First of all, a few words of explanation of what can you expect from this blog. It will be my personal record of the ideas and step-by-step instructions for implementing specific solutions on the topic of smart homes and home automation. I mentioned “personal record”, but hey! Sharing is caring! So I hope some of you may find these information also useful for your own projects. If you are interested in making things like custom sensors from some basic electronics and writing some simple code which automates your life, then you are in a good place!
Smart homes and home automation topics are truly getting more and more attention. There are already a lot of commercial smart home systems, like Google Home, Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings, and many more. If you finally decide on which one you would like to use, then there are a ton of smart devices in the field, starting from simple outlets, bulbs, and finishing on fridges or other appliances, which you can integrate into the smart home system of your choice. Most of the time they are easy to integrate and it’s easy to create some automations. But you always end up with some kind of limitations. However, if you decide to get your hands a little bit dirty with some electronics, a touch of programming skills, and set your mind to DIY, then only the sky is the limit!
My professional background is software engineering, specifically mobile development. A few years back I started my adventure with smart homes and the idea was simple:
- It’s just a hobby so I don’t want to spend too much money on fancy devices and smart home systems,
- I would like to be able to customize as much as I want in that system,
- And most important: have fun!
So I decided on choosing the Home Assistant as my smart home system. It’s open-source, has a huge community, and has a lot of stars on Github! For me, it was enough to give it a try. Next, I built some simple WiFi temperature sensors based on ESP8266 and DHT22, integrated them to be able to communicate with my Home Assistant instance, and got a lot of excitement from being able to tell what’s the temperature in each room! That’s how it all started – a SMARTIFICATION of my apartment 🙂
In the upcoming time, you can expect some posts about my ideas which I turned into working home automation solutions. There will be some simple DIY devices, custom Home Assistant components, and who knows what else comes to my mind, so stay tuned!