Home Automation

Setup

Use cases & automations

Events and Actions

• Unlock front door, enter flat at night: Light up hallway & livingroom (cozy)
• Lock front door: Turn off all lights, & non-critical appliances: TV, Radio, etc.
• Shower usage detected: Turn on towel heater for 30 minutes
• Alexa "Bedtime" - Turn off TV, lights on for hallway, bathroom and bedroom, turn off livingroom (after a short delay)
• Alexa "Good night": turn off all lights
• Alexa "Home office": turn on lights and computer in office room
• Alexa "end of workshift": turn off computer, lights (after a delay)
• Alexa "short break": Pause TV, increase livingroom brightness, light up bathroom
• Alexa "go on": Un-pause TV, dim living lights, turn off bathroom

Components

• Homematic CCU3 - controlling Homematic components
• Philips Hue - lights
• Raspberry Pi & Node Red - higher level automations & Web Dashboard
• Alexa - voice control
• Parsable - event logging
• Graphs

Tips and tricks

Keep local actions local

If a wall mounted switch (primarily) controls a light - program the switch (this is possible with homematic). You want to have your systems (and the low level controls) run as autonomously as possible - even if the "higher level" functions die (read: the CCU3 Bridge or the NodeRed automations) are not available.

Links

=> Node-RED "Low-code programming for event-driven applications"