Preface
Home Automation has been a popular subject for numerous years and is progressively growing in fascination, primarily due to the active involvement and introduction of innovative product launchings by prominent market leaders. In the middle of the huge amount of solutions and products available, you, as a Home Automation enthusiast, will have multiple questions. How can I start to automate my home? Can I build my own system? How can I manage it?
This book will help you to answer this and many other questions you have related to Home Automation. The central piece of the Home Automation technology discussed in this book is Home Assistant. This customizable software will allow you to understand how to connect all the dots of Home Automation technology by creating and managing your own system. Depending on your level of knowledge and skills, you could even be able to create your own electronic hardware devices and develop automations to control your day-to-day tasks.
In this book, I share all my knowledge learned and consolidated over more than 20 years of experience in this area dealing with Home Automation as a hobby activity. All the examples in the book are real and implemented in my home, so you can imagine that writing this book was a very pleasant adventure for me. I tried to provide as practical a guide as possible so you can implement the examples in a very straightforward approach according to your needs and interest.
This book will support you in creating your own ecosystem to automate your home using Home Assistant software. It will explain the components of a Home Automation system and how to create, hack, and configure them to operate seamlessly. You’ll learn how to set up Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi to work as a Home Automation server. Using practical examples and three hands-on projects, you’ll create and install your own IoT sensors and actuators based on ESP32/ESP8266 and set up real-life automation use cases. Other software tools, such as Node-RED, InfluxDB, and Grafana, will help you to manage, present, and use data collected from your in-house devices. Finally, you’ll gain insights into new technologies and trends in the Home Automation space to help you continue with your learning journey.
As the author of this book, I want to clarify that the content included within the pages of this book represents a careful selection of relevant information based on my personal experiences. It is important to note that not all content pertaining to the Home Automation and Home Assistant subject could be covered comprehensively. Nevertheless, I have striven to provide valuable insights and perspectives that I believe will be beneficial to you.
After reading this book, you’ll be able to build your own creative Home Automation IoT- based system using different hardware and software technologies.
