HOME (away) Automation

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I've been tinkering with smart devices before but when expanding my cabin automation system I ran into trouble with functionality. By invoking even smarter sofware solutions I found a workaround.

At home, I quickly realised that I would need a Philips Hue bridge in order to have full functionality of my bulbs, led strips and smart plugs. Spotify integration and even control from my LGB1 OLED TV was not possible through bluetooth control. 

At the cabin, with one bulb and one smart plug, bluetooth control had worked nicely so far. I then got the idea that I wanted to have the outdoor lighting be controlled by suset/sunrise. The cumbersume setup for bluetooth devices was cumbersome as ever: I. used about four hours for four bulbs, but finally they were all discovered by Google Home.

There is a known bug in Google Home that "Routines" are missing from iOS apps.  This can be fixed by changing the language of your Apple device to US English. This restored the functionality and lightbulbs could be turned off at surise and back on at sunset. There was only one problem: the bluetooth range was not good enough to cover all bulbs: only about half of them would respond to the given command.

The obvious solution was to install a Hue bridge but here the problems started. For Google Home control "Out of home control" needs to be enabled. Philips app does unfortunately not allow two bridges to be connected to the same account. You can use two accounts in the app but the problem arises when you want external control in Google Home: Google Home can only be linked to one of the accounts!

Setting up two accounts for Google Home is possible, but the switching between accounts is not very practical when it comes to functionality.

I thought a lot about solving this issue and read up on some home automation software that could solve this issue.  I eventually discovered openHAB. I quickly set up a server on my ubuntu laptop (quickly is an overstatement because the java installation requirements were a bit tedious) and discovered that the Hue implementation was excellent with autodiscovery of devices once the Hue bridge was configured. By installing myopenhab.org cloud services and setting Google Automation ("ga") metadata tags for the devices, they were autodiscovered by Google Home.

Another bonus I discovered was that openHAB works seamlessly with Netatmo. Though Netatmo API access to all data is avaliable and can be plotted in openHAB dashboards. So far I have not been able to display Netatmo temperature data in the Google Home app. If somebody knows how to do this, I would like to know. The icons pop up when metatagged as "Temperature Sensor" but they show no actual data.






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