[Disclaimer: no AI used for my blog posts]

During my career break, I offered to help one of my family members make his home more automated. It turned out to be one of the most entertaining projects of last year.

Specification

• No cloud – he did not want to pay any SaaS payments
• Controlling all lights and devices in the apartment
• One switch for turning off all devices

Where we ended up

• Heavily customized HA installation (own HACS components, tweaks)
• 85 devices and sensors
  • cameras, temperature sensors, water sensors, air quality sensors, vibration sensors
  • 2 cars connected (without using any remote services from the car manufacturer)
• 145 automations
  • location-based (no need to turn off any lights when leaving)
  • the apartment secured
  • notification of new letters in the mailbox
• Some family members tracked by BLE using Google network (no GPS/4G needed, battery lasts for 10 years)
• Integration with all networking devices, NAS

What was learnt

• You can order 3 Zigbee devices from AliExpress and get three different chips with them.
• Stability of the mesh network can be vastly influenced by Chinese noname Zigbee router devices.
• The very similar solution from professional companies can cost 30-40,000 EUR, I was able to create it for a fraction of that.

Main dashboard

3D rendered interactive floorplan

This seemed a bit tricky, but a lot of work with CSS and Photoshop batch processing made it look quite eye-catching.

Network monitoring

Zigbee availability chart was quite handy in case of debugging (along with the network map).

NAS monitoring

Created custom component for NAS Synology.

Power consumption

Using Shelly Gen3 device, lot of fun with Apex charts.

Network map

Lot of fun with electronics and relays

In the next parts of this blog series, we can check the details.

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