Home automation project

This is a hobby project that was created during Christmas 2019 in order to:

Play with the Auth0.com service.
Discover what's new in .net core 3.1 (and upgrade to all the way to .net 6.0)
Allow people in my building to control public doors (including garage) from their mobile phones
Expose internal video feed from the motion project that runs in the RPI.

If you are looking for open source well adopted solutions for your house automation, please consider:

Run in RPI

Publish the web host.

Zip the contents of bin\Release\net6.0\publish and transfer the zip file in the RPI.

Unzip the zip into /var/www/rpihost.

sudo unzip publish.zip -d /var/www/rpihost

Ensure that the RpiHost executable has the required permission:

sudo chmod +x /var/www/rpihost/RpiHost

Create a new service definition file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/rpihost.service

with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=The RPI host web app to control the relays

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/rpihost
ExecStart=sudo /var/www/rpihost/RpiHost
Restart=always
# Restart service after 10 seconds if the dotnet service crashes:
RestartSec=10
KillSignal=SIGINT
SyslogIdentifier=rpihost
User=rootUser
Environment=ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Production
Environment=DOTNET_PRINT_TELEMETRY_MESSAGE=false

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

and then install the service, execute and observe status:

sudo systemctl enable rpihost.service
sudo systemctl start rpihost.service
sudo systemctl status rpihost.service

If you modify the 'rpihost.service' file, you will need to reload the daemon by sudo systemctl daemon-reload.

If you just need to restart the service after a new deployment:

sudo systemctl start rpihost.service

Running behind nginx

Read the following articles:

Which boils down to:

sudo apt-get install nginx
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
sudo systemctl start nginx

To get a let's encrypt certificate if you can expose port 80 in the net

sudo apt-get install certbot python-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx

Otherwise, you have to do it manually:

sudo apt-get install certbot
sudo certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges=dns -d <YourDomain> -m <YourEmail>

To edit nginx configuration:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
sudo systemctl restart nginx

The nginx configuration:

server {
        server_name _;
        # SSL configuration
        listen 9080 ssl default_server;
        listen [::]:9080 ssl default_server;
        ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/public.domain.name/fullchain.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/public.domain.name/privkey.pem;

        root /var/www/rpihost/wwwroot;

        # Try direct files first and then reverse proxy
        try_files $uri @proxy;

        location @proxy {
                proxy_bind $server_addr;
                proxy_pass http://localhost:5000;
                proxy_http_version 1.1;
                proxy_set_header   Upgrade $http_upgrade;
                proxy_set_header   Connection keep-alive;
                proxy_set_header   Host $host:$server_port;
                proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
                proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
                # Needed to pass the external port as part of the host 
                # since it was not a default 80/443 one
                proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Host  $host:$server_port;
                proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Port  $server_port;
                # oAuth forced me to do that
                proxy_buffer_size  128k;
                proxy_buffers      4 256k;
                proxy_busy_buffers_size 256k;
        }
}

RPI's ubuntu maintenance

Various commands for maintenance of the ubuntu in RPI

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt autoremove
sudo certbot renew

Oneline bin only update

sudo mv RpiHos* /var/www/rpihost/ && sudo chmod +x /var/www/rpihost/RpiHost && sudo systemctl restart rpihost && ls -la /var/www/rpihost/

View service logs

sudo journalctl -fu rpihost.service

Handling secrets

You should always treat your codebase as if it was public, thus no secrets should be stored in the repository. See Microsoft docs reference. In this project's case, we are using the secret manager approach. Right click on the project and select "Manage User Secrets" to specify your settings.

Video stream reverse proxy

In the RPI there is Motion installed with an RPI Camera module. We could use https://github.com/proxykit/ProxyKit to expose the feed but unfortunately the steam is not passing through. This is why we implemented our own reverse proxy that flushes the buffers.

Corners that were cut

Dependency injection and testability of this project was not in scope of the MVP.

Docker deploy via IoT Hub

A public docker image of this repo is available at https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/dodekanisou/home-automation.

The application.json can be overridden using docker volumes. Upload your json file in the RPI /etc/iotedge/storage/home-automation.appsettings.json.

Assuming you have (installed and configured the IoT Edge runtime](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-edge/how-to-install-iot-edge) you will need to deploy a module:

Name: home-automation
Image url: dodekanisou/home-automation:2022-02-01 (or later)

Container create options: Note that we give access to gpiomem and make it privileged to access the gpio pins

{
"HostConfig": {
  "Binds": [
    "/etc/iotedge/storage/home-automation.appsettings.json:/app/appsettings.json",
    "/dev/gpiomem:/dev/gpiomem"
  ],
  "Privileged": true,
  "PortBindings": {
    "5000/tcp": [
      {
        "HostPort": "5000"
      }
    ]
  }
}
}

IoT Edge runtime on Ubuntu 20 in RPI 4b

Here are the commands used to deploy the iot edge runtime:

apt install curl -y
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/18.04/multiarch/prod.list > ./microsoft-prod.list
cp ./microsoft-prod.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > microsoft.gpg
cp ./microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/
apt-get update
apt-get install moby-engine -y
apt list -a iotedge
apt-get install iotedge -y
# Add your connection string
nano /etc/iotedge/config.yaml

systemctl restart iotedge
systemctl status iotedge
iotedge check
iotedge list
docker ps

# Troubleshoot
journalctl -u iotedge -p warning
iotedge logs home-automation -f

dodekanisou / home-automation

readme