A happier one this time. In the early but far-too-recent Wild West days of the smart home, manufacturers used a wide variety of protocols and platforms, most of which were proprietary, and largely none of which were inter-operational. As time moved on, the devices landed on being at least minimally operational with the bigger platforms that arose: Amazon, Google, and, to a much lesser extent, Apple. Some required Internet service, some required a (proprietary of course) hub, while a few allowed local control absent an external device or phone home. Meanwhile, a few standard protocols started being...
Continue reading...smart home
Towards a smarter home, part 6: Let there be lights (exclusions apply)
Well, that was annoying. Where we left off, I had a running installation of Home Assistant with most of my devices running well on it, and a few other server applications humming along pretty well. Time to install some new devices. One thing I wanted to do right away was smarten my porch light. The ability to turn it on and off both from anywhere in the house and remotely would be extremely useful, especially during the winter dark times. There have been a good number of times that the light was off when I returned home...
Continue reading...Towards a smarter home, part 5: Home movies
When we left off, we had a working Home Assistant instance running in a container on the home server. It works! Used it primarily for the last few days, and it largely replaces the advertising company’s system, at least functionally. It’s not pretty, and it’s not that complicated or set up completely, but it’s okay for now (the automation I created to test ended up working, if after a little tweaking). So, after all that, I decided to take a little diversion. At the start, I had planned on three basic uses for this little home server:...
Continue reading...Towards a smarter home, part 4: That was easy (kinda)
I finally installed Home Assistant. As you may have noted, I encounter a number of reasonably complicated problems beforehand, but may or may not have solved them. Now, with the help of a helper script, I have installed Home Assistant on my server, and it worked like gangbusters. Using this guide (previously linked for installing Proxmox), and specifically the linked helper scripts, I now have a working instance of Home Assistant operating on my local network. It’s pretty cool! It automatically brought in a couple of my devices (specifically for some reason, my Google Chromecast, my Google...
Continue reading...Towards a smarter home, part 3: I will be your server today
I used to be a bit of a techie. In the 80s and 90s, experiencing home computers and game consoles unlock their usefulness and capabilities was a wonder. But in those days, you had to be sort of a techie to use any of those devices. The first computers I learned how to use mostly operated on BASIC: from the Commodore 64 at the church, the Apple IIs at the school, and finally my first computer, the much-maligned TRS-80. The BASIC days were cool in their way. One of the best parts of those days was building...
Continue reading...Towards a smarter home, part 2: The mistake
Well, oops. I was going to spend my second post in this series detailing my experience setting up the server, installing applications, and getting Home Assistant running. Instead, though, a pretty big oversight means I will have to wait a bit. I bought a refurbished Dell machine, which seemed plenty enough for what I wanted to do with it: 8th generation i5 Intel processor, 16GB RAM, and 1T storage. Except, oops, I didn’t notice that it included the stupid Intel Optane chip and the real storage is a spinny rust hard drive. Probably showing how long since...
Continue reading...Towards a smarter home, part 1: Intro
Gadgets and tech used to be fun and cool. In the far-too-distant past, products would be released that could do something tech couldn’t do before, or faster, or were just neat. Commodore 64s and Nintendo Entertainment Systems gave way to Sega Genesises, which gave way to PlayStation’s, which gave way to supercomputers in our pockets that could surf the internet and play all our music. But somewhere along the way, tech became a nightmare. To use a product, you had to sell your data to the advertising company. The web, which was fucking awesome in the 1990s,...
Continue reading...
Recent Comments