I have been away for a while, but in my absence I have been playing with a Home Automation System called Home Assistant. You can find out more about it here on their website: https://home-assistant.io/
One of my Father’s Day Gifts from my Wife and Kids was a SmarThing Hub with a Arrival sensor. Now Home Assistant has literally hundreds of pre-built integrations however SmartThings is not one of them. To make it work with Home Assistant you will have to use a protocol called MQTT which is very versatile and can be used to create your own Automations. (Find out more about it here.)
Now my Home Assistant instance is running on a Rasberry Pi 3 (also a Father’s Day Gift) however it also runs on a Raspberry Pi 2. I am also running HASSbain which is a Raspian image created by Home Assistant. As for MQTT there are a few products out there that you can use, I prefer Mosquitto as there seems to be more guides out there on how to configure and manage it.
Start off by checking for and installing updates for Raspian:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
this could take a while depending on your setup.
Next you will need to setup the smarthings-mqtt-bridge via npm
sudo apt-get install npm
sudo npm install -g smartthings-mqtt-bridge
Then you will need to setup pm2 to run the processes
sudo npm install pm2 -g
Once installed you will need to create and edit smartthings-mqtt-bridge config
sudo cp /usr/local/lib/node_modules/smartthings-mqtt-bridge/_config.yml ~/config.yml
sudo nano ~/config.yml
Here is what the mqtt-bridge-configuration ~/config.yml file should look like if all is configured correctly.
mqtt:
# Specify your MQTT Broker’s hostname or IP address here
host: mqtt://localhost
# Preface for the topics $PREFACE/$DEVICE_NAME/$PROPERTY
preface: smartthings
# Suffix for the state topics $PREFACE/$DEVICE_NAME/$PROPERTY/$STATE_SUFFIX
# state_suffix: state
# Suffix for the command topics $PREFACE/$DEVICE_NAME/$PROPERTY/$COMMAND_SUFFIX
# command_suffix: cmd
# Other optional settings from https://www.npmjs.com/package/mqtt#mqttclientstreambuilder-options
username: pi
password: mqttpass
# Port number to listen on
port: 8080
Now that all of the local configurations have been completed you need to configure the SmartThings Device handler, Device, and SmartApp using steps outlined in https://github.com/stjohnjohnson/smartthings-mqtt-bridge150
Device Settings
IP: raspberry pi IP
MAC: Raspberry pi MAC
Port: 8080
Next you will need to add mqtt to HomeAssistant config configuration.yaml
mqtt:
broker: localhost
port: 1883
client_id: home-assistant-1
username: pi
password: mqttpass
Now you will need to add your devices to their own file, or configuration.yaml
Since I am using mine for presence detection mine looks something like this
device_tracker:
– platform: mqtt
name: “MQTT Presense Detection”
devices:
Friendly Name: smartthings/device name/presence
Friendly Name1: smartthings/device name/presence
Now you will need to start the bridge
sudo ln -s “$(which nodejs)” /usr/local/bin/node
pm2 restart smartthings-mqtt-bridge
restart Home Assistant
sudo systemctl restart home-assistant.service
That should do it. You may want to sudo reboot
In the future I may do more of these as I have learned at lot from it, including beginning to dabble with Docker.