home automation – Dilettante

Controlling a Amcrest PTZ camera with a joystick

I have a Logitech Gamepad F310 USB controller, a computer, and a Amcrest Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) camera that supports the ONVIF standard. I wanted to control the camera’s motion with the joystick. So I did.

Reading the joystick in Python is super easy using pygame. I ran the demo code toward the bottom of the joystick page as my first step. It showed all axes and buttons working great out of the box with my controller.

Amcrest cameras support the ONVIF protocol. The python-onvif-zeep package supports sending ONVIF commands from modern Python (I used Python 3.10 for this project).

Specific example code demonstrating how to use the package from Python to send PTZ commands to the camera can be found e.g. here.

Given the ability to read the joystick and the ability to control the camera, we just need to glue it together! So I wrote a 250-line package called joy-ptz-cam that does just this.

The package is pretty limited at the moment but does handle PTZ controls. It pans and tilts with the left joystick and zooms when you pull the right trigger and zooms out when you pull the left trigger. (Note that for this particular camera, zoom is purely software, but on an actual zoom cam it would work the optical zoom).

And there you go I saved myself $500 vs. getting one of those fancy joystick camera controller things.

I have a fancier PTZ ONVIF-compliant camera on order which is the real reason I wanted to try this out on the smaller cam.

A LIRC config file for the Peachtree Audio Decco IR remote control

A family member upgraded his stereo and offered me his Peachtree Audio Decco as a hand-me-down. I couldn’t say now because my previous hand-me-down has recently become buzzy. But, in order for it to work with my home automation setup, I needed to be able to turn it on and off, switch inputs, and change volume from my Home Assistant home automation system via my Raspberry Pi. I use LIRC for this but there is no remote config for the Decco. So I used the remote and recorded the pulses.

Using irrecord didn’t go that well. The dots were coming in but very slowly. I’d have to sit there for 10 minutes pressing in order to get enough dots for it. So I used mode2 to record raw commands on my pi. Then I hand-edited it to have the right format for a conf file and then ran irrecord -a on it to convert it to actual codes.

Since the LIRC remote DB hasn’t been updated since 2018 and has a few open merge requests, I figured it’d be easier to just post the file here for the next person who needs it. It works great. Here you go.

decco-analyzed.conf_decco lirc config file

Fun times.

Controlling a Fujitsu heat pump/air conditioner with Home Assistant over IR

I have some of those mini-split Fujitsu heat pumps in my house that have infrared (IR) remote controls. This post explains how I set up my smart house to be able to automate the heat and air conditioning with a raspberry pi and Home Assistant.

Smart holiday lights that change colors for the next upcoming holiday

I rigged up some holiday lights that switch between a number of color palettes based on what holiday is coming up next. I used a $25 light strip, a $5 WiFi microcontroller (ESP8266), and Home Assistant to make it all happen.

Setting up the light strip

Using a “NeoPixel”-like addressable RGB light strip is pretty well-covered online these days. I got this waterproof one. I plugged in one of my ESP8266’s and loaded it up with some demo code from the FastLED library. I bought an outdoor waterproof enclosure for the 5V power supply and ran outdoor wires in a small trench over to my fence, where I then used one of these outdoor wire coupler things to both protect the connection and store the ESP8266 itself.

Live internet bandwidth monitor for living room

I like the concept of measuring flows and so have sensors on my water main and my electric mains. Naturally, I wanted to add a reading of how much bandwidth I’m using and get it displayed in my living room. I already have the following in place:

My LED matrix infopanel
A router running OpenWRT
A local MQTT server (with bridge to a remote one, but that’s irrelevant for this post)

As it turns out, this is enough to get live internet usage numbers showing with just a few simple scripts.

My GE 12727 Z-Wave Smart Toggle Switch started clicking like a metronome and died after 5 years

Since the product is no longer sold on Amazon, I am left with putting this product review here. I got a bunch of GE smart toggle switches back in 2016 and installed them in various smarthome builds. Then, just yesterday (2021-03-14), I was (ironically?) installing a different smart switch on the same circuit. I turned the breaker on and off a handful of times while installing/testing the new one. And then I heard a clicking. Click… click…click… click… click… like a metronome with 1 second delay. It was the GE 12727 smart toggle from 2016. It was just clicking and clicking and clicking. At first I thought for sure the new switch was interfering with it somehow so I disconnected it and the clicking continued.

The clicking itself

I guess a 5-year life isn’t terrible, and that one of the issues of going all in on home automation is that complexity generally leads to lower reliability. I can handle replacing the ones in my home, temporarily with the OG dumb switches and then with new upgrades (I’ve been using Inovelli switches recently based in Michigan what what!, which have cool extra features). It’s a lot more problematic when something like this happens at my mom’s house and she has to like call an electrician.

Apparently people have found that this can be fixed by changing out a capacitor.

And here’s a video of a similar fix. I’ll try it out and report back.

Weather and air quality monitoring station with ESP8266 and Home Assistant

I’ve always wanted a weather/air quality station. So I built one. Here it is.

The weather/air quality station laid out before connections. Rain sensor not pictured.

I’ll basically detect whatever I can get. Here’s the parts list so far (expected to expand):

PIR Motion sensor because maybe I want to know when people walk by the sensor box
Si1145 Sunlight sensor for Infrared, Visible, and Ultraviolet light. Conveniently using this Grove library to interface.
LIS3DHTR 3-axis accelerometer. I read that this one might have the noise and sensitivity characteristics needed to try to measure some seismic activity (I live in Seattle, after all)! Notably I did not research this very seriously so we will see. Note: this chip has three analog-to-digital inputs but they are not available in the Grove package that I got. Prefer Adafruit)!
BME680 gas sensor for Temperature, Humidity, Air Pressure and Volatile Organic Compounds (a rough measure of air quality)
HM3301 Laser PM 2.5 Air quality sensor for measuring particulates in the air at sizes PM1, PM2.5, and PM10. This will be really useful to have one outside and one inside during fire season so I can see how dangerous the air is outside and how well my air filters are doing inside.
Grove Loudness Sensor for keeping up with traffic noise, fireworks, landscaping, air traffic, etc.
The ESP8266 Microcontroller. I absolutely love the ESP8266 for being the brains of things like this. I had used one for my doorbell sensor, my mom’s boiler controller, and various other things. Programming this to read all these sensors is a major part of this project.
MH-Z14A NDIR carbon dioxide sensor (up to 5000 ppm). This is more interesting on the indoor unit than the outdoor unit, but fun nonetheless
Geiger Counter with USB interface. I had to reverse engineer the protocol coming out of this USB port and was able to do it using pyusb but that’s another post in itself. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can actually read this USB port too easily on the ESP8266 so I might have to slap a Raspberry Pi in here, or some other USB interface. This is a big TBD.
(Not pictured, see below or rain sensor post): Infrared rain sensor from Hydreon in MN. This is actually a sweet sensor. It shoots IR light around the dome and when water hits it, refraction of IR changes and the response at the receiver can pick up even a single raindrop. Garsh-darned epic!

As you can maybe see, I got most of these sensors with I2C interfaces from Grove, which has a really nice ecosystem with easily-interconnectable sensors. This is my first experience with the Grove ecosystem, and I love it. Very clean. Note, however, that I2C is not good for off-board sensors (so maybe not a great choice for the sunlight sensor which should be placed higher up).

Reading a TUF-2000M Ultrasonic Flow Meter with an Arduino or ESP8266

I had a flood in the garage the other day and realized how great of an investment my flood sensor had been, saving me literally weeks of time and thousands of dollars in repairs. As I considered buying more flood sensors to cover more parts of the house, the thought to put a flow meter on the main water inlet to the house popped into my mind. It’s not quite as clear of a signal as a flood sensor, but if I detect flow when everyone is asleep or when on vacation, I can be sure that something is going wrong and have Home Assistant give me an alert.

I didn’t want to cut into my water main and put a in-line flow meter in, so when I saw a reasonably priced clamp-on ultrasonic flow meter called the TUF-2000M, I had to bite.

The TUF-2000M Ultrasonic Clamp-on Flow meter

Connecting a Hydreon Infrared Rain Sensor to a ESP8266 (or Arduino or Raspberry Pi)

I’ve been working on a home-brew weather station and was looking into rain sensors when I discovered that you can get infrared (IR) rain detectors. A company in Minnesota sells one called the Hydreon RG-11. They shoot pulses of IR light around a plastic dome and monitor them on the other end. When rain hits the dome, the refraction changes and the pulses received are perturbed. This is nice because it’s very simple and has no moving parts. I figured I’d be able to find a way to read it into my weather station.

The RG-11 rain sensor with a NodeMCU for scale. (It’s actually bigger than I thought)

Don’t use push-to-connect (“sharkbite-style”) fittings on high-temperature hydronic heating systems

I had a bad experience with push-to-connect pipe fittings between my hot water heater and my hydronic heating system and wanted to share with you what happened.

On Saturday morning at 4:19 am I was fast asleep. But then I jolted awake as the bedroom lights flashed on and a slightly robotic voice proclaimed:

“FLOOD ALERT! FLOOD ALERT. IN THE GARAGE! FLOOD!”

“Huh!”, I thought. “I wonder why that thing is going off?”

A live polar sun path chart (plus Moon and some planets)

I happened upon a polar sun path chart a while back and really thought it was a great graphic. It shows where the sun goes each day as a function of the seasons. Behold:

The polar Sun path chart for Seattle, WA

For Seattle, you can see at the top that the sun rises in the SE, peaks at 20° above the horizon, and then sets at 4:30pm on the winter solstice. Ugh. But in the summer, it’s up from before 4am to after 8pm, and peaks above 60° . You can make one of these plots for your area over at the University of Oregon’s Solar Radiation Monitoring Lab.

I liked this plot so much that I wanted to take it to the next level and see where the sun is live. In my experience with Python, I’ve grown to expect there to be sweet libraries that can compute stuff like that. Sure enough, there are a few. First, I found pysolar, which is really straightforward, fast, and simple. A few lines of code and I was up and running.

My first polar solar plot, showing an analemma at different times of day from my location.

Adding temperature sensors to a hot water heater

A igniter with a layer of white oxide powder all over it. — The bad igniter

I’ve got one of those hydronic home heating systems where hot water from the hot water heater gets pumped to radiators around the house in addition to heating up water for faucets. A few days ago it died on me and threw an error code indicating something was wrong with ignition. I took a look at the igniter and found that it was full of an oxide layer.

After sandpapering it, it worked great, but I ordered a spare for when this inevitably happens again. Along the way, it occurred to me that it’d be kind of fun to have instrumentation on my hot water heater. I just got it up and running.

Way back in my first post about hot tubs, I used OneWire sensors called Dallas 18B20s (datasheet) with an Arduino 2009. They worked great at hot water temperature, so I decided to try them out again. This time, rather than using an Arduino, I’m using a ESP8266 microcontroller. These are cheap and have Wi-Fi, so I can easily get the data into my home assistant setup, just like I did with my mom’s furnace, my doorbell, and other stuff.

Step one is to solder a bunch of sensors together. I wanted to get readings on all the different pipes going into and out of my hot water heater. I went down there and measured how much space I’d need between each sensor. Then I soldered them up. Notably 18B20s can work in “parasite mode” with just two wires, but there are problems with parasite mode on ESP8266’s, and in prototype testing I was unable to get that mode to work. So I just wired them up to 3 wires. This tutorial is a good one for wiring up these sensors.

A sensor with three wires soldered to it. — One Dallas18B20 soldered into my wire-o-sensors. Black goes to GND on the ESP, red goes to +5V on the ESP, and clear goes to GPIO 2, which is also jumpered to +5V with a 4.7 kOhm resistor

Making my analog doorbell smart by simply attaching a $7 sensor to it

My doorbell, which I want to make smarter

I live in tall and skinny house with a loft on the upper floor. I can’t hear the doorbell going off when I’m up there, especially if I have music playing. This post is about how I extended the range of my doorbell by hooking a sensor up to it that communicates over Wifi to my smart-home, which then plays a doorbell tone over my speakers throughout the house.

I already have a reasonably capable smart home based on Home Assistant, so I challenged myself to do this in the cheapest, least intrusive way possible. In the end, I did this with a $7 part and without changing any of the wiring in my existing doorbell (I just had to connect 2 extra wires to the existing transformer).

Here’s a preview of it working:

Here’s the demo of it working. The 2nd ring is through the stereo.

Some fun or spooky Halloween automations with Home Assistant

It’s that spooky time of year again, but this time it can be extra spooky with the help of home automation.

Motion-activated jumpscare on TV

One classic spooky thing to do is have a TV do something scary when people walk by. This is easier than ever on any TV now that everyone has Raspberry Pi with HDMI output and z-wave (or other) motion sensors everywhere. Check this out:

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Multi-room audio over Wi-Fi with PulseAudio and Raspberry Pi(s)

NOTE/UPDATE: After an update this kind of stopped working and I struggled with it a lot. Now I actually recommend using snapcast instead of this solution. It works better!

I moved to a new place and it has more than one room. Naturally, I hooked up the stereo in the living room and tested it like my dad taught me: by playing “Money For Nothing” really loudly. It worked. But wait a minute, there’s an upstairs now… how will I get it playing up there? I could always use the wifi network and raspberry pis to beam audio around. Yeah, let’s do that!

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Secure remote access to a camera DVR with VPN and VLANs on an OpenWRT router

If you have a digital video recorder (DVR) hooked up to some cameras and you want to access it remotely when something happens, you can set up remote access to review things from wherever. Here’s how to do it.

Continue reading Secure remote access to a camera DVR with VPN and VLANs on an OpenWRT router

A fancy Home Assistant automation that checks the weather and figures out when to turn on your heater

So in the continuing saga with my mom’s home-automated furnace, it got extra cold recently and I noticed it wasn’t getting up to temperature in time for her to wake up. I figured I could come up with a formula to compute the time needed to come to temperature and turn on the furnace at a dynamic time in the morning so it’d be just right.

Graph of temperatures inside and outside — Temperatures at my mom’s house over a few days

Continue reading A fancy Home Assistant automation that checks the weather and figures out when to turn on your heater

Downloading files from an Amcrest security camera with Python

UPDATE 2021: This was fun but nowadays I have to direct people to a more complete python solution here.

I got a few Amcrest Wifi security cameras for my mom’s house at her request. They’re pretty nice overall (My only complaint is that the web-interface doesn’t fully support Linux). I set one up to save a jpg snapshot to memory every minute and then flew across the country. When I wanted to access them, I couldn’t just put the SD-card in a computer or anything, and clicking all 14,000 of them seemed like a pain, so I decided to figure out how to get them with a Python script.

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The Infopanel: a simple MQTT-connected display system for weather, traffic, pictures, animations…anything!

I got one of those RGB LED matrix things for my birthday and wasn’t sure what to do with it. Then I found this awesome library which has Python bindings and can control it nicely even from a Raspberry Pi. Conveniently I had a spare Raspberry Pi 1 B+ sitting around so I hooked it up. After playing around for a while, I got the demos working.

UPDATE: Full documentation of infopanel is now available.

But I needed to connect it to home-assistant to really make it valuable to myself. So I wrote a little program called Infopanel (available for free on github) that lets you do some things:

Get data directly from a MQTT broker for getting live data (e.g. travel times in traffic, weather conditions) and for command and control. This allows me to connect the screen to my home-assistant home automation system.
Assemble various built-in elements like giraffes, animated text, rainbow text, pictures, animated gifs into various scenes that rotate through on the screen to display the information in various fun and/or useful ways.
There are Temperature and Duration sprites that you can define high and low values of so they’re red when they’re bad and green when they’re good, and anywhere in between.

You can set the scenes to be just random or you can control them through MQTT.

It’s intended to be very configurable but since it’s brand new some extra development is needed to make everything perfect. Send in your ideas and requests and code changes!

A relatively complete example configuration file is in the repo. That demonstrates using MQTT, connecting MQTT topics to various sprites, building your own frames of animation by hand, and adding in gifs and images from file paths. Note that you have to set an environmental variable or two to get the fonts right and whatnot.

Getting live alerts when your website is visited with Apache, MQTT, and home-assistant

I have a website or two and sometime wish I could get notifications whenever someone visited them, just for fun. Well I did it, and now I can get beeps in my home whenever anyone visits. It’s kind of cool to hear it go off, though normally it will be annoying, so we need a switch for it.

Continue reading Getting live alerts when your website is visited with Apache, MQTT, and home-assistant