Ground Up Smarthome Build

Projects General Guidance
1

Briefing

Hi Arduino community, I have been hired by friends of my family to create for them a Smarthome for the house they are building in Virgina, US. I am a CS major in school currently for a specialization in AI Development. However, this will be my first large scale project and the first time I will be tackling home automation. (Don't get me wrong I'm not a complete novice here but never on this scale.)

After doing a lot of searching online OpenHAB looks to be the best solution over all for this project to allow them to not have to worry over ecosystems. This will also give them the benifit of selecting the best products for the price in the long run.

Pros of this project:

  • Nothing has been built yet except for the basement which will only be used for storage and a panic room.
  • No products have yet been bought and my suggestions will be the main ones looked at allowing for the best compatibility and use for price.

Cons of this project:

  • Information on whole home smarthome systems are limited unless it's retrofits and/or ecosystems that limit consumer use.

Current Smarthome Project Plan

Currently the plan is to have a home server (named butler) running Linux and OpenHAB as the entry point for the Internet into the home in the panic room aND a centralized point to proam the home. Run Cat5/6 through the whole home with the electrical lines (separated by 2 feet and in shielded conduit). Have a centralized WiFi router in the home. Use Raspberry Pi 2's inside the walls of each room (called living room maid, kitchen maid, etc) and attach a Arduino to each with a sensor array to monitor the stats of each room.

Now this is where I am coming up stuck. Can a Arduino have a Zigbee shield, Z-wave shield, and a sensor shield attached to one Arduino (note: not saying which Arduino as Idk which one could pull this off if any can). If this is not possible then can you attach 2 Arduino's to a RPI2 and have one with Z-wave the other with Zigbee and the sensor shield with all breakaway sensors added on top to monitor a room? I know I only need 1 or 2 Z-wave controllers. Zigbee I'm more unsure of.

Also on a separate question. Can a RPi2 be a Wifi access point if I was to use these "maids" to have Wifi HATs allowing each room to have its own access point. Each will be direct wired to the server "butler". This could eliminate the need for a router all together.

End goal is to have each room with most protocols so any product they use can be controlled via the OpenHAB app.

If this is a terrible setup say so and why as again this is my first large scale project like this.

Things I haven't even gotten around to looking at is the:

  • Dedicated Audio System they want through the whole home.
    Bluetooth smart locks
  • NVR System with outside cameras on the corners of the home.
  • Dedicated home NAS cloud.
  • Internet entertainment system
  • Any other idea's you guys can suggest as well as more minor integration

Needless to say I bit off a bit more than I can chew alone at one time and any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Goal with this post though is not just for me but for anyone one looking at building a whole home Smarthome system. So please help out in this post as much as possible to make more of a repository for smarthome development for everyone.

2

Why the Cat5 cables when a centralised WiFi router could handle all the WiFi signals?
There are several Wifi shields for the Arduino.
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoWiFiShield101 is one of them.
Any Wifi 'blind' spots can be covered by a WiFi repeater.
Why do you need a Pi? What is it doing that an Arduino cannot do?
The only thing you mentioned that an Arduino cannot do is CCTV.

And, please, do not bury the Arduinos in walls or under flooring where they cannot be easily reached for servicing!
You friend won't be too pleased if, when something goes wrong, you have to dig up his new quarry tile kitchen floor.

You will need to program things so that, in the event of a failure, everything reverts to a safe mode. No scalding water from the shower if the hot water control fails!

3

Your problem is that a building like this might have a 50 or 100 year lifetime. Cat5 or 6 cable is already kind of "dated" so I'd say the thing to run is a little bit of plastic low voltage conduit. Then in 20 years you pull the new "terabit/sec ultra-fiber that your new 3D cameras need

OpenHAB seems to me the way to go now also but I know it will need to be replaced in 5 years when a new commercial product becomes the new must-have "standard".

You are thinking of solutions, you need to think about requirements first, all solutions (openhab, cat5, ARM based SBCs,...) are transient. Requirements are non-transient. So your design starts with this: Where do we put stuff, how do we service the stuff. Can a "normal" person trouble shoot this stuff? What happens when it fails?

All technologies change fast when they are new then as they mature the rate of change goes down. Smart home tech is VERY new. It will change very fast. Plan for change.

As for the audio part, think about the audio properties of the rooms and speaker placement the electronics part is nearly trivial and matters much less