Most smart home devices come with access to a cloud based dashboard/control panel for monitoring and controlling the device.
These control panels are usually vendor specific and cannot be used for controlling other vendor devices.
There are a number of smart home dashboards line homeassistantthat can be used with devices from multiple vendors.
However on this site I will concentrate on using Node-Red as my Smart Home Dashboard and Control Panel.
I will be developing several Dashboards to monitor and control your home network and smart home devices.
Getting Started
Node Red is a flow based tool written in nodejs . It has a low memory footprint and runs on the the Raspberry Pi making it an ideal system for home automation projects.
Node-Red comes pre-installed on the raspberry Pi but you may need to upgrade it.
An install script is provided on the node-red site. Here are the instructions on the Raspberry Pi Site.
If you are new to Node-Red then I would recommend you take a look at this overview video.
I also provide tutorials and videos on my other site covering node-red basics like nodes, startup files etc. See Node-red-overview .
I will be creating tutorials, example flows and dashboards that will show you how to:
- Monitor Your Home Network and the Internet
- Automate your Home
If you have any questions then please use the Ask-steve page
Node-Red Basics
If you are unfamiliar with Node-red I would recommend that you visit my other site stevesnoderedguide and get familiar before you start these tutorials.
Monitoring Your Network
Home Automation
- Controlling the Tasmota Switch with Node-Red and MQTT
- Controlling the Tasmota Switch with Node-Red and HTTP.
- Home Automation Timer with Node-Red
- Using Zigbee2MQTT- A Beginners Guide
Smart Home Simulator
In order to generate test data and control dashboard I have create 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 tutorial suggestions I would be glad to hear them. Please use the comments form below.
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