The Raspberry Pi, a $35 credit card sized computer, is a popular choice for home automation projects. I am running few of those at home myself. But what is the true cost of these, is the advertised cost of $35 really all you spend? Before you know it, you throw in more bucks for a decent power supply, SD card, enclosure, a WiFi dongle and soon end up somewhere in the $70-$100 range for a headless configuration, that including VAT and associated shipping costs for the components required to get it running. Then a new model comes out and here you go again.. I now have couple of the early models retired in the drawer, collecting dust. How is that green (manufacture, shipping and then disposal of millions of units) or cost effective? Thinking along these lines I decided to try Amazon’s Web Services, and more specifically the Elastic Cloud Computing EC2 service. The AWS free tier offers a great opportunity to test things out for one year then decide how to go forward. My interest is for a t2.micro instance, all-upfront 3 year payment costs $179. That makes 4-years (1yr free tier+3yr paid) of your own cloud virtual machine running Ubuntu for $3.72 a month. A good deal I say, and you have nothing to lose as you start with one year free trial before you decide.
What are advantages and disadvantages of moving your home automation to the cloud?
– It is obviously greener. Imagine the pollution and resource use involved in manufacturing, shipping and eventually disposing of millions of these devices (5M as of Feb 2015).
– Scalability. Well if the t2.micro instance starts to be a constraint, few clicks can upgrade you to a more powerful version. Running low on storage? No problem, just add more storage space and you are good to go. Easy indeed. One of the main reasons for me upgrading was the increased amount of RAM or faster CPU available on the newer models of Raspberry Pi.
– Stability. We have all seen the SD card wear damage on the Raspberry Pi that occurs if you use the file system actively, and that has been a massive PITA. Can’t really have a DB running reliably without fearing data loss or doing some major trickery to reduce disk writes. Another thing is you never fear power outages, those are quite frequent where I live. Creating online backups is easy.
– Easy cloud deployment; Build and save AMIs then share those for others to use with few clicks. Want to have a Ubuntu VM running Apache+MySQL+PHP+emonCMS+mosquitto MQTT broker+Node-RED+openHAB? You can have one in 30 seconds, If I share a pre-configured AMI ID with you.
– Easy access. Many ISPs make it hard for clients to run web services from domestic IPs. Running your cloud VM with Elastic IP solves that problem
There are of course disadvantages as well such as
– Cloud vs local hardware when Internet connection is down. Locally running machine can still handle the home automation, whereas cloud running VMs mean your home may be going wild.
– Locally connected peripherals like RFM2Pi board that routes wireless packets to the the respective gateway of choice can’t run on the cloud. Yet. A RFM12/RFM69 + ESP8266 bundle is fully feasible and will remove that shortcoming.
– Many people mention security when using cloud services, I believe this can be resolved with appropriate measures.
Overall I am not ready to go completely to the cloud for my home automation system. I am running a hybrid solution now with a (few) locally running Raspberry Pis handling the crucial mission critical home automation functions, then forwarding data over MQTT to the cloud based VM for storage, visualization, remote control.
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