT development platform e.g Arduino or PlatformIO.  The ability to integrate to smart devices such as Google Home Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple Homebridge. Ha ha,😂😂 this sounds like I am going to g

IoT and Cloud Integration IoT, Cloud, 3D printing, Artificial Intelligent, Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics are all the current (at the date of this blogpst) hottest and interesting technology. In IoT, big players like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have make tools readily available to us to integrate many of these "Edge" devices to their platform. Recently I bought some of these devices to experiment the capabilities and was amazed at how cheap and powerful. So much for writing and let's get on with the projects.