Smart Home Solutions

Home automation is the use of one or more smart devices to control basic home functions and features automatically and sometimes remotely.

Home automation can include the scheduling and automatic operation of water sprinkling, heating and air conditioning, window coverings, security systems, lighting, and food preparation appliances.

The power to monitor occupancy and to intelligently control heating, lighting and appliances around you and your family results in huge improvements in efficiency (and convenience). For example, a smart home can control the Air Conditioning systems by measuring the temperature in each zone of your smart home.

This article helps you find a smart home solution using home assistant with our eSOMiMX6 acting as a broker.

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python3. Using Home Assistant, the following are possible.

  • Set rules for automation (If Temperature > 30 degrees Celsius then Turn on AC).
  • Control your home appliances from a browser.
  • Track the location of your family members.
  • Get notifications on certain events.
  • Of course, it doesn’t stop here… You can change the configuration and automation rules on the go.

Please visit the page to get help on Home Assistant.

eSOMiMX6 – Being a Broker

To facilitate communication between the sensors and Home Assistant, we use our eSOMiMX6 as a Mosquitto. Visit Build Smart Gateway Using eSOMiMX6 to know about MQTT. There are many public brokers but they can be used only for testing purposes. So, it’s better to have your own broker for handling your MQTT messages.

Here is what we have done…

  1. We used Particle Photon and an add-on weather shield board to sense and publish temperature and wind speed values to our eSOMiMX6.
  2. We installed Home Assistant on eSOMiMX6.
  3. We started the Mosquitto broker on eSOMiMX6.

Please visit our developer website to get step by step instructions to build, configure and run Mosquitto on our eSOMiMX6 board.

For further assistance and queries get in touch with sales@e-consystems.com