Hi,
I literally used 12v smoke alarms (as used in commercial and industrial systems).
You need to make sure you get the ones with a relay, not the diode.
I used a similar CO sensor in the room where our combi boiler is located.
The PIR detectors were also standard 12v devices used in home intruder alarms.
My ESP8266 controllers are mounted on development boards that use a 12v DC PSU, which then also powers the smoke/CO/PIR sensors.
Something like this: Optical Smoke Detector - 12v - c/w Relay Base | ESP (PSD212) (tlc-direct.co.uk)
Runs on old desktop pc
Openhab 3
Displayed permantly on 2 tablets (Androids) as wall mounts
4 Phones and 2 tablets have the app (2 androids and 4 apples)
controlled stuf
trough knx:(i don’t use knx to “calculate” anything)
All of my lights (about 50 interior and exterior)
Heating (every room has a sensor and a valve)
window/door sensors
Trough wifi/ MQTT
roomba
Watermeter
Ledstrips in the bathroom, bedrooms, and living
Connection with emby server so i know when to dim the lights
other
notification trough push and email
connection to astro
icalender
various little stuff that is giving me information, like a small weather station, …
Automation
based on location the house shuts down or starts up
if we come home when its dark the exterior lights will be switched on, the alarm will give 5 min of time before it has the be deactivated (normally 30 seconds), this is done on the wall mounted tablets.
going to sleep : everything will shut down, the hallway, bathroom and living will light up (dimmed) and shut of one by one. We get a reminder of the wake up time tomorrow, a reminder if we have to put the trash out (wich one is also shown on de led strip via color)
open a door at the evening and the exterior lights will light up
open a door and the heating will switch of (saved us a lot of money last year)
rules to set up the heating, you can chose day night away, all with defined settings in a special page
…
todo
set up a system to automaticly fill up the rainwater tanks if they are to low (measure the % in the tank)
automated water system for our horses
get the camera’s to read the license plates and faces and let the house react differently according to who or what it detected.(for example: baby is in bed → limit volume speakers, dont ring the bell but let a light flash,…/ friends come to our house → license plate is read → let us know and set up the exterior lights and so on)
build a system to know when mail is received
build a doorbel with camera and voice
automate our garage door and front port to open up with an authorized command from the car (perhaps with the camera and license plate)
Costs
Heum to much, but it is fun and a hobby
Acceptance
I have a pretty high WAF-factor right now, most of the times she say that a knew feature is not necessary but after some time doesn’t want to mis it.
It is interesting to look back at this and see the ways in which my home automation has grown.
70 Things, 409 Items
Let’s say six years now
I use all UI driven rules now so the line count isn’t easy to come by nor all that useful. I’ve 45 rules, 24 scripts, 2740 lines in automation_rules.json, 358 lines in personal libraries and another 566 lines in libraries I’ve made publicly available.
This may seem low but I manage to get a lot of functionality out of the libraries and rules. For example, I’ve a Debounce rule that by itself implements presence detection as well as sensor debouncing and a couple of other things. So one rule does multiple jobs. All my timer management is handled by a library so that 50 lines of code or so get reused in almost all of my rules.
It’s probably still the dialog that asks me to open the garage door when I get close to the house. I rather like the garage door widget I created for MainUI too which shows a camera feed from the garage as well as the status of the garage doors and lets me control them. A close second is an alert I get when my son uses one of the Chromecasts with what he’s playing. It helps me keep track that he’s not watching something inappropriate relatively unobtrusively. Most of my focus these days though is building libraries and rule templates to help others not have to code so much on their own. From that perspective my Timer Manager library is the best feature.
I’m mostly working on carving out my rules and converting them to rule templates to publish to the Marketplace. My actual home automation is pretty stable. I add new sensors here and there (e.g. I got some Airthings to monitor radon levels) but nothing significantly new. Next year we are getting an EV and if Volkswagon offers and API I might do something with that. A new binding to support Honeywell Home’s API is also on the list.
They are still happy though and mostly are not even aware of it most of the time. They only notice when stuff breaks. “Why is the porch light not on?”
Who knows. It’s spread out over six years, $40 here $200 there.
