It's common to talk about smart home as the tool that makes your everyday life at home easier and more comfortable, but smart home can also be a great help a lot to set your mind at ease when you're away for a long period of time, on a vacation and possibly outside of the country. Being able to keep an eye on what's happening in your house and be alerted when something happens is very helpful on keeping you relaxed and reassured during your off time.
We propose you today to guide you into setting up the necessary tools and automation to have your house monitor itself for you and be remotely accessible at anytime.
Most smart devices on the market offer similar features but are very costly solutions. If you're not willing to invest in such products, or if you have already one or two of these devices but want to implement new features for cheap, this project is for you.
You can make this project in around one hour, with a $50 budget and with no specific skills.
A sound sensor can be a great way to quickly detect any problem in your house. Both an intrusion or the smoke alarm turning on will be directly detected by the sound sensor which can then warn you and ask the webcam to take a picture to assess the situation.
Setting such sensor is very easy with your Prota Pi.
Now your Sensor will react to each close-by sound by displaying "Rising interrupt" and "Falling interrupt" on your GPIO interface (as below).
As we showcased in our Bedside remote project , there are many ways for you to connect your lighting system. We will use here RF (Radio Frequency) sockets connected by a RF transceiver plugged to our Raspberry Pi. It's a very easy way to connect lights, but you can of course connect your Prota Pi to a WeMo plug, any other plug supported by IFTTT or use a MicroBot Push to turn the light switches on.
Please follow the bedside project for instructions on how to set up your connected lights.
Those connected lights, outside of being very useful when you're at home, will allow you to remotely trigger lights during your vacation to give the impression it's being occupied. This century old trick still remain a good way to prevent unwanted intrusions. You can of course create an automation that will turn on and back off your lights at specific times and days, but since this will create a pattern that might be spotted as such, we will see how you can press a simple button on your smartphone to trigger those lights remotely at random hours.
Click on + and name your button. Call it "Lights on" for instance.
As we showcased in our DIY Smart Security project , you can turn an old smartphone into a smart cam by using ManyThing app, which is supported by IFTTT and therefore can be connected to your Prota hub.
Install your smartphone either facing the entrance door (from outside or inside if you have a glass door or a side window) or in a sensitive room (for instance where you keep your valuables). Requirement: Your smartphone needs to be connected to a power supply to stay on during the whole length of your stay + it needs to be in reach of your WiFi connection.
To allow you to come back into a warm house during the winter or a chilled one during summer without having a crazy energy bill due to HVAC appliances left on during, smart appliances can hopefully be triggered remotely. Most smart HVAC appliances are however very expensive.
MicroBot Push lets you turn any HVAC appliance that uses buttons to be turned on remotely based on your needs. It's a much more affordable alternative and lets you keep your old appliance.
You can find MicroBot Push on Amazon (US/UK/CA) or on our website.
Install on your HVAC appliance and it's ready to use!
Step 8: TIME TO AUTOMATE!
Stories is the automation tool that allows you to write automation workflows very simply, in natural language.
When TelegramBot receives "Report", Webcam takes a snapshot then Telegram Bot sends image file.
When Webcam detects some motion, Telegram Bot writes "Motion has been detected at home!" Then Webcam takes a snapshot Then Telegram Bot sends image file.
When GPIO18 detects a rising interrupt, Telegram Bot writes "Sound has been detected at home!" Then Webcam takes a snapshot Then Telegram Bot sends image file.
The remote turning on of your HVAC appliance will depend whether you know exactly when you will come back. You can either trigger it by a Telegram message, through the MicroBot app or by writing a scheduled storyline like "When it's Friday at 5PM, MicroBot Push press the button" (schedule can be done only up to a week).
When GPIO18 detects a rising interrupt, IFTTT applet runs.
When Webcam detects some motion, IFTTT applet runs.
For the last one, it's necessary that you name a specific song name as registered on your phone. We use this applet to trigger an alarm sound that will either warn the neighbors or scare off the intruders (or both). You can download free sounds on http://soundbible.com/ .
Time to install your system!
As soon as you get alerted of a detected motion or detected sound, you can also check on your smartphone's Manything app to see what your old smartphone is recording. This allows you to combine two different views, depending on where you placed the smartphone and the webcam.
Whenever you feel like checking your house, sending 'Report' to your Telegram Bot will clear your mind off.
You can of course complete this project with other smart devices (supported by IFTTT) that you might have at home, like a Nest Smoke Detector or a Netatmo smartcam. Our DIY smart doorbell can also help you keep track of who came to your door while you were gone.
We hope you enjoyed this Instructables and will now be able to go on vacation with your mind completely free! Don't forget to support us by "favoriting" it and following us on both Instructables and Twitter.
Thank you. You made it simple on the instructions.