Smart Home Connect

Smart Home Connect (SHC) is yet another Python home automation framework—in line with Home Assistant, SmartHome.py, SmartHomeNG and probably many more. Its purpose is to connect "smart home" devices via different communication protocols, provide means for creating automation rules/scripts and a web interface for controling the devices via browser.

In contrast to most other home automation frameworks, SHC is completely based on Python's asynchronous coroutines (asyncio) and configured via pure Python scripts instead of YAML files or a fancy web engineering tool. Its configuration is based on instantiating Connectable objects (like state variables, User Interface Buttons, KNX Group Addresses, etc.) and interconnecting them with simple Read/Subscribe patterns. Thus, it is quite simple but really powerful, allowing on-the-fly type conversion, expressions for calculating derived values, handling stateless events, …. Read more about SHC's base concepts in the documentation.

Features

• interfaces
  • KNX bus via KNXD
  • DMX (via Enttec DMX USB Pro and compatible interfaces)
  • HTTP/REST API + websocket API
  • SHC client (connecting to another SHC instance via websocket API)
  • MIDI (esp. for Hardware MIDI controllers)
  • MQTT
  • Tasmota (currently: relais, RGB+CCW lights, IR receiver, power sensors; more features will be added on demand)
  • Pulseaudio
  • Telegram Bot
• websocket-based web user interface (using aiohttp, Jinja2 and Semantic UI)
  • widgets: buttons, text display, text/number inputs, dropdowns, images with placeable buttons, charts, etc., …
• configuration of data points/variables and automation rules in plain Python
  • full power of Python + intuitive representation and interconnection of different interfaces
  • type checking and extensible type conversion system
  • connecting objects via Python expressions
• chronological and periodic timers for triggering rules
• Logging/Persistence (no really stable in API yet)
  • to MySQL

Roadmap

• Stabilize logging API
• Logging to Influx-DB
• More web widgets
  • Gauges
  • timeline/"stripe" charts

Getting started

0. (Optional) Create a virtual environment to keep your Python package repositories clean:

   python3 -m virtualenv -p python3 venv
   . venv/bin/activate

   Read more about virtual environments in the offical Python docs.

1. Install the smarthomeconnect Python distribution from PyPI:

   pip3 install smarthomeconnect

   It will be only install smarthomeconnect and the dependencies of its core features. Additional depdencies are required for certain interface modules and can be installed via pip's/setuptool's 'extras' feature. See Depdencies section of this readme for a complete list. If you install SHC from a source distribution (in contrast to a "binary" package, such as a "wheel" package from PyPI), you'll need NodeJS and npm installed on your machine, which are used to download the web UI assets during the Python package building process.

2. Create a Python script (let's call it my_home_automation.py) which imports and starts Smart Home Connect:

   #!/usr/bin/env python3
   import shc
   
   # TODO add interfaces and Variables
   
   shc.main()

   When running this script (python3 my_home_authomation.py), SHC should start up and run idle until you terminate it (e.g. with Ctrl+C). See the code below for an example with the Web UI and the KNX interface.

3. Read about the basic concepts of SHC and available interfaces in the SHC documentation. Extend your script to create interfaces and Variables, connect connectable objects, define logic handlers and let them be triggered.

Simple Usage Example

import datetime
import shc
import shc.web
import shc.web.widgets
import shc.interfaces.knx

# Configure interfaces
knx_connection = shc.interfaces.knx.KNXConnector()
web_interface = shc.web.WebServer("localhost", 8080, "index")

web_index_page = web_interface.page('index')


# Simple On/Off Variable, connected to KNX Group Address (initialized per Group Read telegram),
# with a switch widget in the web user interface
ceiling_lights = shc.Variable(bool, "ceiling lights")\
    .connect(knx_connection.group(shc.interfaces.knx.KNXGAD(1, 2, 3), dpt="1", init=True))

web_index_page.add_item(shc.web.widgets.Switch("Ceiling Lights")
                        .connect(ceiling_lights))


# Store timestamp of last change of the ceiling lights in a Variable (via logic handler) and show
# it in the web user interface
ceiling_lights_last_change = shc.Variable(
    datetime.datetime, "ceiling lights last change",
    initial_value=datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(0))

@ceiling_lights.trigger
@shc.handler()
async def update_lastchange():
    await ceiling_lights_last_change.write(datetime.datetime.now())

web_index_page.add_item(
    shc.web.widgets.TextDisplay(datetime.datetime, "{:%c}", "Last Change of Ceiling Lights")
    .connect(ceiling_lights_last_change))


# close shutters via button in the web user interface (stateless event, so no Variable required) 
web_index_page.add_item(
    shc.web.widgets.ButtonGroup(
        "Shutters",
        [
            shc.web.widgets.StatelessButton(shc.interfaces.knx.KNXUpDown.DOWN,
                                            shc.web.widgets.icon("arrow down"))
                .connect(knx_connection.group(shc.interfaces.knx.KNXGAD(3, 2, 1), dpt="1.008"))
        ]
    ))

# use expression syntax to switch on fan when temperature is over 25 degrees 
temperature = shc.Variable(float, "temperature")\
    .connect(knx_connection.group(shc.interfaces.knx.KNXGAD(0, 0, 1), dpt="9", init=True))
fan = shc.Variable(bool, "fan")\
    .connect(knx_connection.group(shc.interfaces.knx.KNXGAD(0, 0, 2), dpt="1"))\
    .connect(temperature.EX > 25.0)

# Start up SHC
shc.main()

License

Smart Home Connect is published under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.

It's bundled with multiple third party works:

• “Prism” – Subtle Patterns by Toptal Designers (Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0)

See LICENSE and NOTICE file for further information.

Dependencies

SHC depends on the following Python packages:

• aiohttp and its dependencies (Apache License 2.0, MIT License, Python Software Foundation License, LGPL 2.1, 3-Clause BSD License)
• jinja2 and MarkupSafe (BSD-3-Clause License)

Additional dependencies are required for some of SHC's interfaces. They can be installed automatically via pip, by specifying the relevant 'extras' flag, e.g. pip install smarthomeconnect[mysql] for mysql logging support.

• Logging via MySQL [mysql]:
  • aiomysql and PyMySQL (MIT License)
• KNX interface [knx]:
  • knxdclient (Apache License 2.0)
• DMX interface [dmx]:
  • pyserial-asyncio & pySerial (BSD-3-Clause License)
• MIDI interface [midi]:
  • mido (MIT License)
  • python-rtmidi (MIT License) incl. RTMidi (modified MIT License)
• MQTT interface [mqtt]:
  • paho-mqtt (Eclipse Public License v1.0 or Eclipse Distribution License v1.0)
  • asyncio-mqtt (BSD-3-Clause License)
• Pulseaudio interface [pulse]:
  • pulsectl and pulsectl-asyncio (MIT License)
• Telegram Bot interface [telegram]:
  • aiogram (MIT License) + its dependencies (BSD-3-Clause License + MPL 2.0)
• file-based persistence storage [file_persistence]:
  • aiofile & caio (Apache License 2.0)

In addition, the following Javascript libraries from NPM are required for the web UI frontend. They are not included in this repository or in source distribution packages of SHC. Instead they are downloaded and packed during Python package build and bundled in the "binary" Python packages (including "wheel" packages) of SHC:

• Fomantic UI CSS framework (MIT License)
• jQuery (MIT License)
• iro.js (Mozilla Public License 2.0)
• Chart.js (MIT License)

Development

Feel free to open an issue on GitHub if you miss a feature or find an unexpected behaviour or bug. Please, consult the documentation on the relevant topic and search the GitHub issues for existing reports of the issue first.

If you want to help with the development of Smart Home Connect, your Pull Requests are always appreciated.

Development setup

Setting up a dev environment for SHC is simple: Clone the git repository and install the development dependencies, listed in requirements.txt (+ the python-rtmidi module if you want to run the MIDI tests). These include all dependencies of smarthomeconnect with all extras:

git clone https://github.com/mhthies/smarthomeconnect
cd smarthomeconnect
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
pip3 install python-rtmidi

You may want to use a virtual environment to avoid messing up your Python packages.

Web UI Frontend Assets

Additionally, you'll need NodeJS and NPM on your machine for downloading and packing the web UI frontend asset files. Use the following commands to download all frontend dependencies from NPM and package them into /shc/web/static (using Parcel.js):

npm install
npm run build

When working on the web UI source files themselves (which are located in web_ui_src), you'll probably want to run Parcel.js in monitor mode, providing automatic re-packing and reload on every change:

npx parcel web_ui_src/main.js --dist-dir shc/web/static/pack --public-url ./

Tests and Code Style

Please make sure that all the unittests are passing, when submitting a Pull Request:

python3 -m unittest

The web tests require Firefox and geckodriver to be installed on your system and the frontend assets.

Additionally, I'd like to keep the test coverage on a high level. To check it, you may want to determine it locally, using the coverage tool:

coverage run -m unittest
coverage html
# open htmlcov/index.html

We also enforce static type correctness with MyPy and Python codestyle rules with flake8. To run the static type checks and codestyle checks locally, simply install MyPy and flake8 and execute the mypy and flake8 commands in the shc project repository.

All these checks are also performed by the GitHub Actions CI for Pull Requests and the master branch.