Enlighten your old furnace with a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant, an ESP8266, and some relays.

My mom has one of those on/off furnaces (EDIT: actually it’s a boiler) that heats up water and circulates it through pipes around the house that have little radiator fins. She wants it to turn on before she wakes up so it’s not so cold in the morning. In this post, I explain how to turn a normal furnace into a smart furnace controlled by Home Assistant for only a few bucks.

Furnace controls in Home Assistant

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ESP8266 Furnace Code

Here’s the code for the smart furnace project. This is provided “as is”. Use at your own risk; I take no responsibility if this code damages or destroys your equipment or home or injures or kills anyone. Controlling household/industrial equipment is a non-trivial task.

Getting IP camera motion events into Home Assistant to trigger things

Oh this is exciting! I’ve been trying to figure out how to get motion events from my IP camera into my home-assistant instance running on my Raspberry Pi, and I just did a successful test! It works! Hooray. Briefly, I set up an email server on the Pi, have the camera email the Pi, have the email server trigger a script which parses the email for key words and sends MQTT signals as appropriate, at which point the home-assistant MQTT client sees them and triggers automations (like blinking a light to scare people off). Here’s how I did it.

Camera-based motion sensors in home-assistant

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Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant DIY Burglar Alarm

I just configured a pretty slick burglar alarm with the open-source Home-Assistant platform running on my Raspberry Pi. It can be armed to trigger when a door is opened and/or when a motion sensor goes off.

Arm the burglar alarm

Then, a sequence of events happens:

  • An IR LED turns on my stereo
  • A sound file I cobbled together starts playing. It starts with a computerized voice saying that your entry been detected and recorded, then it beeps for a while (giving you time to disarm), and then it goes into a blaring siren noise. Quite the escalation!
  • A light blinks on and off a few times
  • A camera takes a series of snapshots of the area
  • An email is sent to my phone with the snapshots, showing me what’s going on

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Adding IR send and receive capabilities to my home-assistant based smart home

Or, how to control your A/C from your phone

You may have seen my earlier post about my new home automation setup. Well I just upgraded it! I just finished testing out a new infrared remote control send and receive capability and it is pure awesome. Here’s what I can do now from within home-assistant:

  • Turn on and off my new DeLonghi portable air conditioner from Costco, and set the temperature to whatever
  • Turn on and off the TV and press any buttons from its remote control
  • Turn on and off the stereo and virtually press any buttons from its remote control (which I never even had!)
  • Use an old random blueray remote control to set scenes, turn lights on and off, etc. (basically do anything under home-assistant’s control)

This post is about how I did it on my Raspberry Pi.

Update: A video!

Annotated setup with IR sensors

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Using an Aeotech recessed door sensor in home-assistant

I went over to my friend’s house last night to help get home-assistant on a Raspberry Pi working for his z-wave door sensors and siren. The Ecotech sensor showed up fine but the Aeotech recessed one (Recessed Door Sensor Gen5 , ZW089-A) did not show up by default. After poking around in the logs for a while, we realized that it was sending BASIC_SET command classes instead of BinarySensor commands. Apparently (I thought I had fixed this already), home-assistant doesn’t recognize the BASIC_SET commands just yet. But looking at the config file for this device, we discovered that config item 121 changes which kind of report this sensor sends:
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Home automation with Z-Wave, Home-Assistant, Aeon Multisensor, HUE lights, and a Raspberry Pi 2

I’ve always dreamed of having a “smart-home.” There’s just something cool about being able to flip switches and read sensors and have a program turn a light on when you open the door, but only if it’s dark. This post is about home automation.

UPDATE: I made a video demoing everything:

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