For a long time, I thought the smart house was either a fad or something super expensive, for the “people with the money”.
However, two “use-cases” have caught my attention:
– UC1: being able to remotely turn off a light you forgot on while leaving the house (there are many variants of similar situations)
– UC2: being able to turn on/off my garden water pump with voice command. While I do have my two children around me while gardening, I was sure it was more reliable to get “ok, google, turn on my water pump” working 😉

It took me 7 months of 1-2 hours work after 10pm (in the days when I still had some energy to burn) and many good advises from my friends to get from the first Arduino example (turn LED on) to “ok, google, turn on my water pump”.

– Was it expensive?
– No, not really. What I use today (bathroom lights + hot water control + garden water pump control + mqtt/hass/node-red bridge) should be less than 100 USD.

– Is it secure?
– As secured as any device connected to the internet can be (all connections are secured, all running software is open source). I leave lights/hot water control on permanently as nothing really bad could happen, but I do keep water pump unplugged as I see the risk to big.

– Can I have something like this for my house?
– Sure. My intention is to publish all I did, the architecture I used, the sources of the software, etc. You can try to build it yourself or ask for help.