Of course, in a smart home, it is very easy and simple to use ready-made solutions, that is, you can buy devices from different ecosystems on different protocols and on wi-fi and zigbee and from Tuya, and from Xiaomi, and from Yandex, Aqara and others, and integrate all this and do only that from ready-made components making a smart home, building it, of course, is also quite difficult, you need to study a lot, try a lot, experiment a lot, but there is still a way to go to the next level in general, so to speak, and understand these devices why they are like this, why they have some properties, some functions defined, and for it is very convenient to use Arduino microcontrollers or there are different ESP analogs there.

These microcontrollers allow you to program them in a certain way, connect different sensors to them in different combinations and try to make some basic scenarios directly on the microcontroller, or use some communication tools to already integrate their smart home system.

I started experimenting in a smart home on Arduino this is actually a microcontroller the main board is an Arduino Uno, it is quite large, but it is convenient to experiment with it, it is also convenient to connect everything there, it also has a certain built-in controller for connecting to a computer and you can program it through a computer and also exchange information with it, that is, in principle, it is interesting, that is, you can connect a temperature sensor to it, for example, and humidity, the simplest DHT11 is there, and then you will see that some values change there, query them, program them using different libraries, and you can view them directly on the computer, build graphs and do some management.

data, for example, can be there if you connect LEDs to this Arduino, then you can turn on and off different LEDs there, you can connect many different sensors, that is, you can connect digital indicators or there are some even I bought small OLED displays and display different information on them, that is, in principle, quite full-fledged the solution.

It is clear that there are many different sensors there, there are ultrasonic sensors, usually in all sorts of kits there are different sensors in sets: temperature sensors, humidity sensors, different buttons, different relays, small servos, there are ultrasonic sensors and you can also connect small speakers, LEDs in large numbers can be connected not very powerful, there are certain restrictions, and of course you can also turn them on / off with these LEDs there and show some information.

That is, you can experiment, you can do a lot of different interesting things and now there are also other versions on sale, mostly I recently bought this Arduino Nano, this is such a board it is slightly larger, it is clear that there is an original board there is a Chinese analog, in principle they work the same and on this board of course you can, it is more compact, and you can already turn it on in such a breadboard, stick it in and, accordingly, do some strapping there, that is, right on the layout, you can turn on all sorts of LEDs there, install the necessary resistors there, and you can fully assemble the device.

I still have most of the devices still working, just assembled on a breadboard, of course, the connection there is not the most reliable, but for some basic scenarios it is quite suitable, layouts are of different sizes more, smaller ones are generally huge, that is, you can assemble large complex schemes for management.

There is also an Arduino Micro, which also has the ability to connect to a computer via USB at all, and then it can still emulate the operation of a keyboard or mouse, that is, it also gives great opportunities there, you can do some computer control through this microcontroller.

But all these Arduino, simple microcontrollers, have a limitation that there is no normal connection, that is, of course, you can buy there some additional boards that allow you to interact, there are zigbee modules that can interact, there are wi-fi modules, these are essentially the same ESP, let's say ESP-01, it it can just act as a full-fledged microcontroller or as just a transmitter over wi-fi, but either use a transmitter there at a frequency of 433 megahertz, this is also very convenient, it is a very simple protocol, simple interaction, quite reliable over not very long distances and high-quality power, it allows you to make a transfer there well and I am very happy I made a lot of devices and use them, which work exactly at a frequency of 433 megahertz.

But if we are already talking about the full-fledged creation of some sensors for a smart home system, then of course the next step is just to use this ESP microcontroller right away as the main device itself.

That is, you can also connect different sensors to it, even a simple ESP-01 microcontroller already has a lot of memory on board, and it has essentially four free pins there, you can connect several different sensors, for example, I connected a board with four relays, that is, in fact, such a simple microcontroller the size of a centimeter just a centimeter, it allows you to fully control four relays, this is also a very good solution and it is no more difficult to program it, that is, the same Arduino IDE environment also allows you to program these microcontrollers in essentially the same language and practically on the same libraries, this is also such a solution, that is, it is not necessary to use it now some Arduino can be immediately read to work with ESP.

For ESP, there is an opportunity to simply write some options in your programs, that is, you can make a full-fledged WiFi connection there, set up an exchange and connect to a broker using mqtt, or display some kind of web page for management, or access some kind of webhook, connect to some sites or and then such a device will be fully integrated into the smart home system.

Of course, ESP and Arduino work from the network, from batteries it will already be necessary to consider microcontrollers that are low in consumption, and then they can also make some separate sensors for the smart home system.

But on ESP, in principle, there is also ESPHome, such a library, it makes it very easy to configure and configure and it is completely there, very strongly integrated with Home Assistant, that is, you can download a special loader first, it is installed once on this ESP microcontroller, and then you can use the web interface there you can also make some settings there in a special language essentially similar to YAML, you can write a different structure there, that is, what ports are used for what what sensors are connected to these ports, and then the compiler will already build, pull the correct libraries, build the correct program, and in fact remotely upload it via wi-fi to this microcontroller is updated, and after that Home Assistant immediately sees these devices automatically and already all the sensors process all the necessary libraries correctly at once, this is a very simple way to practically make these devices with its integration directly into the ecosystem in a few clicks of buttons, and everything will work quite correctly.

For example, I have on the basis of such a microcontroller, although ESP32 is used there, but this is not the essence of it, that is, I just made another BLE gateway there, that is, which allows you to connect different devices to this microcontroller via Bluetooth, and it already sends information to Home Assistant, and then I already process it in the smart home system already has all this data using different scripts or inside this system, and performing various interesting scenarios related to this, that is, it is also very simple and not at all difficult to understand.

Well, even now there is also an opportunity to buy similar microcontrollers that work on zigbee, now there are no full-fledged programming libraries for the Arduino IDE, that is, a slightly different programming platform is used there and it is very more complicated, but you can also buy another microcontroller and make full-fledged different devices directly for zigbee networks, then this is also very interesting, an interesting direction, and of course such homemade devices have much greater capabilities, that is, you don't have to think about what parameters the factory one has, try to get along with them somehow, if there are any restrictions, something works with some delay or something-something is wrong, then it seems to be very difficult to fix, here you can safely rewrite the code to do as it should, for example, I have such microcontrollers, programs for example, they work in completely different scenarios, they also process some preliminary information, and do not just send everything to the smart home at once, that is, they are much faster it works, which is also a very interesting thing, and of course, now there are a lot of new interesting sensors for such homemade devices, for example, now there is already a microwave sensor that can also be fully connected directly to Arduino or ESP and also make a normal presence sensor, which in principle will have the same characteristics as the sensor from Tuya, that is, it will basically see and the distance to the object is shown, and its range is also the same approximately there, about 9 meters, that is, this is a full-fledged device and it costs very cheap and of course you can always wait for some kind of sale or buy some set and then it will be cheaper and really it will be possible to assemble a device that can and to determine, for example, the infrared motion sensor, also a plus for the microwave motion sensor, and there are still some events to process, for example, the light in the room or some other scenarios, and this of course greatly expands and moves forward in principle all this current technology that is now used for a smart home, and not be sure to wait until some manufacturers make their new sensors there, this is much more interesting for a smart home.

Automation in a smart home should be useful and create additional comfort, but sometimes everything goes wrong… The reasons for this, and how to configure everything, see on my channel.