Avalon: Your Intelligent Home Made Possible with Raspberry Pi

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A permanent under development project of a smart home system built with Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Android tablets.

Story

The idea

I've always loved the idea of monitoring and controlling things and the smart home concept is already a well known concept, so I've tried to build something in this direction.

The idea of this project will encourage people to make their homes and business more smart and more secure, to offer comfort and protection in their homes.

The project

At the beginning this project was just a monitoring system for my smart home. Now, it has much more features and allows me to see many notifications from different devices or processes or to control different devices. A short list is bellow:

- the temperatures (optional the humidities) in 3 rooms and outside of the house
- weather predictions
- lock or unlock the gate and monitoring the status of 2 doors
- surveillance from one exterior webcam
- personalized alarm and calendar
- see some Avalon parameters on the remote android app installed on the phone
- visualize different parameters in charts for the last week
- status notifications on my tablets, my TV or my phone

This is a stand alone project, meaning NO INTERNET CONNECTION is required(like blynk , azure, cayenne, ubidots and other Internet based projects) for the system to work properly. The Internet connection is used for weather status & sending home status to my phone only.

My project had an integrated voice control system that allowed me to start/stop my TV, open/close the main gate. For that I used an Amazon echo dot device for a couple of month after that it's been proven that it was stolen ( I bought it stolen without knowing) so my voice control system has stopped.

Updates

This project changes from week to week, because it's a hobby of mine and always gets improvements and updates.

The latest updates:

Week 8/2018 –

Week 40/2017 – Happy birthday AVALON 🙂

This project is one year old already. Everything has started back in 02.Oct.2016, with a simple temperature & humidity sensor and a lot of ideas in my head. Now, looking back I can see the progress. This aniversary brings a brad new layout for android tablets and most important, the integration of my TV (along the others devices like surveillance camera, the pump of my central heating and gate status) in the Avalon system. The new layout looks like this:

Wk40 new layout

Week 37/2017 – New communication protocol over my Avalon network. After a few days of searches and trials I managed to change my network communication protocol between rasp PI and terminal tablets. I switched to JSON based protocol because its performance, clarity, easy of use and availability for future improvements or development. Here is a sample of data.json that I use:

{ 
 "temps": { 
	"cam1": "23.0",  
	"cam2": "22.6",  
	"cam3": "22.9",  
	"t_ext": "25.5" 
 }, 
 "weather": { 
	"humidity": "31%",  
	"pressure": "1013",  
	"wind_speed": "1.1",  
	"wind_dir": "SW",  
	"sunrise": "7:08AM",  
	"sunset": "7:46PM" 
 }, 
 "status": { 
	"internet": "on", 
	"pump": "off", 
	"mqtt": "connected" 
 }, 
 "security":{ 
	"gate": "off",
	"camera1": "on" 
 } 
}

New type of communication over my network

I just found a interesting circular progress bar on github (https://github.com/lzyzsd/CircleProgress ) and I use it for a few raspberryPI data on my new layout –week 34/2017

The main screen from android tablets has a new layout – week 33/2017(see bellow)

Now the plot option is available – week 28/2017 – and allows me to view the chart of different system's parameters for the last week. It goes online for this feature but maybe I'll make it local somehow using a database.

The project goes on MQTT – week 25/2017 – much stable, customizable and faster than TCP client-server/java-python protocol (I struggled month for error control, too much effort for such small good results);

I just bought –week 20/2017 – an exterior webcam that is a part of my project. It's only one for now and it's pointed to the gate;

I switched to Openhab2 – week 22/2017 – wich allows me to control/see different parameters from remote android app installed on my phone. I've faced a lot of errors and ilegal opperations 🙂

Custom voice notifications are now available – week 45/2016 – this voice notifications uses TTS engine available in English only and notifies me every message from the system. Also, I can set the temperature in my room.

Inspired by IT movie where I saw a control panel for smarthome, I developed for the android tablets' app its own daydream service featuring a spinning logo avoiding to have a permanent black screen on all day charging tablets.