Home Assistant
Home Assistant runs on a Raspberry Pi and can control most modern Smart Home devices, plus a whole load more you can make yourself.
I started off using ESPHome to control ESP32s with simple temperature and humidity monitors. They send their data using MQTT over bluetooth. From there, I hacked an IKEA VINDRIKTNING air quality monitor; now I can see how the air quality changes when cooking or using the open fire.
By adding a Zigbee stick, I can now control the huge range of smart home devices that communicate over a Zigbee mesh.
Where is the Cat?
Fury and his geotag
My blind cat, Fury, loves exploring the garden. He shouldn’t be able to get out, as the fence is too high for him to jump, but what if someone leaves the gate open?
He has a GPS tag on his collar (a Tractive device) It intergrates nicely into Home Assistant, allowing me to set an alarm if it detects he is no longer within range - i.e., he’s escaped. This means I don’t need to constantly watch him when he’s playing out.
The Tractive collar also has BLE, as does my watch, meaning we can both be tracked within the house during the day using the brilliant ESPresense, which runs on ESP32s. This can not only look out for specific BLE devices, but also handle a selection of common sensors. However calibration can be fiddly, and I’ve found that they often seem to “flicker” position between rooms, but it is useful if I want to know where he is
Location History of me and the cat from the Home Assistant dash
The Sensor Dashboard
Basic Home Assistant dashboards
Data from all of these sensors can be displayed on a custom dashboard, a pretty collection of graphs and figures plus buttons, usually displayed on a tablet or screen. This was a bit boring, so I set about creating a physical dashboard using as vintage components as I could.
Current Temperature and Air Quality can be displayed on old school 7-segment displays. There are two chunky LEDs, showing if the hot water in the tank is hot enough for a shower or not. Currently, a small OLED tells me which room the cat is in.
