Blog blog("Baptiste Wicht"); (Posts about Home Automation)

Home Automation: Power Meter and Integration of Zwave into Domoticz

Baptiste Wicht — Sun, 23 Apr 2017 14:43:13 GMT

I've improved a bit my home automation installation. It's been a while since the last upgrade, but unfortunately I cannot afford as many upgrades as I would like :P

For a long time I wanted to monitor the power consumption of a few of my appliances in my apartment. Especially my Linux servers so that I could try to improve the consumption and reduce my bill on the long run. Unfortunately, there are very few options for power meter in Switzerland due to the special type of plug we have. The only option I found is a Zwave power plug. For a while, I waited to see if I could find other options because Zwave devices are quite expensive and I would have rather preferred to stay with simpler and cheaper RF-433 appliances. Since I didn't find anything, I ordered a ZWave USB controller from Aeon Labs (the generation 5). I also ordered two Aeon Labs Swiss Smart Plug with power meter.

Here is an image of the Aeon Labs key:

And of the power meter in usage:

Integration of ZWave into Domoticz was extremely easy. I just plugged the USB key, restarted Domoticz (seems necessary for it to pick the new tty) and added new hardware "OpenZWave USB" with the correct serial port. From there, there are two main ways to add new devices. The first is to remove the USB key and use the synchronization button on both the key and the device close to each other. The other way is to use the "Include Node" option on Domoticz and then press the synchronization button on the device to detect the new device. I used the second option since it seemed simpler and it worked perfectly. I did that for my two plugs and it worked fine. Directly after this, 5 new devices were added for each of the plug. One for the voltage, one for the current , two for the usage (I don't know why there is two, but they are both reporting the same value) and one for the switch on/off. I was a bit afraid that only the On/Off part of the smart plug would work on Domoticz, but I had absolutely no problem.

Here is for instance the power usage of last 24 hours on my television system:

For now, I haven't integrated this information on any rule, but I plan to monitor this information in the coming weeks and try to improve my consumption, especially for my servers. I also plan to purchase more of these plugs once my home automation budget can be upgraded.

On another note, I also purchased a Chacon wall remote switch working in RF-433. Although it is quite cheap, I'm very disappointed by the quality of this switch. I add to straighten myself the pins that are attached to the battery because there was no contact. After that, it worked correctly and it is able to work with the RFLink module.

I have to say that I'm quite satisfied with ZWave devices with this experience. Even though I still feel it is way too expensive, it is high quality and have a good finishing. I'll probably purchase more ZWave devices in the future. I'm especially interested in The Aeotec 6 in 1 sensor for temperature humidity, motion, light, UV and vibration. This would allow me to have much information in each room with only one sensor in place of several sensors in each room like I currently have.

I still have a few Milight Bulbs and LEDS to install with a secondary Milight bridge that I will install in the coming week, but I probably won't do a post about this.

Home Automation: First attempt at voice control with Jarvis

Baptiste Wicht — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 17:34:19 GMT

I have several devices in my home that can be controller via Domoticz, a few power outlets, a few lights (more are coming), my Kodi home theater. And I have a lot of sensors and information gathered by Domoticz. All of this is working quite well, but I have only a few actuators and intelligence (motion sensor, button and some automation via Lua script).

My next objective was to add voice control to my system. If I was living in United States or United Kingdom I would directly an Amazon Dot or even an Amazon Echo, but they are not available in Switzerland. I could have arranged for delivery, but if I want my system to be useful to several people, I need to have in French. It's the same problem with the Google Home system. So, no other way than custom solutions.

Since I had an extra Raspberry Pi 2, I based my system on this. I bought a Trust Mico microphone and a Trust Compact speakers and installed them on the Pi. Both peripherals are working quite well.

You can have a closer look at my microphone:

and the complete installation:

The Raspberry Pi is on the bottom, the speakers below the TV, left and right and the microphone on the top right.

For the voice control software, I decided to go with Jarvis. It seems to me that this is the best suited software for this kind of project. Moreover, it supports French natively which seems good. I also tried Jasper, but this has been such a pain to install that I gave up.

Jarvis is reasonably easy to install if you have a recent Raspbian image. It took some time to install the dependencies, but in the end it was not difficult. The installation process has a step-by-step wizard help so it's really easy to configure everything.

However, even if it's easy to install, it's easy to configure correctly. The first thing is to configure the hotword to activate commands. There are several options, but I used snowboy which is offline and is made for hotword recognition. This worked quite well, you just have to train a model with the hotword to recognize the voice. After this, the problems started... You then have to configure audio for the commands themselves. There are 6 parameters for audio capture (noise levels to start and stop the capture, silence levels, ...) and no help to tune them. So basically, I tried a lot of combinations until I had something working reasonably well. When you are in debug mode, you can listen to what the system captured. These parameters are dependent on your environment and on your microphone and on your voice. I may be dumb but it took several hours and a lot of tries to get a configuration working. After this, you have to choose the engine for recognition of the commands. Unfortunately, all the good options are online so everything you'll say as commands after the hotword will be sent online. I first tried Bing, but I had very poor recognition rate. I then switched to wit.ai which gave me better results. In the end, I have about 60% recognition rate, which is not great at all, but at least some phrases are working almost all the time while others are always failing. Another problem I have with this is the large delay between commands and action. It takes almost five seconds between the end of my sentence and the time where the lights in my living room are tuned on or off by Jarvis via Domoticz.

So far, I'm a bit disappointed by the quality of the system, but maybe I was hoping for too much. I have been able to control a few of my appliances but not really reliably. Another thing I have realized is that when counting the Raspberry Pi, its enclosure the Microphone and the speakers, this system is more costly than an Amazon Dot and seem highly inferior (and is much less good looking).

I'll try to improve the current system with better configuration and commands in the coming days and I will maybe try another system for voice control. I still hope Amazon Alexa systems or Google Home are made available in France/Switzerland not too far in the future, since I believe these systems are a better solution than custom made systems, at least for now. Moreover, next month, I plan to integrate ZWave into my systems with a few sensors, complete the lighting installation and add new motion sensors. This should make it more useful. And hopefully, by this time, I should have a good voice control system, but I'm not too hopeful.

Don't hesitate to comment or contact me if you have questions about this installation or want to share experience about voice control in home automation. If you want more details about this, dont' hesitate to ask as well ;)

Add Milight smart lights to my Domoticz home automation system

Baptiste Wicht — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 21:00:25 GMT

Recently, I switched from my hand crafted home automation system to Domoticz. This allows me to easily integrate new smart devices and remote controllable peripherals without much effort. I plan to relate my effort in having fun controlling my home :)

I'm now able to control lights in two rooms with Domoticz. The most well-known smart bulbs are the Philips Hue. However, they are stupidly expensive. There are a lot of alternatives. I've ordered some Milight light bulbs and controller to test with Domoticz. I didn't order a lot of them because I wanted to make sure they would work with my system. Milight system is working over Wifi. There are several components to a Milight system:

The LED Light Bulbs with Red/Green/Blue/White channels
The Wifi Controller that is able to control 4 zones
An RGBW Controller for LED strip

The first two are necessary for any installation, the third is to control an RGBW LED strip. This list is not exhaustive, it's only the components that I have used. It is important to note that a single Wifi controller can only control 4 zones. There are also remotes, but I have not bought one since I plan to use them only from Domoticz and maybe smartphone.

The installation of the controller is relatively easy. You need to download the Milight 2.0 application on the Android Play Store (or the equivalent for IOS). Then, you can power on the Wifi Controller. It'll create a new Wifi on which you can then connect on your phone. Then, you can use the application on your phone to configure the device and make it connect to your home wireless network. Once, this is done, you can connect your phone back to your home network. You can then use the Milight application to configure your device. I highly recommend to set a static IP address to the controller. The way I did it is simply to set a fixed IP address on my DHCP server based on the MAC address of the MAC controller but you can simply do the configuration in the application or in the web interface of the controller (the user and password combination is admin:admin).

Here is the look of the controller (next to my RFLink):

(My phone is starting to die, hence the very bad quality of images)

You can then install your LED light bulbs. For, open first the remote on your Android Milight application. Then plug the light bulb without power first. Then power on the light and press once on one of the I buttons on one of the zones on the remote. This will link the LED to the selected zone on the controller. You can then control the light from your phone. Remember, only four zones and therefore four lights per controller.

The installation for a LED strip is not much complicated. You need to plug the 4 wires (or 5 wires if your have an actual RGBW LED) into the corresponding inputs on the controller. Then, you power it and you can link it to a zone like a normal light bulb!

It works really well and directly without problems.

The last step is of course to configure your controller in Domoticz. It is really easy to do. You need to add a new hardware of each of the Milight controller. It is listed under the name "Limitless/AppLamp/Mi Light with LAN/WiFi interface". You then can set the IP address and the port by default is 8899. Once you did configure the hardware, you'll see new devices appear in the Devices list. There will one device for each zone and one device to control all four zones at once. You can add the device you already configured as switches. From the Switches interface you can turn the lamp on and off and you can

You can then put them on your floor plan or control them from your rules.

So far, I'm pretty satisfied with this Milight system. The Android application is of poor quality but aside from this is pretty good and the price is very fair. I'm also really satisfied with the Domoticz support. The only that is sad is that the Domoticz Android application does not support RGBW control of the lamps, only on and off, but that is already cool.

Now that all of this is working well, I've ordered a few more light bulbs to cover all my rooms and a few LED controller to control (and install first) the other LEDS that I have in mind.

On another note, I've also added a new outside temperature sensor outside my apartment. It is a very cheap Chinese sensor, bought on Ebay, based on the XT200 system that is working very well with RFLink.

The next step in my system is probably to integrate Voice Control, but I don't know exactly which way I'll go. I ordered a simple microphone that I intend to plug on my spare Raspberry Pi, but I don't know if the range will be enough to cover a room. Ideally, I would like to use an Amazon Dot, but they are not available in Switzerland. I'll probably write more on the subject once I've found an adequate solution. Another idea I've is to integrate support for ZWave via OpenZWave and then add a few more cool sensors that I haven't found on an cheaper system.

I hope this is interesting and don't hesitate if you have any question about my home automation project. You can expect a few more posts about this as soon as In improve it :)

New home automation system with Domoticz

Baptiste Wicht — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 15:08:42 GMT

As you may remember, I started going into Home Automation last year with a C++ project, Asgard.

Unfortunately, I haven't add the time to improve this project further and make it really useful and I have so many C++ projects already, so I decided to switch to using an existing project.

Choice

I needed a system that was at least able to handle everything my existing system does:

Control my RF-433 Temperature Sensors (Oregon Temperature Sensors)
Control my RF-433 Remote Button
Control my smart power outlets
Ping and wake-on-lan my different computers
Be installable on a Raspberry Pi
Control Skadi/Kodi Home Cinema

Of course, it also had to be open source and in a language that I can write without agonizing pain (no Ruby, no JavaScript, ideally no Python (I hate a lot of languages...)).

It's impressive the number of home automation projects that exist today. It's really a hot topic, more than I though. After a few hours of research, I've finally settled on Domoticz. It seemed that it could handle all my home automation devices that I already had. Domoticz is an open source home automation system. It's written mainly in C++, which is an advantage for me since I'll be able to work inside it if necessary. It has a quite modern HTML5 interface. It has a lot of support for hardware and a lot of bridges for other controllers as well. One of the reason I chose it is also the floor-planner feature that looks really cool.

Installation

First of all, I cleaned the hardware of my Raspberry Pi. I got rid of my breadboard and the components on it. Then, I put the Raspberry Pi on a nicer box that I had laying around. One problem with Domoticz is that it does not support directly RF433 devices, but need a controller in the middle. At first, I believed I could simply connect them through GPIO and lets Domoticz do the rest, but it's not possible. I ordered the different pieces for a RFLink controller at nodo-shops. It is running on a Arduino Mega and is connected to the Pi. The very big advantage is that they handle a lot of protocols directly, so you only have to read the serial port to get information on RF-433 events.

Here is how the current system look:

The black box is the Arduino Mega with RFLink software while the Transparent is simply the Raspberry on which Domoticz is installed.

As for the installation of Domoticz, it's really simple. They also have images of Raspberry Pi directly, but since my Raspberry was already installed with Raspbian, I installed Domoticz on it directly. A simple matter of curl and bash:

sudo curl -L install.domoticz.com | sudo bash

After a few questions, your installation should be complete. You can browse your Domoticz installation at the IP of your Pi and at the given port.

Home Automation with Domoticz

There are several concepts in Domoticz that are important. At first, it seemed a bit weird to me, but in the end it works really well and you get used to it pretty fast.

The first concept is the hardware. It is not necessary hardware directly, but rather a driver to some piece of information of switches than a real hardware in my opinion. For instance, the RFLink Gateway is considered hardware as well as the Forecast weather API. Here is all the hardware I've configured:

I've got some sensors from the motherboard, the Kodi interaction, the driver to ping the different computers, the Forecast weather with Dark Sky and Weather Underground, the RFLink communication, the wake-on-lan and some dummies virtual switches.

On its own, an hardware is useless, but it can create devices that will be used for home automation. A device is sub device of a particular driver. In some cases, the devices will be created automatically. For instance, RF Link can create devices as soon as they are detected. For wake-on-lan, you have to configure MAC Addresses and they will be added as devices. And so on...

There are a lot of types of devices, also called switches. Some devices can do some actions, for instance the wake-on-lan devices, while others are information based such as ping or temperature sensors detected from the RFLink. For instance, here are my temperature sensors:

As for my hardware I already had, I haven't add too many issues with them. The Oregon Temperature Sensors worked out of the box without any issues as well my old RF433 Ninja Block temperature sensor. The smart power outlets have been pretty easy to use as well. The most problem I've add was with the remote buttons. It seems to many that it should be the easiest, but RFLink has a lot of problem with them, they are detected several times and are highly unreliable. Interestingly you can also change the icon of most device to a large variety of existing devices so that they would look more realistic.

Another feature I find pretty cool is the floor plan. You can create plans for each floor of your house and then create rooms inside and finally attach devices to each room and place inside the plan. Unfortunately, to draw the plan, you'll have to use an external tool. I've used floorplanner for this, but you may use any plan you have as long as you have an image.

Here is my floor plan with the devices (the scale is terribly off :P) :

With that you can directly see the status of each of your sensors in each room. Moreover, you can also activate some devices directly from the floor plan as well :)

Normally, my Somfy blinds are supposed to work with the RFLink controller. I have managed to control my blinds but only when the RFLink was within 50 centimeters of the Blinds, which is clearly not acceptable. I don't know from where the problem comes. It may come from my Blinds controller inside the wall or may come from bad antenna of the RFLink or from a bug in RFLink, so from now I cannot control my blinds.

I have several D-Link cameras at home. You can also add cameras to Domoticz, but don't expect a lot of support on this side. It's pretty poor indeed. The only useful you can do in Domoticz with Cameras is to take a screenshot from them. You cannot control the Camera or even have a decent video stream and cannot do motion detection directly. I hope that the Camera support will improve in the future. One thing that would be good is to add a view of the cameras in the floor plan, but it is not possible currently.

What I did is to use Zoneminder to manage the cameras and send alert to Domoticz when motion is detect with the REST API of Domoticz. Unfortunately that means two systems to manage the Cameras. Zoneminder is a very good piece of software, but one of the ugliest I've ever seen (even I can do a better web interface...) and quite obscure to configure. But the numbers of cameras it can handle and the capabilities to control the camera is very very powerful.

Events and actions

No home automation system would be complete without an events and rules system. In Domoticz, you have several ways to create rules.

The first solution is to create group. A group is simply a set of switches that are all activated together. This is pretty limited, but can be useful. The second solution is a scene. A scene is activated by a device and can set several switches to on or off after the activation. The problem with this is that you have to listen for an action as activation, you cannot use an existing device or a rule with a value. For me, these two possibilities are way too limited and I don't really a reason to use them.

The best solution is to script an handler. For that, there are two ways, either you define visually your script with blocky, for instance:

This seemed so cool that I wanted to do all my rules with that. Unfortunately, it is really limited. The main limitation is that you cannot nest if blocks. In fact the interface lets you do, but it doesn't work afterwards. The other limitation is that it has no notion of time. For instance, it's very hard to create an action if a computer is shutdown for more than 60 seconds. You can do it, but you end up creating virtual devices which are turned off after some delay and it gets really complicated really soon...

In the end, I used Lua script directly. These scripts have the information about the last values of each device and the last updated time as well. It's much easier with that to create powerful rules especially when you want a notion of time. There are plenty of examples on the Domoticz forum about very powerful rules that you can create. Unfortunately, there are some limitations. For instance, you cannot send several actions to the same device in the same script Moreover, you also have to decode the values of the sensors yourself. For instance, for a temperature and humidity sensor, you'll have to parse the values and extract the one you need by hand.

So far, I haven't created many rules, only four. The first rule is that with the push of one remote button I can power on my smart socket and turn on one of my computers in my office. Then, if both the computers on this smart sockets have been off for more than 60 seconds, the power is shut off on the smart socket. And I have done almost the same for my media center and TV in my living room.

In the future, I'll probably only use the Lua scripting capability. In my opinion, it's better to have all the scripts in the same language for maintainability reasons. Once my futures devices arrive, I'll have a few more rules to code.

Conclusion

To wrap up, I'd say that I'm pretty satisfied with my new home automation system with Domoticz. It's not a perfect tool, but it has a lot of features and is working quite well in general. I would recommend you to try it if you want a good home automation system, fully featured and relatively easy to use.

I've several more things planned for this system. I plan to test a real motion sensor rather than rely only on the cameras which are focused on the doors and windows. I also plan to add an outdoor temperature sensor. And more interestingly, I'm going to try to integrate smart bulbs from Milight to be able to control my lights from the system. These are the shot term projects that I want to do, but I have many more ideas!

I'm also sure that there are some features from Domoticz that I have overlooked or not discovered.

I'll probably write more posts on Home Automation on the coming months.

For more information on Domoticz, you can consult the official Domoticz website.

Asgard: Home Automation project

Baptiste Wicht — Sat, 27 Aug 2016 20:28:16 GMT

I have updated my asgard project to make it finally useful for me, so I figured I'd present the project now.

Asgard is my project of home automation based on a Raspberry Pi. I started this project after Ninja Blocks kickstarter company went down and I was left with useless sensors. So I figured why not have fun creating my own :P I know there are some other projects out there that are pretty good, but I wanted to do some more low level stuff for once, so what the hell.

Of course, everything is written in C++, no surprise here. The project is built upon a server / drivers architecture. The drivers and the server are talking via network sockets, so they can be on different machines. The server is displaying the data it got on a web interface and also provide a way to trigger actions of drivers either from the web interface or through the integrated rules engine. The data are stored in a database, accessed with CPPSqlite3 (probably going to be replaced by sqlcpp11) and the web server is handled with mongoose (with a c++ interface).

I must mention that most of the web part of the project was made by a student of mine, Stéphane Ly, who work on it as part of his study.

Here is a picture of the Raspberry Pi system (not very pretty ;) ):

I plan to try to fit at least some of it on a nicer box with nicer cables and such. Moreover, I also plan to add real antennas to the RF transmitter and receiver, but I haven't received them so far.

Sensors

asgard support several sensors:

DHT11 Temperature/Humdity Sensor
WT450 Temperature/Humdity Sensor
RF Button
IR Remote
CPU Temperature Sensor

You can see the sensors data displayed on the web interface:

Actions

There are currently a few actions provided by the drivers:

Wake-On-Lan a computer by its MAC Address
ITT-1500 smart plugs ON and OFF
Kodi actions: Pause / Play / Next / Previous on Kodi

Here are the rules engine:

My home automation

I'm currently using this system to monitor the temperature in my appartment. Nothing great so far because I don't have enough sensors yet. And now, I'm also using a wireless button to turn on my power socket, wait 2 seconds and then power on my Kodi Home Theater with wake on lan.

It's nothing fancy so far, but it's already better than what I had with Ninja Blocks, except for the ugly hardware ;).

Future

There are still tons of work on the project and on integration in my home.

I'm really dissatisfied with the WT450 sensor, I've ordered new Oregon sensors to try to do better.
I've ordered a few new sensors: Door intrusion detector and motion detector
The rules system needs to be improve to support multiple conditions
I plan to add a simple state system to the asgard server
There are a lot of refactorings necessary in the code and

However, I don't know when I'll work on this again, my work on this project is pretty episodic to say the least.

Code

The code is, as always, available on Github. There are multiple repositories: all asgard repositories. It's not that much code for now, about 2000 lines of code, but some of it may be useful. If you plan to use the system, keep in mind that it was never tested out of my environment and that there is no documentation so far, but don't hesitate to open Issues on Github if you have questions or post a comment here.