Smart home setup advice

[Nutty_Death]

Figured this was the area to post this since there's no smart home section.

I'm rewiring a new house both electrical and putting in ethernet cables. Whilst doing this I want to consider how smart devices might smartbe integrated.

I'll have a nest thermostat, Chromecast into TVs and Chromecast audio's in a couple of rooms.

I would like to add a front door camera, toying between a doorbell or just a camera. An obvious choice might be a nest camera but I don't like that it'll constantly be rinsing my upload bandwidth. I do however like the thought of how this might integrate into Google home, but perhaps non nest cameras would work too?

I'd like a central way to control all this so the obvious choice again might be Google home with a nest home hub but I'm not sure how an IP camera or other devices might integrate with this. I'll mostly Obviously use my phone for casting.

Any thoughts or advice?

 

[Avalon]

I haven’t looked at Nest specifically, but surely to (insert whatever imaginary friend you prefer here) we live in a world where motion detection means your smart doorbell should only upload when something has triggered it? Ring Pro for example records locally till a trigger is detected and then uploads the clip/sends the notification.

 

[Semple]

Figured this was the area to post this since there's no smart home section.

I'm rewiring a new house both electrical and putting in ethernet cables. Whilst doing this I want to consider how smart devices might smartbe integrated.

I'll have a nest thermostat, Chromecast into TVs and Chromecast audio's in a couple of rooms.

I would like to add a front door camera, toying between a doorbell or just a camera. An obvious choice might be a nest camera but I don't like that it'll constantly be rinsing my upload bandwidth. I do however like the thought of how this might integrate into Google home, but perhaps non nest cameras would work too?

I'd like a central way to control all this so the obvious choice again might be Google home with a nest home hub but I'm not sure how an IP camera or other devices might integrate with this. I'll mostly Obviously use my phone for casting.

Any thoughts or advice?

I'm not quite sure what your question is?

The smart doorbells i believe come in two variants, electrical or battery, but both are wirelessly connected to the network.

You could go for a wireless nest cam integrated with other google home stuff, i think Nest cameras are quite pricey though, and are usually placed from an elevation rather than facing straight out from the door.

The problem you're facing is the same with all smart home integrations - having multiple components from different manufacturers all working together. If you're reasonably tech savvy, how about taking a look at Home Assistant or OpenHAB. These are open-source smart home hubs where you can control lots of different smart home components all from one application.

 

[Nutty_Death]

I haven’t looked at Nest specifically, but surely to (insert whatever imaginary friend you prefer here) we live in a world where motion detection means your smart doorbell should only upload when something has triggered it? Ring Pro for example records locally till a trigger is detected and then uploads the clip/sends the notification.

Yeah that would make sense but as far as I'm aware nest constantly uploads as it doesn't have any form of local storage.

 

[Nutty_Death]

I'm not quite sure what your question is?

The smart doorbells i believe come in two variants, electrical or battery, but both are wirelessly connected to the network.

You could go for a wireless nest cam integrated with other google home stuff, i think Nest cameras are quite pricey though, and are usually placed from an elevation rather than facing straight out from the door.

The problem you're facing is the same with all smart home integrations - having multiple components from different manufacturers all working together. If you're reasonably tech savvy, how about taking a look at Home Assistant or OpenHAB. These are open-source smart home hubs where you can control lots of different smart home components all from one application.

Thanks. I wasn't very clear

Basically I want to set this up but I'm unsure what route to go down. I feel like I'm leaning towards nest but I have issues with the cameras.
I want the system to be as integrated as possible.

I've looked into home assistant a little but but I'll try and find out more. Particularly how things such as Chromecast etc integrate into that.

 

[PaulCa]

If you have any engineering skills you can set stuff up yourself without having to buy into the proprietary cloud non-sense spyware. You can still later integrate with said cloud spyware/security holes/data breaches by making an integration layer.

And for security you will want a wired camera. A professional burgling your house will, these days, have a wifi jammer and will probably leave with any hard-disk they find. That's after they hack your camera to scope the joint out.

The integration protocols which are becoming somewhat standards are MQTT and IFTTT which work with Alexa and GoogleHome etc. I haven't tried using these yet, but at least there are some standards emerging from the lock-in approaches.

 

[Nutty_Death]

If you have any engineering skills you can set stuff up yourself without having to buy into the proprietary cloud non-sense spyware. You can still later integrate with said cloud spyware/security holes/data breaches by making an integration layer.

And for security you will want a wired camera. A professional burgling your house will, these days, have a wifi jammer and will probably leave with any hard-disk they find. That's after they hack your camera to scope the joint out.

The integration protocols which are becoming somewhat standards are MQTT and IFTTT which work with Alexa and GoogleHome etc. I haven't tried using these yet, but at least there are some standards emerging from the lock-in approaches.

I think for now I'm not going to go ott and buy a load of equipment.
Already running ethernet cable in my house so I'll just run some to where I may want Poe devices in the future.

Whatever I do I want it to be modular so I can swap parts out as things improve and hopefully become more integrated. I'm also comfortable enough setting things up myself but I also don't want something that requires constant tinkering and ends up being a time drain.

 

[PaulCa]

I think for now I'm not going to go ott and buy a load of equipment.
Already running ethernet cable in my house so I'll just run some to where I may want Poe devices in the future.

Whatever I do I want it to be modular so I can swap parts out as things improve and hopefully become more integrated. I'm also comfortable enough setting things up myself but I also don't want something that requires constant tinkering and ends up being a time drain.

I went fully DIYOW (Do it your own way). I am however a software engineer who has always had a dream of an automated home. For me, using an existing, commercial proprietary system is a no go. I don't want my automation to require the Internet or be bound to any external services or subscriptions. I want the ability to do the software myself.

This has led me to go down to the metal so to speak. While it sounds scary when you consider flashing micro-controllers with your own firmware and writing your own "hub" controller in Python, there is such a vibrant and active "Maker" community online and such great technologies available very cheaply that you can get some pretty cool stuff working with a few hours work.

I started with a Raspberry Pi and a few weather station sensors. However I then discovered the ESP8266 which is at the heart of so many commercial smart home devices. It's a chip about the size of your thumb nail which has about 10 times the power of an Arduino and a fully functional TCP/IP and Wifi stack. Literally code for a basic webserver comes "in the box" and all you need to do is change your Wifi SID and PSK and off you go. Put a sensor or two on it and drop it down the back of the sofa or clip it to the underside of a table/bench/shelf and you have a smart home probe.

Recently the ESP32 has become easily available, it has even more power than the 8266 but also has BLE 4 (Bluetooth low energy). This little device opens up so many options for "presence awareness" in a smart system. Consider a temperature probe clipped descretely to the back of your sofa which is sending it's termperature data over Wifi every 5 seconds, but in addition it provides a bluetooth service which you can pair your phone to. Of course having the room temp pinged to your phone every 5 seconds is not all that interesting, except that the little temp probe knows you are in the room (or in range of the bluetooth at least). It can now notice the control system with a probability of you being in that room. The stronger the signal the more likely.

You don't even need to "Frankenstein" up the hardware, if you look at https://www.itead.cc/ for example and do a bit of research you will find that a lot of their smart products actually run on ESP8266 or ESP8285 chips. They are also "hackable" to flash custom firmware or your own code. Most are just a relay controllers, but some have sensors. The do however keep one of the difficulties neat and tidy as they contain their own power supply. With ESPs dev boards you need a 5V USB power supply. So that's a mains powered, wifi enabled, relay controller with a temperature sensor. Perfect for switching your heating or lights/appliances on and off.

I choose to write my "hub" in python on the RPI. So far it's a datalogger with all the devices able to send data, updates or brand new data to it and it collates the data, timestamps it and makes it available to any other device that wants it. (Security is not a concern unless someone hacks my Wifi and they are welcome to know what temperature it is in my garage!). Other modules fetch this data and write it into datalogging archives for graphing, or displaying it on a LCD screen.

So far I have the following features:
* Bedroom temperature.
* Living room temperature.
* Garage temperature.
* Outdoor temperature, humidity, pressure.
* Solar panel volts, amps, power, battery volts, load demand.

I am just about to add a SOnOff Wifi switch to the heating and have code already written for running schedules based on the above data and time of day, day of week stuff.

I suppose one thing you will miss going this way is pretty UIs. Unless you make them yourself or manage to integrate your DIY stuff into a commercial system's UI, you are going to be stuck with ugly boring HTML pages. You also become responsible for the security when you want to access it remotely.
EDIT: Although, these seem almost too good to be true: https://www.itead.cc/7-0-nextion-in...-capacitive-touch-display-with-enclosure.html

 

[WJA96]

1. If you can cable it, cable it. Run a bare minimum of two cables into every room. Put 4 by the TV if you want to avoid a switch back there.
2. Consider putting in a two layers of access points. One for 802.11b and 802.11g and one for 802.11n and AC/AX. This is because the preamble on the early 802.11 standards seriously slow down the other traffic on an access point. I normally block all 802.11b but in some recent installs the customers have had 802.11b IoT devices and they ask for it to be turned back on. Then the moaned royally about the fact that the previously very snappy page load times had suddenly slowed up massively. So I now install a couple of AP-AC-LR units just for 802.11b and 802.11g.
3. Mount access points on the ceiling. Or use in-wall access points that cover rooms instead.
4. While you’re cabling up, run two cables to every corner of the attic. Then if you decide you want CCTV in future you just need to run a cable through the soffit and you’re live.
5. Bring everything back to a central patch panel. Some people don’t like the loft for this. I’ve never had any issues in the UK.
6. If you’re fully rewiring, make sure you have plenty of sockets where you terminate the patch panel because you’ll probably want at least one switch there, possibly two and maybe a router and rack-mount NAS or application server as well. And the electrician I work with is now putting 2 sockets in every room corner except the door, and 4-6 where the TV and audio will live.
7. If you like Sonos (or a Sonos type system), consider placing a power socket and RJ45 connection in locations where you might wall-mount a Sonos speaker - especially if you’re thinking about surround-sound at any point in the future.

 

[Nutty_Death]

Thanks, that's really useful.
I've planned out a very similar layout, just waiting for the electrical work to start before I get going.

Using euro modules with keystones, means I can connect my amps to ceiling speakers as well as RJ45 sockets on the same modules.
Like you said. 4 RJ45 sockets where there are TVs and 2 in all thr other rooms.
Currently the plan is to use 2 AP's.
Everything running to a patch panel in the attic.
Amazingly the 300m of ethernet I have might not be enough.

I like you're idea of electrical sockets in each corner and running some spare ethernet to corners of house