Schinckel.net

HomeKit is Apple’s home automation software, and it’s pretty nice. It is local by default, although it can be configured to allow access from outside your home network, it does so in a way that does not store all of your data on an external server. Instead, the hub (an AppleTV, iPad or HomePod that lives in your house) can be contacted by your iOS or macOS device, and interact that way.

I’ve been playing around with the ESP8266 microcontroller, and whilst you could put a complete HomeKit Automation Protocol client on there, it’s probably going to run too slow to be useful. Instead, I’ve written an MQTT to HomeKit bridge, and just have simple devices that send data to the local MQTT broker.

I’ve even set up a different wireless network, just for those devices. They cannot connect to the outside internet, only to the MQTT broker (which is then in turn able to connect to the HomeKit hub). That can comfortably run on a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

The story for writing custom firmware for the IoT devices is a bit more complex. I started out with MicroPython, and then (after running into problems with devices stopping and requiring a reset), moved to an Arduino approach. Following that (and after meeting the author of MicroPython), I went back to that. But, as I thought more about it, there were a bunch of features that I wanted to implement, and my deployment processes were somewhat awkward.

I’d looked at the various packaged firmware: Espurna, and Tasmota in particular. All of these have a bunch of people using them (which is good, because then I don’t have to reimplement everything). But all of them were not quite able to do what I wanted, which was just send messages to a specific MQTT topic (and perhaps listen on that one too).

Then I came across ESPHome. This enables you to use YAML to define a device and it’s services, and is far more flexible than the prepackaged firmware. You can run the build tool in docker, which compartmentalises it and means you don’t have to worry about maintaining an installation of the tool. And, it can do OTA updates, as well as provide access to logs over Wifi!

So, now, I can have a really nice workflow for building and deploying firmware.

esphome:
  name: temperature_01
  platform: ESP8266
  board: nodemcuv2

wifi:
  ssid: "SSID"
  password: "PASSWORD"

# Enable logging
logger:

ota:

i2c:
  - id: bus_a
    sda: D2
    scl: D1
    scan: True

sensor:
  - platform: bmp280
    i2c_id: bus_a
    address: 0x76
    temperature:
      name: "Temperature 1"
      state_topic: HomeKit/temperature_01/TemperatureSensor/CurrentTemperature
    pressure:
      name: "Inverter pressure 1"
  - platform: wifi_signal
    name: "WiFi signal sensor"
    update_interval: 60s

mqtt:
  broker: "mqtt.lan"
  discovery: false
  topic_prefix: esphome/temperature_01

In addition to this, I came across the tuya-convert package, and Mirabella Wifi Bulbs, which are $15 at K-mart, so now I have a couple of those. Although, I am still not happy with not being able to have the smarts at the switch, but since I don’t have neutral wires in the switch, that’s a problem.