Home Automation from Scratch: Introduction

6 Aug 2020 | 4 minute read

Suffice it to say, I’m a home automation enthusiast (it says so right on the homepage!). I started with a Wink Hub and a couple Trådfri lights from IKEA, and quickly moved to SmartThings when the Wink hub bricked itself a week in¹. Eventually almost every light, door, and window in my Pittsburgh apartment was equipped with control and sensors, and at some point I moved the “brains” to Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3B.

I could (and did!) impress my friends and family by turning lights on and off when they’d visit, but despite all the hours I poured into it there’s only so many things to automate in a 550 ft², 1-bedroom apartment.

I’ve since moved out of that apartment, and for the past year I’ve been living a relatively nomadic life while all my home automation equipment sits unused in a storage unit. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to unpack it into a new permanent apartment and really dive deep on more useful automations and integrations. In the meantime, though, I have a huge new automation project.

You see, my parents bought a new house.

“Can I get some of those cool lights?”

This new house feels really big. It actually has the same number of bedrooms and 15% less square footage than the one I grew up in, but the layout is spread out in a way that makes it seem twice the size. The old house was a compact three-story box, while the new house is a mix of indoor and outdoor spaces meandering across a 100'-by-75' area of land. If my mom leaves a light on in her sewing workshop above the detached garage it’s a long walk around the house—partially outside—to go turn it off.

About three weeks after they moved in, I got a call asking how hard it would be to set up the same sort of system I was running in my apartment. My dad had also seen the neighbors' security camera footage of everything from bobcats to bears, so he tacked on an additional request for a full exterior camera system.

Scoping it Out

At the time, I just did a quick inventory of the house and layout to get a sense for the scope of things. Luckily I’d already documented the light switches throughout for the sake of labelling the breaker panel, but other questions were a constant back-and-forth on the phone with my dad. How many doors and windows are there? Do you want that light to be dimmable? Smart locks, yay or nay? (it was “nay”)

It would have been a tedious process fully designing the system over the phone, not to mention the impossibility of instructing my dad on how to install it all himself. He’s reasonably handy, but as soon as things get computer-adjacent he completely loses his mind. I sent him a rough design document and a ballpark budget, but nothing was going to progress on the project until I had time to drive down to South Carolina and set it up for them. That wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon, but then the COVID-19 crisis hit. Like many millennials from all walks of life, I suddenly found myself moving back in with my parents.

Looking for a silver lining in a horrifying scenario, this at least meant I had a chance to put together the system myself after all. And to be honest, I was stoked about getting to build a home automation setup in a fully-spec’d way instead of piecing it together across several different protocols and a dozen manufacturers like I’ve done in the past.

In the next post of this series, I’ll go into the planning process and the final design plan for the system (before the inevitable “first contact with the enemy” changes).