Help for a beginner. What device to use to control my devices

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
1

Hello,

If I understand correctly, there will be a software part installed in a pc , or smarthphone, laptop, raspberry and then what devices can I use to control my home appliances and centralize schedule program them ?

Raspberry I know has pins, ports , but from a laptop how can I do that?

thank you

2

There are too many ways to list. At a high level though you will have:

  • a central controller which runs on a server and is not necessarily connected to the devices, just on the network
  • microcontrollers (Arduino, ESP8266, etc) or board computers (Raspberry Pi, Beagle Bone, etc) wired to the device or a relay
  • some sort of communications infrastructure (MQTT, REST web calls, wireless like RFM69HW, etc) that allow the microcontrollers to communicate with the central controller

With commercial devices most of the above complexity is hidden from your. For example, with zwave you have a USB dongle you plug in which lets the computer send and receive messages to zwave devices wirelessly.

Given the level of this question I will caution you that approaching home automation in this way is hard. You might be better off starting with one or two commercial devices (e.g. zwave, knx, etc) to get started learning how the controller (i.e. openHAB) works and then start learning the DIY electronics required to build a device like this.

1 Like
3

Thank you!

I want some sort of a central controller (raspberry pi 3) via wireless network, control devices like orvibo from this central location, set up schedules, etc.

4

There is an Orvibo binding but it currently only supports S20 Wifi Sockets. So you would install OH on your Pi, install and configure the Orvibo binding. Then you would set up schedules using Rules in OH.

5

amazing! I will start that way , thank you again!