Book Image

Building Smart Home Automation Solutions with Home Assistant

By : Marco Carvalho
5 (1)
Book Image

Building Smart Home Automation Solutions with Home Assistant

5 (1)
By: Marco Carvalho

Overview of this book

Picture a home where you can adjust the lighting based on the time of day or when movement is detected. In this same home, you can also detect when a door is unexpectedly opened or an alarm is triggered in response to any suspicious activity. Such automated devices form part of a smart home, and the exciting part is that this book teaches you how to create and manage these devices all by yourself. This book helps you create your own ecosystem to automate your home using Home Assistant software. You’ll begin by understanding the components of a home automation system and learn how to create, hack, and configure them to operate seamlessly. Then, you'll set up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi to work as a home automation server, build your own IoT sensors based on ESP32/ESP8266, and set up real-life automation use cases using hands-on examples and projects. The chapters will also guide you in using software tools such as Node-RED, InfluxDB, and Grafana to manage, present, and use data collected from your Home Automation devices. Finally, you’ll gain insights into new technologies and trends in the home automation space to help you continue with your learning journey. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build your own creative, IoT-based home automation system using different hardware and software technologies.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Home Assistant – Installation and Configuration
4
Part 2: Install, Create, and Hack Sensors and Actuators
7
Part 3: Automations, Customizations, and Integrations Using Home Assistant
10
Part 4: Expanding Home Assistant’s Capabilities
13
Part 5: Learn by Doing and Future Trends

Enclosing, calibrating, and installing the sensor

In this section, we will enclose our sensor in a box and calibrate the motion sensor. Once we’ve done this, we will physically install and test our sensor.

Enclosing our sensor

You can enclose your sensor in different ways. All the circuits, including the three boards and harness, can easily fit in an 80 x 80 x 50 mm box. You can purchase or use a pre-fabricated box that has similar dimensions. You can use any material for the box except for metal because it will block or degrade the Wi-Fi signal.

If you have a 3D printer at home or are familiar with rapid prototyping, you can have a more customized enclosure for your sensor. You can make a mechanical design or use some free 3D models available on the internet. On websites such as https://www.yeggi.com/ and https://www.thingiverse.com/, you can search for and find different 3D models for PIR motion sensor cases. These 3D models are available in STL file format, but once...