GoKawiilSome readers will know, but most will not, that I am a bit of a self-confessed foodie. I enjoy cooking, but especially so when others get enjoyment from it. Be it friends, family, or neighbours, and sometimes all three, I’m always up for putting something together.
Food isn’t what this post is about, but it’s the underlying motivation for much of the things I talk about, mingled with a healthy dose of nerdism.
At work, some of my colleagues enjoy tinkering with Home Assistant. For anyone unfamiliar, HA is a platform for collecting data from devices, controlling them, and running automations. It’s pretty cool. I was unfamiliar with it, but it sounded pretty cool. OK, so we have a solution. Now to find a problem.
My property has a basic irrigation system for the lawns. 6 zones, you attach the right hose to the tap and let it run until you remember to turn it off. All well and good, but I figured it could be smarter and safer. So, that became the first thing I decided to solve with Home Assistant.
Here are the requirements for the system:
Simple. No crazy electronics. Safe. Pissing water out for 24h would be bad. Cheap. Let’s not break the bank. Build in an extendible way to pave the path for future ideas. Observable. I want proof it’s all working properly. Run unsupervised. Avoid cloud dependency where possible (a common desire for Home Assistant users)
The hardest part was choosing some hardware for this new platform. I didn’t want to mess around building a server, something off the shelf would suffice. I ended up going with a Beelink EQ14 Intel Twin Lake N150 which seemed like a good fit. It has a 500GB SSD, gigabit ethernet, 16GB RAM and a decent CPU. I paid $259 USD shipped to NZ. It’s definitely overkill for running Home Assistant and a couple of containers, but I wanted some headroom for future projects like a media server and it uses very little power.
Going back to my first use-case for Home Assistant (irrigation), I needed something to control water flow. Various solutions exist, from off the shelf to DIY, but I didn’t want to muck around with custom electronics in close proximity to water, where the failure state is a flood. I also wanted something that operated locally to the property and didn’t require cloud connection. I stumbled across Link-Tap which can either run as a cloud client or it can use a local MQTT server, which I figured would be easy to integrate with Home Assistant, so I took the plunge and got their Q1 4-zone unit.
Once it all showed up, I started by testing out the Link-Tap with their app and cloud integration. It all worked flawlessly and I was really pleased with it. I ran the irrigation schedule for a few days to prove it was working as expected.
Link-Tap installed with transceiver placed up high.
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