My smart home, more server stuff, and plans for IoT

2018-02-20 | IoT , Python , Arduino , Html , Web ,

This post is a work in progress.

What I have now

I have a bunch of random stuff around that I plan on connecting together in a DIY IoT-thingy. While I am still looking for a flat this project is pretty much on hold for installing permanent fixtures but I can still experiment in my test environment and get a basic setup going.

Currently the components I have are:

  • 3 raspberry pi's
  • millions of ESP8266 Nodemcu kits (these things are awesome)
  • two old security cameras
  • an Amazon Echo Dot
  • a few temperature sensors
  • motion sensors
  • a bluetooth speaker
  • 5 metres of RGB LED striplights
  • arduino's everywhere
  • 433mhz power outlets!

What am I going to do with all of this, I hear you ask?

Here is a list of all the things that I plan on doing right away:

All of the sensors feed into a central hub that controls everything. This is Home Assistant and its freaking awesome. Its open source and made in python so is easy to configure and extend. My current home page looks like this (it's a bit basic of course):

todo put a photo here 6/3/18

I recently got an amazon echo from Kordia as a leaving gift. I plan on using it to add voice automation to home assistant - everything that can be controlled through the web interface should be voice controlled too. Alexa - the echo's voice - can be extended through the use of skills, which can be developed for free. There are already a bunch on the amazon store.

The Server

I recently got myself a new rackmount server - a Dell R170 poweredge. It has 64 gigs of ram, 16 cores, 5 odd hard drives and all the other redundant power supply goodness. Hopefully I should be getting a new managed switch as well to handle most of the networking in the flat. The server is running proxmox but i'm thinking about switching to VMware to be more like the industry standard.

Some of the things the server does currently and will do in the future:

  • Plex - video streaming to every computer in the house (I have about 2tb of movies and TV shows currently)
  • Pihole - network wide ad blocking (even on phones)
  • Couchpotato & Sonarr - automatic downloading of TV and movies
  • Deluge - manual centralised downloads
  • Wiki (confluence) - centralised wiki notes for uni, the flat, homelab documentation
  • Nextcloud - self-hosted fileserver like dropbox
  • VPN - access any of our computers at home from anywhere in the world
  • Jenkins - CI build server
  • Web server - hosting my website and anyone elses
  • Game servers - arma, tf2, etc etc
  • Calibre - self hosted ebook server
  • Gitlab - git repository (like github).
  • Pfsense - router
  • Home Assistant - IoT home automation hub

Here's what the flat lab will look like:

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