Introduction

Recently I have brought and moved into my first home and have decided to dabble in the world of home automation.

This blog is mainly for me to have one single place to store my thoughts and findings, there is nothing worse than fixing a problem for it to happen again in a couple of days/weeks/months/years and having no idea what the specific commands you need to use are. Hopefully this will also help others who might be in a similar position to myself.

I am a technically minded person but without any taught programming knowledge. For years I have been messing around with arduino code that I have found on the Internet, cutting and pasting/butchering to get something that works resonably at the end.

I have decided that I will be using openHAB as the central server as I like that it is fully opensource and it supports lots of different protocols.

I am not currently interested in any of the shop brought products (as I feel that they currently are still far too expensive to buy) but by openHAB supporting these it means that there will be a larger ‘customer’ base and it will be more likely to get updates and improvements and less likely to stop being supported.

While researching online I worked out my basic requirements were –

• Server to run openHAB
• a MQTT broker running on the server (Mosquitto)
• Devices scattered around the house to do different things