My Winter Deep Dive Into Home Automation & Networking

As winter rolls in, my house projects and hobbies have mostly shifted indoors. I’ve become fascinated with IoT and home automation. I mean, I have dabbled in IoT and home automation for quite some time with hue light bulbs, nest thermostat, nest audio, robot vacuum, and a few other “smart home” devices managed via the Google Home app. I had some routines setup in Goggle Home that were helpful, such as saying goodnight and it would turn off all of the lights and lock the back door; however, their routines were still lacking conditions. I was super stoked when Google announced they were adding scripting to Google Home app for creating conditional automations. As soon as it released, I quickly setup an automation for turning on the backyard string lights when my girlfriend or I arrive at home after sundown. We tested this out over a couple weeks and we were quickly let down. It was not reliable at all, even with letting the Google Home app always track our iPhone location. I knew there had to be a better way and if you are a tinkerer there definitely is. It’s a very popular open source project called Home Assistant. Over the past couple months I have gone down the rabbit hole of Home Assistant, learning about why local control is better, adding local controlled devices to our home, and weaning myself off of home cloud services. You can run Home Assistant on all types of hardware including a raspberry pi. I ended up buying a Home Assistant Yellow from Nabu Casa for my install since it supports on going development, and has several nice features that you wouldn’t get just running it on a raspberry pi. After getting Home Assistant setup and the integrations needed for my devices installed, I setup the same automation I had tried with Google Home. This automation now works reliably turning on the string lights in the backyard when either of us arrive home after sundown. The best part of this Home Assistant automation is it not only uses GPS for home/away detection, but I also have it setup to use the main home WiFi to detect if a device is home or not. Now I’m totally hooked. I’ve added several Shelly devices that are all configured locally and don’t need to connect to a cloud service. Shelly relays are great for making regular light switches or outlets smart without changing the switch or plug. I also purchased a ratgdo for full local control of my garage door opener after the whole chamberlain/myq debacle. It works great and gives more features, like being able to open the garage door to a certain percentage. I’ve even been able to give back to the Home Assistant community already opening a pull request to fix a small issue with an integration that I’m using for our Mila air purifier.

Adding all these new devices to our network then led to a deep dive into networking. Lots of IoT devices on a regular home network can not only cause performance issues, but there are also some privacy and security concerns to be aware of. After a ton of reading I decided it was out with Google WiFi and in with tp-link Omada. I needed something that was more robust than a typical consumer home router so I could setup a vpn and vlans. I also wanted it to have an integration for Home Assistant to allow for device tracking, this is what led me to Omada. We now have 3 networks in our house: main, IoT, and guest. I still may add a 4th called NoT for devices that just need to be on the network, but don’t need internet access. All of the separate vlans all have their own WiFi ssid with passwords. Our main vlan now only has devices like our laptops and phones. The guest and IoT vlans are walled off from each other and from the main vlan, yet things like airplay and casting still work across vlans via mdns. I bought a tld .house domain for the house with sub domains for each of the vlans. DNS for our network is now handled by a raspberry pi running pi-hole for ad blocking. On that same raspberry pi I’m running core-dns for local device name resolution from my omada router. This requires using a custom core-dns plugin. I also configured a VPN so we can securely get on our home network when not at home. All of the network gear is connected to UPSs so it will stay powered up if we lose power. In case the main cable internet goes out I added an LTE modem that my router will fail over to automagically.

I know this is only the beginning, there is so much more to dive into and I have all kinds of ideas for things I’d like to automate. I’ll try to do more posts about my setup over the next few months.