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Smart Home transformation

Eric Perry

Eric Perry

Jun 16, 2002
12,630
688
the depths of fiery hell, I mean Phoenix
www.facebook.com
#1
Who here has gotten sucked into the abyss of converting your home to a smart home? I started by adding a few switches or light bulbs here and there, but have since went a little crazy with adding new cameras, lights, switches, locks, plugs, sensors, a vacuum, multiple automations, etc. This is been SUCH a fun project, albeit a little pricey to get into. I've continued to chip away and upgrade things here and there, in hardware, software, automations, routines, etc. My house has become pretty damn cool lol. For hardware, I'm using:
  • Tablet - a cheapo ($350... but NICE) 15" Amazon tablet
  • Voice commends - multiple Alexa devices throughout the house
  • Hub - Tapo H100
  • Contact Sensors - Tapo T110
  • 3-Way Dimmer Switches - Tapo S515D
  • Single Pole Dimmer Switches - Tapo S505D
  • Single Pole Regular Switches - Tapo S505
  • Motion Sensor Switches - Tapo S500DM
  • Smart Plugs - Tapo T215M
  • Cameras - Tapo C510W
  • Deadbolts - Tapo DL110
  • RGB Bulbs - Tapo L535E
  • Robot Vacuum - Tapo RV30 MAX Plus
  • Temp Sensors - Tapo T310 and Govee H5074
  • Doorbell - Ring
  • Thermostat - Nest 4th Gen.
For automations, I use some door sensors to turn on lights when those respective doors are opened after sunset in a number of areas of the house, motion sensor switches in the closets to auto turn on lights, humidity sensors in the bathrooms to auto turn on and off bathroom exhaust fans when the humidity rises/falls accordingly, my traffic and commute time to work are spoken to me every morning at 6:00 AM (along with a random "motivational" (i.e. sarcastic and condescending) rant of some sort, spoken reminders to take out the garbage and recycles weekly, a spoken reminder not to grab any snacks if I open the refrigerator door after 8PM, etc. All of these are done by Google Home, Tapo, and/or Alexa.

It's all controlled by this tablet mounted on the kitchen wall (a 15" Android tablet from Amazon that's surprisingly very high quality!) A combination of Google Home, and Tapo Widgets controls most things. I know the screen is busy AF. I just got the vacuum literally last night. I am hoping the mapping feature of the vacuum, and Tapo's 3d floor plan creator in the app, work well enough together to create a floor plan that I can add all my gadgets to, If so, this will look markedly different once that's integrated and created. Time will tell...

For those of you into this stuff, share what you've done. I LOVE new ideas.

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#2
Only scratched the surface myself, a few lights with wifi switches for control and remote operation, and 5 motion detector cameras / security lights at the entrances. Just getting my toes wet, but have dreamed about going whole hog with it since the early X10 days (never got that stuff working though).
 
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#4
Nope. Other than the "Smart Meter" that the local utility company pretty much forced upon us, I still prefer the old school method of turning things on & off by myself.

Even my garage door is a manual operation..... I'm likely the only one that doesn't have an electric opener.
 
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#6
I started simply, with two wi-fi outlet switches, and a Google Home speaker. I found that I loved the convenience of turning off the lights with my voice. I was also able to place the lights on an automation schedule for when I was not home.

Many years later I had to replace my home air conditioner, and the new model was Wi-Fi equipped. This was an unexpected bonus. I could ask my home speaker about indoor and outdoor temperature and turn the air conditioner on or off with voice commands.
 
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#8
Our son has gone that route with everything on a tablet like that. It's been a pain in the rear now that they sold that house and are moving. I spent some time removing smart ceiling fans and lights and replacing them with dumb ones before showings. Of course I'll be recruited to reinstall them in the new place.

For my wife and I we only went as far as Ring cameras on the vacation cabin. Installed them last fall when internet was finally viable and affordable there. Great to have over the winter to keep an eye on things. No issues, which is good.
 
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#9
I'm running Philips Hue lights, Ecobee thermostat (with sensors), and Harmony Hub (controlling Roku, TV, and receiver) all from Home Assistant. I ditched all of my Comcast/Xfinity network gear a few years ago and replaced it with Ubiquiti stuff so that I could effectively separate the IoT devices from the rest of the network. I run HA in a virtual machine on a local server, and it's generally pretty solid. I've hit a few bumps with HA updates, but with a virtual machine, I can take snapshots before updates to make it easy to roll back. The HA phone app is pretty slick, and it pretty much replaces a bunch of remote controls.

I haven't got hog-wild with automation scripts. Just some minimal lights-on, lights-off timers.

One of the cool integrations in HA is Lyrion Music Server (formerly Logitech Music Server, formerly Slim Server), which we use for streaming our ripped CD collection off a Synology NAS, and also Spotify streaming. I use a Raspberry Pi as the "Squeezebox" endpoint for the streaming.

I'm also running PiHole on a VM for whole-network ad blocking (roughly 30% of our daily traffic gets filtered by it -- we are all just products being sold to advertisers and data miners).

Eventually, I may add some Ubiquiti cameras (they have a surveilance application).

It's pretty cool stuff, but I try to keep it fairly simple -- easy control and some automations, when useful.
 
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#10
srosenthal13 said:
I'm running Philips Hue lights, Ecobee thermostat (with sensors), and Harmony Hub (controlling Roku, TV, and receiver) all from Home Assistant. I ditched all of my Comcast/Xfinity network gear a few years ago and replaced it with Ubiquiti stuff so that I could effectively separate the IoT devices from the rest of the network. I run HA in a virtual machine on a local server, and it's generally pretty solid. I've hit a few bumps with HA updates, but with a virtual machine, I can take snapshots before updates to make it easy to roll back. The HA phone app is pretty slick, and it pretty much replaces a bunch of remote controls.

I haven't got hog-wild with automation scripts. Just some minimal lights-on, lights-off timers.

One of the cool integrations in HA is Lyrion Music Server (formerly Logitech Music Server, formerly Slim Server), which we use for streaming our ripped CD collection off a Synology NAS, and also Spotify streaming. I use a Raspberry Pi as the "Squeezebox" endpoint for the streaming.

I'm also running PiHole on a VM for whole-network ad blocking (roughly 30% of our daily traffic gets filtered by it -- we are all just products being sold to advertisers and data miners).

Eventually, I may add some Ubiquiti cameras (they have a surveilance application).

It's pretty cool stuff, but I try to keep it fairly simple -- easy control and some automations, when useful.
Click to expand...
"Fairly simple" he says. Lol
 
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#14
Did that about 20 years ago. Got so sucked in I even had the lighting on my aquarium doing dawn and sunset sequences (graadually brightening at dawn, gradually dimming at sinset). It was tied to the actual daily occurence of sunrise/sunset. A friend went nuts roo. He set up a security system so that if someone crossed his fence line at night he would first turn off any yard lights. If the sustem still found movement, he turned on the sprinkler. Then the robber was not only in the dark but wet. If the robber made it to his door, the system activated playback of a recording of Clint Eastowood saying "Go ahead, make my day". I think he was greatly disappointed that nobody every tried to break in.

Now I've done away with most off the automation. But I am still able to turn off the lights in the carriage house from my house.
 
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#15
> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
 
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#16
Over the weekend, and with the help of my robot vacuum's GPS and LIDAR, I was able to map out my home's floor plan, which I was able to tweak to represent with a pretty high degree of accuracy. There are a couple more 45 degree walls that I'll need to go in and edit manually, as the app doesn't have the ability to do angles automatically. I also added many of the controls in it. There are more to do. Some names I assigned rooms when I mapped it don't align with room names for each device and because of that it won't let me add them. So I need to go in and do some renaming and remapping before I can present all my primary gadgets. Regardless , it's still super cool, IMHO. 😁

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#17
Alexa is a member of our family.
She helps out with just about every light, except a few rarely used overheads.
There is an Alexa in every single room and a Show in the kitchen. She is also connected to the thermostat (thru an Ecobee with several satellite sensors), all of our tvs (thru Firesticks), our main stereo which comes from the hdmiARC on our living room tv (Amazon music is better than CD quality), all of our Blink cameras all over inside and outside of the house (including Blink doorbells at every door) our door locks via a Schlage wifi + deadbolt, a space heater with wifi thermostat and the Christmas tree lights.
She can also monitor the wifi dishwasher and refrigerator, but I haven’t found that to be too useful.
We are pretty much living the Amazon dream.
 
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