Category: Home Automation

I wanted a way to control my Smart Home devices inside the house if I had no Internet connection. I have a mix of Wemo and Kankun plugs right now that I’m using to control various lamps and my outdoor light.

I built a small web page on my Raspberry Pi with buttons for each device. I need to do a lot of cleanup to get the buttons lined up but what I used for the Wemo devices had a lot of padding around each image that was used. The small red light indicates the switch is on, on the Driveway button no light indicates it is off.

Below is an image from the Wemo pages that I replaced with the buttons shown above.

For Wemo’s I used the instructions found here. I had a fair amount of trouble getting this working correctly because of permission issues. First it wouldn’t build the database because of a missing line at the top of wemo_backend.py not sure if I deleted that or if it was just missing but I added “#!/usr/bin/python” and that ran. Then I had to create the logfile in “/var/log/wemo/switchlog”.

To get Google Home to play with my WeMo switches I ordered one of these hubs. For about fifty dollars it added a bunch of other features like door and window sensors along with multi sensors that can detect water leaks and motion. I sent Google Home back as it wasn’t as well integrated with other devices  as the Echo Dot ,aka Alexa and cost $99.99 on sale compared to Alexa at $39.99 on sale.

This has been easy to setup but requires another app on my phone and a connection to the cloud to work.

I used the labs section and connected my WeMo devices immediately and they worked with no more problems. I went to the Google Home and said hey google, “turn on the Christmas lights”, and everything worked. With Alexa I didn’t need the smart hub to make this work as the plug for this was a WeMo and native to Alexa.

The hub did add other options though like motion, and temperature sensing. I can’t find a decent doorbell option though. I just want the doorbell to ring inside and record when it was used, no fancy video or two way communication needed.

Geofencing

Once I got my location set this seems to work pretty well.

I have eight devices setup with the hub now, Belkin Wemo, Amcrest SmartPlug, Samsung Multisensor, Aeon Multisensor, and a Samsung Door sensor. The Amcrest SmartPlug has been the most interesting so far, it is a re-branded Kankun plug that needed some slight tweaking to make it work but cost about ten dollars less than the Wemo switch that does the same thing.

More info on this plug here.
Android App to program these plugs WidgetKK for SmartPlug.
Default user root and password p9z34c. SSH is enabled by default. As it 
turns out Amcrest has someone else make this, KONKE Technology Co.
BusyBox v1.19.4 (2014-03-27 17:39:06 CST) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

  _    _               _    _
 | | _-_| _____ _____  | | _-_| _____ ____
 |  -_-  |     ||     ||  -_-  |     ||    |
 | |-_   |  -  ||  |  || |-_   |  -__||   _|
 |  _ -_ |_____||__|__||  _ -_ |_____||__|  
 |_| -__|  S M A L L   |_| -__| S M A R T
 -----------------------------------------------------
 KONKE Technology Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.
 -----------------------------------------------------
  * www.konke.com            All other products and   
  * QQ:27412237              company names mentioned
  * 400-871-3766             may be the trademarks of
  * fae@konke.com            their respective owners.
 -----------------------------------------------------
root@koven:~# passwd

Changing password for root
New password: 
Retype password: 
Password for root changed by root

root@koven:/www/cgi-bin# cat /etc/openwrt_release
DISTRIB_ID="OpenWrt"
DISTRIB_RELEASE="Bleeding Edge"
DISTRIB_REVISION="r39365"
DISTRIB_CODENAME="barrier_breaker"
DISTRIB_TARGET="ar71xx/generic"
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="OpenWrt Barrier Breaker r39365"

I added an index.html in /www

I did find some information on building a web page to control this here.  I get an error as below. However if I grabbed the files from here and then upload them using WinSCP everything works fine. So this turns out to be caused by my cut and paste.

Unable to launch the requested CGI program:
  /www/cgi-bin/relay.cgi: Exec format error

My country was set to CN so I changed it to US.

To display current setting:
/sbin/uci get wireless.radio0.country

To set it (to US, for example):
/sbin/uci set wireless.radio0.country=US
/sbin/uci commit
reboot

I borrowed a script to test network connection and reboot if it drops. I’m using WidgetKK for some of the management its free on the ap store for android.

root@Modem:~# cat reboot.sh
#!/bin/sh
#This is the version 1 for WidgetKK reboot script
#This script will reboot the KK smartplug if it can’t ping the router.
#This script use arguments so you need to pass the router IP or Hostname
#Ex:
# Reboot.sh 192.168.1.1

ping -c5 $1

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo “ok”
else
reboot
fi
echo “rebootScript”>

chmod +x network_test

I added this to cron.

root@Modem:~# crontab -l
*/30 * * * * /root/reboot.sh 8.8.8.8

So if I can’t ping 8.8.8.8 in thirty minutes it power cycles my cable modem.

I then built a webpage on my Raspberry Pi where I can display multiple switches and turn them all off and on from one location. Since I only have one switch right now its the same switch three times.

nano /var/www/index.html

I bought  a second plug off Amazon this time it was branded as JTD WiFi SmartPlug. Its the same plug on the inside running OpenWRT. I also used WidgetKK to push json.cgi and set the cronjob to power cycle if it loses Internet connection.

LivingRoom 
Repeat three times once for each switch.

I need to make some labels and the little light at the top goes off when the switch is off on when it is on.I got a WeMo switch today and it is about twice the size of the Amcrest, but the WeMo App is better developed.Turn the lights on and off from the cli. The advantage to this is there is no outside contact required, I can script the lights to run in a cron job and have the lights on and off on a timer without using the app or having any sort of outside control.

#lights off
echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/tp-link\:blue\:relay/brightness
#lights on 
echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/tp-link\:blue\:relay/brightness

Edit the host name with vi /etc/config/system and change it to whatever you like. I have six of these now so I’m using scp to push the scripts and index files around to new devices.

scp cgi-bin/*.cgi root@192.168.xxx.xxx:/www/cgi-bin