FLAON Smart Home project

Avalon project become FLAON project, much stable, much faster, more precise.

The idea

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

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, known as AVALON project. It was based on a few sensors, a raspberry PI (Barney) and a few controllers.

Now, FLAON project is much faster, much stable, more precise and it has much more features that allows me to see many notifications from different devices or processes or to control different devices. A short list is shown bellow:

- the temperatures in 3 rooms and outside of the house- weather predictions - provided by darksky.net- lock or unlock the gate and monitoring the status of 2 doors- monitoring the house's thermal power- surveillance from exterior cam- visualize personal calendar events- notifications from FLAON on the remote android app openhab2- 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 (from openhab2) 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 or to be voice notified by different events or errors. For now I use an Amazon echo dot device but I am considering to move to a Google home assistant.

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 52/2019 – With a lot of time to spend with, this project gets a new look (meaning a new android interface for controls). The need of having the most important info about FLAON project on the first screen, made me to change the layout of the android tablets (see below).

Also the daydream is changed by providing additional info regarding the main statuses of the system as a notification icons (below is the new event icon example)

• Week 22/2019 – The Avalon project became FLAON project.

Differences:

• the MQTT protocol is used instead of serial communication.
• ESP & WEMO D1 controllers replaced the old Arduino Nano R3
• the new tablets' interface looks like this:

https://youtu.be/4POG5rDeEMM

• added: weather predictions, moon phases, calendar events
• still under construction: the system layout

Week 8/2018 –

https://youtu.be/vjnlJ4EbLRI

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 anniversary 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:

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

Source: FLAON Smart Home project