Home Automation using Free Software

Speaker: Abhas Abhinav

Track: Other

Type: Long talk (45 minutes)

Room: Kuthiran

Time: Sep 12 (Tue): 16:30

Duration: 0:45

Most off-the-shelf home automation hardware products run proprietary software. We usually purchase them for the additional convenience they might provide us.

However, its very possible to do control our lights, switches, networks, music and much more using Free Software exclusively.

As a part of this workshop, I will offer a practical hands-on demonstration of running a wide variety of devices that can be used in a typical home network using Free Software.

This includes:

  1. A home server using Yunohost & Home Assistant (on Debian)
  2. A wireless router using OpenWRT
  3. Off-the-shelf tube-lights flashed with free software firmware (Tasmota)
  4. Electrical switches with Tasmota & Espurna firmware
  5. Monitoring power consumption
  6. Building colourful lights using WLED
  7. Integrating self-hosted voice assistants like Mycroft with Home Assitant
  8. Integrating and bridging communications systems: Matrix, XMPP and more.

I will setup a network with all these hardware and walk the participants into how to integrate and use them.

My hope is that via this workshop some people will want to build such a “playground” for themselves. And that will encourage more activity into integrating these tools better with Debian so that they’re easier for others to use.

URLs