I thought I was a home automation nerd when I rigged my Amazon Echo to turn off the lights, while turning on a humidifier and baby monitor camera in my son’s room. Turns out, I am a rank amateur in the home automation space, because I haven’t embraced the power of container deployment!
This great piece by Carlo Costanzo shows how he upgraded the guts of his home automation system from an overburdened Raspberry Pi to an unused Core i7 laptop. While that’s a big jump in raw processing power, the switch required an upgrade of equipment to utilize his existing automation hardware. But after finding some replacements for his connected Pi, he used a combination of Ubuntu Server, Docker, and the Cockpit server manager to add some serious containerized IoT goodness to his abode.
Of course, what’s the point of a connected home if you can’t update social media about it? Make sure to check out the Twitter account for Carlo’s house. If you’re interested how that got started, make sure to checkout this post.
Carlo Costanzo comments:
Once Docker was up and running, it was super easy to just import containers into the environment. The ones I have currently running are :
MQTT – image: eclipse-mosquitto:latest
This container provides all the IOT to IOT communications.Home Assistant – image: homeassistant/home-assistant:latest
This is the latest version of Home Assistant. The container makes it super easy to upgrade and downgrade versions.HomeBridge – image: oznu/homebridge:latest
This container provides full Apple HomeKit support for all my Home Assistant devices. Works amazingly well.Dasher – image: clemenstyp/dasher-docker:latest
This container provides support for the few Amazon Dash buttons I have deployed around the house.Unifi – image: jacobalberty/unifi:latest
This container runs the Ubiquity Unifi software controller to manage the Access Points in the house. Automatic firmware upgrades, configuration consistency and neat client charts and stats.
Read more at: Journey to Docker
