My goal someday is to have a near fully automated smart house with robot butlers serving me drinks on voice command. Unfortunately I am not there yet. I do however have a start to my home automation machinations. Below I drew a diagram in Affinity Designer that lays out each zone with smart devices and agents. (as an aside I am loving this software as a replacement for Adobe Illustrator). My home automation setup isn’t planned in the slightest. I have slowly piecemealed this setup through gifts and small additions.
Zone layout of my smart home devices. Not included are my personal robots as they don’t really contribute to the smart home behavior yet.
Lighting – For lighting, my main constraint is that I can’t modify the electrical wiring of my apartment (I mean, I can its just very heavily discouraged). Second to that, my other constraints are budget and Alexa support. And that is how I came across Third Reality switch controllers. These are really great devices that are mounted on top of your existing light switches using the provided screws. I have both Rev2 and Rev3 and while I slightly prefer Rev2’s stronger motor, Rev3 has a slimmer/cleaner profile. My kitchen, foyer, and bedroom standing lights all use this control method. Highly recommend.
Rev2 Third Reality switch in bedroom plus covered unused switch
(it doesn’t go to anything in my apartment).
Rev3 Third Reality switches in kitchen.
I also have a couple LED strips for accent lighting, one on my kitchen island another under my desk. Right now the island LEDs are only controlled via an IR remote. I plan on revitalizing my ESP8266 LED control service project and then hook it into Alexa. The under desk LEDs are Alexa-enabled (got them as a gift from my brother).
Cleaning – A cool hack I have setup in my apartment is a Glade plugin air freshener plugged into a Kasa smart outlet. This affords control of an otherwise passive air freshener so that my fragrance isn’t wasted during the night nor overwhelming during the time I’m at home.
Glade air freshener with Kasa smart plug.
I would be remiss not to mention my Roomba. Please check out my separate review of the iRobot Roomba i7+ here.
Entertainment – I am not a huge TV watcher. I tend to just turn something on while working on my hobbies. Though I do have both an Amazon Firestick and Xfinity Streambox. They are currently hooked up to my desktop monitor though eventually I plan on purchasing an actual TV (eventually meaning in a few years when I can no longer socially excuse my lack of a TV).
Routines
I only have a modest set of Alexa routines at this point (as shown in the figure below). The routines fall into two tracks, self-initiated (a la 1:00 PM air freshener activation) and user-controlled (“Good Morning”). Self-initiated routines are great for routine maintenance tasks like resetting the volume on each speaker and routine cleaning (air freshening).
Routine behavior flowchart broken down by agent. Future work to add additional routines and agents.
Volume Resets – Every morning all Echo devices automatically reset their volume to level three. I found this to be a good default. Some days, I might adjust it to be louder but I would rather the volume always be at a predictable level.
Good Morning – In the morning I can initiate a “good morning” routine that turns on my bedroom standing light my nightstand light, and the overhead light in the kitchen. Being able to turn on the kitchen light right at the start of the morning is the such an underrated feature. It allows me to navigate to my coffee or the bathroom without the usual vision impaired tripping hazards.
Once I get more third-reality switches in my bathroom, I am going to hook these up to the “good morning” routine.
Periodic Air Freshener – Every day I run my air freshener to keep my apartment smelling clean. But at the same time I don’t want it too be too strong of a smell. Additionally, if its running then it consumes the scented oil faster. So I hooked it up to a smart plug that only keeps it on for a few hours while I am generally out at work or running errands.
Roomba Vacuum – Less a custom routine and more default behavior for integrating Alexa with Roomba, this behavior lets me voice trigger a cleaning routine. As I don’t have a scheduled time for Roomba to clean, this comes in handy (plus I like watching Roomba work).
Good Night – This routine is the best after I have comfortably swaddled myself in blankets with the light on. Then regardless of the state of the apartment, I can kindly ask Alexa to turn everything off. Bonus is she tells me to have a good night.
Only problem now is that the bathroom lights are not hooked up to this routine. Definitely something I need to solve in the future.
Future Plans
There are a few things that I need to work on. Primarily, I have a few projects in mind that involve automating existing devices to be smart. Some other projects include data collection and adding more agents / control in my smart home.
Smartifying Devices – First, I am planning on automating a plant grow light (that currently must be manually configured each time). This isn’t as important during the summer when I have decent afternoon sun in my apartment. But in the winter, I barely get any direct sunlight. My goal is to use an ESP8266 to expose a simple RESTful interface. I may also build out Alexa integration but frankly haven’t looked into it yet.
Similarly, I have an air purifier that must be manually turned on and configured. I would love for this to be another ESP8266 project.
Lastly, my kitchen island LED strip is only controlled via an IR remote. This is a project that I definitely need to integrate into my Alexa smart home environment. I previously built a controller using an ESP8266 in my old apartment that I would need to tune up for this (Github repo here).
Data Collection – Separately, I want to start collecting more data in my apartment. Mostly for my indoor plants. That is moisture level of soil, pH of soil, and light level. My vision is to use ESP8266s (or maybe some nRF24L01 radios with a cheap micro) to collect readings from multiple plants. Eventually all of this data will be reported back to my Raspberry Pi (maybe MQTT?). Hopefully, I find time to create a database that aggregates this data and can make decisions like:
- when to water,
- when to turn on grow light,
- when to repot / replace soil (when pH out of whack),
- and routine activities like making sure my Japanese maple has a dormant period.
Control – Lastly, there are a few high level control problems. Since some of my lights have switches (Third Reality), I am still in the habit of manually turning on/off lights. However, other lights are only controlled remotely via voice commands. At some point, I will need to either purchase or construct a few control buttons for these other lights. While I am at it, I am also proposing a few preset multi-device buttons built into whatever dashboard I construct.
I already mentioned this but I still need to integrate my bathroom lights into my home automation setup. Preferably I could turn on both lights at the same time but turn them off at different times (one should have a delay when moisture is high – as it also controls the exhaust fan).
One light that I probably won’t get to is the track lights over my desk. They are controlled via a dimmer switch. I would need some kind of servo mechanism to control this and frankly its probably not worth the effort given all my other projects.
On the left, the dimmer switch to be controlled.
On the right, a covered kitchen overhead light switch.
Robots – In the near future I plan to bring my Jetson Nano robot, YAM, back to a functioning state. At that time, I plan on integrating some Alexa functionality into it. I think it would be pretty fun to get an initial mapping routine up and running. After that I will have to think about what behaviors to build in.
Final Remarks
Thanks for reading this rambling post. Hopefully you got something out of it. Feel free to comment your ideas and suggestions for future routines / behaviors. Keep on building!
Device List (with Amazon Links)
In case you want to purchase similar devices, here is a list of Amazon links.
