Automation of the Home Automation

automation, , , , , ,

After we talked a lot about it in our podcast, I finally started with my “Automation of the Home Automation” project.

What I’ve done so far: Set up a Raspi 4 with Ubuntu Server, fully provisioned using Ansible. Also, it seems, the Kernel bug causing USB devices to fail on the 4 GB version of the Raspi 4 seams to be removed with the most recent binaries available.

Deployed MQTT, InfluxDB, Telegraf and Node-Red on Docker containers using Ansible.

Wrote my very first Node-Red flow to get data into the broker and the database:

The data is read from my EZcontrol XS1, which became surprisingly easy using Node-Red.

The EZcontrol XS1 integration for Home Assistant allows you to observe and control devices configured on the XS1 Gateway. Please have a look at the official docs for using this gateway.

While I was not sure about the available resources on the Raspberry, it seems there is plenty of space (RAM, CPU) left on the device.

On the other side, using Ansible I will be able to deploy services to other (more) nodes once necessary.

Unfortunately, docker-ce is not yet available for Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan. Therefore, adding the Docker repositories will fail.

A simple workaround is to add the repositories for disco instead.

The Ansible code to do so is quite simple:

- name: Add stabel repository 
  apt_repository: 
    repo: deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu "disco" stable
    state: present 

Also, I realized some issues with Ansible on Ubuntu running on the Raspi and Python. Therefore, I made sure Python 2.7 is entirely uninstalled. Instead, I made sure my inventory file is set to use Python 3 on the target system. 

[raspi]
raspi4

[raspi:vars]
ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python3

There have been some other issues, I came along, especially because for various bits OI was looking for there are no ARM aarch64 releases available. Also, the official Docker images I used do not support Apline on ARM v8 / aarch64 as Alpine seems not to support this target architecture, yet.

More bits and bytes to be added soon…