I constantly have a question about what to do with the next smart home or the next automation, which sensor to buy or which device, and it seems that almost everything that can be done has already been done, there is Zigbee, there is Wi-Fi, there is Z-wave, there is a new Matter format, but in general, for all time I have already concluded that something new appears every year. Five years ago, when I started building a smart home, the sensors themselves, which can now be bought for 500 rubles, were very expensive and, accordingly, it was unclear which was better, to buy branded expensive sensors or to do the job myself, Moreover, even branded ones were mainly Xiaomi, Tuya were still not so developed and popular, and other sensors were generally unavailable.
As an option, of course, I first started doing everything on Arduino, I bought my first board and started buying the cheapest sensors, these are temperature and humidity sensors, I tried to do some automation on them, do some param...

Today I was reconfiguring the light in the bathroom again, I noticed that the light often stays on for various reasons when there are no people there, this is because I did not make it work on a timer, but I process events using sensors, these are door opening sensors and motion sensors, I have done So when the door opens, the opening sensor detects the signal and transmits it to the smart home system, and at that moment, if the light was turned off, it turns on, then when the door closes, no action occurs, and when the door is reopened, the signal is transmitted to the system again and it is checked if the light was on, then it turns off.
My goal was to make sure that when a person opens the door, there is no desire to turn on the light manually, if this happens very quickly, then after a while, of course, the desire to press the manual button disappears, since there is usually no point, or even worse, when the light turns on when the door is opened, but the person pushes by inertia ...

My multimedia server, which I use to play music, stopped responding. I made a multiroom system that allows you to play music on different speakers in different rooms. Initially, I planned to do this by analogy with Wi-Fi speakers, that is, not to transmit a signal via Bluetooth or wire, but simply have some kind of Wi-Fi device that can directly connect either to audio streaming or directly to some online stations or servers.
At first I tried to do this on a Raspberry, there is an audio output on it, this is a mini jack, and in principle, of course, they say that the sound is not very good and it is really quite bad, but if you listen to not very high-quality acoustics and do not turn the volume to the maximum on this output, then in principle there is not much interference and it is quite possible use it. I made it so that I just have a player running on this Raspberry, I use a player called MPD, this is an audio server that is installed on a MiniPD and then this server can either pl...

Today I was setting up geolocation on my phone, I use it to track the location of people in my smart home, that is, they are in my house or have gone out somewhere.
There are several different ways to assess whether someone is at home or not, you can use Wi-Fi. For example, if a person's phone is connected to Wi-Fi, then in principle it is clear that he is at home. Of course, there are cases when Wi-Fi is not turned on on the phone or forgotten, or on purpose, and then the system will of course not work properly.
It is very important to assess how many people are at home, who exactly is at home, and even more importantly, in order to understand who is at home or not at all, if there is no one at all, then it is advisable, of course, to put the entire smart home in the absence of people mode.
There are also tracking options, for example via Bluetooth or in some other way, for example, it is often suggested to use NFC to determine who is at home, but first of all it is very difficult and...

It is very often suggested to use a phone to control a smart home system, of course, this is a universal and convenient solution, it can either be some kind of application installed in the phone from the manufacturer, for example, there are such offers from Xiaomi, Tuya, and, accordingly, you can use these applications to control devices and configure scenarios, enable-turning off sockets and switches and different relays, watching different sensors, and in principle it is also quite convenient, but the limitation is that for each device, for each ecosystem, you will need to use your own application., which usually, of course, not friendly, you can use any aggregators, for this you can use either Yandex, or Apple, or Google, of course, it is possible to connect different devices in different ecosystems and to try to do something. Well, for example, in my opinion, the most developed, of course, Yandex turns out that it is possible to write a script quite conveniently, and in principle t...

At first, I tried to make a device that works online, powered by 5 volts, but it quickly became clear that it was much more convenient to use battery-powered devices, of course there were quite a few devices on the market that could be bought, or they were very expensive, and I had to study what could be used to make these devices alternatively, in particular basically, I ended up using the attiny 85 microcontroller, there is a special version, which allows you to work with low consumption in sleep mode, this is the 20u version and on this version the sleep consumption of this microcontroller is only 4 microamps, so in the operating mode of this microcontroller there are about 4 milliamps and this is of course, for example, if I use a CR2450 battery, I chose it because it is bigger, it has a higher rated current, which it can give out, and this microcontroller can work in standby mode for 17 years, and if it works in continuous mode, it will certainly work for about 6 days, based on th...