Home Assistant Robonomics Integration

Secure IoT with Blockchain

For your smart home, the modern IoT market provides a wide range of solutions. But you are usually tied to centralized cloud providers or expensive proprietary gateways. As a result, you as a user are always dependent on the hardware and infrastructure vendor to run your smart system. At the same time, your smart home cannot be truly smart without cloud statistics and analytics.

We see two main problems with current smart homes:

• You have no control over what data you share with the vendor or third party.
• Your smart home is vulnerable to shutdowns of centralized cloud servers.

To solve both problems, we suggest you to try Robonomics, our secure, serverless and futuristic decentralized cloud.

Robonomics Integration encrypts your data using the private key of the account in Robonomics blockchain, then store encrypted data in IPFS and save the IPFS hash of the stored files in Datalog transaction. This technology allows you to be sure, that nobody can see or change the information about your home.

Robonomics DApp for remote access

Robonomics Integration allows you to see the states and control devices from your Home Assistant local instance remotely using Robonomics DApp.

Also you will be able to manage users access to your smart home.

Smart home administrator can add or delete users with their own Robonomics accounts to the access list. After that user will be able to create the secure password for local Home Assistant and get access to the remote telemetry and control.

Activate Robonomics Subscription

• Create Owner and Controller Accounts

To control Home Assistant with Robonomics, you need 2 accounts on the Robonomics parachain. For one of the accounts (sub_owner), you will buy a Robonomics subscription. Second account (sub_controller) will control all Home Assistant processes (such as telemetry) and will give access to other users. These accounts will provide security for your Home Assistant.

WARNING

Both accounts must be created with ed25519 encryption. Because of this, you need to create an account using the Polkadot-JS UI and select the required encryption. This feature is disabled by default on the Polkadot-JS UI. To enable it, navigate to Settings -> General -> account options and select Allow local in-browser account storage in the drop-down menu in-browser account creation.

Go to Robonomics Parachain app on Polkadot / Substrate Portal. Check the top left corner to ensure that you are connected to Robonomics Parachain.

Go to Accounts -> Accounts and press Add account button. You will see the popup menu with account seed. It has two forms: Mnemonic (human-readable) and Raw (a sequence of digits and letters).

Open Advanced creation options, change the crypto type of creating account to Edwards - ed25519.

Save the Mnemonic seed phrase securely, press Next and follow the instructions. You need to create two accounts: sub_owner and sub_controller.

• Add Accounts to Polkadot.js

For convenience, you should use the Polkadot.js extension and add these newly created accounts to it. For an ed25519 account you can do that only with a backup JSON file. You can use the files saved when you created the accounts.

You can get these files again by creating a backup file of the account. Press on three dots on your account, choose Create a backup file for this account and type in your password.

Open an extension and press + button on the top right, then choose Restore account from backup JSON file.

In an opened window upload the JSON file, enter the password and press Restore.

• Activate Robonomics Subscription

For this step, you must have a sufficient amount of XRT tokens (minimum 2-3 XRTs) in your sub_owner account.

Go to Robonomics dapp to the subscription page and press connect account on the right sidebar.

In the following popup menu connect Polkadot.js extension. You will see your account address with balance.

Before purchasing, check that you chose the sub_owner account. Press the address profile icon, you should see the sub_owner account under the Check owner account field.

Finally, press the SUBMIT button and enter the password for your account. After that wait until the activation process is completed. You will see the state of your subscription after a while.

• Add Accounts to Subscription

Now you need to add a sub_controller account to the access list.

Open extension and click on the icon near the account name. It will copy the account address.

Paste this address to the Robonomics parachain address field in the Manage access part. Give it a name and press the + button.

Press Save. Enter your sub_owner password in the popup window and wait until the activation process is completed.

Install Robonomics Integration

For Home Assistant Docker and Core installations you can use installation scripts. Download it on you Home Assistant host and run:

For Docker:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/airalab/robonomics-hass-utils/main/raspberry_pi/install_integration_docker.sh
bash install_integration_docker.sh

For Core:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/airalab/robonomics-hass-utils/main/raspberry_pi/install_integration_core.sh
bash install_integration_core.sh

You will see the following output:

<...>
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/airalab/robonomics-hass-utils/main/raspberry_pi/install_ipfs_arc_dependent.sh
<...>
IPFS daemon installed and launched, use ipfs-daemon.service to manage.
<...>
A    robonomics/utils.py
Checked out revision 125.
Integration downloaded!

During the process, you will be asked to confirm the restart of several services. Navigating with tab, select the yes option.

For Home Assistant OS you need to install several Add-Ons. All the following installationsteps are only for Home Assistant OS!

Robonomics Integration stores the data using local IPFS daemon, so you need to install it first.

If you have Home Assistant OS installation, there is an IPFS Add-on for Home Assistant. To install it go to Settings -> Add-ons and press the ADD-ON STORE button in the lower right corner.

Press on three dots in the upper right corner and choose Repositories. Add there the following link:

https://github.com/airalab/ipfs-addon

Press ADD button.

Close the repository manager and refresh the page. Now in the end of the page you can see IPFS Daemon Add-on.

Open the addon and press INSTALL. After installation press START.

Then you need Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) that allows you to install custom integrations. You can use these instructions to install it.

Now you can install Robonomics Integration using HACS.

Open HACS from the sidebar menu and navigate to Integrations. Click on Explore & Download Repositories, then search for Robonomics and click on the Download button located in the lower right corner. Once the download is complete, restart Home Assistant.

Configure Robonomics Integration

In the web interface of Home Assistant go to Settings -> Device & Services and press ADD INTEGRATION. Search for Robonomics.

Click on Robonomics and fill in the configuration:

• Add seed from the SUB_CONTROLLER account to controller account seed.
• Add the public address of the SUB_OWNER account to the subscription owner address.
• Set the interval of data sending (by default it is 10 minutes).
• (Optional) You can add credentials for pinning service Pinata or other custom gateway to spread your data wider over the IPFS network.

Press SUBMIT after finishing the configuration. If you filled in everything correctly, you will see the success window.

Setup Robonomics DApp

After all you will be able to communicate with your local smart home using Robonomics DApp.

To start use it you need to add there credentials for SUB_OWNER and SUB_CONTROLLER accounts. Go to Your RWS subscriptions tab and press ADD NEW RWS button. Fill in the fields with the required information and press ADD RWS.

Now you can use all features of the remote access to your smart home. More detailed information about available functions you can find in Robonomics Wiki.