Control Your Home with

Raspberry Pi

Koen Vervloesem

an Elektor Publication
LEARN DESIGN SHARE
● This is an Elektor Publication. Elektor is the media brand of
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© Elektor International Media BV 2020
First published in the United Kingdom 2020

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● ISBN 978-1-907920-94-3

● EISBN 978-3-89576-383-0

● EPUB 978-3-89576-382-3

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Images and logos used in this book are courtesy of Material Design Icons, Cisco, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation

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LEARN DESIGN SHARE
 Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Chapter 1 • Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.1 • What is home automation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.2 • Why use a Raspberry Pi as a home automation gateway? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.3 • The properties of a good home automation system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.3.1 • Secure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

1.3.2 • Modular . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

1.3.3 • Open-Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

1.3.4 • Self-sufficient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.4 • How to use this book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.5 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Chapter 2 • The Raspberry Pi as a home automation gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

2.1 • Which Raspberry Pi models are suitable for home automation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.2 • Requirements for a reliable home automation gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.3 • Installing Raspberry Pi OS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.4 • Setting up network connectivity with Ethernet or Wi-Fi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.4.1 • Ethernet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

2.4.2 • Wi-Fi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

2.4.3 • Setting a fixed IP address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

2.5 • Remote access using SSH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.5.1 • Enabling the SSH server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

2.5.2 • Connecting with the SSH client . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

2.6 • Basic setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.7 • The tmux terminal multiplexer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.7.1 • The basics of tmux: windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

2.7.2 • Working with tmux sessions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

2.7.3 • Seeing more at the same time with panes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

2.7.4 • Copying and pasting text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

2.8 • Python . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
2.8.1 • Virtual environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

2.8.2 • Package requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

2.9 • Docker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.9.1 • Installing Docker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

2.9.2 • Installing Docker Compose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

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2.9.3 • Creating a Docker Compose YAML file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.10 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Chapter 3 • Secure your home automation system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

3.1 • Some general computer security principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.2 • Isolate your home automation devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.2.1 • Physical isolation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

3.2.2 • VLANs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

3.2.3 • Firewalls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
3.3 • User management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.3.1 • Permissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

3.3.2 • Passwords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

3.3.3 • Lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.4 • Encryption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.4.1 • Your threat model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

3.4.2 • TLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

3.4.3 • Setting up your own CA with mkcert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

3.4.4 • Creating a CA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

3.4.5 • Creating and signing a certificate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

3.4.6 • Keeping your root CA key secure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

3.5 • Keeping your software up-to-date . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.5.1 • Update apt packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

3.5.2 • Update Docker images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

3.5.3 • Update pip packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

3.5.4 • Update manually installed packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

3.5.5 • Update your home automation devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

3.6 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Chapter 4 • MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

4.1 • What is MQTT? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.1.1 • Central intermediary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

4.1.2 • Hierarchical names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

4.1.3 • Using wildcards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

4.2 • Installing and configuring the Mosquitto MQTT broker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.2.1 • A basic Mosquitto setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

4.2.2 • Testing your setup with the Mosquitto clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

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4.2.3 • A secure Mosquitto setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

4.2.4 • Testing your secure setup with the Mosquitto clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

4.2.5 • Default options for Mosquitto clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

4.3 • Using graphical MQTT clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
4.3.1 • [Link] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

4.3.2 • MQTT Explorer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

4.4 • Using MQTT in Python . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
4.5 • Direct communication between other containers and Mosquitto . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
4.6 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Chapter 5 • TCP/IP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

5.1 • Wake other network devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
5.2 • Remote control with SSH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
5.2.1 Run commands on other devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

5.2.2 • Secure passwordless logins using SSH keys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

5.3 • Collecting information from devices using SNMP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
5.3.1 • Walking through the MIB tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

5.3.2 • Collecting your router's version using SNMP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

5.3.3 • Collecting your printer's ink levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

5.4 • Using devices with a HTTP/REST API . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
5.4.1 • Setting up a Shelly device for secure remote control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

5.4.2 • Using Shelly's HTTP API with curl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

5.4.3 • Using the HTTP API in Python . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

5.5 • Creating a video surveillance system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5.5.1 • Turn your Raspberry Pi into an IP camera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

5.5.2 • Turn your Raspberry Pi into a camera controller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

5.5.3 • Viewing your remote cameras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

5.5.4 • Motion detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

5.5.5 • Notifications on motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

5.6 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

Chapter 6 • Bluetooth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

6.1 • An introduction to Bluetooth Low Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
6.1.1 • Broadcasting data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

6.1.2 • Connecting to services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

6.2 • Enabling Bluetooth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
6.3 • Investigating Bluetooth Low Energy devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
6.3.1 • Scanning for Bluetooth Low Energy devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

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6.3.2 • Dumping raw Bluetooth broadcast data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

6.3.3 • Discovering device characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

6.3.4 • Reading device characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

6.4 • Reading BLE sensor values in Python . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
6.4.1 • RuuviTag Sensor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

6.4.2 • Miflora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

6.5 • Relaying Bluetooth sensor values with bt-mqtt-gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
6.5.1 • Configuring bt-mqtt-gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

6.5.2 • Running bt-mqtt-gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

6.6 • Presence detection with Bluetooth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
6.6.1 • Presence detection with [Link] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152

6.6.2 • Configuring and running [Link] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

6.6.3 • Trigger arrival and departure scans in [Link] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

6.7 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

Chapter 7 • 433.92 MHz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

7.1 • 433.92 MHz protocols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
7.2 • Hardware requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
7.2.1 • Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

7.2.2 • Antenna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

7.3 • Receiving sensor values with rtl_433 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
7.3.1 • Installing rtl_433toMQTT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
7.3.2 • Configuring rtl_433 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
7.4 • Publishing 433.92 MHz sensor values to MQTT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
7.5 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

Chapter 8 • Z-Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

8.1 • An introduction to Z-Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
8.1.1 • The specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

8.1.2 • How does Z-Wave work? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

8.2 • Choosing a Z-Wave transceiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
8.2.1 • Transceiver on the GPIO header: RaZberry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

8.2.2 • USB Transceiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

8.3 • OpenZWave and Zwave2Mqtt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
8.3.1 • Installing Zwave2Mqtt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

8.3.2 • Configuring Zwave2Mqtt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

8.3.3 • Using the Zwave2Mqtt Control Panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

8.4 • Using your Z-Wave devices with MQTT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

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8.4.1 • Reading sensor values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184

8.4.2 • Controlling switches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

8.5 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

Chapter 9 • Zigbee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188

9.1 • An introduction to Zigbee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
9.1.1 • The specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188

9.1.2 • How does Zigbee work? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

9.2 • Creating a Zigbee transceiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
9.2.1 • Connect the downloader cable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190

9.2.2 • Install the flashing software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192

9.2.3 • Flash the firmware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192

9.3 • Zigbee2mqtt and Zigbee2MqttAssistant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
9.3.1 • Connecting the CC2531 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

9.3.2 • Installing Zigbee2mqtt and Zigbee2MqttAssistant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

9.3.3 • Configuring Zigbee2mqtt and Zigbee2MqttAssistant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

9.3.4 • Using Zigbee2MqttAssistant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198

9.4 • Using our Zigbee devices with MQTT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
9.4.1 • Reading sensor values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

9.4.2 • Controlling switches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

9.5 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202

Chapter 10 • Automating your home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

10.1 • Node-RED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
10.1.1 • Installing Node-RED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

10.1.2 • Adding authentication to Node-RED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

10.1.3 • Using Node-RED over HTTPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

10.1.4 • Creating Node-RED flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

10.1.5 • Installing extra nodes in Node-RED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

10.1.6 • Creating a dashboard in Node-RED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

10.2 • Home Assistant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
10.2.1 • Installing Home Assistant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

10.2.2 • Integrating MQTT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

10.2.3 • Creating automation rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

10.3 • AppDaemon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
10.3.1 • Installing AppDaemon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi
10.3.2 • Creating an AppDaemon app with MQTT: the time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

10.3.3 • Creating an AppDaemon app with MQTT: garage door alert . . . . . . . . . . 231
10.4 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Chapter 11 • Notifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234

11.1 • Forwarding local email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
11.1.1 • Installing Nullmailer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234

11.1.2 • Testing Nullmailer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236

11.1.3 • Using Nullmailer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

11.2 • Forwarding emails from Docker containers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
11.2.1 • Installing docker-postfix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

11.2.2 • Sending emails to docker-postfix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

11.3 • Push notifications with Gotify . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
11.3.1 • Installing the Gotify server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242

11.3.2 • Adding applications to Gotify . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

11.3.3 • Using Gotify applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244

11.3.4 • Using Gotify clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

11.4 • Notifications on receiving MQTT messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
11.4.1 • Installing mqttwarn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

11.4.2 • Sending emails with mqttwarn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

11.4.3 • Transforming and filtering payloads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

11.5 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

Chapter 12 • Voice control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256

12.1 • A basic Rhasspy setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
12.1.1 • Hardware requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

12.1.2 • Configure audio hardware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

12.1.3 • Installing Rhasspy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260

12.1.4 • Rhasspy's settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

12.1.5 • Configuring audio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262

12.1.6 • Configuring the wake word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

12.1.7 • Configuring text to speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

12.1.8 • Configuring speech to text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264

12.1.9 • Configuring intent recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

12.1.10 • Configuring dialogue management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

12.1.11 • Testing your Rhasspy setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

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 Table of Contents
12.2 • A Rhasspy base with satellites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
12.2.1 • Hardware requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

12.2.2 • Setting up the satellites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

12.2.3 • Setting up the base . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270

12.2.4 • Testing your base and satellites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

12.2.5 • Enable UDP audio streaming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

12.3 • Train your sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
12.3.1 • Rhasspy's template language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276

12.3.2 • Slots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

12.4 • Intent handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
12.4.1 • Intent handling with MQTT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278

12.4.2 • Intent handling with AppDaemon and MQTT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280

12.4.3 • Intent handling with WebSocket in Node-RED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282

12.5 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287

Chapter 13 • Remote access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

13.1 • Three ways for remote access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
13.1.1 • Port forwarding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

13.1.2 • A localhost tunneling solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

13.1.3 • A virtual private network (VPN) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

13.2 • Updating your dynamic DNS with ddclient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
13.3 • Running WireGuard on your Raspberry Pi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298
13.3.1 • Installing PiVPN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

13.3.2 • Adding a VPN client . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300

13.3.3 • Connecting with a VPN client . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302

13.3.4 • Managing your VPN clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304

13.4 • Summary and further exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305

Chapter 14 • Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306

14.1 • A dashboard for all your services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
14.2 • More about home automation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310

• Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312
15.1 • Getting the name and ID of a serial device . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312
15.2 • Switching USB ports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
15.3 • Disabling the onboard radio chips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
15.3.1 • Disabling onboard Bluetooth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314

15.3.2 • Disabling onboard Wi-Fi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314

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15.4 • Disabling the on-board LEDs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
15.4.1 • Raspberry Pi Zero (W) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

15.4.2 • The big Raspberry Pi models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

15.4.3 • Ethernet models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

15.4.4 • Raspberry Pi Camera Module . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316

15.5 • Securing insecure web services with a reverse proxy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
15.5.1 • Using nginx as a reverse proxy with HTTPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

15.5.2 • Adding basic authentication to nginx . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

15.6 • Bridging two MQTT brokers securely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323

• Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327

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 Preface

• Preface

Ever since the Raspberry Pi was introduced, the popular single-board computer has been
used by enthusiasts to automate their home. That's not a coincidence: the Raspberry Pi is
a powerful computer in a small package, with lots of interfacing options to control various
devices.

In this book, I'll show you how you can automate your home with a Raspberry Pi. You can
do this in many ways and with various software and hardware choices. I'll show you one
way, which is a bit different from what you'll read in many other books, but my approach
has its merits, and I'll explain why.

You'll learn how to use various wireless protocols for home automation, such as Bluetooth,
433.92 MHz radio waves, Z-Wave, and Zigbee. Soon you'll automate your home with Py-
thon, Node-RED, and Home Assistant, and you'll even be able to speak to your home auto-
mation system. All of this in a secure way, with a modular system, completely open-source
and without relying on third-party services.

At the end of the book, you can install and configure your Raspberry Pi as a highly flexible
home automation gateway for your protocols of choice and link various services with MQTT
to make it a system of your own. This DIY (do it yourself) approach is a bit more laborious
than just installing an off-the-shelf home automation system, but in the process, you learn
a lot, and in the end, know exactly what's running your house and how to tweak it. And
that's why you were interested in the Raspberry Pi in the first place, right?

Koen Vervloesem, May 2020

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi

Chapter 1 • Introduction

In this introductory chapter, I give a short overview of what home automation is and why
you would use a Raspberry Pi as a home automation gateway. Then I describe what I
consider properties of a 'good' home automation system:

• secure
• modular
• open-source
• self-sufficient

In the rest of this book, I'll explain step by step how to create such a good home automation
system with a Raspberry Pi.

1.1 • What is home automation?

Home automation is the process or result of automating systems that are running at home:
lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), appliances such as washing
machines, blinds, and roller shutters, and so on. A home automation system is also able to
use information from environmental sensors (temperature, humidity, pressure, CO2, …),
smart meters, movement sensors, presence sensors, cameras, and so on.

A home automation system typically consists of:

• a central gateway (also called controller or hub), which controls devices and reads
sensor measurements
• controllable devices
• sensors

The controllable devices and sensors are regularly called "smart devices", although almost
none of them are really smart. Another name you'll see for them is IoT (Internet of Things)
devices because they can be (directly or indirectly) linked to and controlled over the internet.

Figure 1.1 A home automation system consists of a central gateway and various controllable devices and
sensors.

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 Chapter 1 ● Introduction

A home automation gateway always has a user interface. Of course, the purpose of home
automation is to automate as much as possible, so the idea is that the user shouldn't have
to use this user interface that much. But a user interface is still essential to:

• configure the home automation gateway: for instance if the sun goes down, close the
blinds;
• manually control your devices: this should still be possible because you can't automate
everything;
• show you a nice dashboard of sensor measurements: for instance to see the inside and
outside temperature.

This user interface can come in many forms:

• Most home automation gateways have a web server running, which supplies a web
interface as the user interface. You can access this web interface on any computer or
mobile device.
• Some systems have a mobile app for Android or iOS, which is generally better adapted
to the specific requirements of mobile devices, such as a smaller screen.
• It's also possible to use a dedicated touch screen, for instance hanging on the wall, to
control your home automation system, and to show you some nice graphs.1
• Last but not least, in recent years home automation systems have added a new kind of
user interface: speech. With a so-called voice assistant or smart assistant (again, they
are not that smart), you can give speech commands to your home automation system
and it replies with spoken messages.

This book is not focused on any of these user interfaces; it's more about the backend
services and how to link and automate them. However, I cover two home automation
projects with a web interface in Chapter 10 (Home Assistant and Node-RED), and create a
voice assistant for your home automation system with Rhasspy (Chapter 12). You should
consult the documentation of these projects if you're more interested in the user interface
side of home automation.

1.2 • Why use a Raspberry Pi as a home automation gateway?

If you buy an off-the-shelf home automation system, the gateway is a small box that looks
somewhat like a router or a Wi-Fi access point. In this book, we'll show you how you can
create your own home automation gateway with a Raspberry Pi.

But why would you do that? Because you can, of course! More seriously, the Raspberry
Pi is what makes the approach in this book possible. We'll go into the advantages of this
approach in the next section, but the number one reason to use a Raspberry Pi as your
home automation gateway is: you are in control.

An off-the-shelf home automation gateway isn't flexible: you can only do with it what the
1 In many cases this touch screen is just running a fullscreen web browser visiting the
home automation gateway's embedded web server.

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi

manufacturer allows, you rely on the manufacturer's goodwill to receive updates and new
functionality, and most of the time you can't "hack" on it yourself.2

Contrast this with the Raspberry Pi. You can choose your operating system (which we'll do
in the next chapter), you can choose which communication protocols you'll want to support
(which we'll cover in various chapters in this book), you can choose your user interface,
and so on. You can even choose the case to protect your Raspberry Pi and which expansion
boards you connect, as there's a whole ecosystem of hardware for the Raspberry Pi.

Of course, you can also run home automation software on a more powerful system, such
as a NAS (network-attached storage) or a home server. But the Raspberry Pi has several
advantages to these systems:

• It's very low-power, so it doesn't cost you much to keep it running 24/7.
• For most home automation tasks you don't need the processing power that these other
systems offer.
• The ecosystem of software and hardware for the Raspberry Pi is immense, as well
as the number of resources where you find more information about it.3 This is also
a reason to choose the Raspberry Pi over similar single-board computers from other
manufacturers.

1.3 • The properties of a good home automation system

A good home automation system should:

• be secure, so you don't risk someone else controlling your house or spying on you at
home;
• be modular, to make it easy to plug in other protocols or applications;
• only use open-source software;
• be self-sufficient, not relying on cloud systems from Google, Amazon, or other parties.

This is my highly opinionated vision, and it's this vision that I build upon in this book.
If you consider these properties for a moment, you'll see that this vision is almost
diametrically opposed to most off-the-shelf systems you'll find. I'll give some examples in
the next subsections.

It's possible that you don't agree with some of these properties, or that you don't have such
strong feelings about them as I do. That's OK: while I explain an approach in this book

2 With hacking I don't mean gaining unauthorized access to a computer (which is the
connotation the word unfortunately has received). The Jargon File describes a hacker as "a
person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their
capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary." (The
Jargon File, [Link]
3 For instance, the Raspberry Pi Foundation publishes its official magazine about the
Raspberry Pi, MagPi ([Link] and Elektor (the publisher of this book)
publishes Dutch ([Link] and French ([Link] editions of the
magazine.

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 Chapter 1 ● Introduction

that implements this vision, thanks to its modularity you can certainly plug in proprietary
software or cloud systems if you prefer these. Heck, you can even add monolithic and
insecure software, but I don't tell you how.

In the next subsections, I'll go over these four properties in more detail, and I hope that
at the end of this chapter you'll agree with me that this approach to home automation is
the right one.

1.3.1 • Secure

Of course, a home automation system should be secure. No one can be against it, can't
they? A home automation system controls your home, so whoever can break into it can
make your life very miserable.

Unfortunately, even if a manufacturer tells you that his system is secure, chances are that
it isn't. Security is very difficult to attain, and most manufacturers don't want to spend the
resources needed to secure their system.4

Home automation and IoT devices are notoriously insecure. At the Usenix Security
Conference 2019, the Czech security software company Avast and Stanford University
presented their research of household IoT devices. Avast scanned 83 million IoT devices
in 16 million homes around the world of people who agreed to share these data. The
results of the study published in "All Things Considered: An Analysis of IoT Devices on
Home Networks" ([Link] were
staggering:

• 7% percent of all IoT devices support an obsolete, insecure, and completely unencrypted
protocol such as Telnet or FTP.
• Of these, 17% exhibit weak FTP passwords, and 2% have weak Telnet passwords.
• Surveillance cameras have the weakest Telnet profile, with more than 10% of them
that support Telnet with weak credentials.
• 3% percent of the homes are externally visible on the internet and more than half of
those have a known vulnerability or a weak password.

This is not an isolated study. Not a week goes by without some news items about insecure
devices, most of the time because basic security measures such as strong passwords are
not enforced by the manufacturer or basic programming errors have been made. To give
you an idea about what can happen: in 2018 nude videos of the Dutch women's handball
team appeared on a popular porn website because the surveillance cameras of the dressing
room of a sauna were broken into. Imagine if someone can access your baby monitor with
a camera or your security camera in your living room or bedroom…

So what can you do to secure your home automation system? If you choose an off-the-
shelf system: not much. You fully rely on the manufacturer's ability to create a secure
4 Most consumers probably wouldn't want to pay more for a secure home automation
system anyway.

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi

system and the goodwill to keep supplying patches that solve security issues that have
been discovered. And the home automation and IoT industries have clearly shown they
are not up to the task. This is one of the reasons why I prefer open-source software. Not
because it is always secure, but because the transparency of the open-source development
process forces developers to create more secure software.

Security is such an important property of a home automation system that I dedicate an

entire chapter in this book about it. It's such a vast topic that entire books are written
about it, and I encourage you to read much more about computer security than I can tell
you here. In Chapter 3 I'll cover the most important tools you need to secure your home
automation system, so you don't need to be paranoid and continuously think about the
possibility that someone is currently spying on you.

1.3.2 • Modular

There are many competing standards and communication protocols for home automation,
such as Z-Wave, Zigbee, and KNX. Other protocols aren't specific to home automation but
are very usable in this domain too, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Near Field Communication
(NFC).

Unfortunately, many off-the-shelf home automation gateways support only a small subset
of these protocols or even use a proprietary protocol that locks you into using devices of
the same manufacturer. That severely limits your choice of products.

You can't know which protocols will become popular in a few years, and maybe you like
one product that uses Z-Wave and another product that uses Zigbee. It should be easy to
interconnect these devices, even when they use different protocols.

This is why a good home automation system should be modular, which makes it possible
to plug in new components when you want to support a new protocol, add a new user
interface or extend its functionality in another way.

Many of the wireless communication protocols for home automation need a dedicated
transceiver because they work on a specific radio frequency. That's where the Raspberry Pi
shines: you can easily connect Z-Wave, Zigbee, or 433.92 MHz transceivers using the USB
ports or the GPIO header. So you can start with a basic Raspberry Pi setup supporting only
IoT devices that are communicating over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, add an RTL-SDR USB dongle
to read the measurements of your 433.92 MHz weather sensors, later add a Z-Wave HAT
on the board when you start adding Z-Wave sensors to your house and then add a Zigbee
USB transceiver when you want to control some Zigbee lights.

Figure 1.2 A good home automation system is modular enough to support many home automation protocols.

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 Chapter 1 ● Introduction

Modularity is also important for software. There's a lot of user-friendly software to make
your Raspberry Pi a home automation gateway.5 So you just install this software on your
Raspberry Pi and that's it: you have a gateway that supports several devices. Some of
these systems are very modular and extensible, others aren't. Many of them support MQTT
(Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), a common language to exchange messages.

MQTT has become the standard for interoperability between various home automation
devices. For instance, if your home automation gateway of choice doesn't support Zigbee
but it does support MQTT, then you only have to run the Zigbee2mqtt software (see Chapter
9), which translates the Zigbee protocol to MQTT messages. Your gateway can then talk to
your Zigbee devices using MQTT.

Modularity also means that you don't have to have one gateway. You can perfectly have
your main gateway in your basement, but install a second gateway with your 433.92 MHz
receiver for your environmental sensors in your living room because that gives you better
coverage to receive data from these wireless sensors. If you're using MQTT, that's very
simple to implement: you just relay the sensor readings that your gateway in the living
room receives to your MQTT broker, after which your main gateway receives the readings
in the MQTT format.

In short: a good modular home automation system means that you can mix and match
the devices that you like, irrespective of their protocol, and you can use the software and
hardware components of your choice, in various locations in your house.

1.3.3 • Open-Source

Source code is code written in a human-readable programming language, that specifies

the actions a computer has to perform. The source code of a program is then compiled to
machine code that the computer can execute, or it's interpreted on the fly to machine code
and thus immediately executed by the computer.

Most software is being distributed as machine code, so it's not readable for us. If you buy
an off-the-shelf home automation gateway, you generally don't get access to its source
code, so you cannot peek into it to see what it does or to assess its quality. You just have to
believe the manufacturer on his word. Is that enough for you if it's about software that will
get to know you intimately because it processes sensor readings and even camera images
about you in your home? Not for me.

But there's a type of software where you do get access to the source code: free and
open-source software (sometimes abbreviated as FOSS or even FLOSS).6 If you really
want to be precise, there's free software and open-source software, but for the end-user,
the differences are minimal and mostly philosophical. When I talk about "open-source

5 An example is Home Assistant, which I will introduce in Chapter 10.

6 The L in FLOSS stands for "libre", which is kind of a synonym to "free" but making it
clearer that it's about maintaining the user's civil liberties: "free" as in "free speech", not as in
"free beer", as they say.

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi

software" in this book, I mean free and open-source software.

But what when you're not a programmer and don't even understand the source code of
your home automation system? Even then the use of open-source software has a lot of
advantages. It's not because you don't have the programming experience that others can't
help. Most open-source projects have a decentralized software-development model that
encourages open collaboration.

So if you find a bug in the software, or see something wrong in its source code but don't
have the programming experience needed to fix it, just report the bug on the issue tracker
of the project, and hopefully, someone else in the project's community will step in and fix
it. It all depends on the health of the project's community. But a good open-source project
has a vibrant community of developers and users who collaborate to continuously improve
the software.

In the process of writing this book, I participated in various communities of the programs I
covered. I opened issues to report bugs, fixed some bugs, added support for new devices,
contributed documentation, and helped people build their software for Raspberry Pi. This
was all only possible because they are open-source.

And open-source doesn't just mean getting access to the source code, it's much more
than that. If you want to get an idea about what open-source is, I recommend you to read
the Open Source Definition on [Link] by the Open Source Initiative. For
instance, with open-source software you are not only able to read its source code, you are
also allowed to modify it and distribute your modifications.

Even more, when you know a specific software project is open-source, you know that
it doesn't arbitrarily restrict what you can do with it. The Open Source Definition even
explicitly lists that the license of open-source software must not discriminate against any
person or group of persons, nor restrict anyone from making use of the program in a
specific field of endeavor.

Open-source is a complex and nuanced topic, and I recommend you to read about it more
if you're not accustomed to it. The decentralization and transparency of the open-source
development model gives power back to the users, where it belongs. For home automation
that's even more important. I don't want a company having control over my house. That's
why you'll see that all software in this book is open-source.

1.3.4 • Self-sufficient

During the last ten years, there has been a worrying development in the computer
industry: we all depend more and more on (centralized) cloud systems. Unfortunately, the
home automation industry didn't escape this fate. Many popular home automation and IoT
systems depend on a cloud server. Some examples:

• the Ring video doorbell with Wi-Fi camera;

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 Chapter 1 ● Introduction

• the Nest Learning Thermostat;

• so-called 'smart speakers' running voice assistants, like Amazon Echo and Google
Home;
• the IFTTT service that links various other services.

This isn't without its problems. In the last couple of years a couple of cloud services for
home automation stopped working for their users:

Revolv Hub
In 2014 Nest bought the company that was selling the Revolv Hub home automation
system, not long after Nest itself was acquired by Google. In 2016 Nest shut down the
servers Revolv Hub depended on, after announcing it with a quiet note on the website
of Revolv a few months earlier. That meant that the $300 Revolv Hub ceased functioning
entirely.

Best Buy Insignia devices

At the end of 2019, Best Buy announced that several of their Insignia-branded smart
devices would stop working because they decided to shut down the corresponding backend
systems.

Wink devices
In May 2020 Wink (with the catchphrase "A simpler way to a smarter home") announced
with just a week's notice that it would start charging a monthly fee for the use of their
services. Users that didn't want to pay were no longer be able to access their Wink devices
and their automations were disabled. The Wink Hub, that had been in stores with the
clear description "no required monthly fees, ever", was rendered useless. Ironically, the
announcement ended with the message "Our user community is integral to Wink, and we
want to continue to be your trusted smart home provider."

Now imagine when the highly popular IFTTT would stop their service: suddenly the
automations of millions of people would stop working.

It also just makes no sense to use cloud services to automate your home. Home automation
comes down to: you want one device to be able to respond to another device in your home.
For instance: the motion sensor in your bathroom detects motion at night, and this turns
the bathroom light on for five minutes. If you use IFTTT to link both devices, the motion
sensor has to send a message to the internet, IFTTT relays the message to your bathroom
light (for instance a Philips Hue light), and the bathroom light turns on.

But there's no need for an internet service like IFTTT between both devices because they
both are in your home, so it makes much more sense to link them locally, using a server at
home. This could be a Raspberry Pi running home automation software that doesn't need a
cloud server to function, but does all its processing on-device (or on the edge, as it's called
now). You can perfectly do this with Node-RED or Home Assistant (see Chapter 10). Then
there's no way a company can render your home automation system useless by shutting
down their service, or your bathroom light doesn't turn on at night because your internet

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi

connection or IFTTT's servers are down. You're fully in control of your home automation
system.

Figure 1.3 The home automation at the left is cloud-based: a simple motion detection message first goes to a
server over the internet before returning to your light. The self-hosted system on the right makes much more
sense: a Raspberry Pi on your network relays the message without using the internet detour.

Using cloud services for your home automation system has another risk: it invades your
privacy. Look at some of the privacy issues with the services I talked about above:

• If you use the Ring video doorbell, it sends a video of everyone that steps on your
porch to the manufacturer. The Ring company (which has been bought by Amazon in
2018) has a questionable approach to privacy: in January 2019 it was uncovered that
employees have access to the video recordings of all Ring devices and even that the
data are stored unencrypted.
• If you use the Nest Learning Thermostat, Google knows precisely when you are home
and when you aren't.
• If you run a smart speaker like the Amazon Echo, what you tell your house members will
be sent countless times inadvertently to Amazon because the Echo thinks it has heard
its wake word.7 Moreover, Amazon's employees listen to a part of all 'conversations'
with the Echo to improve its algorithms.
• If you use the IFTTT service to link your various other services, you give one company

7 In 2020, a team of researchers at Northeastern University and Imperial College

London simulated real-world conditions by playing popular TV shows. They found that a variety
of smart speakers would activate by mistake up to 19 times each day on average. The study
can be found here: [Link]

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 Chapter 1 ● Introduction

access to all your home automation services, which is too much power concentrated in
one company's hands: they can see exactly what you're doing.

1.4 • How to use this book

This book describes a lot of components to support various home automation and IoT
protocols. I don't expect that everyone will want to support all these protocols by installing
these components manually. Home automation platforms such as Home Assistant (described
in Chapter 10) have a fairly complete support for these and many more protocols. You can
use such a platform to turn your Raspberry Pi into a home automation gateway.

However, I'm also a big believer in choice. You will have your preferences. Perhaps:

• you don't like these user-friendly home automation platforms.

• you do like one of these platforms, but it doesn't support one of the protocols.
• one of these platforms does support the protocol, but only with a local transceiver and
you need a transceiver in another location for better coverage.

In all of these cases, you can use one of the open-source projects in this book to link this
protocol to your gateway.

You can look at this book as a DIY manual to create your home automation gateway from
scratch. But it's also describing a software architecture for a secure, modular, open-source,
and self-sufficient home automation system. It's up to you to choose the components that
implement this architecture in your own house, and if a home automation platform such as
Home Assistant or Mozilla IoT WebThings Gateway does the job for you, that's fine. They
don't lock you into their way of doing things, so you could perfectly use them and still link
them to other systems thanks to MQTT and other protocols.

This book expects some familiarity with Raspberry Pi OS (formerly called Raspbian) or
Linux in general. I explain most commands the first time I use them, but if you have
never worked with a Linux system, I recommend reading an introductory text about Linux,
Debian, Raspberry Pi OS, or bash (the Linux command line used in this book).

In various chapters, I show short Python programs that interact with your home automation
system. The Python code in this book is not that advanced. If you don't know Python, you
should be able to understand what the code does, and maybe you will even be able to adapt
it because Python is known for its clarity. However, if you want to make the most out of
this book, I do recommend you to learn some Python. The official Python documentation
([Link] especially the Python tutorial ([Link]
tutorial/[Link]), is a good way to start. A home automation system is typically
something very personal, and being able to program it is the best way to customize8 it to
your taste.

8 All Python code in this book has been developed for and tested on Python 3. Its
predecessor, Python 2, has been retired on January 1 2020 ([Link] and
shouldn’t be used anymore.

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi

Note:
This book is not about how you connect sensors, relays, and so on directly to your Raspberry
Pi using the GPIO header, but it strictly covers how you use your Raspberry Pi as a home
automation gateway, collecting data and controlling devices remotely using radio and
network protocols. Of course, it's perfectly possible to let your Raspberry Pi combine both
tasks, but I wouldn't recommend it because it could lead to stability problems, and your
gateway should be as reliable as possible.

Here's a short overview of what I'll cover in this book:

Chapter 1: Introduction
The theoretical foundation for this book, with my vision of what good home automation
should look like and why you should use a Raspberry Pi for it.

Chapter 2: The Raspberry Pi as a home automation gateway

The practical foundation for this book, where you prepare your Raspberry Pi for its task as
a home automation gateway.

Chapter 3: Secure your home automation system

Some general computer security principles and specific instructions to keep your home
automation gateway secure, including encryption of all network traffic.

Chapter 4: MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport)

The lightweight network protocol that is at the center of this book, including the installation
of an MQTT broker with encryption and authentication of all messages and the exploration
of some MQTT clients.

Chapter 5: TCP/IP
Some TCP/IP-based protocols that everyone can use for home automation without the
need for specialized transceivers, such as Wake-on-LAN, SSH, SNMP, HTTP/REST, and video
surveillance systems.

Chapter 6: Bluetooth
An introduction to Bluetooth Low Energy, including a way to investigate Bluetooth Low
Energy devices and using them to read sensor data and for presence detection.

Chapter 7: 433.92 MHz

The use of the RTL-SDR dongle to receive sensor measurements from devices transmitting
on the popular 433.92 MHz frequency.

Chapter 8: Z-Wave
An introduction to the Z-Wave mesh protocol for wireless home automation.

Chapter 9: Zigbee
An introduction to the Zigbee mesh protocol for wireless home automation made popular

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 Chapter 1 ● Introduction

by Philips Hue and IKEA TRÅDFRI products.

Chapter 10: Automating your home

Complete home automation platforms such as Node-RED, Home Assistant, and AppDaemon,
including dashboards for your home automation gateway.

Chapter 11: Notifications

Email and push notifications to warn you about events in your home, including an easy way
to create notifications on receiving specific MQTT messages.

Chapter 12: Voice control

Voice control for your home automation gateway, without depending on online servers.

Chapter 13: Remote access

An overview of ways to remotely access your home automation gateway, with specific
instructions about how to create a VPN.

Chapter 14: Conclusion

A wrap-up of this book, with a dashboard for all the discussed services.

Appendix
Some specialized tips that could come in handy in various situations.

Note:
Code examples from this book are published on [Link]
raspberry-pi-home-automation. They can be copied from the GitHub repository one-by-
one when trying the various applications in this book. You can also download them all at
once. Refer to the instructions in the GitHub repository for more information.

1.5 • Summary and further exploration

In this introductory chapter, I gave a theoretical foundation for this book, with my vision of
what good home automation should look like and why you should use a Raspberry Pi for it.
I argued why your home automation system should be:

• secure
• modular
• open-source
• self-sufficient

I hope the examples I gave you have convinced you that these are important properties of
your home automation system. In the rest of this book, I show you how you create such a
system with a Raspberry Pi.

If you want to read more about some issues I raised in this chapter, I can recommend

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi

the special edition of Mozilla's Internet Health Report of November 2019, called "*Privacy
Included: Rethinking the Smart Home" ([Link]
included/). It talks about the so-called "smart home" from a more general point of view
and is much in line with the approach I advocate in this book. The report stresses the
importance of privacy, security, interoperability, and sustainability for smart home devices.

Note:
The use of the ⏎ symbol denotes that code should be typed contiguously on the same line.

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 Chapter 2 ● The Raspberry Pi as a home automation gateway

Chapter 2 • The Raspberry Pi as a home automation gateway

While the previous chapter gave you a theoretical foundation with an overview of what
you're going to build in this book (and especially why), the second chapter gives you
a practical foundation: it's all about preparing your Raspberry Pi for its task as a home
automation gateway.

I'll first talk a bit about which Raspberry Pi models are suitable for home automation, after
which you'll learn how to install Raspberry Pi OS, configure network connectivity and access
your Raspberry Pi over the network using SSH. I also talk a bit about the tmux terminal
multiplexer, which is indispensable for many tasks in this book, and about installing Python
packages. I'll finish this chapter by installing Docker, which is essential to be able to install
various programs in later chapters without messing up your base system.

2.1 • Which Raspberry Pi models are suitable for home automation?

Since its first release at the beginning of 2012, various Raspberry Pi models have been
released. Most of them, even the first ones, are suitable for home automation, but not
every model is up to every task. I have been running the Domoticz home automation
software on the first Raspberry Pi B model for more than five years to control my home,
and it has only been replaced by a newer model in the last three years.

So if you have an older model like the Raspberry Pi 2 or even the first model lying in your
cupboard, by all means, try it. Whether you can use it as your home automation gateway
depends on how many devices you want to control and which extra software packages you
want to run on your Raspberry Pi.

Note:
These early models don't have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. If you want to use these wireless
protocols, you'll have to use adapters that plug into the USB ports.

In most cases, I recommend you to use a Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+ as your home automation
gateway. These models have enough processing power to run most home automation
workloads, and they have Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. The Raspberry Pi 3A+ (which has
the same processing power as the 3B+) is fine if you don't need Ethernet connectivity and
one USB 2.0 port is enough for you. You can always connect more USB devices with a USB
hub. But note that 512 MB RAM could be insufficient for some applications.

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi

Figure 2.1 In many home automation scenarios the Raspberry Pi 3B+ is up to the task.

Figure 2.2 The Raspberry Pi 3A+ is fine as a home automation gateway if you don't need Ethernet
connectivity and one USB 2.0 port is enough.

Only if you're serious about home automation and are running very demanding workloads,
or need the USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet throughput, would I recommend choosing a
Raspberry Pi 4 as your home automation gateway.1 This model exists in versions with 1, 2,
4 and 8 GB. Choose the RAM size depending on your workload.2

1 The Raspberry Pi 4 is essential if you're running AI (artificial intelligence) tasks such

as image recognition with the Google Coral USB Accelerator: this TensorFlow Light accelerator
dongle needs USB 3 acess to use its full speed.
2 The model with 1 GB RAM has been retired in the beginning of 2020, but if you have
still one of these, it's perfectly usable for most home automation tasks.

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 Chapter 2 ● The Raspberry Pi as a home automation gateway

Figure 2.3 You only need the Raspberry Pi 4 for very demanding home automation workloads, for instance for
image recognition.

The Raspberry Pi Zero W(H) has the same processor as the first Raspberry Pi model, but
clocked at 1 GHz instead of 700 MHz. So this is only suitable for minimal home automation
workloads. It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, but no Ethernet and only one micro-USB
OTG connector. So for a gateway, the Raspberry Pi Zero W(H) is seriously handicapped. On
the other hand, because of its low price, small size, and low power consumption, it's a very
interesting model to read Bluetooth sensors at various places in your house, for instance,
to detect in which room you are (see Chapter 6). And in combination with a Raspberry Pi
Camera the Raspberry Pi Zero W can function as a cheap IP camera.

Figure 2.4 The Raspberry Pi Zero W(H) is not powerful enough to run a serious home automation gateway,
but it's perfect as a simple gateway for Bluetooth or Wi-Fi sensors or other devices.

There are still other Raspberry Pi models: the Compute Module, Compute Model 3, and
3+. These are meant for industrial use. While they have their advantages, I'm not going
to use them in this book. This is, after all, a book about home automation, not industrial

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi

automation. But if by any chance you have one of these, feel free to try them: they should
work because they are fully compatible with software for the 'normal' Raspberry Pi models.
To sum up, this table shows some specifications of the Raspberry Pi models that are most
relevant for home automation:

Pi Zero
Pi 4B Pi 3B+ Pi 3A+ Pi 3B
W(H)
SoC BCM2711 BCM2837B0 BCM2837B0 BCM2837 BCM2835
Cores 4 4 4 4 1
CPU clock 1.5 GHz 1.4 GHz 1.4 GHz 1.2 GHz 1.0 GHz
RAM 1 / 2 / 4 / 8 GB 1 GB 512 MB 1 GB 512 MB
2 × USB 3.0, 2 1 × micro-
USB 4 × USB 2.0 1 × USB 2.0 4 × USB 2.0
× USB 2.0 USB 2.0 OTG
Gigabit over
Ethernet Gigabit / 10/100 Mbps /
USB 2.0
802.11b/g/n/ 802.11b/g/n/ 802.11b/g/n/
Wi-Fi 802.11n 802.11n
ac dual-band ac dual-band ac dual-band
Bluetooth 5.0 4.2 4.2 4.1 4.1
85.6 mm × 85.6 mm × 65.0 mm × 85.6 mm × 65.0 mm ×
Size
56.5 mm 56.5 mm 56.5 mm 56.5 mm 30.0 mm
Table 2.1 Raspberry Pi models for home automation

2.2 • Requirements for a reliable home automation gateway

The Raspberry Pi is an easy computer board to experiment with. If you pick a Raspberry
Pi, put a Raspberry Pi OS image on the microSD card, and start installing some programs
explained in this book, you'll have a home automation gateway in no time.

It's tempting to start this way, and if it's just to see what the possibilities are, that's no
problem. But you'll run your house on this Raspberry Pi, so you'll have to at least think
about how to make it reliable. These are some aspects you have to consider:

Place
Your home automation gateway should be in an accessible place so it's easy to troubleshoot
it or attach or replace adapters. But at the same time, you don't want it to be too accessible.
For instance, if you have it lying on your desk, the risk is too high that you spill coffee on
it, yank off its power cable, or just that it's in your way.

Storage
The capacity of the microSD card for your Raspberry Pi should be high enough to store all
software, logs, and data. If you install all projects in this book, you need a microSD card
of at least 16 GB. I recommend 32 GB to be on the safe side. Because microSD cards are
notoriously unreliable, especially after a power failure, regularly take a backup of the most

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 Chapter 2 ● The Raspberry Pi as a home automation gateway

important data.3

Case
It's perfectly acceptable to use the Raspberry Pi without a case when you are experimenting.
But as soon as you're starting to rely on it as a home automation gateway, you should put
it in a case: this protects your Raspberry Pi from dust or small accidents. Choose a case fit
for your purpose. For instance, if you need to use the GPIO pins, make sure the case gives
access to them.

Cooling
Especially with the Raspberry Pi 4, the temperature mustn't rise too much. If the temperature
of the SoC is between 80 and 85 degrees Celsius, the ARM core(s) will be throttled back
in an attempt to reduce the core temperature. If the temperature of the SoC reaches 85
degrees Celsius, the GPU will also be throttled back. Running for too long on these high
temperatures is detrimental to the health of the processor. If you are doing intensive
computations on your home automation gateway, add a heat sink or a fan. There are even
cases that double as a heat sink with their body.

Power
Use a reliable power supply for your Raspberry Pi, as you don't want your home automation
gateway to fail when the power requirements are not met temporarily. The official Raspberry
Pi power supply is a safe choice, but other adapters that supply 5.1 V 2.5 A (or 3 A for the
Raspberry Pi 4 to be on the safe side) should be fine too. Note that the power consumption
depends on the peripherals you have connected, such as USB transceivers or the Raspberry
Pi Camera Module (which requires 250 mA).

Network
Wi-Fi connections are not as reliable as Ethernet connections. If it's possible, use an
Ethernet connection for your home automation gateway. This way your house doesn't lose
its head when your Wi-Fi access point fails.

3 In this book, you only need to copy the [Link] file and the contents of
the directory /home/pi/containers to have all your home automation data.

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Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi

Figure 2.5 Pimoroni's Fan SHIM is an efficient cooling solution for the Raspberry Pi 4.

Note:
If you have a power outage in your home, the microSD card of your Raspberry Pi may
become corrupt and your home automation gateway will not work anymore after the
power comes back on. If you want to protect for this scenario, use a UPS (uninterruptible
power supply) for your Raspberry Pi. It has an emergency battery with enough power to
safely turn off your Raspberry Pi.

2.3 • Installing Raspberry Pi OS

In this book, you'll use Raspberry Pi OS (formerly called Raspbian) as the operating system
for your Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi OS is a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux,
optimized for its use on a Raspberry Pi. It's the official operating system that the Raspberry
Pi Foundation recommends.

If you visit the download page on [Link]

os/, at the moment I'm writing this book you'll see three variants of Raspberry Pi OS:

• Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) with desktop and recommended software

• Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) with desktop
• Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) Lite

You'll use the Lite version: this doesn't have a graphical desktop, so you have to work with
Raspberry Pi OS using the command line. Some familiarity with the Linux command line is
therefore recommended, but I'll explain the commands that you need.

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