Control An IRL Home From Minecraft

Minecraft seems to be a game in which anything is possible, both in the virtual world and in the real one. As a sandbox-style game, we’ve seen all kinds of things implemented in it including arithmetic logic units and microcontroller emulators. On the other end of reality we’ve also seen a lot of projects in which real-world interfaces impact the virtual world in some way. As a game, the lines between these two worlds often seem to blur, and that’s no different for this project that allows for control of a smart home from within the game itself.

The project is called HomeAssistantMC and is built with Forge. The mod interfaces directly with a Minecraft game. From within the game, players can create a model of their home complete with light switches and other control interfaces. A WebSocket API listens to the game for changes to these devices, and interfaces with real-world controllers which control the home in real life. The game uses special state blocks to handle the control, and the entire control system can be configured in-game once all of the appropriate software has been installed.

For anyone willing to experiment with this software, all of the code for this project is available on its GitHub page. One of the other interesting things about this project is the ability to use other creations within Minecraft for home automation. For example, building logic gates allows for nuanced control of the home automation setup with creations we’ve already seen in Minecraft before. And, if you really want to go deep into the weeds, you could even build a complete 6502 processor from within the game as well.

12 thoughts on “Control An IRL Home From Minecraft

  1. Just another toy. Highly doubt some one would really use it to control their smart home all the time with it. “Dang it, I left the kitchen light on. Let me go fire up Minecraft to turn it off.”

    1. That seems rather harsh to me. It is a really fun project – and a great bit of fun – I’m sure any children will love playing MC and turning on-off the lights.

      Its not exactly practical, but at the same time I can see practical potential for it – play on a multiplayer server and trigger the I’m online light in all your friends homes, when some creeper has blown up important stuff light the beacon to warn your buddies that home base might be compromised and dangerous when you spawn in… Less intrusive than phone calls and texts etc but gives your friends the information…

      I’d also say you may not be firing up MC to control the home – if you like MC enough to do this you might well have some automation or camera mods and be showing the state of the MC world and all your creations as Art in your primary living space – so the control is always on anyway…

      1. I can see a use for a visual aid for a 3 d model of your house and turning lights on and off using a visual representation or creation of a program to automate it.

    2. The project is actually a Forge mod, not a Bukkit plugin. The main function is to be able to build and execute home automations just like Node-RED, but with redstone logic. Ideally, a local dedicated server should be setup and running 24/7. Of course nobody is going to open up Minecraft just to turn off their smart devices.

  2. This is actually much easier to do in minetest (a minecraft clone) last time I checked you could run lua script with the redstone-equivalent blocks. this would be nice on… say a pi (with the head block thru relays, or usb )

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