Home Automation, part 6: Leaving and Arriving home routine via NodeRed

Context

Following my previous posts about my automation flows and my night and morning routines, in this post, I want to describe the two simple routines I have in place for when I leave my place or when I come back.

It is basically about managing devices and alarms when I leave or come back home.

The involved devices are:

• A raspberry pi 0W with a fisheye camera pointing at the door entry running

motion;

• Telegram on my phone;
• A z-wave door sensor;
• My homelab cluster with NodeRed, Domoticz and Mosquitto;

Nota: More devices will be used for the next post explaining all alarms in place.

Routine description:

Leaving Routine

When leaving my apartment, the following scenario runs: - Wait 30s and: - Switch off lights and TV (if on); - Stop kodi media server and the multi room music system if playing; - Switch off the piscreen display. - Wait 5min and: - Start entry door camera (motion); - Set “Away” mode (for alarms); - Send “good by” notification.

The NodeRed flow looks like this:

Figure 1: NodeRed leaving flow

I will describe in the next post the alarms themselves in place and how they work so I won’t say much here except that NodeRed will send via MQTT a message. A custom python script run on the raspberry pi 0W with motion listen to this specific topic. Depending on the message, the script will start/stop motion and the camera. Stay tuned for more details.

You can read the part 4 for details on managing the devices.

5min later, I will receive a message on Telegram if everything went well saying «Away mode activated! See you soon :)».

Starting the “leaving routine”

I used to have a Bluetooth beacon to detect if I was home or not but it died. Since then, I have a more manual process. When leaving the house, I have multiple options to start the “leaving home” scenario: - On the touch piscreen, I can start the “leaving home” scenario (see this post for a screenshot of the dashboard); - By clicking on my “exit button” near the entry door. Unfortunately, this is the only unreliable z-wave device I have so I don’t really use it as it doesn’t work most of the time¹; - By clicking on the right button that my multi button remote control; - By sending a Telegram command (Allow me to enable it whenever I want).

Arriving Routine

When arriving home, the following is done: - Switching off the entry camera (stopping motion); - Switch on piscreen display; - Send me a welcome message on telegram (just to make sure that if anyone else know how to stop the alerts by saying I’m home, I still receive something on telegram); - Change house mode from “away” to “home”;

The NodeRed flow looks like this:

Figure 2: NodeRed home flow

Again, on the next post I’ll talk about the different alerts mechanism in more details. But same as above, a message is sent via MQTT so that the motion service is stopped.

Starting the “arrived home routine”

As said above, I do not have Bluetooth detection anymore to see if I’m home or not. To start this scenario, I can: - Click on a specific button of the remote control; - Send a telegram message (eg: when in the elevator); - Wait for the alert and indicate I’m home (read below).

The 3rd option is the one I’m using the most because when I get back home without starting the home routine ahead (which I never do since I don’t do Bluetooth detection), it will starts an alert (because door has been opened while “away mode” activated, and because the entry door camera will detect motions).

Again, I will explain in details the alarm/alerts in place, but what you need to know here is that when the entry door is opened while in “away” mode, I will receive a message via telegram asking « Stop Alert », « Real Alert », « I am Home ».

More details later, but clicking on « I am Home » will simply start the “arriving home” scenario.

Figure 3: Telegram Door Alert

So when I arrive home, I usually use this.