For almost 3 years I use Homeseer 2 as a fine, basic software for my Home Automation system. My intension of a Home Automation system is that it is not limited to specific hardware or software. I would like to use every hardware and software that has an API that could be used to receive from and/or send data to it.

Also important, I don’t want to use a cloud solution. My personal data don’t have to be shared online, but also when the internet connection is down, everything has to be working.

There are a lot Home Automation systems that are made for a specific brand of materials, so you can only use products of brand A. But if you want to use products of brand B, that’s not possible with the same system…

I would like to have one app or website that ‘grab’ or combine all data from different hardware and software together in one Home Automation system. I would like to switch my lights, screens, control my iTunes library and show the rainmeter from ‘Buienradar.nl’ on my interface. Even events that trigger on RSS feeds is a must. With Homeseer it is possible via plugins (free or charged) of you write your own scripts.

 

I started with some ‘click-on-click-off’ modules for lights, and screens.

Sensors for temperature and humidity are connected via the RFXCOM transceiver (send/receive on 433.92 Mhz and receive 868.95Mhz for Visonic devices only);

Because the Visonic sensors send also a low-battery message and and has a tamper trigger, I used for all door and window sensors the MCT-302T from Visonic.

Two cameras, one at the frontdoor, one in the garden (faced to the house).

In the beginning I used several Plugwise circles, to measure energy usage, but each circle can toggle (on/off) also it attached device. Later a smartmeter was installed. I bought the Plugwise Smile P1 to read the telegram (xml) from the smartmeter. Now every 15 seconds the telegram is received from the smartmeter. With the output data I can calculate my energy consumption. If you have solar panels, then the energy production is also visible. Later I asked myself the question: “Why measure all energy usage for each device?” even the toggle-device function I never used. I sold all circles…Well it was interesting what every device used in idle mode or on high powermode… I tested it on the fridge, my TV, AVR receiver (20 Watt in idle mode..because the internal webserver was activated), etc, etc.

When you have a power outage, or maybe a burglar creates it for you, the complete house is offline. Oke, when the internet provider is down also, you don’t have an internet connection anymore. So you don’t get any emails or push notifications, but when will that happens. I get in the last years only 1 outage of my internet connection).If you have an UPS (backup battery) you can connect your server, modem, router, switch to it. It will be working, ofcourse, until to battery is empty. Your can trigger on the battery level to do some things.

 

(Virtual) devices that are added to my HA system are:

  • Alarm
  • Smart energy meter to measure power and gas usage
  • RFXCOM to measure water usage
  • Z-Wave (Fibaro motion sensors, Fibaro smoke sensors, Fibaro wallplugs, Sensative doorsensors)
  • RSS data, like traffic jams, speedcams, weather forecast, P2000 announcements
  • GPS device in cars
  • Visonic door/window sensors (via RFXCOM)
  • Oregon Temperature and humidity sensors (via RFXCOM)
  • Cameras, connected via BlueIris
  • Outdoor screens
  • Central heating (OpenTherm gateway)
  • Google calendar
  • Whole house audio via XAP800, Pioneer VSX-921
  • Several Lenovo 7″Tabs for Spotify speaker and receive current Spotify track data also in HA System
  • UPS data
  • FritzBox inbound and outbound calldata and able to switch guest WLAN.
  • Smoke detectors
  • Flood sensor
  • RSS feeds with police, ambulance announcements
  • Traffic jam monitor, speed camera monitor
  • Motion sensors
  • Lights
  • Screens
  • Doorbell

At timestamp 01-03-2016, I’ve 445 (virtual) devices, 201 events and 80+ scripts written in vb.NET.

 

Hardware

  • Server: Zotac ID91, Core-i3, 120GB SSD. Energy consumption appr. 21 Watt.
  • Router: Fritz!Box 7390
  • Switch: TP-Link 24 Ports 1GB
  • Cameras: Dericam m601W dome / Foscam FI9900EP
  • Speech and whole house audio: ClearOne XAP800 Microphone mixer / Pioneer VSX-921
  • Brainboxes ES-246 Ethernet to Serial
  • APC UPS ES-700
  • Aeon Labs Z-Stick Z-Wave Plus

 

Software:

  • Windows 8
  • Homeseer 3 Pro
  • BlueIris 3: Video surveillance software for both of my cameras.
  • Spotify
  • Texaloud: NL speech (voice Jasmijn)
  • Snip: to retrieve current Spotify data
  • XAMPP for MySQL and webserver