The goal of simple smart home project is to make inexpensive, accessible, secure, reliable, customizable, extendable, easy to install and good-looking smart home devices.
- Inexpensive. Better yet cheap. Currently available mass market devices make it cost-prohibitive to build a complete smart home solution. By making a lot of cheap devices it is possible to make everything a smart device.
- Accessible. Making these devices should require minimal skills, so it can be accomplished by as many people as possible. Maybe it could act as a gateway to a new hobby, which is always great.
- Secure. With your home being controlled by smart devices it is important to have a secure system. Home Assistant platform allows to make everything locally controlled, which means there are no 3rd party clouds, servers, accounts involved. If set up correctly, there’s nothing to breach, nothing to leak, nothing to hack.
- Reliable. No one wants to have a device that works half the time, or doesn’t work in certain situations. All devices in this guide were designed to serve their core function even if Wi-Fi or server dies.
- Customizable. I like to be in control of how my devices work. I want to choose when the LED turns on or off, I want to choose what long or double press does.
- Extendable. Having a smart device is good, but being able to make it do more things is better, and being able to do it as you need is the best.
- Easy to install. Every commercially available smart switch I’ve seen was bulky, hence hard to fit in non-empty electrical box. Maybe even impossible to fit in smaller boxes. My design is very compact and leaves a lot of space for wires. And connected 2-gang switches make it super easy to fit the cover on.
- Good-looking. For me it is important for my creations to be perfect: I will use them daily and I want to enjoy the experience. Wife-approval factor is also a thing.
With the goals defined it is time to start the project.