Home automation

Few would argue that having lights turned on in a room without occupant is a waste of electricity. Ideally, lights and other appliances like air conditioners would only be turned on when someone is around. This project is a NodeJS application that gathers data about the occupancy of an apartment and manages appliances accordingly.

Over the years, I modified all the lights, air conditioners and heaters of my apartment so as to control them via MQTT. In the process, I also deployed multiple sensors among which are PIR motion sensors. This node app subscribes to the MQTT topics of all motion sensors and determines in which room the user is based on which sensor was triggered.

To detect if I left the apartment, my smartphone is set to make an API call to the Node.js app whenever it no longer finds my Wi-Fi to connect to. Thus, the app can publish MQTT messages to the appliances according to where it has established that I am.

Source code available on GitHub