Home Automation

 In my initial investigation with the Google Nest Mini I was able to control RGB lightbulb, smart switches and, to some extent the TV.
I want to expand the scope to more devices and also make the control somewhat more sophisticated.  Intelligent controls form the basis of Home Automation which builds on top of basic device control.  An initial look at the field gives us IFTTT and Home Assistant as interesting possibilities.

IFTTT

IFTTT stands for If This Then That.  Automation is based on actions (THAT) which are triggered by an event (THIS).   For example:  whenever you publish a new blogger post you could alert your twitter followers.

For my demo I chose an IFTTT button widget as my trigger (THIS) and creation of an item in my Google Task list "Jobs" when the button is pressed.  Once I enabled the widget I could use a button on my iPad to add an item to the joblist.  In practice it isn't much use, but it gave me an idea of what to do.

Unfortunately, after that I didn't make much progress.   IFTTT could not control either of the devices I already have working: Smart Life (RGB Bulb) actions aren't supported and ewelink (for wifi switches) requires a $10 pa subscription to enable control.  As these devices already work on Google Home I felt it didn't offer me anything extra.

Home Assistant

Home Assistant (HA) looked promising but it is difficult to tell until you try it.  It was suggested by Clemens Valens at Elektor because it supports ESPHome, a Home Automation offering for ESP8266/ESP32,  It apparently supports Google Assistant and probably sonoff.

HA  recommend installation on a dedicated RPI4, which implies it is a serious meaty product.  They provide a suitable, up to date 64-bit image, which is pre-configured for everything you need.  When you burn your image to SD card and start up your server you can access the home page through a browser at http://homeassistant.local:8123.  Wonderfully easy.

HA does its best to help you by discovering local network devices it can work with automatically.  

After the excitement of installation I struggled somewhat to use HA.  There is a dashboard showing all the things you can do, initially it just showed me what the weather is and what my name is :(.  I found a couple of good youtube videos from JuanMTech and TheHookup to give me ideas on what to configure but nothing specific I could use.

I need to get something more interesting, ideally something useful, for example the ability to control the devices I have.
I was pleased to find that the Arris TG2492 router which was auto-discovered is my Virgin Media Superhub.  Clicking 'Configure' on the entry causes HA to go off to configure it in to the system and adds the results to the dashboard.  There are a number of router statistics that you can look at, for example the network traffic over the past couple of days:

This is good, I am happy my new HA server can actually do something real.  I still feel a million miles from being able to conntrol it but I have made a start, the community who put it together have done a grand job making it useable and it has some excellent documentation.  I will add more in my next HA post.