Hi!
I’m building a house and I decided to make my own automation control. Being a big fan of the Raspberry, I searched for options and sure enough I found OpenHAB. After a few days of tinkering and going back and forth with some bugs, I have an initial setup from which I can build on, I think.
The house is simple and I want to keep the system as simple as possible. Only a ground floor with a garage/man cave, an open space kitchen/living room, an office, three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and the garden.
For now, what I really need to implement is the roller shutter control. I have an electrical box in a wall where all the roller shutter local wall switches and motor conduits lead to. The OpenHAB raspberry will be inside this box with two 8-relay boards.
I am planning on using the GPIO on the raspberry to control the outdoor garden lighting and some other things.
Now, for the roller shutters - There are a total of 13: 12 outdoor roller shutters, and one indoor roller blackout.
To keep it cheap and seeing I have wired access to all the the wall switches, I could use some a couple more raspberry’s (I have quite a few), hooking GPIO outputs up to relays and connecting the wall switches as GPIO inputs. The these “slave” RPi’s could communicate with the OpenHAB RPi over MQTT maybe.
A similar approach could perhaps be using ESP8266 modules with NodeMCU or ESPEasy and having these talk to OpenHAB through MQTT.
A more ready to use approach could maybe be ZWave? This would bring the cost significantly high, but perhaps it’s more reliable and easier to implement? Also easier to grow the system over time?
Any suggestions? Any other brand or automation system that has shutter controllers that may be cheaper or has other advantages?
Currently I have an RPi2 running Wheezy and the latest openhab 1.8.3. Started on Jessie but found out about the GPIO input issue and so I rolled back to Wheezy.
The GPIO and weather bindings are working well.
In time I would like to add to the system, maybe some Hue and Wemo devices, controlling heating etc. but for now I really need to make a decision on the roller shutters so I can start ordering hardware and hooking things up.
Thanks!!