My Try To Do Home Automation For My Home

Everyone loves the concept of having a smart home where we can control all the devices via our phone or any other automation. But we don't know where to start. The same happend to me when I was trying to setup a minimal smart automation for my home. When I researched , I came to know that there were lot of agencies who does this but it didn't give me the fun coz I am a software develper and I want the things to be done on my own.

The Product Loop:

The first thing I researched was smart bulbs and smart fans. The device will be smart enough and we can control them via their app or we can connect them to google smart home app. But here is the catch , the smart devices are costly and if the device somehow gets damaged , we have to buy the same smart device to replace it and it will cost more money, even though it is a great start for smart automation it is not efficient enough. So I researched some more to see wether I can control the devices in circuit level, meaning I can use normal appliances like normal fan, normal light yet control them via app and automate them by taking control over the circuit level.

The Smart Relays:

When I researched the smart relays was the right choice for my use case, a smart relay is nothing but a smart module which sits in the circuit level , usually we can fit them behind a normal switch board and control each switches. So we will be control this smart module and this smart module will decide wether to give power the actual device which it is being connected to or not. This makes the normal devices to achieve smartness by some level. But when I digged deeper there were two smart relays wifi smart relay and zigbee smart relay. Usually wifi smart relays were cheaper where as zigbee smart relays were little bit pricy. I researched why this difference.

Zigbee vs Wifi Smart relays:

For the wifi smart relay as the name suggests that the smart relay works on wifi protocol where as Zigbee relays works on zigbee protocol. But what is the main difference. For wifi smart relays each device will be connected to our main wifi router meaning lets take we have around 45 devices in our home that are being automated means all these 45 devices will be connected to our main router and thus reducing the performance of our local wifi network and will slow down the internet connectivity..Also one more catch is that we cant have local automations being executed for wifi smart relays coz it stores the automations in the cloud of the smart relay's vendor and if the internet is gone these automations probably wont work, so here comes the zigbee protocol. The Zigbee protocol is a mesh network protocol and it is a separate protocol and it wont affect our wifi network. Also all the automations we do for zigbee are local and the vendor wont store it in cloud so our automations will work even if we are not connected to the internet. For the zigbee to work we need a zigbee coordinator which is a device which will talk to our zigbee devices and we will be needing an open source software called home assistant to configure and connect the zigbee devices to the zigbee coordinator. For making sure to run this software we can run it in a raspberry PI or any laptop, I choose running it in my old legion laptop.

These are all my base setup and thought process and my knowledge gathering, I will update my progress and actual setup once I finish it in my home.