120 makezine.com
SKILL BUILDER: Home Assistant
Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local
server.”
Instead of an HA standard, Home Assistant is
a platform that allows open-source developers
to create integrations for any device or service.
There are over 2,000 integrations available, with
over 7,000 contributors, and more than 200,000
active installations.
Home Assistant’s dashboard (Figure
B
) is easy
to create and edit with a visual editor (Figure
C
).
Home Assistant is very much a maker-friendly
project; you download the software to a USB drive
and install it on a Raspberry Pi or other Linux
server, possibly in a virtual environment. It is now
possible to purchase a Home Assistant appliance,
ready to plug in, but it’s still not something that
general DIYers are purchasing from a big-box
home improvement store. Maybe in the future?
Key to the success of Home Assistant are
automations. They have three components:
triggers, with optional conditions, cause actions
to occur. For example: When the front door is
opened (trigger), and it’s after sunset (condition),
turn on the hallway light (action). Automations are
also easy to create with a visual editor (Figure
D
).
Because Home Assistant has so many
integrations — all the big platforms; brands like
Phillips, Lutron, Leviton, and Ikea; protocols
like MQTT, ESPHome, and Tasmota — there are
endless ways to build your own HA device and
make it part of your Home Assistant ecosystem.
D
Here are some of the HA projects I’ve
implemented with Home Assistant:
LEAK ALARM / WATER MAIN CONTROL
When you think about the damage an unnoticed
water leak can cause, you can’t help but consider
an HA solution. I built a simple leak detector
using some gold-plated traces on a surplus
printed circuit board and connected it to an
ESP8266 D1 mini to monitor the resistance.
B
C
My Home Assistant dashboard.
M85_118-23_SB_HomeAuto_F1.indd 120M85_118-23_SB_HomeAuto_F1.indd 120 4/9/23 1:17 PM4/9/23 1:17 PM
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.