place

Home automation platform.

Rationale

I built place because while there are many projects with the same goals - most offering much wider compatibility and flexibility - I found them cumbersome to maintain, overengineered in some ways, and primarily just not fun to work with.

place is supposed to be fun for me to work on, and that'll continue to be the main goal.

Can I run place on my own home?

Probably, but right now it makes some heavy assumptions of what your home looks like. If you're trying to use it and running into a problem, open an issue and let me know. At this point I'm making no effort to accomodate other users besides myself.

Features

Flexible rule system (see config/default.example.yml, or the example below) around the above mentioned events
Extensive events you can hook into to automate various features
Scheduling support
Plex support
Chromecast support
Hue lights support
Pihole support
Webhook support
Network discovery-based presence detection, including enter/exit detection
Push notification suppport with Pushover

Example rule configuration

rules:
  - name: theater-on-stop
    description: Turn on the lights in the living room when pausing or stopping something on the chromecast/plex
    triggers:
      - theater:media:stop
      - theater:media:pause
    conditions:
      time:
        from: { hour: 19, minute: 0 }
        to: { hour: 23, minute: 59 }
    actions:
      - run: command:hue:group:state
        name: Living Room Ambient
        state: true

Setup

place can run on any computer running nodejs, including a raspberry pi:

# You must have nodejs installed
$ node -v

# Copy and modify the example configuration file
$ cp config/{default.example.yml,default.yml}
$ (vi|nano) config/default.yml

# Install project dependencies
$ npm i

# Start place with the development logger
$ npm start

# Build place and run it from the distribution build (recommended if running as a daemon, for example)
$ npm run build
$ node dist/index.js

Enabling and disabling modules

Modules can be enabled or disabled based on the existence of a key in the top level of the configuration file with the module's name.

For example, to enable the rules module, simply add a rules key to the configuration yaml file:

rules: []

The above will enable the rules module (though since the list is empty, no actual rules will be configured).

State information

All place modules can collect and expose, in some form, state about their domain and behavior. For example, the hue module exposes information about lights and sensors, the theater module exposes information about the last played media, etc.

This state can be accessed in 3 different ways:

With the /state API endpoint, in JSON format, to be consumed by any compatible client
With the internal handlers.collectState API (or by hooking into the home:state event)
In notifications and other places where templating is supported (using {{ state.someModule.someValue }})

filp/place