Home Automation project

Amateur project to automate a few task in my home and communicate with some IoT devices. I used a mix of languages, frameworks and platforms. I will try to document as much as possible, but remember, this is an amateur project.

Global view

In order to interact together, devices communicates with each other through a MQTT server using a custom JSON-based protocol. Besides the devices, there are a few “modules” too, those modules are programs that consume the MQTT messages, perform actions based of information and allow human interaction (Web, App).

Devices on the left size of the image (rover, food, device x) are connected to through wifi or ethernet to the home network. Modules on the right (logger, api, database, dashboard) reside in an external server along with the MQTT server, but they could live in a Raspberry Pi or similar inside the home network.

Protocol

I decided to created my own protocol sinces I didn’t find any that suits my needs and was easy to use. The protocol is best described at the protocol section.

MQTT server

For the MQTT server I choose to use Mosquitto inside a Docker running on a external server.

Home (Logger + API)

Due to the nature of the database (Badger) and the amount of code shared between both of them, I decided to merge the logger and the API in one single service. Both are written in Go.

Logger

The logger just log almost all messages from the MQTT network and saves them in the database (devices, values, events) to be later consumed by the API or any other service.

API

It offer a simple API to access the information of the devices, sensors and events on the network. It also allows the user to send commands to the devices.

Database

For the database I choose to use Badger, Go-native key-value database.

Dashboard

The dashboar uses the API to consume the information off of the database and show some nice charts to the users (web, mobile app) and allow them to manually perform actions or request additional data.

Devices

Food-01

Food-01 is a rabbit automatic feeder. It dispenses food twice a day, small quantity on breakfast and a bigger one at dinner time. It communicates the status, if there was any problem during its operation. It accepts an user command to dispense extra food at any given time. It also sends temperature/humidity

Food-02

Food-02 is the evolution of the first prototype of rabbit automatic feeder. It has the same features as the previous version while including some improvements and being more robust in ddesign.