mqtt

As part of my home automation series, I did write about a small interfacing library that I did write, called evok2mqtt. The purpose of this service is to translate between two different protocols: websockets, as exposed by evok and mqtt, which is the primary protocol I did use in communicating with home assistant. If you’d like to get more details about the setup itself, check the blog post series first. [Read More]

Up to this point, I did already lay out all of the tidbits concerning the electricity, the I/O hardware units, even some custom software to provide an event-based API to address all of the various components in the overall system. The final fundamental piece to bring everything together is what I call the service layer, and specifically home assistant. This post is a part of a larger series of posts on my home automation setup. [Read More]

After connecting everything on the different “physical” layers, it is time to have a look at how to connect all on the software side of things. This post shall describe my current setup, specifically the different software components and the protocols they rely on for the unipi hardware. This post is a part of a larger series of posts on my home automation setup. See the home automation overview post, to learn about the rationale and a description of the other posts! [Read More]

Prior to actually building anything, it is important to think on a higher level what the various components are and how they will interact with each other, i.e. the architecture. Over the process of doing my own setup, I came across a large number of different possible configurations, each with their own benefits and downsides. For the first part of this post, I will focus on the final layout. While discussing the architecture, it is important to realize there are a number of different layers of abstraction to reason about these. [Read More]

MQTT is a popular lightweight protocol for use in home automation. If features a central broker where each of the clients can communicate with in a pub / sub fashion. Since I’ve been toying around with some home automation setups, I was curious how to secure it with TLS. Mosquitto The most commonly used broker implementation I have come across is mosquitto and is quite straightforward to setup on most *nix flavors. [Read More]