Hestia

A project between roommates, firstly forest of home-built IoT lights, sensors, blinds, switches, etc., spoken for by EPICS, the control system that runs particle accelerators, light sources, and ITER! Every device becomes a process variable. This is part of a homelab project.

Motivation

Two goals at once! First, control a real apartment (mine and my roommates') with something better than vendor apps that each phone home to a different cloud, and secondly, the reason for EPICS specifically, to learn part of the actual control-system stack used in nuclear, accelerator, and fusion facilities by operating one first at apartment scale: PV naming, the motor record, Channel Access, Phoebus operator screens, the archiver, alarms, sequencing.

What's here

• firmware/ : ESPHome configs, one dir per node type. Field devices (ESP32) speak MQTT.
• ioc/ : caproto soft IOCs, the EPICS layer. One per device class and each bridges MQTT telemetry into Channel Access PVs.
• bridge/ : ca2influx , camonitor PVs into an InfluxDB hestia bucket for Grafana.
• cad/ : 3D-printable parts (parametric OpenSCAD), e.g. the non-intrusive toggle-switch flipper.
• hardware/ : KiCad, the puck-carrier PCB and driver boards.
• calibration/ : per-device calibration recipes + stored coefficients.
• deploy/ : docker-compose for the MQTT broker + IOCs on the Obelisk.

Architecture (one line per layer)

Field (ESP32 / ESPHome) → field bus (MQTT) → control (caproto IOCs → Channel Access PVs) → services (ca2influx → InfluxDB/Grafana, alarms → Telegram) → interface (Phoebus OPI, Grafana, and a thin hestia MCP domain so Helios AI and Claude can query/command the flat). See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md (once written!).

An ESP32 cannot run an EPICS IOC, as it's the device. The IOCs run centrally (Docker on the Obelisk). Because Channel Access is location-transparent, an IOC can later move to a per-room Pi with zero client changes.

Status / Next steps

• Now: one environmental puck (ESP32 + BME280) → MQTT → ioc/puck_ioc.py → camonitor HES:LR:BME1:TEMP, meant to test the whole chain end-to-end.
• Next: ca2influx → Grafana, a humidifier closed loop (RH → smart plug), globe-light PWM dimming, the toggle-switch flippers, curtain + blind-tilt motion axes.
• Later: Phoebus apartment OPI, access-security (.acf) per-room scoping, the hestia MCP domain, Hyperion consumes apartment anomalies.

See also

• homelab : the server side (InfluxDB / Grafana / MCP / Telegram / Hyperion).
• car-daq, ionosphere-daq : instruments (may be integrated here soon!), same sensor→feature→store pipeline.
• EPICS (epics-controls.org), caproto (pure-Python CA), Phoebus/CS-Studio, ESPHome (declarative ESP32 firmware).

License

Software: MIT · Hardware: CERN-OHL-S · Docs: CC-BY-SA