Overview over my opencource Smart Home & Garden DIYs

All projects that are detailed described here are opensource & openhardware projects. Therefor your can use it all for free to rebuild for your own or use. Beside that you can bought here also complete build devices programmed with the latest firmware of maybe just the PCB. Via GitHub I'm hosting all projects, the links to the GitHub repro can be found at the detailed description. The description here are giving lots of additional information and detailed tips also I categorize the projects by difficult level to build them, because if you want to build them on your own from ground up sometimes you need some special equipment to get real tiny SMD parts soldered.  

So whats is that smart home stuff that is described here.

If you look around at the market of home automatisation there are lots of closed systems that trys to push there own standards and are quite closed software, at the end of the day you can't integrate the device from Vendor Y with Vendor X because they can't be interfaced to your home central. Simply because of that I like and love open source projects that often have much more ready to use adapters then any comercial system has and best new devices can be interfaced quite fast and easy without buying propertairy bridges etc. You can choose for home automatisation / smart homes between alot of open source systems that where build and used worldwide by the community, all of them have their strength and community behind that implements more or less fast new features or yoou want to get a bit deeper and do it by yourself when you are quite familar with the used language. 

I choosed open source NodeRed as one of these Systems as base for interfacing all my devices to a easy to use and expand home automatisation. I will give you my personal overview and opinion why I choosed NodeRed as base System. Lets dive into it. First let list what I want and why:

• Fast and realy easy to configure, program & extend home system
  Because I want to interface alot of my own designs or comercial ones I wanted a platform that is easy to understand and maintain giving me as much freedom as possible to design my own workflows.
• Using standard protocols 
  By using standards I open to interface any device that supports open standard protoocools like MQTT etc.
• Easy to design & configure home automatisation workflows
  I want to design my workflows and the toooling should be intuitiv, easy to understand and has to be well documentated.
• Easy to use programming language
  Adding programm logic to workflows should be done by scripting languages like javascript phyton etc.
• Can be extended by modules with new functions / devices
  Easy to install modules/devices & functionality/workflows coded by the commuinty 
• Having a huge community
  To ensure development and future features getting implemented 
• GUI for Desktop / SmartPhones or Tablets
  As nice as any backend/ hoome server can be all useability is on the proof by a nice gui that can be used by different device like cell phones, desktop computer or tablets
• Must to run on a Raspberry PI
  The server should be a low energy open source System on linux base to implement and run lots of other features that can be used like backups, time sync & databases

If you compare the NodeRed features with my personal needs its fits 100% to all of them. But to be honest these kind of systems are not plug & play and forget. If you want to have as much freedom as possible to integrate all kinds of opensource and commercial products into one home automation system with on GUI thats a real nice system to use. If you don't like to spend some time and just need limited functionality it's much easier to go with a commercial prooduct but don't get frustrated if you can't easy and cheap integrate devices from different vendors into your System.

In this area "Smart Home & Garden" I give detailed information about my own developed smart devices and some comercial devices I do recomend because they use open standards, that I integrated into my smart home & garden automatisation. Under the main menu you can find some details about my workshop using tools, programming and NodeRed based Workflows. Last but not least my little shop where you can buy my PCB's or complete ready to use devices for your quick start. Keep in mind that these products are all hobby grade systems that may be even better then commercial systems in terms of livetime but also maybe can include also some sort of bugs.

At the moment I do prepare the following  topics / devices / software / workshops 

• HARDWARE  RFID - DOOR 
• HARDWARE  SolarGarden water & RGB Light controller
• HARDWARE  PWM & Realtime I2C interface board
• WORKSHOP  Using commercial power 220V AC wifi switches 
• WORKSHOP  Controlling smart home automatisation all with voice (google Home Mini / Amazon Alexa)

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