Raspberry Pi as SMART HOME hub – (Video Tutorial)

Raspberry Pi as SMART HOME hub – Home Assistant, Node RED, Grafana, InfluxDB etc. Guide From Scratch

In this article/video I’ll show you how to create a Smart Home hub on a Raspberry Pi from scratch. I’m going to install Home Assistant (HASSIO), Node-RED, Mosquitto MQTT, Grafana, InfluxDb, Pi-Hole, Portainer, OpenHAB, Plex media server, Log2Ram & TasmoAdmin, but don’t worry it will be easier than you think and everything will be based on Docker containers.

After you complete this tutorial you will be able to connect almost every smart device that you have, in one place, and control it from there. Oh and there is even a menu. 

Requirements for making Raspberry Pi as SMART HOME hub

To complete this tutorial you will need:

• A smashed subscribe button or at least like the video in YouTube 
• A Working Raspberry Pi with Raspbian – if you don’t have such go watch my video https://youtu.be/vn4nqk7qo80 and then come back here after that.

If you don’t have Raspberry yet, you can buy one from the affiliate links below:

• Raspberry Pi 4  – https://amzn.to/2qs0Dtw
• Power supply for it – https://amzn.to/2pwE1HL
• Micro SD card – https://amzn.to/2Os6cA3

I’m using MacOS but you can follow the same steps with Linux terminal or any Windows SSH client.

To download the project type the following in a Terminal:

sudo apt-get install git -y

git clone https://github.com/SensorsIot/IOTstack.git ~/IOTstack

To start the Menu

cd ~/IOTstack && bash ./menu.sh

After you install Docker and you have chosen anything from the Menu – type:

docker-compose up -d

This will download the Docker images from Internet and will install them on your Raspberry Pi. Depending on how many containers you selected and your internet connection speed this can take a while.

Portainer

Portainer is a powerful, open-source management toolset that allows you to easily build, manage and maintain Docker environments.

• URL: 
  • YOUR_RASPBERRY_IP:9000
• Default Credentials:
  • You will be asked to choose a password

Node RED

Node RED is a visual programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways. It provides a browser-based editor that makes it easy to wire together flows using the wide range of nodes in the palette that can be deployed to its runtime in a single-click.

• URL: 
  • YOUR_RASPBERRY_IP:1880

To enter inside the Node RED container execute:

docker exec -it bordered /bin/bash

or

./services/nodered/terminal.sh 

To secure Node-RED you need a password hash. To get the hash run the command bellow and change the PASSWORD with your password to get the hash:

node -e "console.log(require('bcryptjs').hashSync(process.argv[1], 8));" PASSWORD

Copy the generated has and open the file 

./volumes/nodered/data/settings.js 

Then follow the writeup on https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/runtime/securing-node-red for further instructions.

Grafana

Open-source platform for data visualization, monitoring and analysis. Grafana works great with InfluxDB for storing IoT devices metrics, and it also supports other data sources (Prometheus, MySQL, Postgres) 

• URL: 
  •   YOUR_RASPBERRY_IP:3000
• Default Credentials:
  •   username: admin
  •   password: admin
• Then you have to change your password

Mosquitto

To enter inside the Mosquitto container execute:

docker exec -it mosquitto /bin/sh

or  

./services/mosquitto/terminal.sh 

Then run the following command replacing MYUSER with username of your choice:

mosquitto_passwd -c /mosquitto/config/pwfile MYUSER 

It will then ask you to type your password and confirm it. 

To exit the container’s shell type:  

exit

Edit the file below and remove the comment in front of password_file

services/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf 

Restart the container either from your local Portainer or with the command:

docker-compose restart mosquitto. 

Then you can use these credentials in Tasmota, Node-RED, Home Assistant etc.

Home Assistant (HASSIO)

Hass.io is an Open source home automation software that puts local control and privacy first. Home Assistant currently supports over 1,400 different integrations with more added with every release.

• URL: 
  •   YOUR_RASPBERRY_IP:8123
• Info
  • Hass.io now has a seperate installation in the menu.
  • You will be asked to select your device type during the installation.

InfluxDb

InfluxDB is an open-source time series database. It is written in Go language and it is optimized for fast, high-availability storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operations monitoring, application metrics, Internet of Things sensor data, and real-time analytics.

• Default Credentials:
  •   username: nodered
  •   password: nodered

To enter inside the InfluxDB container execute:

 docker exec -it influxdb /bin/bash

or 

./services/influxdb/terminal.sh

Using the CLI inside container you can type the following

To create mydb Database:

CREATE DATABASE mydb

In order to show all available Databases, you can use:

SHOW DATABASES

To connect to mydb Database:

USE mydb

Insert statement to add a single time series data point into InfluxDB, enter: 

INSERT cpu,host=serverA,region=us_west value=0.64

Select statement To retrieve data from the database

SELECT "host", "region", "value" FROM "cpu"

Perform a GET request to retrieve data from HTTP:

curl -G 'http://YOUR_RASPBERRY_IP:8086/query?pretty=true' --data-urlencode "db=mydb" --data-urlencode "q=SELECT \"value\" FROM \"cpu_load_short\" WHERE \"region\"='us-west'"

Pi-Hole

• URL: 
  •   YOUR_RASPBERRY_IP:8089/admin
• Default Credentials:
  •   password: pihole

Then you can change the password by entering inside Pi-Hole docker container using the following:

docker exec -it pihole /bin/bash

and then by executing:

pihole -a -p

You have to type your new password twice to save it.

openHAB

open Home Automation Bus (openHAB) is an open source home automation software written in Java. It is deployed on premise and connects to devices and services from different vendors. 

• URL: 
  •   YOUR_RASPBERRY_IP:8080
  •   YOUR_RASPBERRY_IP:8443 #for HTTPS.

Plex media server

PlexMediaServeris a free digital mediaserver which lets you access the media contents (audio, video, pictures) on one computer with any other computer or devices. 

• URL: 
  •   YOUR_RASPBERRY_IP:32400/web 
• Info:
  • Create a directory in you home directory called mnt with a subdirectory HDD.
  • Follow these instructions to mount your external drive to /home/pi/mnt/HDD in you fstab
  • edit your docker-compose.yml file and under plex section uncomment the volumes for tv series and movies (modify the path to point to your media locations).
  • Run docker-compose up -d to rebuild plex with the new volumes

Log2Ram 

Very usefull tool for RaspberryPi for not writing on the SD card all the time.

Activate it through the menu and execute the following commands to ensure that is working. They have to return some lines if everything is OK.

df -h | grep log2ram

mount | grep log2ram

TasmoAdmin

TasmoAdmin is an administrative Website for Devices flashed with Tasmota firmware.

• URL: 
  •   YOUR_RASPBERRY_IP:8088

Question for You

My question for you guys is very simple. What kind of smart devices are you currently have – let me know in the comments bellow.

I’m using several Tasmotised Sonoffs and D1 minis with temperature and humidity sensors.

These IoT devices are connected to my Home Assistant and Node-Red and I control my house heating, some of my lights and my garage door. 

Support my work

Any sort of engagement on this channel does really help out a lot with the YouTube algorithm, so make sure you hit the subscribe, Like and Bell buttons If you enjoy this video.

Also feel free to add me on Twitter by search for KPeyanski. I post there pretty much daily. 

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I hope that you find this tutorial useful and definitely stay tuned for the other tutorials that are coming up. 

Thank you for reading, stay safe and see you next time.