Ask HN: What technology/products do you use for home automation?

11 points by sk2code 10 years ago | 9 comments

I am very new to home automation and would like to implement the home automation for controlling: Lighting (Indoor/Outdoor), Home Security & Thermostat

Finding a lot of material related to home automation on the internet and I am not sure which one to use: Home automation protocols : Z-Wave, ZigBee, Insteon ; Home Automation Hubs: SmartThings, Wink, Vera

Also very interested to know if someone has worked on open hardware for home automation using Raspberry Pi/Arduino. Are there any good websites/blogs to learn more about all this?

dangrossman 10 years ago |

I have z-wave door locks (Schlage), a ton of zigbee light bulbs (GE and Cree), two wifi garage door openers (Chamberlain), the Nest thermostat and the Nest Protect CO/smoke detector. I used to have some sensors and other security stuff, but it was unreliable compared to a hardwired system, and wasn't worth the effort for me to build my own security system. I sold them off on Amazon Marketplace.

I used to use a Vera hub. It has an ugly, difficult to use UI but exposes an API, and doesn't require going through the internet, which is nice. Once I got tired of tinkering and building my own dashboards (e.g. http://www.dangrossman.info/wp-content/uploads/home2-1024x51...), I just bought a Wink which ties together all of the wifi/zigbee/zwave products in a very nice mobile app that everyone in my home is happy to use. Sold the Vera.

I have a cheap Android tablet mounted on a wall that has it open. My Amazon Echo also connects to Wink, so lights and switches can be voice controlled. IFTTT also has Wink channels.

pjungwir 10 years ago |

I have a Raspi and have been researching how to control my sprinklers with it. The old sprinkler control box is flaky, failing, and inflexible, so I'd like to replace it, and it seems like a good excuse for a Raspi project. I have 13 lines, each controlled by a 24 VAC solenoid. The Raspi GPIO pins put out 3.3 VDC. So I need to convert 13 GPIO signals from 3.3 VDC to 24 VAC. If it were one line I'd buy a relay and be done, but I don't want to buy 13 relays. I think a couple of these will do the trick:

http://www.ti.com/product/uln2003a

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/uln2003a.pdf

But I'm pretty fuzzy on electronics stuff.

If anyone wants to confirm that I'm on the right track that would be nice. :-)

tmuir 10 years ago |

If you're looking to program this stuff yourself, node-red (nodered.org) is a good place to start. You can run it on raspberry pi or beaglebone, in addition to any desktop platform. Its a browser based programming environment that allows you to interface pretty much anything to anything. There are all sorts of built in nodes for all of the big names in IoT, like Hue, Wemo, Insteon, etc. There's also a ton of networking protocols built in. Additionally, you can access the shell, which means you can have it run any program/script/whatever you have local to your machine.

The end result is that it's every simple to do stuff like make make GPIO changes trigger SMS/email/Push/HTTP etc, as well as the inverse, have network traffic change the state of GPIO.

Best of all, its all javascript, so it should be very easy for most HNers to get started.

dirktheman 10 years ago |

I made a self-watering plant container a couple of years ago: a moisture sensor senses the moisture level in the soil. When it gets below the treshold it sends a signal to a small pump, which extracts the water from a little container in the pot. I had plans to make a water level sensor so that I would get a SMS when it was time to fill the container, but I never got around it. Arduinos rule, BTW!

koliber 10 years ago | |

Hook it up to a water line and you never need to worry about refilling your container.

TimLeland 10 years ago |

I wrote a post on wirelessly controlling power outlets. This works great for lamps. http://timleland.com/wireless-power-outlets/

saintfiends 10 years ago | |

That's a nice and easy setup. Is there a similar product for wall switches/plates?

Someone 10 years ago | | |

I recently came across https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dobots/crownstone. Looks very good to me, but will not be on the market for a year, and the marketing may not 100% reflect reality.

I also haven't found how much power such a switch uses. It shouldn't be much, but for such devices, I think it should be tiny, way below 1W, and that is kind of hard to achieve (the electronics isn't the problem, but doing AC to DC conversion and transformed nog down may)

hyattjon 10 years ago |

My wife does most of it for me...