Home Assistant controls microcontrollers over MQTT
Home Sweet Home

© Lead Image © shamain, 123RF.com
Automating your four walls does not necessarily require commercial solutions. With a little skill, you can develop your own projects on a low budget.
Home automation offers many opportunities, but equally harbors many risks. If you succeed in becoming independent of commercial products, you can save money while retaining control over what data flows where. In this case, the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol proves to be very useful.
A previous article on Z-Wave [1] showed how you can bring the Raspberry Pi up to speed with Home Assistant and components available on the market to attain the goal of achieving automation magic in your home without human interference. Plenty of components can be addressed by Home Assistant, even without the cloud. The only limits are your wallet and your imagination.
This sequel explains how you tweak both the price and the DIY factors of the components. The Raspberry Pi from model 3 onward comes with a wireless interface that is also available in many microcontroller modules and is likely to open many doors. The glue that connects the whole thing to the Home Assistant environment looked at in the previous article is an IP-capable protocol that saw the light of day long before any Internet of Things (IoT) hype did: MQTT.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.