Tech Diary

The project has reached an operational stage with the following milestones. The original posts can be found at Starting a smart home project Smart Home Design V1 The Smart Home is controlled by Openhab2 using a Raspberry PI. After some initial instability, the system finally is able to be functioned smoothly. The main control panel is Habpanel and a sample of the main dashboard is as shown. Habpanel is one of the official UI supported by Openhab. It comes with some pre-defined widgets such as buttons, frames etc. For the pictures above, some of the widgets are custom widgets created by third parties such as the column of sliding switches, presence detection panel and the fan control panel. User can easily extend habpanel widgets because the widgets are written in AngularJS. There are 5 main types of communications protocols: 1. WIFI This is the main backbone used by all the devices. 2. Zigbee This is mainly used by Xiaomi sensors. 3. RF 433 MHz This is used by...

This post describes the control panel developed with a few open source software and libraries. The main purpose is to have a proof of concept that the various components can be put together to become a useful product. I have built a smart home system controlled using Openhab and the hardware switches are primarily using Sonoff switches with Tasmota firmware. The switches are controlled using Openhab Habpanel using an Android Tablet. Generally, this is my preferred way of  using the Android Tablet but the Arduino control panel is developed so that it can interface to external hardware at low cost. The control panel is developed using ESP-Link firmware with the El-client APIs and the hardware is an ESP8266 and Mega2560 combi board.  Besides acting as a touchscreen based on/off switch, it is also an internet clock (ntp) and a doorbell buzzer. The software/firmware/libraries are ESP-Link el-client APIs (interface to ESP-Link firmware MCUFriends Arduino library...

When setting up the smart home system using WIFI as the core network infrastructure, it is important to split the surfing traffic and smart home traffic. This will ensure that the smart switches respond timely.  For my smart home setup,  I have used  2  Asus routers (RT-AC1200G+ & RT- AC68U), one is configured as the main the other configured as the slave. There is no reason why a particular model is chosen as it is based on what I have on-hand but it is better to have dual-band routers because I will have 4 separate bands (Two 5Ghz and two 2.4 GHz) of network bandwidth. The router is configured as a Master-slave mode with different subnets and network route is added to make sure that the traffic can flow both ways.  The smart switches are all connected to a dedicated 2.4 GHz bandwidth and the remaining 3 bands are for normal surfing. For normal surfing, in order to the client devices to automatic connect to the strongest signal frequency...

Next, I need a Micro P rocessing Unit (MPU), Micro-controller (MCU) and the software. After some design considerations, I have decided the brain of my system shall be a Raspberry PI. Raspberry is easily available. I have purchased mine at Taobao for less than S$70. It comes with a casing, power supply, 3xheat sinks, fan and a 16GB micro SD. This is the cheapest I can find. There are so many documentations, videos and websites on Raspberry Pi.  I watched a youtube clip showing Google Home assistant can be easily installed on a Pi. That sealed my decision to choose Raspberry Pi.  The next piece shall be the automation software, Currently, the most popular Home Automation control software are Openhab and HomeAssistant. I do not have time to evaluate both and settled for Openhab as I am more of a Java programmer. In case anything that needs debugging, it will be easier for me (but it turned out that I do not really need to look at the code). I like the Arduino ...

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 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.