- Controlling LEGO hubs: a mqtt2pybricks gateway
We finally moved to a new home. Not an apartment on a 6th floor with dozens of crazy and noisy neighbors but a real house with a garden and a garage.
I also quit my job and I am taking a rest. So I finally have both time and opportunity to look into domotics.
I installed OpenHAB on a Raspberry Pi and started adding ‘things’ to get familiar with it. The first was a Nedis dehumidifier I bought a few months after moving – we moved to a place with its own micro-weather, lots of humidity, and my wife and the younger kid have allergies problems so I’m trying to keep humidity levels low.
Although the dehumidifier has builtin wi-fi we were using it just on manual mode but since it was easy to integrate with OpenHAB I started with it.
OpenHAB offers ‘bridges’ for several types of devices. This dehumidifier is a Tuya device so I added a Tuya bridge and found that I could read humidity and temperature values even when the dehumidifier was in standby mode (previously, to know the humidity level of the room I needed to turn it on to be shown on the display and just humidity, no temperature readings).
So I ordered two Tuya humidity+temperature sensors to monitor our bedroom and the #2 bedroom.
And then I added a older humidifier to OpenHAB through an also older wi-fi power plug. The humidifier has a ‘mechanic’ power switch so I left it always ON and control it from the power plug.
And then the third humidifier. But this one has a ‘digital’ power switch so you need to press it to turn it ON/OFF. And no builtin wi-fi. So a fingerbot-like gadget was needed. I chose a Switchbot Bot:
It is a Bluetooth BLE device, is supposed to be used with the SwitchBot Hub that works as a wi-fi to BLE gateway but I found a description of its API so used python to control it and created my own mqtt2switchbot gateway with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (using ‘bleak’ and ‘pahoo-mqtt’) and adding a MQTT broker to my OpenHAB server.
So I can control Bluetooth BLE devices from my domotics central.
And LEGO Hubs are BLE devices.
So the next obvious step was controlling LEGO from my domotics central 😀