Home Automation Using Node-Red

Most smart home devices come with access to a cloud based dashboard/control panel for monitoring and controlling the device.

These control panels are often vendor specific and cannot be used for controlling other vendor devices.

There are a number of smart home dashboards like HomeAssistant that can be used with devices from multiple vendors.

However on this site I will concentrate on using Node-Red for my home control system and as my Smart Home Dashboard.

I will be developing several Dashboards to monitor and control my home network and smart home devices.

So if you want to take the DIY approach to building a home automation system then you might also want to give it a try.

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

• Monitoring Your Internet connection- Is it Up?
• Checking and Monitoring Your Internet Speed

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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