The Perfect In-Wall Touchscreen for a Self-Hosted Smart Home - Lanbon L8 running OpenHASP

[@camerongray1515]

Buy Lanbon L8 (Affiliate): - Amazon UK: amzn.to/3KzyqnY - Amazon US: amzn.to/3IZ0AIF - Aliexpress: bit.ly/3hXW3KD Note: No guarantee is provided that switches purchases through these links are compatible with openHASP. It is possible (although unlikely) that the specifications and chipsets used in the device could be changed at any time without warning.

[@openhasp]

Thanks for this great overview of the Lanbon L8 device. The video showcases the exact reason we've built a custom firmware to control Home Automation devices. The integration with the lights looks amazing. Well done! @29:52 Is indeed an issue with compatibility in Safari browsers that will be fixed in openHASP 0.6.3.

[@openhasp]

openHASP 0.6.3 has now been released with bug fixes and new features.

[@DigisDen]

Also, Cameron, thanks for introducing me to node-red, it is truly amazing how much can be achieved in so little time.

[@Liny_Fox]

Your assumptions on r45 are correct, that is a thermistor, the cutouts around it on the PCB are a dead giveaway, they are there to thermally isolate it from the rest of the board so it can get an accurate reading.

[@Daz-L-CV]

A cup of Tea, some Hobnobs, and a Cameron Gray video. Sit back and relax. Nice little controller, Look forward to see what gadget you get next :)

[@nekolivegaming]

10:38 thats interesting Here in norway our lights and Outlets are usally on the same fuse and we normaly have 10-16 amp on regular outlet and lights course, i have two thou lines like that. now one of my lines dose have a 25 amp fuse cuz of my power draw, now im using 230v, and technicaly 16 amp is the max rating our regular walloutlets have, so we could say its not fully legal, but im not pulling over 16 amps thru one single outlet, most of the power actualy gets feed out thru a 3 phase outlet wired for one phase, and the actual outlett can take up agains 30-40 amps, so in ground and reason its fine and not a fire hazard, but the plan is to see if we can bring down .. well its gonna be tight cuz its a concreet building and we cant add extra in-wall cable shrouds, but we are gonna try to bring down an extra set of L, N and GND from the fuse box and wire that directly into that 3 phase outlet to make it a 100% complaiant. 44:57 Oh holy heck... This is gonna take some time to get the grasp off. but u said openHASP had a lot om documentation so i guess it will be fine... right?.. XD

[@rodrigozambrano3227]

Always a good day when a new video comes up

[@JakeHillion]

A 2-gang box version of this, perhaps with smaller borders, would be perfect. I really enjoy how it integrates with your great switch system seen previously. Great video as always.

[@aadishah8768]

I believe sonoff may have made something similar to what your saying

[@DigisDen]

Loving this, just ordered two. Even if I don't put these in walls, I like the idea of a backbox with a cable going in, I know you can get the ones with flex clamps in. I can have one sat on my desk or whatever.

[@camerongray1515]

I actually thought about doing the same although for added neatness, you don't even need to use the included power supply. You can power it by simply providing 5v DC to the appropriate pins on the connector on the display (same connector used for programming). It would be dead easy to just wire it up to a USB cable and power it from a USB power source. I've considered making one of these for beside my bed where I already have a multi-port USB charger. That way you'd be able to just have the slim display portion sitting flat or maybe on some sort of stand without needing to accommodate the large power supply.

[@jonjohnson2844]

When these Chinese manufacturers begin to understand how much importance we give to fonts in the Latin alphabet they'll take over the tech world.

[@tehklevster]

That was excellent Cameron.

[@jumadhaheri]

Node red that is fantastic screen epic

[@regallee]

Great tutorial pal. Not got the time or inclination to get this deep into node red although it clearly a better option a manufacturer ecosystem. Am waiting for a sonoff NS panel to arrive simply for convenience.

[@tonylou8424]

hello i have to say your subscribers should be over 1.m because all the time you put in to these videos i love them them all and i wish i had your skills keep them the video's coming from Canterbury Kent uk 🙂

[@travisash8180]

How do you control the Space Octopus ?

How did you fix to controll all flash individualy ?? 😮

[@aRndBelgianGuy]

Very interesting (as always), I'm interested in that "Linving Room AV" tab in your Node-RED too :p

[@camerongray1515]

The Living Room AV stuff is a bit bodgy but works well. It periodically connects to my receiver over Telnet to determine whether it's on or off and then controls smart plugs feeding my subwoofer and TV LED backlight accordingly. It also gets the receiver's current input and uses this to switch HyperHDR between HDR and SDR modes.

[@aRndBelgianGuy]

@@camerongray1515 Okay, I expected it to control stuff over IR too :-)

[@chrismccormickreel]

Cameron, do you think it would be possible to control the 3 relay model like you have yours setup. For example, if I have a light on each relay could you set up pages to control each with the warm, cool, dim as you did with he one light?

[@camerongray1515]

It's not something that I've tested but apparently you can control the relays from OpenHASP by controlling the GPIO outputs. However, of course these are just relays so you wouldn't be able to use them to dim or adjust the colour temperature of the connected lights directly. In the setup I showed here I didn't use the relays at all and instead just used smart bulbs powered via a key switch. The L8 was purely acting as a touch screen with no load connected to it.

[@nadirmyers767]

your tv backlight is diy? u have video?

[@charles-lychao]

What is this mind map app? Looks good.

[@BenGillam]

Hi my wife just bought this, not sure if you can advise on the fitting. We have a plastic back box and a ground wire available. The l and l1 and neutral all fine and make sense. There is no ground connector. They have a video showing the ground being connected and I guess bridged with neutral. This looked odd to me never seen that before. Some Googling suggests it shouldn’t be done. Not sure if I should just leave the earth out and cap it off with wago to keep it away or if I should fit it with the neutral, what did you do sounds like you are in uk so assuming you have same sort of wiring as me

[@camerongray1515]

You definitely wouldn't want to connect the earth/CPC/ground to neutral, all that'll do is trip any downstream RCDs. The Heat Link doesn't need earthed if you aren't using the 12v output to the thermostat so you could just connect it in a wago however there is a earth connection to the right hand side towards the 12v outputs so I'd connect it there to keep it out the way.

[@balsanghera]

How does fair in 2024? Or do you have any better recommendations? Looking for 5 smart switches

[@Kamil_101]

Can you make it so you can turn off multiple lights that are connected to Google home through this?

[@Ghost01989]

Just wired mine in and the screen just flashes white, what do I do??

[@riparo-express-comisorivae9663]

hello friend, sorry my english. Can you help me get my lanbon l8 Openhasp firmware to work? from address I log in but the display has no buttons. how do i create the 3 buttons to activate the relays?

[@derekrichardson9138]

Hello mate grate video iv been after some thing like this for a long time all my down lights are smart would you be interested in programing 3 of the smart switches for me im a electrician by trade but never got my head round the programing

[@camerongray1515]

Might be a bit tricky to be honest, the touchscreens on their own can't control lights directly, they need a server to communicate with which in turn controls the lights. It works great but requires quite a bit of ongoing technical maintenance if things break or if you wanted to change the lighting scenes.etc. It's not a "set and forget" solution unfortunately.

[@derekrichardson9138]

Tha ks for taking the time to reply The down lights I use are tcp smart lighting they have a app for phones and run on most platforms but if I had to add some.thing to.make.them.talk.to.each other.id.be happy to.do that I could probably do the matance it's just programing the smart switch I could not do

[@camerongray1515]

The difficulty is that the part that sits between the touch panel and the bulbs (in my case Node-RED) is probably the most complex part to set up requiring a server running software and the creation of Node-RED flows which in my setup requires Javascript programming to get certain functions to work as I want them. If you were to attempt this, I'd strongly recommend getting the Node-RED setup working first without buying smart switches.

[@Judlad]

Great video Cameron, any reason why you didn’t go for the NSPanel and flash that?

[@camerongray1515]

The NSPanel looks great and is definitely on my list of devices to check out if I have the time/budget, however it's much more complex to use in a setup such as this. The display is actually a Nextion HMI which itself is essentially a microcontroller. Therefore to get a custom interface, you'd need to both flash the firmware on the NSPanel itself (with something such as Tasmota) and then also flash the Nextion HMI with your UI which you'd need to build using Nextion software and UI components. People have figured out the process now however when I first started this project, the process was still in its very early stages. By contrast, the Lanbon L8 is just a microcontroller connected to a SPI LCD display, much like people would make as a hobby project using an Arduino. Obviously I used OpenHASP here however it would also be trivial to build your own firmware from scratch if you desired. Finally, the L8 was also just a fair bit cheaper and I felt like it hadn't been covered in any real detail on KZbin so decided to prioritise it over the NSPanel which already has a lot of KZbin coverage from much larger, better channels than mine.

[@tramcrazy]

I looked into the mesh functionality, and apparently with the default firmware it can mesh with other L8s to allow connectivity from further away from the WiFi AP.

[@nicsarahnicol9742]

I believe up to 8 units can mesh with one. This would be a great addition to openHASP I think.

[@yorks_atheist3069]

been playing with the NSPanel if I'd seen these first would have got these tbh. Downside is my light don't have neutral at the switch

[@camerongray1515]

Researching the NSPanel was what actually caused me to discover these. I still want to get an NSPanel to try out at some point now that the Nextion stuff is starting to get figured out for creating custom UIs. As for not having a neutral at the switch - you'd need one for either device, however if you're using smart bulbs and not worried about actually switching from the device, you could always alter the wiring at the ceiling rose/junction box so that the light is wired permanently on and the 2 core cable used for the switch drop would instead carry a permanent live and neutral down to the switch. (this applies to the UK, other countries may vary). This does of course mean that in order to power the light fitting down (e.g. to change a bulb) you'd need to turn off the whole lighting circuit which isn't ideal, but it's an option worth considering.

[@robputt]

Hello, Sorry if I missed it in the video, but how deep of a back box do you need for these bad boys? Also I noticed no earth connection, I presume this is due to no exposed metal parts once mounted on the wall?

[@camerongray1515]

I'd go with a 47mm box, you could maybe squeeze it into something smaller but it'll be tight. I totally forgot to mention the earthing in this video. In my opinion this really should have an earth terminal. In my situation, I have it in an earthed metal box so it'll earth it through the screws which is good enough for me, but if you're fitting it in a plastic box or want to be extra safe, you might want to try and add on some sort of earth terminal to the metal plate and to be honest, I should probably do the same here as my backbox lugs are both spring loaded - it's showing good earth continuity but isn't necessary "by the book" correct

[@robputt]

Damn, that back box is deeper than when we conceived our third child O_o. The touchscreen doesn't bother me so much it's nice but in reality I think overkill, the SONOFF Mini may be better suited, did you also fit that in a box the depth of a metro station or can they squeeze in a smaller box (also I trust SONOFF's CE marking more than a Lanbon China special).

[@camerongray1515]

The Sonoff Mini is 20mm thick so you'd basically need to work out if you have enough space, you could probably squeeze into a 35mm box but it'll likely be a bit too deep for a 25mm one unless your switch barely protrudes into the box. I'm very fortunate here that all my walls are stud walls so even though all of the original boxes are also set back pretty far, I can easily fit 47mm dry lining boxes if needed (if I'm using a dry lining box, I'll basically always use 47mm)

[@barrydonaldson]

Hey Cameron. Great vid! What (and how many} devices do you have controlling your living room down lights?

[@camerongray1515]

Living room is just the touchscreen, the Node-RED web UI on my phone and the retractive switch on the wall connected to a Sonoff Mini as shown in my recent video. Bedroom is the same but also has a small "Osram Smart+ Mini Switch" zigbee remote that I can use to control the lights from in bed. Then they're also integrated with the alarm system so that they turn off if I arm the alarm, but that's coming in a video soon!

[@barrydonaldson]

@@camerongray1515 thanks man. I was more after the controller(S) attached to the lights cos I can't see how to control the individual lights with only one sonoff mini... Thanks again!

[@camerongray1515]

Ahh, the whole thing is controlled by Node-RED that receives messages from the input devices then controls the lights, all done over the MQTT protocol. Most of my lights are currently Zigbee devices so I have a raspberry pi with a Zigbee USB stick running the Zigbee2mqtt software which allows me to control them over MQTT. Then any WiFi devices I have are flashed with custom firmware such as Tasmota which also allows them to be controlled over MQTT. I demonstrated the Zigbee2mqtt setup in this video here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/sKCTc2mqjaZ5pa8

[@DigisDen]

To anyone buying these, quality control is a definite concern. I now have five of these devices, they are amazing, I have another two coming tomorrow. Unfortunately, only three of the five are without problem. One has bad corruption on the screen and randomly locks up, usually within a very short period and the other one locks up too, usually within an hour.

[@camerongray1515]

That's annoying, I experienced frequent lockups when powering it from a plug but after powering it from the lighting circuit I maybe get one lockup a month, therefore I suspect it's maybe due to some sort of interference with the power supply. If you aren't using the relays, you may be able to remove that entire part of the system and power it using a different 5v power supply connected to the pin header on the back of the display - before I installed it in the wall, I was able to power it from a USB power supply running off the same socket circuit that was causing crashing with the included PSU without any lockups.

[@DigisDen]

@@camerongray1515 That's a really interesting comment Cameron, there was one downstairs by the Mrs computer and I was for a period convinced it was something to do with the power supply down there as units that run 24/7 in my office up here started crashing down there.

[@DigisDen]

Is your one in the wall stable now?

[@DigisDen]

I was wondering if some ferrite beads on the cable or something may help.

[@DigisDen]

PS add those 45 degree backboxes to you amazon affiliate links down below, you may get a couple of pennies from them :)

[@gabiold]

It is cool how this works for you, however I would like an ethernet PoE variant better. I know, ESP32 is cheap and common as f., but I really don't like the idea of having fifity mains power supplies constantly on, buried in walls. And to use radio for a fixed installation. But the market does seem to go solely in this direction... I might design one myself (can't compete with the price, nor the looks though) with wired PoE connection. I thought about CAN bus + the PD part of PoE as well, but I dropped the idea as it does not seem to integrate well easily with MQTT enviroment, unless someone designs everything from scratch, which is crazy amount of work.

[@camerongray1515]

Totally agree, in fact there's literally a CAT6 cable sitting in that wall that I ran in years ago with the hope that a product that would support it would become available. This solution was simply the easiest solution although if a hard wired option became available I'd be strongly tempted to move over to it.

[@gabiold]

@@camerongray1515 I just found out that there is a development board from Olimex with stock code ESP32-POE-ISO* which has an ESP32 module, an IEEE802.3af compatible PoE PD with galvanic isolation (there are unisolated versions too), and an Eth PHY compatible with ESP32-IDF, so not just powered by PoE, it can also communicate on the wired port. You mentioned that you don't want to tinker, but I think practically you have to connect the existing SPI display to the Olimex board (probably by removing the existing ESP32 module from the original PCB to keep other functionality, like LEDs, temp sensors). This devboard seems to be a very good base for these kind of devices. The disadvantages that it is 100mm wide + the eth plug itself, so it does not fit into 63mm EU wallboxes and only fits into double-sized UK ones, and there is only 5V/300mA available for additional circuitry (ie. not the full 15.4W of the 802.3af).

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

can you not do ser0=NULL once you have updated to latest firmware so no one can get into your network.

[@camerongray1515]

Huh? There are no configuration parameters in OpenHASP anywhere close to "ser0" and I can't see how a single configuration parameter on a smart switch would stop people "getting into my network"

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

@@camerongray1515 was worth a try anyway but as ser0 equates to the serial connection port it has to be exposed somehow.

[@openhasp]

@@DAVIDGREGORYKERR You can disable the serial port in the firmware but this still allows anyone to flash the device over serial because that part is handled by the bootloader. As for access to your network, the openHASP firmware is open source. You are encouraged to review and contribute to the codebase. Compiling the source yourself allows you to disable/remove any of the network services you don't want.

[@jamieevans2413]

Awesome video. I’d love to see a NSPANEL video by you and get your thoughts on which one you prefer

[@TechySpeaking]

First

[@dartfrogdk]

WAY too EXPENSIVE

[@camerongray1515]

Value is subjective, with this it's something I needed but there was no cheaper alternative

[@openhasp]

Check out the WT-86-32-3ZW1 by Wireless-Tag. It's very similar and quite a bit cheaper with (arguably) a nicer design...

[@camerongray1515]

Interesting, that looks like a really nice device! Shame that it's not as easy to get hold of (The Lanbon L8 was a relatively impulsive Amazon purchase) but I can see it on Alibaba with sellers that allow them to be purchased individually so I might need to pick one up for a video once my budget allows!

[@lewiskelly14]

So many issues in this video

[@camerongray1515]

Care to actually explain them so I can improve then?

[@BenCos2018]

@@camerongray1515 there's always people like that can't really see any real issues personally tbh