Home Automation

 I've been playing/researching/getting up to speed on Home Automation.

This consists so far, of Home Assistant running on a Raspberry PI 4, with a separate RPI Pico W running some sensors, communicating via MQTT to the HA instance, some BLE temperature/humidity sensors, some energy monitoring smart plugs & a couple of Shelly EM energy monitors flashed with Tasmota, monitoring energy.

It started off with a wish to monitor temperatures & humidity in the house & the loft, if only as a way to see how the loft insulation is doing & to tweak the radiator thermostatic valves.

The sensors are 

ThermoPro TP357

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0BTSW9JGT/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

Battery powered, with a battery life of about a year, BLE Bluetooth low energy, they have the very  occasional spasm of odd readings, probably to do with the randomised nature of low energy Bluetooth .

Picked up as an integration in HA.

Raspberry PI4, with a case & power supply & a micro SD card. Home assistant added as an OS image to the card, insert in the RPI & boot, takes about 30mins.

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi/

Use a network cable to start, but can be configured for Wi-Fi afterwards.

Lots to learn & configure, but can be used as is, the programming language YAML is a bit of a pain.

Having said that, I'm more comfortable with a soldering iron & test equipment, I think my last programming was 'Hello World' on a Sinclair ZX81! 

Update.

After a crash of home assistant, discovered the SD had failed, looks like not happy with constant writes.

Copied the OS image to an SSD with a usb adapter, applied the backup & all is well.

Moved the RPi sensors over to an ESP32 running a tweaked tasmota to accommodate the sensors,

I got fed up of the RPI W falling off wifi & MQTT & not reconnecting, I think the RPI MQTT implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

I use one of these https://thepihut.com/products/adafruit-veml7700-lux-sensor-i2c-light-sensor-ada4162 to sense the dim on led on the boiler, threshold is 2Lux!

As the boiler is the only gas appliance we have, I can use a  counter within HA to measure the daily, weekly, monthly on time of the boiler, albeit in 30sec steps, multiply this by a constant gives me the surprisingly accurate gas consumption without having to read the gas meter. & I can graph it over time.!