Home Assistant is a popular open source home automation platform written in Python 3 programming language. The GNU/Linux distribution Hassbian makes Home Assistant perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi. Out of the box, it supports popular mass market Internet of Things such as IKEA Trådfri, Philips Hue, Google Assistant, Alexa / Amazon Echo, Nest, KODI, and many more. Our open source hardware add-on board ANAVI Light pHAT has been designed with Home Assistant in mind.

Home Assistant provides almost a thousand components for integration with other devices and systems. One of the most convenient ways for connecting Internet of Things things to it is the machine-to-machine protocol MQTT.

ANAVI Light pHAT relies on the MQTT JSON Light component. It defines a standard way to control brightness and RGB color settings through Home Assistant and MQTT. In order to use it, two additional key ingredients are required: an MQTT broker, such as Mosquitto and our MQTT client application called anavid.

The source code of anavid is available at GitHub under GPL-3.0 license. It is written in the C programming language and it is based on the Paho library for MQTT client and the piGPIO library for pulse-width modulation (PWM) control of na RGB LED strip. Have a look at README.md to get started.

And one more thing… our crowdfunding campaign reached the 2nd stretch goal. Your step-by-step tutorial for customizing an IKEA GRÖNÖ Table lamp with a Raspberry Pi and ANAVI Light pHAT is coming soon. Thank you for your support!

Thanks, Leon