Lately I’ve been in an automation spree around the house. Since COVID-19 we’ve been working from home and spending most of our time indoors, so it makes sense that all the projects we had gathering dust are becoming important again.
In future posts I’ll talk more about what I’m using to drive my IoT devices, but the core of it all is a Home Assistant instance running inside my FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) server, in a Virtual Machine with Home Assistant Operating System.
This gives me access to the official Add-on Store and runs everything seamlessly, without fear of breaking everything up on an upgrade.
I’ve got a few wall switches, some plugs, LED strips and bulbs… everything running the latest Tasmota. Tasmota is an Open Source firmware that can be installed on almost all Chinese IoT devices that are running inside an ESP8266 (think of it like an Arduino with integrated WiFi).
Tasmota works great, and in latest version it integrates directly with Home Assistant. Older versions needed an MQTT server to broker messages to and from the devices. If you’ve never used MQTT you’ll find it similar to an email inbox and outbox, where your device sends messages to Home Assistant (ie: I turned myself on) and Home Assistant leaves messages for your device (ie: Turn yourself on).
Home Assistant integrates with MQTT as a way to communicate with a lot of stuff, not only with Tasmota devices, but with basically anything that can send messages in a format HA understands.
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