A couple of years ago we built a house, and as a part of that we had to decide on all the different installations we wanted in the house. At that point, making the house “smart” was something my friend did by replacing bulbs with Phillips Hue and replacing fixed light switches with expensive wireless alternatives so it was possible to control the light from a wall mounted switch instead of the wired electric installation. All this made me take the decision to get an LK IHC electric installation – At the time I did not believe I would use it for very much, but on the other hand, I would not like to end up in a “replace” situation like my friend.
I have had many people question this decision, “Why not Smart House?”, “Why not X?”, “What do you want to use it for?”, even the electrician installing the system said to me that I would never get to change anything on the installation after it was configured. For 18 month the electrician was right – I barely touched the installation, only to change a few mappings of the buttons, and tried to control the floor heating system (Wavin AHC9000). But the last couple of months this have changed. I have bought smart bulbs, zigbee window/door sensors, and zigbee motion detectors. I have connected my Ubiquiti Access Point to the system so it is able to detect when we leave and come home.
Now my system consist of an alarm system that can be controlled with the IHC buttons around the house by knowing the right key combination, smart bulbs that can be controlled by two IHC buttons switching between colors and brightness and of course power, and it greets my wife welcome home each day and puts on her favorite internet radio. Many more ideas have come as the system have matured and I have gotten more comfortable configuring it.
I will post more descriptions of the different parts when time allows it, but this will be an overview. I have decided on using Home Assistant(HA) as the main system – it is being developed a lot, and over the last two years IHC has become a default plugin of HA and a lot have become easier to configure. I took a look at OpenHAB, but it didn’t convince me that it was better than HA. I started hosting it on a OrangePi, but besides of the speed issues of the OrangePi I experienced stability issues as well, and ended up getting a Synology NAS. The NAS serves another purpose as a backup for my server in Germany hosting various websites and my email.
Connected to the Synology is a Conbee 2 zigbee usb stick which reads all the Aqara window/door sensors and motion detection. deCONZ is supporting the Conbee 2, so that have been deployed using docker on the Synology, and a deCONZ integration on HA have been configured. This makes all added sensors in deCONZ available in HA without no further configuration.
Currently a USB to RS485 converter is also connected, to allow reading and writing values of the floor heating unit (which uses a custom set of modbus commands), but that will be replaced by a system that will be powered by the modbus connection and deliver the information by wifi.
So a parts list of the most important parts is:
- Synology NAS
- Home Assistant
- Conbee 2 USB
- IHC controller visual 3
- USB to RS485 converter
- Wawin AHC 9000
- Nedis E14 RGB bulbs (WIFILC10WTE14)
- Xiaomi Aqara Window/Door sensors
- Xiaomi Aqara Motion detectors