The purpose of this post is to try and document a proposal for a home automation implementation for different sensors and components using the Arduino framework and hardware components that are easily available in the Arduino ecosystem.

The main driver was to steer away from having to install a WiFi chip on each and every sensor or component. The reasons for this are as follows:

• reduce or limit polluting the list of connected devices on your WiFi router.
• drastically reduce power consumption on sensors using alternative wireless chips, protocols and MCUs.
• reduce the overall cost of the sensor or device by using alternative wireless chips and MCUs.

Software and hardware intended to be used:

• Arduino - probably the most popular electronics platform
• Atmel AVR MCUs - cheap and widely used microcontrollers.
• nRF24 - cheap and reliable wireless communication chip.
• ESP8266/ESP32 - WiFi chip that is cheap and popular amongst DIYs engineers.
• ESPHome - framework intended for ESP8266/ESP32 WiFi chips that uses simple configuration files to generate the firmware for your device.
• NRFLite - small footprint library for controlling nRF24 chips with only two pins.

Read the entire article on martinescu.com