As a domotica enthousiast a domotica hub is a must. This is due to all the ‘standards’ that are used that do not communicatie with each other. There is Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc, etc. A pain in the butt if you ask me. Guess that’s just the way these things work (or don’t work actually).
But here come the domotica-hubs and all the various protocols just suddenly talk with each other. Because the domotica-hub is the universal translator so to speak (pun intended).
There are a few hubs you can choose from and some good ones are even free. Just install them on a computer and plug them into your home network. One of the first hubs I tried is Domoticz. Simply running on a Raspberry Pi. Totally free, super easy to install.
Just get a freshly installed Raspberry with a fully updated Raspbian connected to your home network and the Internet and run the following command.
sudo curl -L install.domoticz.com | bash
Now you have your own domotica hub.
Just start a webbrowser and connect to the Domoticz installation using the IP address of your Pi. My Pi for example uses 192.168.2.23
http://192.168.2.23:8080
And voila! All that is left to do is configure your various devices and you are done. Okay, there are better solutions that are also running on a Raspberry Pi, but as I said this was my first experiment regarding the domotica hub software extravaganza.
Adding devices is done by these three steps.
First go to the Setup menu (upper right of the screen) and choose Hardware
The first drop down menu you see is called Type. Here you must choose the device your want to add. For example Netatmo.
Click Add and go back to the Setup menu. Now choose Devices.
If the device you’ve added under Hardware has more than one function or several attached other devices they will probably all show up here. In my case I use multiple Netatmo devices such as indoor temp, outdoor temp, rain, wind, and so on. They all show up in the Devices menu.
By clicking on the green dot with the white arrow of each device I can actually add them to my Domoticz server. After which I can use them from the various other menu options (Temperature, Weather, etc.).
Just go through all of the other menu options to see if a device is added. Once you have found one you can click on the little star icon in the bottom left corner of each device to make them a favourite and they will be added to your Dashboard.
Do this for all your other domotica devices if you wish. Add your Hue lights, Logitech Harmony remote, Nest thermostats, what ever is presented in the Type dropdown menu.
This is just the basic setup. If you look in the Setup menu you will find more advanced options to automate and even script all of the devices triggers and values into a complete automation Walhalla. But that is for another post…
featured image source: techpulse.be