Just attempted adding the mqtt addon to hass since migrating to a raspberry pi. Will only bootloop without ever providing a gui. observer shows all green when it is alive. Logs are unhelpful. I just wana sleep man.
I’m a tech worker, and I’ve got tons of smart things. They’re just all local. (Except my garage door opener. Man, fuck LiftMaster. Oh and my thermostat. Ecobee is ok, but I wish they would offer a local only option.)
RatGDO is a local ESP device you can hook into a LiftMaster to connect it to WiFi in a better way. Highly recommend.
Oh really? I’ll check that out. Thank you. :)
This is awesome, as a small garage door business owner, I may start bringing these up. Though, I may be one of the few people that cares about this.
I may get one, I’ve kept dumb motors for a long time to avoid any bs subscription to open my efing door.
I second that. Chamberlain’s/Liftmaster’s MyQ app grows more ad-infested by the day and the RatGDO gives you local control (no cloud required)
This gives a new meaning to trouble shooting. 🤔
Man, I remember reading about all this home automation stuff in Compute’s Gazette for the Commodore 64. It’s been around forever and a day.
I like having smart lights. I think having smart locks would also be kinda cool. There isn’t really anything else in my home that would benefit from smartness, though. I mean, other than me.
Personally I love the idea of a smart home only if its self hosted and running on fully open source software, also never put a gun near an unattended printer :3
And if anybody is wondering if that exists, it’s called Home Assistant.
I really need to get back into troubleshooting why it won’t work in my instance. Got into a habit of it but I got distracted by a crazy lady
Zwave and ZigBee baby!!! It’s been Awesome so far.
Zwave is superior for not clogging up the 2.4GHz airspace, both are darling to use with hass. Wifi is a close third for usability but suffers from bogging local wifi/airspace without interoperability without a controller of some kind being online. Zigbee/Zwave both can function somewhat even with the local server offline
Never connect an unattended printer.
Home assistant, as a central system (it basically let’s you wire anything into anything!). The smart switches etc should be esp8266 or esp32 based. You can then flash either tasmota or esphome to them.
Since your server will likely be Linux based, it’s open source all the way to the bare metal, (or at elast as close as possible).
My current system almost doesn’t notice if the Internet dies. Also, if you nuke critical components, in the worst case, it still defaults to dumb control behaviour (physical switches still work etc).
I still know where the kill switches are however. I’ve also made sure it doesn’t have control of anything mobile, other than the robo vacs, and I’m fairly sure I could take them in a fight.
As a tech worker, I’d rather have a panicked skunk in my home than a printer.
I got a Lexmark business laser printer from a place that was going out of business for like $50. Best investment I ever made. It just sits there quietly, not doing anything, until I print something like twice a year. Five years in and it still works fine, I haven’t even replaced the toner.
But people keep insisting that I print, sign and scan documents like we are living in the stone age of computing. I literally recently got a brand new in a box printer from 2008 just so I could do exactly that.
Places don’t accept pdf files that have signature touchscreen signed signatures?
I sold and bought a house without signing anything except the final papers at the notary. The mortgage, the realtor papers, the inspection all were signed on either a DocuSign page or on my phone with a stylus.
I just got onboarded to a fortune 500 company as a consultant and that was the process.
Your entire house is
smarthackable and tracks your every step for advertising revenue of big companies.My smart home is Home Assistant hosted on a server in my house. It’s fully open source and has gone through multiple paid audits to show its security is good too. The only non-local-only integrations are the weather api’s and my thermostat (ecobee).
A firejail doesn’t hurt either ;)
I mean yeah, it’s possible to set it up privacy-respecting and that’s great. But the average tech enthusiast doesn’t set up his own server beyound a NAS.
A NAS is the perfect device to host it on though. Docker or VM.
How many hours per week do you tinker with it though?
At first, a lot. Not so much recently though. It’s definitely more work though I’ll admit. Sometimes that’s the price to pay for privacy. Also, I learn a lot of skills that could help me get a good paying job by doing it.
THIS
I work with tech; other than in my home office; there is no tech in my house.
The voice activated things…just no. I looked into Mycroft, which looks interesting, but is till a solution looking for a problem.
As a tech worker, it’s stunning how many of my colleagues have smart Amazon or Apple surveillance home
I’m not being flippant but how else would or should I control my smart plugs and lights? Or set a timer with a voice command? Get my devices set up for “movie time” or control music ?
I paid for the Mycroft and that was a flop and they are now out of business.
Using an app is kind of a shitty interface for that type of thing. Even if I managed to do the rain dance to get home assistant up and running with my stuff…
It’s always risk vs convenience.
Personally I respect folks keen on privacy. But I’m old, I don’t have kids, and don’t give a fuck. Give me my voice commands and no hassle set up/use…
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Because being a tech worker doesn’t mean you have privacy concerns, after all someone made those privacy intruding devices
My printer is on a separate network and traffic to and from it is controlled via pfSense. There isn’t a single “smart” device in my network.
this guy should check out c/selfhosted
I’m horrified when I see someone with an Alexa in their home
Yup, my parents have Google Home and Alexa, and my brother has Alexa. And here I am, the only one in the family who works in tech with neither. In fact, I got a free Google Home and gave it away because I don’t want it anywhere near my home network.
One of these days I’ll figure out how to DIY it, but until then, I just use my phone (GrapheneOS, so some protections there) to play music and look stuff up.
There is www.home-assistant.io but that might be too much for your needs.
With a bit of work homeassistant can be a quite good voice assistant.
You can either revive some old android device and use that, or get an ECHO M5 for ~13€ and hook that one up.
You can even run some local Ollama AI and use that for the voice assistant nowadays. It’s quite useful and home assistant can be integrated into music / audiobooks aswell with something like Music Assistant 2.0
I’ve been meaning to set up a voice assistant with Google’s old AIY voice kit and Mycroft for a long time now (so long, in fact, that at the time I started thinking about it those things hadn’t been discontinued yet) and then trying to integrate that with Home Assistant. (See also: Picroft, Mycroft Home Assistant integration)
If I still wanted to use that voice kit hardware, what would be the best software to put on it these days?
Yup, just need to get around to doing it…
One of these weekends I’ll have the right ratio of time:motivation. Anyyyy weekend now…
I like having something in the garage. It’s in a place where I only stay when I’m working on something and my hands are super dirty. It can be isolated to a vlan by itself.
But if my hands are covered in oil. I like being able to yell at it to play music and not get one more thing dirty.
Makes sense. I’m also interested in getting something like it, I just don’t want anything by Google or Amazon, and I’ve been too lazy to go the DIY route.
When I’m working in my garage, I’m usually listening to an audiobook, and all I need to do to pause is bump a button on the side with the back of my hand or something. Or sometimes I’ll listen to a playlist. But if I’m working on something in the garage, it’s usually not for very long (e.g. maybe an oil change, brake job, or headlights), so I’m usually in and out in 30 min to an hour. Some people love working in their garage though, I personally see it as a chore that I do to save some time and money.
Mine was a hacked Google home mini (physical hack, not software) where I took the speaker out to an aux jack to have it loud enough.
I was in there for hours for all sorts of projects like engine and trans rebuilds.
I got a free Google Home and gave it away
To an enemy, I hope! Otherwise, you should’ve just thrown it out, or stripped it for parts or something.
I think it was to my parents, who already had a Google Home and an Alexa. I figured it was safe to add it to the rest of the dumpster fire…
Tech worker here. My house is largely smart, but it’s all controlled by a local server.
Cybersecurity tech worker here, and same. Even with the local server though, the one smart thing that I absolutely don’t fucks with is exterior door locks. I got one that does PIN entry, but absolutely no wireless or Bluetooth or anything. Other than that let’s fucking go it’s 2024 I can’t be bothered to open my window shades with my hands like I’m living in the 1800s on a farm in the fucking prairie or some shit. They open on a schedule, synced at a slightly earlier offset to my wake up alarm.
Yep fully agree on the exterior door locks. That is the one thing that should never be connected to anything even local servers. Also have to be careful with electronic locks in general. Some brands are terribly designed and can be bypassed in a stupidly easy way.
I’m more of a middle-ground person myself. I have Home Assistant fully self-hosted and using a secure cloudflare tunnel for external access. A few other self-hosted containers running other various things. Anything exposed to the internet requires a login. I always try to find stuff that integrates with HA, but I don’t go to the full length of finding stuff that doesn’t require the brand app to setup. I like the local control stuff if I can get it, because it usually works a lot better, but I won’t actively avoid every brand that connects to a cloud somewhere because that’s too much effort to avoid for me.
Dream: I will slowly wake up to gently increasing morning sun
Reality: my alarm clock sound is now just the buzzing and whirring of a motor that is starting to open my blinds. Just as I fall back asleep the whirring noise starts again to increase the light level.
Yo do you write for Black Mirror?
I wish someone made a smart door lock status indicator. I don’t want my doors to unlock for me; I just want to know if I remembered to lock them.
Like you want to have a dumb lock but a smart sensor that tells you if the deadbolt is locked or open?
I remember reading some blog somewhere about a person who rigged up a sensor to alert them if their mailbox had been opened or not, you could probably design something to do similar. Idk maybe a magnetic thing to detect the bolt itself, or something to detect on the position of the latch on the interior of the door?
Found this after a quick search, sorry for it being Reddit and the video of the working solution being uploaded to gfycat.
It wouldn’t be hard to do if I got a hall sensor, I just didn’t want to have to mess with 3D modeling and printing a housing for it.
The ones I saw from Cisa, aside from reporting the status, could automatically lock every time you closed them
HomeAssistant can do this. Set an automation when you leave your home zone, if door is unlocked notify you.
If you have a smart lock, you can even close it. You should get cameras and an alarm system first, though.
if door is unlocked notify you.
How do you detect this condition without a motorized smart lock?
Hall sensor or a switch that gets pressed when the lock is locked.
Shades? A real tech enthusiast uses PDLC Film!
(Seriously, I wish I could afford some for all my windows.)
Shit. I am a fossil.
Build your own! All you need is an esp32 or pi pico, stepper motor, and driver.
That’s next on my list of projects after I finish my smart microchip keyed pet feeding stalls.
I’m not sure the build-it-yourself route is the cheaper one compared to just buying a ZigBee smart opener
I think they’re saying they wish they could afford PDLC film for all their windows. If you can DIY PDLC film you probably have a 3D printer the size of a tractor trailer and are 3D printing yourself a new house or something just for for the fuck of it in the backyard of your estate.
@pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online was talking about stepper motors and microcontrollers, those are for motorizing a shade
Unless my client is fucking up and putting their post as a reply to the wrong comment (which is a real possibility), they replied to Telorand who was talking about PDLC film.
I really hate that the automated shades I needed (must be plug in because they’re 18’ off the floor) are so proprietary that it’s not even wifi.
There are Somfry blind controllers with small solar panels that face outwards on the motor housing. No plug required.
Here in Italy shutter covers are common, I have those and awnings, both can be connected to any sort of smart 2-way switch. I use BTicino for the shutters and Shelly 2PMs for the awnings
Damn that sucks. I lived in an apartment and wound up rigging up an arduino to pull the chain on these three massive window shades in my apartment, they were seriously like 20 foot tall windows. This was back in 2015 or so, so I didn’t even bother trying to find anything off the shelf.
I love your username btw.
I would assume those would be zigbee or z-wave or something. What does it use?
In the US, 95% of “smart” tech wants WiFi connection to a proprietary cloud and they will make breaking API changes and/or ban users for using 3rd party clients. Only phone apps with permission to see your contacts allowed!
That being said, you can usually find products that will work locally but it’s really difficult, and big-box stores almost never have anything Zigbee/Z-wave or even Matter enabled. It’s bleak.
Ew. Blinds really should be line of sight IMO. I don’t want anything related to my physical privacy living in the cloud (and that goes double for you, Ring).
Ikea sells ZigBee blinds that connect right up to any home automation hub. Pretty cheap too, in the $100-200 range for most windows.
I’m using several. Batteries are solid. I get a good 3 months with daily opening/closing. I only wish they had solar modules you could add in, but the battery tray design makes that unlikely.
It’s not zigbee or anything anyone else uses. Someone spent a little time with a software defined radio to decode some of the signal.
Ew, that’s awful.
Yep.
I love tech, as long as it’s tech that I have full control over.
Home Assistant is the antithesis to this meme
There’s a difference between recognizing the risks of “smart” tech and knowing the futility of avoiding it -or- even better having the skill to mitigate as much risk as possible.
This is part of the reason I have no intention of having anything to do with IT once I retire.
I have one plan for retirement, goat farming. I go over that old list of reasons every few years just to remind myself there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Nice! What makes you want to get into that?
It was originally a joke I found online, after reading through the list it honestly just feels like I want a simpler life one day. The site isn’t mine but it came up when I searched for a couple items from the list (like “Goats security is checking the fence, not sitting in a room listening to someone for hours.”)
So that you can become an enthusiast again right? Right?
Maybe. Possibly. Probably not. But who knows?
As someone into the Home Assistant community, this post is always annoying and wrong.
Care to elaborate?
Home Assistant can be used as an AIO for smart home devices. I assume OP is referring specifically to home assistant integrations that are privacy friendly such as Z-Wave and ZigBee devices that only communicate to each other locally over radio instead of over the internet to someone else’s PC.
I struggled for years trying to find a way to set up door cameras that were secure enough that I can check in remotely. Around 2015, I finally had a solution.
I ended up spending a couple hundred dollars on a wired camera Setup from 2000s that streams to a old desktop. Then spend a couple hundred dollars on a network and software that I can dial in to view the desktop remotely. I also bought a VPN to dial in. Probably about $2k, which is chump change compared to corporation setups.
After three years and constant maintenance at roughly 10 hours a week, I gave up.
Then around 2020, i bought a Eufycam and setup, plugged it in and was up and running without any maintenance for like $200. They got a major security leak a year or two ago. Kinda sucked.
But damn, the tradeoff is so painful. Either strong secure network that costs a lot (time and money), or a insecure off-the-shelf solution that just works.
All this for the convenience of being able to see the mailman walk up to my door.
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