Introducing Simple Smarthome System

I always have some code and electronics lying around, waiting to be finished. This time I wanted to test my skills in backend development and learn a little bit in the process. I have experience with Kotlin, so the obvious choice for me was to try Ktor.

This approach has the benefit of seeing Kotlin in action on other platforms, since Kotlin multi-platform might be a valuable tool in my toolbox. I chose Vue.js for the frontend since I’ve already tried React in the past. Okay, so I’ve got the tools, but what should I work on? The answer came to me when I was not satisfied with existing solutions in the smart home dashboard environment.

What didn’t I like about existing solutions?

• They are hard to configure
• They have too many features
• They are configured through configuration files with little documentation

So I decided to build my own. How hard can it be?

After more than half a year, I present to you the Simple SmartHome System:

It also works on mobile:

What can it do?

• It can show the latest status of devices.
• Group devices into logical groups like rooms or garages.
• Send events back to an MQTT broker.

What is missing?

• A rule engine that can change the state of sensors based on events.

There are a couple of concepts I’ve tried to follow while developing SSS:

1. It is based on MQTT. MQTT is a popular standard in the IoT world with a lot of devices already supporting it.
2. It should easily integrate with two tools I use: zigbee2mqtt (gateway software that allows you to use proprietary Zigbee devices without proprietary gateways) and Tasmota (open source firmware for devices based on ESP8622 chips).
3. Everything should be configurable through a UI.

Please go to Github for installation details and source code.

I’ve learned a couple of things during development. I think I like React more than Vue. The MVVM approach of Vue is nice, but observable variables didn’t always work as expected. Kotlin is a superb technology even on the backend, but Ktor is not opinionated at all, so I needed to figure out a lot of stuff, like which database to use and what is the database connection pool :)

I need to mention the great support I received from Netguru in developing this tool. Not only do I have the opportunity to promote it here and host it on Netguru’s Github, but also great people from the Vue team helped me with this framework. Growing at Netguru is a pleasure :)

Photo by Robin Glauser on Unsplash