2020-11-19, 03:33 PM
(2020-11-19, 01:32 PM)PieterO Wrote: Craig,
Realy interesting to read this story. Strange that no-one commented on this. My current house is totally operated by Home Assistant and now looking to replace my old instruments on my boat by using Openplotter. I choose Home Assistant because of the Wife Acceptance Factor and the fact that supports so many sensors and devices. You could see home Assistant as a great addon for OpenPlotter.
I would have though that more Geeks on Open plotter would have Home Assistant (or domoticz) in their houses.
One thing that you did not Highlight, but I will definitely use is. giving SIRI or Google voice commands. And Home assistant allows remote access over internet. So with remote acces you can have:
- Water leak alarm
- Intruder alarm
- Camera (CCTV) on the boat.
- Preheat the boat when you get there.
- Auto start motor to charge batteries
- And if you really go that far, remote control your boat
Hi,
It is and has been a steep learning curve to get so many different systems and protocols working together reliably.
I am setting up bilge monitoring and leak alarm with zwave sensor and I'm also currently working on a ESP32 bilge activation and duty cycle sensor. I'm using ESPHome to program the ESP with an optocoupler 24v to 3.3v to check when the float switch opens and for how long. Also a current sensor to validate if the bilge pump is actually running and not failed when the float switch is open. I'm working on adding a leak sensor to this ESP, so it will activate if the bilge pump fails and alarm everything to phone, siren and so on. Basically redundancy for the z-wave leak sensor.
I have cctv into HA via aarlo community adding, but the arlo cameras are unreliable to be honest and they do of the base station frequently. I'm considering wired poe cameras instead, but that's for another day.
Have a bunch of motion and door sensors that alarm when armed or outside of a geofence with our mobiles using the HA app. Works petty well and good notifications that automatically turn on lights and activate recording.
With the boat preheat, it's manual, found automation was av but unreliable did to figuring it the logic that you were heading home instead of leaving the office and going somewhere else. Have a Kabola diesel heater connected to a z-wave thermostat that can be remotely set to any desired temperature and reports current temp as well. Works a treat, set the temp and nice and warm when you get back.
I use Google Assistant for voice and expose the HA via Nabu Casa for voice integration, but find i hardly use it. The"good might" routine is useful though to turn everything off, set the cameras and alarm and thermostat to night mode all in one go though.
My thoughts at it would be really nice if there was an official HA integration for OpenPlotter, would make life easier. I moved the boat a couple of weeks ago and OpenCPN on the laptop with all the data from around the boat such as engine room temp and so on was useful for sure.
My thoughts are integration between so many products and protocols is still a couple of years away from being amazing in terms of reliability. Everything still needs a lot of nursing. For example, ran and apt-update on OpenPlotter a couple of months ago and it broke and needed to be restored from backup. Things like this shouldn't really happen these days IMHO. Software updates should be reliable and not break things. However, it's more of a hobby than anything, but trying to explain how things work is extremely complicated and it would be nice if I ever sell the boat that a novice can figure it out, but at the moment, that's not plausible.