I built this custom night light for my kids as a fun little project. It’s pretty easy so thought someone else might be inspired to do something similar.
The core hardware is just an ESP8266 module and an Adafruit NeoPixel Ring. I also bought a 240V bunker light and took the guts out to use as the housing, as it looked nice and had a diffuser (you could pick anything that you like).
Continue readingHaving built the core of my own “dumb” smart home system, I have been working on making it smart these past few years. As I’ve written about previously, the smart side of my home automation is managed by Home Assistant, which is an amazing, privacy focused open source platform. I’ve previously posted about running Home Assistant in Docker and in Podman.
I do have a couple of proprietary home automation products, including LIFX globes and Google Home. However, the vast majority of my home automation devices are ESP modules running open source firmware which connect to MQTT as the central protocol. I’ve built a number of sensors and lights and been working on making my light switches smart (more on that in a later blog post).
I already had experience with Arduino, so I started experimenting with this and it worked quite well. I then had a play with Micropython and really enjoyed it, but then I came across ESPHome and it blew me away. I have since migrated most of my devices to ESPHome.
ESPHome is smart in making use of PlatformIO underneath, but its beauty lies in the way it abstracts away the complexities of programming for embedded devices. In fact, no programming is necessary! You simply have to define your devices in YAML and run a single command to compile the firmware blob and flash a device. Loops, initialising and managing multiple inputs and outputs, reading and writing to I/O, PWM, functions and callbacks, connecting to WiFi and MQTT, hosting an AP, logging and more is taken care of for you. Once up, the devices support mDNS and unencrypted over the air updates (which is fine for my local network). It supports both Home Assistant API and MQTT (over TLS for ESP8266) as well as lots of common components. There is even an addon for Home Assistant if you prefer using a graphical interface, but I like to do things on the command line.
When combined with Home Assistant, new devices are automatically discovered and appear in the web interface. When using MQTT, the channels are set with retain flag, so that the devices themselves and their last known states are not lost on reboots (you can disable this for testing).
That’s a lot of things you get for just a little bit of YAML!
Continue readingmDNS, or multicast DNS, is a way to discover devices on your network at .local domain without any central DNS configuration (also known as ZeroConf and Bonjour, etc). Fedora Magazine has a good article on setting it up in Fedora, which I won’t repeat here.
If you’re like me, you’re using OpenWRT with multiple VLANs to separate networks. In my case this includes my home automation (HA) network (VLAN 2) from my regular trusted LAN (VLAN 1). Various untrusted home automation products, as well as my own devices, go into the HA network (more on that in a later post).
In my setup, my OpenWRT router acts as my central router, connecting each of my networks and controlling access. My LAN can access everything in my HA network, but generally only establish related TCP traffic is allowed back from HA to LAN. There are some exceptions though, for example my Pi-hole DNS servers which are accessible from all networks, but otherwise that’s the general setup.
With IPv4, mDNS communicates by sending IP multicast UDP packets to 224.0.0.251 with source and destination ports both using 5353. In order to receive requests and responses, your devices need to be running an mDNS service and also allow incoming UDP traffic on port 5353.
As multicast is local only, mDNS doesn’t work natively across routed networks. Therefore, this prevents me from easily talking to my various HA devices from my LAN. In order to support mDNS across routed networks, you need a proxy in the middle to transparently send requests and responses back and forward. There are a few different options for a proxy, such as igmpproxy, but i prefer to use the standard Avahi server on my OpenWRT router.