IOT studio for your home!

Written by Nicholas Klem, Bjørge Næss, Kapehe, Armando Cerna, Carolina Gonzalez, Mikolaj Dobrucki, Tony Stimpfel

Why would you build your home automation with Sanity? Because you can!

Of course, we are not aiming to replace Homekit in your home. We use home automation to show you the extent that Sanity can read and write to different API's, that Sanity is well capable of reaching out beyond the internet and into the physical world.

The most common setup among our employees is running Raspberry Pis. While the RPi's are user-friendly, they are picky about who their friends are. If you like tinkering with under-powered Linux platforms with a soldering iron, check out that sanity tutorial here.

What we will build

In this example, we use the Phillips Hue system, since it has already solved the "how to traverse your home's firewall" by giving you a publicly available API endpoint you can communicate with. So, what do you need? You will need:

• Philips Hue Bridge to control your devices
• Philips Hue Bulb the light you want to control from Sanity
• Philips Smart Plug to control anything else on your electric grid
  • Your coffee machine?
  • Your disco-ball and smoke machine?
  • Your angle grinder (to scare away thieves!)

Of course, as long as you are in the Philips Universe the Philips provided UI's and functionalities are by far easier to set up and use. But for illustrating the reach of Sanity, as something beyond a CMS, this is a great combination.

Starting our project

Plug in the bulb and the smart plug, and set up your Hue as instructed.

The Sanity part is relatively easy, we have made plugins to support A simple Hue setup. If you want to expand on this example it is a great starting point:

https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity-template-home-automation

Create a new project with the starter:

This starter automatically adds the plugins necessary and the schema used.