DIY Home Automation Using Node-Red and Raspberry Pi

There are many home automations systems available and choosing one can be very confusing.

However if you are technically minded and willing to learn it is possible to take a DIY approach and build your own system.

Not only will this save you  money but you will also learn about:

  • home automation
  • networking protocols
  • programming
  • APIs

Using Node-Red and Raspberry Pi

Node-Red is a very popular low code system for building IOT and other applications.

Because of this it is ideal for building smart home systems without requiring lots of programming knowledge.

Because an home automation system is always on the low power consumption and small footprint make the PI an Ideal device for hosting your own DIY home automation system and this will be the preferred device for most people.

In fact the popular open source home automation system home assistant runs on a raspberry pi.

However you are not limited to a pi as you can run node-red on any computer you want.

What Is Being Covered?

I will be creating project tutorials with example flows and dashboards that will show you how to:

  • Monitor Your Home Network and the Internet
  • Automate your Home.
  • Manage Tasmota devices
  • Work with APis

If you have any questions then please use the Ask-steve page.

Getting Started with Node-Red

If you are new to Node-Red then I would recommend you take a look at this overview video.

To learn the basics of node-red I recommend you visit my other site stevesnoderedguide.com.

Using MQTT

Although most current smart home devices use http for management and control MQTT is fast becoming the protocol of choice in IOT and home automation.

To use MQTT you will need to set up your own MQTT broker. Node-red has MQTT broker called Aedes which is installed as a node

See Install and run Aedes on Node-Red

For home automation using the Aedes broker works perfectly fine and doesn’t involve any other software.

However if you prefer to use mosquitto you can also install it on the Pi.

How to Install Mosquitto on The Raspberry Pi

Monitoring Your Network

Home Automation

Smart Home Simulator

In order to generate test data and a control dashboard I have created a smart home simulator in node-red which currently consists of :

  • sensor simulators
  • Control dashboard

You can read more about it and download the node-red flows- Smart home simulator

Question

Do you have any project suggestions I would be glad to hear them. Please use the comments form below.

2 comments

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