Smart home center with the Raspberry Pi
In this tutorial you will learn how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a smart home center in just a few steps.
January 9, 2021
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Here you can find my articles in an order that you can work through them. The articles build on each other.
The Rasberry Pi has more or less established itself as a single-board computer. At around 40 € it is quite inexpensive and you can find a lot of accessories and tutorials on the Internet. Therefore, it is ideal as an inexpensive smart home center.
In this tutorial you will learn how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a smart home center in just a few steps.
Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash Log files make life a lot easier because they make debugging possible. It is therefore all the more important to regularly evaluate these files. But let's be honest, nobody will do that with a small IoT device.
MicroPython is an implementation of Python 3 that runs on microcontrollers such as the ESP32. It offers a REPL (Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop) that can be used to communicate with the microcontroller via the serial port or a web interface (WebREPL). There is even a package manager. How to use all of this, I explain here.
MicroPython is a lean and efficient implementation of Python 3 that is optimized to run on microcontrollers. In my experience, it massively accelerates and simplifies the development process. You can find out how to install it on the ESP32 in this tutorial.
A weather station is the perfect project to get into the subject of "measuring". In this tutorial I show how to measure with an ESP32 and some sensors and send the data to a central Raspberry Pi via MQTT.
The control of my heating is getting on in years and before it fails completely, I thought I would build my own control that I can maintain and repair myself. Sure, you could buy a ready-made controller, but where's the fun in that?
In these step-by-step instructions you will find out how I implemented a control for my heating with an ESP32. All plans and source codes are freely available.
In the first part of the tutorial you will learn how to install MicroPython on the ESP32 and establish a WiFi connection.
In the second part, we set up a mini HTTP server through which we can configure the ESP32. We will only create one configuration page in this part, and at least two more in the further course.
In this part we will solder for the first time and read out the DS18B20 temperature sensors. We will also create the second configuration page through which we can assign the sensors to the measuring points.
In this part we will implement the control in a state machine. I will explain to you how my heater works and we will solder again to control the pump.
In this part you will find out how to control an LCD display with the ESP32 and how to display a menu on it. In this part we will solder for the last time.
In this part we will send the measurement data to a broker via MQTT. These can then be displayed later with io-Broker or Grafana.
Would you like to solder something yourself? Then here is a project proposal for you. A weather station with SolidCircuit HV3. You can integrate them into the smart home center described above.
A weather station is the perfect project to get into the subject of "measuring". In this tutorial I show how to measure with an ESP32 and some sensors and send the data to a central Raspberry Pi via MQTT.
Sometimes it is not bad at all if a smart home device has its own web interface. It is sometimes not that easy to configure a device when it only has an LED and a button. A web interface offers more flexibility. You can find out here how to set up an HTTP server with MicroPython on the ESP32.
One of the greatest advantages of the ESP32 is its built-in WiFi module. It has never been easier to give your IoT device access to the network or the Internet. In this tutorial you will find out what else is there that is worth knowing on this topic.
In the first part we set up a small HTTP server that could answer GET requests. With this we could configure our wifi. In this part we want to extend the HTTP server so that it can also process POST requests.
