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

by sk2code on 9/15/15, 5:48 PM with 9 comments

• by dangrossman on 9/15/15, 6:05 PM

  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.

• by pjungwir on 9/15/15, 11:03 PM

  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. :-)

• by tmuir on 9/16/15, 2:06 AM

  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.

• by dirktheman on 9/15/15, 8:43 PM

  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!

• by TimLeland on 9/16/15, 2:51 PM

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

• by hyattjon on 9/16/15, 2:33 PM

  My wife does most of it for me...