We've been renting a house in Auckland, New Zealand. This house needs a lot of maintenance and renovation, but the landlords let us have two cats and a dog so we can't complain! They also let us do whatever we want to the house (within reason), so I had a lot of fun doing some DIY projects and setting up home automation stuff.

However... We're moving to the Bay of Islands! My wife got a job up there, and I'll keep working on DocSpring from home. We're looking forward to exploring this part of New Zealand.

So before I take all my home automation stuff down and pack everything up, I wanted to take some photos and share some of the projects I worked on over the last few years.

Lighting

All the lights in our house are Zigbee RGB bulbs that are controlled via motion sensors and timers. The most useful thing is that we don't need to use light switches, and we can turn all the lights off at the same time. A slightly less useful thing is that we can set them to crazy colors.

We don't use the colors very often, but I got these bulbs because I wanted to use Adaptive Lighting. This Home Assistant plugin adjusts the brightness and color of the lights based on the position of sun. They're cool and bright during the day, and warm and dim at night. (You might have something similiar on your phone or laptop.) Apparently it's good for your circadian rhythms.

I also set up lots of LED strips around the house and in my workshop:

Bedroom TV Dashboard

We have a TV in our bedroom. It wasn't doing much during the day so I thought it would be fun to show a dashboard.

I plugged in a Raspberry Pi running FullPageOS and set up the dashboard in Home Assistant. It turns on and off based on motion sensors and bed presence sensors (Withings Sleep Analyzers.) So it's on when we get up in the morning and whenever we walk into the room. It doesn't turn on if we're in bed or if we're watching something on the TV.

It's handy to see our calendar, news headlines, weather, and some of our cameras.

Bathroom Dashboard

I put a similar dashboard next to our bathroom mirror. This is a Lenovo M10 HD 2nd Gen 10.1" Tablet.

This dashboard also shows our calendar and cameras, and it tells us how much LPG gas we have left in the tank. An alert on my phone reminds me to order a new tank before we start having cold showers. (I put a Lippert Bottlecheck Bluetooth sensor on the bottom of the active tank.)

I also bought some electric bluetooth toothbrushes because I thought it would be funny. So now our dashboard has a "toothbrush mode" whenever we brush our teeth. It's pointless but it's also kind of fun.

Air Quality Automation

I have these Zigbee air quality sensors in almost every room:

They report:

• CO2 levels
• PM2.5 (e.g. smoke, pollution)
• Humidity
• VOCs

I also put some bluetooth temp/humidity sensors in the bathrooms.

Home Assistant automatically turns on the kitchen extractor fan and the bathroom fans whenever the PM2.5, CO2, or humidity gets too high. I also get an alert if the CO2 gets too high in my office so I can open a door or window.

I use ESP32-based IR blasters to automate our heat pumps. I was going to make something myself but I already had too many projects on my todo list, so I just bought some of these on AliExpress.

Side note: It was really nice to find a professionally designed product that was specifically designed to run your own custom firmware. Most big smarthome manufacturers force you to use their cloud services, but I mainly buy Zigbee devices or products that can be hacked to run custom firmware.

I also use one of these IR blasters to control a CRT TV in my workshop. The TV runs RetroPie and has lots of old games, but most of the time it shows a screensaver with some interesting animations that I find on X (formerly Twitter).

Record Player

My record player connects to the stereo via bluetooth. I put a Zigbee door sensor on it so the stereo switches to the right input source whenever I open the lid. There's also a Zigbee knob on the side that controls the stereo volume, and you can click the button to cycle between input sources.

Coffee Machine

I put a SwitchBot on our coffee machine so that it turns on when my wife gets up in the morning. I'm still tempted to take the coffee machine apart and do this properly, but the SwitchBot works great and it was very easy to attach.

418 I'm a teapot

I bought a WiFi Kettle and modified the firmware so that it responds with the 418 I'm a teapot HTTP status code.

~/code/Tasmota $ curl -v 192.168.1.113/bc
*   Trying 192.168.1.113...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to 192.168.1.113 (192.168.1.113) port 80 (#0)
> GET /bc HTTP/1.1
> Host: 192.168.1.113
> User-Agent: curl/7.64.1
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 418
< Content-Type: text/plain
< Content-Length: 12
< Connection: close
<
* Closing connection 0
I'm a teapot

Flashing a Kogan Smart Kettle with Tasmota

I bought a wifi-connected kettle and flashed it with a custom firmware. I had to open it up, connect some wires, and flash it via serial.

Made By NathanNathan Broadbent

Sadly this kettle died a few months ago. RIP.

Home Security

Front Door

We have a "Nest X Yale" lock on the front door:

It automatically locks at night or when we go out, and automatically unlocks when we come home. (Mostly based on the location of our phones.)

Garage Doors

Our garage doors automatically open if we're driving home and the Home Assistant app detects that we're within a certain radius of our house. They also close automatically when we leave, or after 10 minutes of no activity in the garage.

Cameras

I set up 10 cameras around the house (7 outside, and 3 inside.) I use Frigate NVR and have a Google Coral TPU for AI object detection (cats, cars, people, etc.)

It's not a particularly dangerous area. I just thought it would be interesting to experiment with AI for face and object detection, and the cameras also double as motion sensors.

The indoor security cameras turn around to face the wall and stop recording when we're home, but the cameras in the living room and kitchen are active during the night if we're in bed.

Conclusion

Home automation is fun! Sometimes it can even be useful.

We're probably going to design and build our own house at some point, so I'm going to have a lot of fun with that project.

Thanks for reading!