Arduino Fun

My parents still like to send their adult kids birthday presents every year. When there is no COVID-19 making travel difficult it is normally easy enough to get away with an excuse to have them over for a weekend. Go out for a dinner together. And enjoy some company.

This year, that wasn't happening. So, I asked for an Arduino like kit. One of the things I've been really interested to do is get a sense of how easy or difficult it would be to build out my own smart home solution.

Technically, I've already done a rather major portion of that with Home Assistant on my desktop. I even have MQTT integration, though, at the moment it is primarily just for detecting when my cameras detect motion. I also had it up and running on a Raspberry Pi at one point. So, the next major piece was to see if I could build out some of my own sensors, displays and buttons.

And that is where the Arduino stuff comes in. I always knew that, in theory, there wasn't much to worry about there. But, without actually trying it out, you can't be sure. Actually turned out to be easier than expected. Pretty much every component comes with one or more library pre-built for the Arduino IDE. I have programming skills already. And then the rest is just following the diagrams to get the physical connections right.

Really the hardest thing is building attractive enclosures for these things. My first test project was a temperature sensor with humidity readings hooked up to an LCD display. Currently it is housed inside of an empty tissue box.

Next, I need to get a board with either WiFi or Bluetooth (or both), remove the display, and get the data into MQTT. After that, I would feel confident that I could build a lot of simple devices which could feed data to help run a smart home. At which point the next step would be building a proper hub. Right now I rely on Hue and Tradfri. But, ideally, there would be a single hub, which I own and which controls the lights directly.

I know this is possible as well. The dongles exist, and almost all of them seem to work with the Raspberry Pi. 

Which leaves communication with my personal devices. WiFi is easy, but I don't like having too many WiFi devices in the house. Bluetooth is OK, but I may need some devices to act as repeaters to cover the whole house. Zigbee or Z-Wave would be cool, but the chips are too expensive to add to the kinds of devices I'm thinking of building.

And after all of that comes power and cases.

I may eventually need to get a 3D printer.

Also, somewhere in there will be a project to build my own smart blinds.

Yet another potential solution to the connectivity issue is to have a central MQTT server running over WiFi on something like a Pi Zero W, and then build a hub with a display per room. Everything can pipe back into the MQTT server, and from there I can pipe it into Home Assistant as a master, and have it able to pipe commands back out over MQTT.