The Smart Home Project

There are a lot of posts online asking Philips to add functionality to their motion sensors so that they don't turn lights off if a certain activity is happening or the lights were turned on by another means. There are third-party apps (most of which cost money) to add some functionality to allow this, but it can be done for free if you're prepared to send some JSON configuration to the built-in debugging page.  "Wait, that sounds scary and difficult!" I hear you cry, but it is actually very simple... even if you aren't a techie. I'll take you through it step-by-step here, but all you need is a web browser and the ability to paste an edited version of the configuration into a web page and click on a button.  Scenario There are many different scenarios where this can be useful, but I'm going to give you one of my scenarios here to demonstrate the principle. I have some garden lights controlled by a motion sensor and a Hue Button, but I can also set scenes v...

When I started looking at a Smart Home controller for my new house, something that struck me as being quite 'cool' (if you're a geek like me) was a 3D floorplan with interactive icons. When I settled on Home Assistant, there were several people showing implementations with simulated lights turning on and off and switching between day and night. So, I decided to create an interactive floorplan for my home, but I also wanted to simulate the amount of daylight in the image and add other elements, like motion sensors, and coloured lights, etc. Below is the Ground floor as a work in progress.  A few basic pre-requisites that you'll need (all of which have plenty of tutorials on how to set them up): Home Assistant up and running Home Assistant Community Store  (HACS) installed in Home Assistant Config Template Card frontend add-on through HACS to enable JavaScript and CSS support A means to upload image files to Home Assistant (I use the Samba Share Add-on) Some smart lightbu...

Philips Hue bulbs are fantastic and hugely flexible when paired with the Hue Bridge. Out of the box the accessories support a range of features and will do most of what people want. However, if you are prepared to go a little bit deeper with them and use the built-in Hue Bridge API, you can get very sophisticated lighting automation and other information. For example, the Rules engine in the Hue Bridge allows for rules to be triggered by other rules and events and they also allow you to set any action for any button press on their accessories (e.g. successive presses of the same button on a tap switch can dim the scene or cycle through as many scenes as you want). Something that Philips doesn't shout about is that their motion sensors also have temperature and lux sensors that you can query - also very useful. So what's the problem? Well, the Philips Hue app and integrations with Amazon Alexa, Google Home Assistant, etc., assume that you have exactly 1 Hue Bridge. I guess that ...

I made the decision that we would use consumer tech in our Smart Home (see this post) and the lighting system we settled on was Philips Hue. I will explain why we went for Philips Hue over other possibilities in another post at some point. However, when using a system like Philips Hue (or any of the others with their own controllers) there is a choice between performing the automation natively in the system controller, doing it within a central control system (like Home Assistant) or some form of hybrid.  In my experience, there is always a slight (but noticeable) delay if trying to perform all the automations within the central controller. I know that some of this comes from the particular platforms that are being integrated, e.g. the Philips Hue integration polls the Hue Bridge rather than accepting push notifications for motion sensors, etc. However, there is a second issue; namely, what happens if my central controller is offline for some reason? If my Home Assistant machine f...

As part of my Smart Home build, I need a proper network with segregated sub-networks for our computers, IoT & media devices, management and, of course, guests. The full network design and decision process will be the subject of another post, but I obviously need wi-fi - at least 3 different wi-fi networks in fact.  All the forum posts and information I can find say that the R9000 doesn't support VLANs in dd-wrt. I need VLAN support so that I don't have to have 3 or more different APs (one for each network SSID). Looking at the hardware spec (and the fact that the stock firmware supports limited VLANs), I figured that it should support VLANs, so I trawled the forums, looked at the code and learned about the toolsets included in dd-wrt and I made it work!  This post covers how I set up VLANs on my Netgear R9000 Nighthawk X10 in dd-wrt. I'm sure you will want a different setup (in fact this isn't my final setup either, but it shows the principle).  Pre-requisites I am ...