At this point in the project, you’ve got a Raspberry Pi that can run just about anything that comes as a Docker container. Running home automation will expand upon this by deploying several applications in a stack.
By the end of this step, you will have:
You don’t have to install the home automation stack. It’s completely optional. If you choose to deploy it, you don’t have to deploy all the applications, nor do you need to invest in a bunch of “smart” devices. You can start small with some passive home monitoring and go from there.
The main application in the home automation stack is Home Assistant. This is central hub, providing connectivity to various devices and organizing the data into a dashboard view. Home assistant can be integrated with a surprising number of devices just over wifi. Without a lot of effort, you can probably connect to your television, internet router, video game console, thermostat, mobile phones, etc.
ESPHome is helpful for connecting to other, non-wifi devices like those using Bluetooth Low Energy. This includes things like battery powered sensors. It does not run on the Raspberry Pi. The ESPHome container is simple a management console for communicating with ESPHome running on ESP32 microcontrollers.
Mosquitto is an application that provides a common communication protocol (called MQTT) that is understood by a large number of home automation devices. Configuration is very simple and having and MQTT gateway will greatly expand the number and type of devices you can integrate with.
Node-RED is for creating complex integrations with your devices and carrying out actions based on workflows that you create. You can do simple things like monitor temperature with device attached to a freezer and send an alert if it gets too warm. Or you can do complex things, enabling the tap of a button on your phone to turn on the television, power up the home theater system, and bring up the menu for your favorite streaming service.
Even with the large number of applications in this stack, deploying is really no different than the others. There are the usual files: pre-deploy.yml, docker-compose.yml, and post-deploy.yml.
Here are the tasks carried out by the pre-deploy.yml playbook.
pi@mypi:~/cloudpi/home-automation $ ansible-playbook pre-deploy.yml
TASK [Gathering Facts] **********************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [Install SQLite client] ****************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [Create Homeassistant configuration directory] *****************************
changed: [localhost]
TASK [Create ESPHome configuration directory] ***********************************
changed: [localhost]
TASK [Create Node Red configuration and directory] ******************************
changed: [localhost]
TASK [Create Mosquitto configuration and data directory] ************************
changed: [localhost]
PLAY RECAP **********************************************************************
localhost : ok=6 changed=4 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0
The stack is deployed with Portainer, using the information in docker-compose.yml
Running the post-deploy.yml playbook looks like this:
pi@mypi:~/cloudpi/home-automation $ ansible-playbook post-deploy.yml
PLAY [Home automation post-deployment configration] *****************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] **********************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [Checking for Nginx installation] ******************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [Creating ESPHome reverse proxy config] ************************************
changed: [localhost]
TASK [Creating Home Assistant reverse proxy config] *****************************
changed: [localhost]
TASK [Creating NodeRED reverse proxy config] ************************************
changed: [localhost]
RUNNING HANDLER [Reloading Nginx config] ****************************************
changed: [localhost]
PLAY RECAP **********************************************************************
localhost : ok=6 changed=4 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0
Most of the Home Assistant configuration can be done using the web-based interface, though sometimes you will see references to configuration.yaml. When you deploy the home automation stack using the Ansible playbooks, you’ll find configuration.yaml in the /opt/docker/homeassistant directory. Configuration help can be found in the official documentation at: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/
Mosquitto doesn’t require much in the way of configuration, it just sort of runs. The only thing you might want to do is set up a username and password for any devices that don’t have an option for anonymous connection. See the Mosquitto documentation for the user/password utility and the Portainer documentation for accessing the container console.
NodeRED doesn’t require much in the way of configuration either, though having an incorrect timezone seems to be a common theme on internet discussions. Make a connection to the NodeRED container console and run the date command. Run the date command on your Pi. They should be the same. If the time is wrong on the Pi, it should be equally wrong in NodeRED. Fix the time on the host and restart the NodeRED container.
ESPHome should not need any configuration other than the reverse proxy to enable an HTTPS connection. If this isn’t working, over the air updates will be unavailable due to browser security features.
If you made it this far, you are well versed in deploying and configuring containerized applications. You have created a system with plenty of services to help you install the next, shiny application that catches your eye. The only thing stopping you is the resouce constraints of the tiny computing platform called Raspberry Pi. But as we have seen over the course of this project, it’s quite a capable machine.
From here, you can explore Docker Hub to find new and exciting applications to run on your Pi. You can visit Composerize to help you turn docker run commands into docker-compose.yml files and run them as stacks. You can even read up on the syntax of the Dockerfile and build your own containers.
You may also want to consider what it will take to maintain the system.
The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago…. And that was with a coffee machine. —Marvin the Android