Adventures in Home Automation - Part Two

It's been more than three years since I wrote my last article on home automation and its unbelievable how much has changed in that time. We are unfortunately still in the midst of a global pandemic that has caused so much turmoil and pain across the world. There have also been big changes for me both professionally and personally. I have moved to Palo Alto Networks after spending 15+ years at Cisco and its been a great 5 months leading the CloudGenix Product team. I have also moved into a new home this October which was one of the few bright spots in this unprecedented year.

Which brings me back to the main topic of this article. My new home was built as Smart Home and pretty much everything was setup for automation. The home automation market has moved forward very rapidly in the past three years and the DIY/duct-tape approach required is largely not needed. Most products come ready out of the box and can be easily to integrated with your voice assistant. The plethora of home networking protocols has also largely consolidated to Ethernet and WiFi (in lieu of Z-Wave and ZigBee)

Here are some of the existing home automation capabilities that I have already which were fairly basic to setup and all of them integrated with Amazon Alexa

• Lights / Dimmers: Lutron Caseta Switches (20+)
• HVAC and Fire Alarms: Cielo Controllers (4) for HVAC and Nest (8) for Alarms
• Smart Speakers and Cameras: Sonos (3) and Ring (1)
• Smart Locks and Garage Door: Schlage (2) and Genie Aladdin (1)

So if everything is so easy, why am I writing this article?

Aha! That because there were two components in my home that were not smart and there is no easy way to integrate them with Alexa. One of them is my DSC Home Security System and the second are my Motorized Levolor Shades. Neither of these is "Smart" but I was determined to teach them since I took some time off in the holidays

DSC Home Security System

This was a relatively easy DIY project. I used the Envisalink Interface Module to connect to my DSC Control panel.

The Envisalink basically acts as a keypad for the DSC system and it connects through the RJ45 interface to your home router to enable you to control the home security from your smart phone

The instructions are pretty simple and I was able to get this done including the integration with Alexa in a couple of hours.

Motorized Levolor Shades

This was trickier because basically the motorized blinds come with a BLE enabled 6-channel Remote only. This means that you can use your smart phone to operate the blinds with their app but no good way to integrate with Alexa. Found this internet thread that solved the problem.

So I bought an ESP32 circuit board which basically includes BLE and WiFI (for $10). Figured out how to use the Arduino IDE to program and flash it. Used this code to basically set up WiFI on the board and send BLE commands to the 6-Channel Remote to Open and Close the Blinds. Then I used IFTTT to basically bind Alexa and the web server running on the ESP32.

Finally, bought a small junction box to make it look nice. It works great and even with multiple redirections (Alexa-> IFTTT-> Web Server->BLE remote> it only takes 4-5 seconds to perform the specified action. This took me a few hours to get done since I had to get familiar with the ESP32 board and to understand the BLE protocol.

That's all folks! At this point I do not have anything left to automate but if I do conjure up any more projects I will document them possibly three years from now going by past history!