Grow room Automation

[Trichitect]

I'm headed down the automation rabbit hole.
Who's going with me?

I'll post everything to do with automation in this thread. I'm completely new to this and I think it will be awesome to have others join me in the process and give some feedback or suggestions. I know the unique collection of minds here can help me make it better than I could even dream of on my own.

Let's get to it...

Here's some of the hardware I'm starting with:

I'm going to control everything through the Home Assistant app. Starting with monitoring temp & humidity, and using that data to switch on/off environmental controls. This will also track and record all of that data so I can go back and look at the history. Once those are dialed I'll move on to adding some other stuff to the system.

 

[Rasterman]

I've got an original Raspberry PI I haven't booted up in years.

 

[Trichitect]

Just a quick update, not off to a great start, I'm having problems getting the sensors to update at a regular interval. I'm out of my league on this one so I'm getting some help from my tech buddy...

 

[corndizzle9]

Wanted to share some stuff I learned setting this up myself. After Home Assistant is running, I needed to decide what kind of sensors I would use. A lot of the home automation stuff uses Wifi, but I opted for Zigbee which is like a bluetooth mesh. I had to get a zigbee USB dongle for the raspberry pi. A list of supported ones can be found here: Zigbee Home Automation. It's possible to mix and match all types of sensors. No need to only use zigbee, thats just my preference.

From there it's actually quite easy to find all sorts of zigbee devices:
Amazon product

Amazon product

The smart outlets are really nice, they can track power usage over time. Hope this helps someone