home-automated, low cost setups: PRESENTATION & DISCUSSIONS

hi @Weedweasle appreciate your comments, thx

haven't sorted out the CAT cable problem yet
I will come back to this later on here in the thread have replied over there to your post but would like to continue here please

the cat cable issue had not the first priority, but I would be glad to discuss and try out your input later.

 

here the missing info/pics from inside the tent

as written I was looking for a mid-height-frameing but didn't find anything that fit out of the box
I am by no means a cheap guy, yeah I like DIY, sustainability, repairing things instead of throwing them away and buying new
but when a non 100% fitting solution will cost 1/4 of the whole tent and yet has to be modified to fit, than I am a cheap guy
so I bought these wall fitting clamps to attach tubes to for e.g. running cables inside, pack of 10 clamps for 2$
2x 140cm and 2x 70cm raw metal tube for 6$
8pcs of hardwood round 10cm long 1$

shortened the tubes to snugfit lengthwise between the 2 clamps
I glued the wooden round pieces into the tube and drilled a whole inside
big long screw though the clamp into the wooden inlet, bang
less than 10$ and superduper fitting frame, easy to snap in and out, easy to push up or down, good for preventing the tent to devrease in width-space because of underpressure, even perfect for a scrogging net as the bars can simply be pushed up and down to perfect height

con, I had no time to paint them so now they show rust, but when the grow is finished, I sand them, give them a layer of antirust color and a 2nd spray in white and they will look like as if they belonged to the tent by supplier

 

it is Home Assistant

???

 

so let's start with the automation and let me add a few words forehand

I had never contact with homeautomation at all, living for rent I didn't want to change shutters and plugs and switches and modifiy the whole appartment ... what if we move out, rebiuld to original state or hope the next one will pay for t when leaving all equipment
but I always was interested in homeautomation
the tent was the perfect little project to automate I thought, so I digged into it
keep in mind all my infos here are from a rookie and I will try to explain in my own naive words

basically homeautomation is an easy system that is based on 2 things
a trigger followed by an action ... later on rules conditions devices etc come into play but basically it is trigger/action
so let's start with the easiest device in the tent, e.g. the LED-light or even the canopy fan
normally they run on AC and are supplied with a plug to be stuck into the walls socket
that the canopy fan has a 3-point-switch OFF, Power1, Power2, or the LED ON, Dimmer, OFF
and to control the lightcycle most will use a timer device, plugged into the wall and the light/fan plug will go into the timer socket
the timer is either digital or analog, you set daytime ON, nighttime OFF ... bang done easy peasy cheap
yep, for a simple light or device to toggle twice a day, all fine but not really handy to change the lighcycle and especially when 5 devices have different ON/OFF toggles

well, instead of a timer between device-plug and wall-socket we use a relais, or in other words a switch
and this relais despite having a little button to switch it ON/OFF in place like a wall switch, it has an integrated wifi chip and a little microcontroller.

I looked around for the different devices relais, dimmer shutters etc and came across the fact that they all send data home to the manufacturers cloud server in order to have the desktop app or the smartphone app controlling the relais.
WTF ??? why shall chinese gov now when my growtents light go out?
on top you are always limited to the manufacturer as it is a closed proprietary programming system, new feature, updates ... all depening on the manufacturer

so when looking for self-hosted solutions I came across Tasmota
Tasmota Documentation - Tasmota
and after some more evaluation I order sonoff devices 3 relais and 1 relais with RH temp sensor to start off with

7.24US $ 42% OFF|SONOFF Basic R2 Smart Home WiFi Wireless Switch Wifi Breaker Module Work With Amozon Alexa And Google Home EWeLink Itead SONOFF|Home Automation Modules| - AliExpress

11.06US $ 40% OFF|ITEAD Sonoff TH10 TH16 WIFI 10A 16A Smart Switch Temperature Humidity Sensor Wifi Remote Control For Smart Home Automation Modul|Home Automation Modules| - AliExpress

2bContinued

 

wclm @TallCotton

 

when the devices arrived I started to explore thee beginning with the sonoff basic R2 switch
https://sonoff.tech/product/diy-smart-switch/basicr2/



I attached a plug with 3 wires to the bottom part in the image (when removing the 2 screws the cap will come off and show 3 little screwed wire sockets) so it is just pushing cable in and fixing with the screw 3x and close the lid
same on the top side, where I attached a socket on the wire

I plugged it into the wall, the little lamp starte flashing and it made CLICK
on the other side I plugged in a table lamp and with the little black button on the front of the sonoff I could switch the lamp on off
first milestone done, the thingy seems to work at least manual

next it is getting a little technical as we have to flash the tasmota firmware onto the device
the process is well described, plug and play and all ya need is a PC, a little 2.5$ usb adapter with 4 dupont cables (female/female) and a chrome browser, the whole process takes only a few minutes and needs to be done only ONCE per device
one time the tasmota FW is flashed to the device, all other things can be done wireless OTA (over the air)

if ya have questions on flashing devices with the tasmota FW do not hesitate to ask, but it is worth to follow the steps in the docu and there is tons of videos on YT plus a superduper english discord channel for quick and direct help
Getting Started - Tasmota

once the FW is flashed to the device and it is detached from PC and the big cover closed again simply plug the thingy back into the wall AC and open your wifi network manager on the PC and you will see a new unsecured wifi network called tasmota-XXXXXXXXXX
simply try to connect to it without user pwd or whatever
a browser window will popup and ask you to put in YOUR wifi credentials like the ssid of your network or the IP address of the router and the wifi password
make sure router DHCP is enabled you can switch it off later again
after filling in your wifi credentials simply press submit and lay back and wait
the device will stop exposing it's own network, try to connect to your network and when you allow new devices in your router and have DHCP enabled, than the relais will connect to your network, show the assigned IP it has received and close that popup ... DONE

now you either remembered the IP address or look into your router device list for the IP
call this IP in your browser and you will get this



it will display different headlines but it shows the state of the relais and when you press the toggle it switches the table lamp ON/OFF
controlled from your PC or any other device tablet smartphone that is part of your wifi network and has a browser
call the IP and control the relais for the lamp from the browser window!

another milestone to home automation !!!

 

impressed how easy it was to flash the little sonoff basic R2 I immediately flashed the second device
https://sonoff.tech/product/diy-smart-switch/th10-th16/
basically the same device and formfactor but with a little socket to plug in the external RH/TEMP sensor

and again calling the ip address assigned by the DHCP of the router I got this

again a toggle to switch the relais ON/OFF plus the temp RH and dew point of the sensor

yeeeehahhh ... from now on I can check temp and RH directly from my mac at the desktop ... oh did I mention I work at home and sit on the mac anyway all day

now I had 4 switches + the temp RH sensor, monitoring and switching ... fine but next step would be to replace the analog timers I had in use. quite easy. configuration, configure timer and the rest I didn't need any docu, it is self explaining



haveing the switches still on the table with the lamp attached, I tried and played around and yes ...
15 timers with different settings and options like the weekdays on bottom or repeating options a more sophisticated timer than the analog ones and all for a few dollars, often lot less than a single digital wall-plug-in-timer

time to install it so I quickly drove to the next wally you would say LOL and bought some cables plugs and sockets
an old wooden board and a pole and I ended up with this in the pooper-cab

replacing top image cables and 2 analog timers with the board in 2nd image

 

haha @Dr M calling me a techie and you old dude have been the road way back in time ... coolio

yep it is incredibly cheap and easy to run home automation on a wifi network
although I would never use that for e.g. security automation if it was my home, like fingerprint or iris scan to access doors even for window shutters I do not think wifi is a secure way, but for all other things it is damn cheap and easy as most have an existing wifi network at home running anyway, and we all have smart devices and laptops tablets desktops already so the step to automate the grow step by step was clear near and easy and a good project to learn

keeping power of from water is always a good idea LOL, although I have only the canopy fan and led panel on AC the rest runs on DC
fully powered the tent costs me round about 20$ per month
if it brings 6-10 oz at the street price here that is less than 1/10 per gram what a grow costs me in total including soil nutes all
and that is ok with me for my personal use

 

fine so now I had basically the same setup in the pooper-cab despite that I had 4 timer devices vs the 2 analog ones before and I had temp and RH as well and all on my desktop
BUUUT ... those devices at that time didn't communicate with each other
each of them has his on web interface and timer settings and despite the TH16 with the sensors, rules and basic automations where limited to timers ... I started to explore the tasmota webUI and the options and ways to configure
with trial and error, test and monitor and adjusting the toggleing of e.g. exhaust ON/OFF or canopy fan ON/OFF I managed to have quite a steady temp and RH for day and night time, but yet it was each device on it's own
like extending the lightcycle from 18/6 to 20/4 ment changing timers on each device individually, so knid of pushing pins up and down on the analog timer wheels, only bit more comfortable at the desktop but that couldn't be the end of the game
and again the tasmota documentation brought me to mqtt and IO broker software all terms at that time that where absolutely terra incognita for me, but the tasmota docu made it easy to understand what the next steps will be and offered several options
I decided to go for home assistant as it promised a lot of possibilities w/o programming knowledge, and haven't regretted it yet

Home Assistant

stay tuned for the next step, from single tasmota devices to the dashboard control center with history graphs and monitoring, webcams and growlog

 

mqtt and IO broker ... the final step

we all know, at least from the movies, those villas where they come to the gate with the ferrari and 100yds before it slowly starts opening by the time the ferrari has passed the gate closes and the garage opens
inside the whose there is all these tablets hanging around and laying on tables and they steer everything even with voice control or clapping their hands, all this is naive spoken IO, input output, trigger action

with our devices and the webUIs standalone we cannot achieve this, so this is where HomeAssistant (HASS) or any other IObroker SW come into play. HASS is what I chose for several reasons. easy install, learning curve moderate, capable of many devices on the market out of the box, flexible and versatile, free and community driven, well documented and supported

what we need is a computer that will serve as HASS server so to speak
I had an old spare macmini around and fiddled installing ubuntu linux and than a virtual machine and inside that virtual machine I run HASS server ... way to complicated for 95% of the users I think, but hey there is an easy peasy way
so why didn't I chose that way, well I had the mini already and in the end it was not sooooo complicated with some comuter knowledge
but here the dummy-proofed way

a raspberry Pi will do, download HASS software to PC, download an image making program, start that program and ... step 1 chose the HASS software just downloaded, next chose the traget - SD card in USB adapter, next click create
when it is finished stick the SD card in the raspberry Pi and boot it, bang HASS server installed, just call the IP of the raspberry in the browser followed by colon port like http://homeassistant:8123/ or http://<IP>:8123/ and bang all setup and running
well documented on the HASS website and if ya have questions ... correct feel free to ask

so know we end up with an empty dashboard ready to be populated with whatever we want in whatever design desired
Getting Started
and again a discord channel for nice quick direct community help

 

unfortunately not

 

I have stopped here as it seemed nobody interested really
meanwhile I have automated my RH control
I set a kpa for VPD and according to the actual temperature the RH is calculated and set as target value, which than is the trigger for the humidifer to keep RH in sync with temp