Home Automation

Even though I work a lot with computers, I don't trust where they are headed. With everything going cloud based you end up putting all your trust in a third party in the hopes that they keep all your information safe and don't abuse their access to it. Historically, that has kept me putting in a full smart home.

Initial Experience

My very first experience with a smart home was back in 1995. I was getting a degree in Electrical Engineering and had to do a year long senior design project. I was working with a person who has cerebal paulsy, making it difficult for them to move around and do simple things like turning on lights, opening doors, adjusting the temperature in their house, etc. So I came up with an idea... The project took X10 devices, which sent a signal through the electrical wiring in a house to turn on/off X10 modules that ran lights, outlets, etc, along with a custom controller board, location sensors and some software written in c++ to make life easier for them. Back then pagers were still a thing, so there was a pager sized device that would clip to a persons belt that would be picked up by the sensors. As they moved through the house the computer would know where they were, along with what devices were in the rooms they were entering / leaving and would automatically turn items on/off, open windows, etc. All things to make their life easier. It was a cool project, but it never went any further. But it did get my group one of the only A's that year.

Why not try it before now

Technology has made it to the point where it is very easy now to do things like that. But to make it easy all the items are typically controlled by a third party. Using them means your information, your setup and your house can now be controlled by them. If you forget to pay your bill, you loose access. If they go out of business, you loose access. If you have an internet outage, you loose access. All of those things aren't acceptable to me.

What got me interested in trying it

It's time to replace my alarm system at my house. That system is 35+ years old. It has physical sensors on all the doors and windows. There are wired fire and CO2 sensors. There are wired speakers. Everything is hardwired. Yeah, it could be replaced by a Wifi enabled alarm system, but blocking wifi signals is easy, so I don't see that as secure. Then I ran across a system that says it can replace the existing alarm board and can hook into a smart home hub. So that got me thinking, maybe I should look at the options for the smart home hub again. So I started digging around and found a privacy focused option designed to be hosted at home. Hosting at home isn't an issue, due to my work I have business class internet service brought in, servers in racks, enterprise grade wifi, enterprise grade firewall, backup power, etc. So I have the infrastructure to build on.

home assistant - The hub I'm using

The first thing I wanted to make sure worked right was a local, privacy focus, home automation system. What I found was Home Assistant ( https://www.home-assistant.io/ ). Looking at what it does, it met my requirements
  • Privacy focused
  • Can run on Intel hardware or virtual machines
  • Able to connect remotely either through a website or mobile client secured via a VPN or other method
  • Able to integrate with a large variety of hardware (lights, switches, sensors)
  • Able to integrate with the alarm system I'll be using
  • Actively being developed

Hardware Used for Home Assistant

Hardware that worked
  • Intel based SFF computer (Gemini Lake N4000 processor, 4 GB Ram, 256 GB SSD, HDMI 4K Support, Vesa Mountable
  • Philips Smart Wi-Fi LED WiZ Connected Bulbs (functional)
Hardware that didn't
  • HomeDepot branded Smart Devices
  • Philips Smart Wi-Fi LED WiZ Connected Bulbs (Power History)

INITIAL HOME ASSISTANT SETUP

Initial setup of Home Assistant was done on an Intel based small form factor computer. The computer itself used to run Window 11, so it is fairly new. Setting it up was very straight forward. All I had to do was the steps shown to the right
It was very straight forward, installed without any issues, and booted just fine. This particular piece of hardware was one that I had sitting around. I had experimented with it by installing FreeBSD, which worked OK except the Wifi kept dropping, a couple of Linux installed, which would not work on wifi at all, before putting Windows 11 back on it. But it then turned out that the manufacturer used a non-standard audio chipset in it, and they would not provide the drivers for it. So the machine was just sitting there. So this gave it something to do.
Downloaded the current image file for Home Assistant. Once downloaded, I uncompressed the file using the xz --decompress command.
Removed the SSD from the computer, attached it to my Windows machine and using BalenaEtcher I burned the downloaded image file to the SSD and reinstalled it in the computer
Powered up the computer, and once it was booted it displayed the URL for me to go to to complete the installation.

First Devices

The first test I did was to go get a couple of smart bulbs. I went to the local Walmart and looked at their selection of them. They had several different options, and I used my phone to look up compatibility for each brand. I wanted to make sure it had built in support with no additional hardware required. Going through each of the options they had, I went with the Philips Smart Wi-Fi bulbs and picked up to of them. Hooking them up I had to use the WiZ app to hook them to my Wi-Fi, after which I was able to use the WiZ integration to add them directly into Home Assistant. Through Home Assistant I was able to turn them on and off, change colors, change brightness, etc. All the functional items work great. The only thing that didn't seem to was the power history, but I'm not really concerned about that. Maybe I'll go back and try to get that to work at a later time. I then installed the app on my phone, and through the internal network was able to connect to the Home Assistant server. I was able to do all the same things with the lights from the app that I could from the website, so I was happy there.

Securing the Network

Now that I had the home automation working, I needed to secure it. So I created a seperate VLAN on the network, assigned ports to it on my switches, and created a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network for the devices to sit on. At that point, I did a reset on the Philips lights, powered down the Home Assistant machine and moved everything to the new VLAN. Bringing it back up I was able to set back up all the lights. I have a VPN that can be used to get back into my home office network, which I'll be able to use to access the system.

More Information to come!!!!!