You left your WRT open?
I jest but you should be using OPNsense, OpenWRT is so old and OPNsense has many more features.
People connect their thermostat to the internet?
Yes, so they can change it while they are away from home … for some reason.
A big issue is, IT is a very broad field with many parts extremely niche and disconnected from each other.
It’s like saying “work in science” that could mean anything.
I’ve met more than a few programmers that were above average, but could barely turn on their computer.
I’ve had many discussions with friends, saying I should work on servers or desktops when my IT experience is in medical databases and interfaces (HL7)…
Having worked in IT for 17 years. I don’t trust any MFer that uses their IT experience as a reason to do something.
I will trust people using their IT experience as a reason to avoid something, though
Not all of us will do it to the same degree though. IT security has always been a sliding scale between security and convenience. The most secure data is stored in a locked safe without being turned on or connected to anything. That’s not very practical, so we make concessions based on how often we need such data and other convenience metrics.
I’m not as paranoid as the OP, though I agree with some of the stuff said. Reasonable security measures are fine; you don’t need to look like a digital version of a prepper with a bunker, for most people.
Edit: for instance I don’t use my TV all that much, but it is a “smart” TV, meaning it has apps that connect to Internet, and I have some online libraries.
It seems like half of the people claiming they work in this field actually struggle more than the average person
As a general rule, if you buy “smart” anything where it requires an internet connection and a cloud service to function it will be bitrotten within 5 years and dead within 10. And that’s assuming the company survives so long and is bothered to support it. That’s from planned obsolescence and the ongoing cost of supporting the platform when they have something new to sell. And while things can benefit from an internet connection, if its white goods then run a mile.
I think forward thinking companies could actually gain a lot of free publicity and sales if they openly pledged that their software was in escrow and would automatically release after a period of time and/or as a failsafe if the company discontinued the product and/or they went bust.
it will be bitrotten within 5 years and dead with 10
Worse, it could get bought out and converted to a Meta, Google, or Amazon product.
It should be required that companies either maintain their services perpetual or release the software with a permissive license to allow users to maintain their own service.
Mechanical Windows
As opposed to what, wireless windows?
How about bio-windows?
Microsoft Windows
Electric windows exist. I guess these days they can also be controlled wirelessly.
Is this a thing fat americans use or whatever the stereotype is meant to be here?
I’ve only heard of that in DIY context: I remember someone making one of these to be as dumb as possible by just making it toggle positions on a wake-on-lan packet and just be off otherwise.
Following computer security stuff makes every smart thing suspicious
As they should be.
I used to work the IT help desk as well and I didn’t want to fix broken shit in my spare time either. Friends and family were constantly on me to fix their shit or worse, help them setup their new thing / upgrade or whatever. The thing that always irritated me about it was that no one ever considered this a favor, you know, actual labor. To them, I just knew the secrets, and should simply share those secrets with them like a good friend. Because whatever they wanted to do, in their minds, was very very bad easy, they were just missing some small secret answer that would make it all suddenly work. And of course they’d only consult me late in the game after they’d made the purchase or whatever and gotten stuck because it didn’t work. Eventually I had to formally declare that I wouldn’t be helping anyone anymore.
The only people I do this stuff for is my parents, because they certainly did a lot for me over the decades. Also, if I don’t do these things for them, some asshole will drain their bank accounts because their passwords would be the names of their children.
I just started writing up invoices for my side hustle and quoting prices to fix their shit.
I do that for a day job, so I have no interest in working more for free. Putting a price tag on the help definitely helped cut down how much bullshit they tried to get me to do
Tell them “Only if you help me” and make them sit and watch and learn. If they stop watching/helping, so do you. They will then learn how time consuming it can be and it’s not just one magic secret.
If it’s a very well defined task with repeatable steps, sure. Often it’s more like “why won’t my CarPlay open my garage door?” And in those cases I barely even know where to start and need to experiment and fiddle, and the last thing I want is them hanging on my arm asking questions and offering bad theories.
That’s exactly when I want them hanging around, so they learn that I don’t know shit, and now we both will be learning how to fix something at the same time
Next time they will think “he doesn’t know shit himself, no point in asking, might as well Google myself how to fix”
My trick with family is I tell them “Well, I can do it, try harder.” It’s my little way to show them how much I appreciate how often they told me I was mentally handicapped growing up.
The more you understand tech, the more you trust the simplest version of it 😅
“no smart home crap” Yeah… That’s just a choice. I have two homegrown smarthome solutions that are amazing and complex without creating security holes.
Boom. Exactly. Self hosted solutions are amazing. We have choices about this stuff.
You can tell it’s an IT guy’s home assistant if there’s no hardware that requires someone else’s cloud.
My home automation philosophy is that everything in the house should work with or without internet. It’s going well so far.
And an electronics guy’s smart home if there is no wireless at all and all KNX and Ethernet wired lol.
I’ll add that things should also fail gracefully. If something breaks, they should all revert back to working like the dumb equivalent. Dumb switches, dumb thermostat, etc.
For sure. That one is a bit harder to get right, but is good to keep testing and striving for.
My home assistant is set up that way. If I turn it all off, the house is a little less awesome, but everythiing works fine. You just have to turn on/off lights and open/close doors yourself now. you’ll have to diddle with the thermostat and ceiling fans more too.
This is the Way.
Good recommendation for light bulbs?
Zigbee bulbs, third reality and sengeled (sp?) are most of what I have attached to my home assistant. Stay away from the WiFi shit tho
do not
Don’t do the lightbulbs (unless you rent). Do the power to the sockets.
Smart lightbulbs are a fucking rort
One benefit of smart lightbulbs is being able to control the colour temperature
Which is great if you do that on the reg
There’s a great automation integration in home assistant that uses the suns position and time of day to automagically set the color temp throughout the day. It’s super nice to have the color temp get warmer as the sun sets.
I use that feature every day and in multiple rooms.
Like the other user mentioned: depends on your setup.
I have recessed lighting throughout my house, so swapping to bulbs for all of them would have been an expensive pain. So I opted for smart switches. I got innovelli reds, because they were the best there was at the time. You can get them with any protocol you want (zigbee/zwave/wifi)
With a smart switch, you can control lots of lights with only one device. Originally I just added Shelly relays behind each switch, but I wanted the dimming capability of the innoveli.
If you do still want bulbs, nothing beats hue. But they are by far the most expensive.
As an alternative, we have found bulbs that can run tasmota with the MQTT integration to be perhaps the most reliable part of our smart home (as long as the hardware already had a descent CRI). I’ve heard good things about ESP home too, but we have not tried it.
If someone has some light bulbs that are laggy (due to cloud integrations) or a pain to use due to software, its worth checking out of tasmota or esp home can be installed on them to locally pair with something like home assistant. It turned a regretful purchase into a nice addition.
With that said, we don’t buy connected devices any longer without checking internet and cloud requirements first.
Tasmota is awesome. I flashed all my early Shelly devices with it. But now the native Shelly firmware is amazing, and it allows you to turn on local mqtt only. So I’ve stopped using Tasmota for everything besides the few devices flashed early and behind my wall switches. (I’m too lazy to pull them out)
Is it hard to flash bulbs with Tasmota? Don’t you usually need access to the pins? Or have an OTA option for updating the firmware?
The ones I had you could do it over the air, but some do require access to the pins. Even with soldering experience it is not approachable as bulbs are not packaged to be opened, it is part of why I check for offline or flash compatibility before buying as even the same “model” could have different hardware revisions. No info = avoid.
I love my lutron Caseta gear. Integrates with home assistant and reverts to dumb. Expensive ass dimmer though, and they run on a proprietary hub.
It depends on the rest of your setup, but I recommend going with zigbee or matter/thread for the connectivity. I definitely wouldn’t put any “smart” devices on my general purpose wifi. That stuff is never going to be secure. Also, consider if smart switches would work for you instead. That way you don’t have to pay the premium when a bulb burns out.
Yeah I’m stuck between those two options however it’s for much later down the road in my case. House needs a renovation but finances don’t allow just yet.
I have a mix of TP Link wifi globes, IKEA ZigBee and Hue Zigbee throughout the house. Zigbee are controlled by a SLZB 06 and ZHA / MQTT. By far the Hue are the best I’ve tested and have been in service for around 10 years.
This is why I’m conflicted about getting online weather information.
Pretty hard to replace weather info without internet. I don’t have any automations that rely on weather info, and I have a cheap rain gauge that a friend 3d printed for me. It uses a simple zigbee door sensor to detect rain accumulation. Pretty clever device (not my invention.)
So eventually I want to automate the watering of my garden, and I intend to use the rain sensor to help there. But honestly, it never rains in the summer here in the PNW, so my 3rd reality moisture sensors are more useful than actual weather data.
Pretty hard to replace weather info without internet.
Hard to tell the weather without the “Cloud.”
Home Assistant and local, cloud-free protocols and devices are great
I have an apartment and it is dumb
Same thing for mechanics. My dad has wrenched for 45 years and you should see what he drives lol
Homeassistant is cool though. Also most of my stuff would work without it, they just works better with it.
None of the devices I bought for it talk to the internet! Home assistant can control and even update the Shellys completely over the local network.
As it should be
Remember Home assistant =/= smart home nonsense
I dont need some AI assistant to automatically manage my thermostat, I just want to be able to control it all using my own local server.
There are people who tie gemini into their HA instance
These people are insane.
Any suggestions for someone tech savvy enough to run a proxmox server for a handful of services, to get started with home assistant?
Can you replicate something like a Google home with voice commands?
I may or may not be getting a new house soon. I’m good with electrical to replace switches with wireless ones. But what do you get? Where do you start and where do you end? What about the WAF?
I saw LTT did smart switches in his house and it was a mess of incompatibilities.
Any good resources? I don’t even know what I don’t know haha
HAOS literally has a proxmox iso for home assistant. Slap that baby on.
There are homebrew voice units, but you’ll need a beefier system than normal to process in house. If you have apple devices you can expose certain elements from HA to apple home (and keep others obscured) to use your watch / voice etc.
There are a lot of home assistant communities and they are all very very friendly. It’s a massive learning curve and we’re all working together
Define beefy? Like 8 to 12gb vram? Or will an old 970 do the trick?
I really only skimmed over it before deciding IDGAF at this point (i’ll probably revisit later, but in the middle of renovations and kittens right now) but https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_local_assistant/ should set you right
Thanks!
Look into ZWave and ZigBee mesh networks. I run Home Assistant with a couple hundred devices and integrations. ZWave tends to be my hardwired switches, and ZigBee tends to be my battery operated motion sensors, remotes, etc.
Personally, I run Home Assistant on its native HAOS on a raspberry Pi. In addition to Home Assistant, I have lots of automations running in Node Red, a no/low code orchestration addon.
For voice control, I’m playing with the Atom Echo.
Couple hundred?! Are most of those lights or something? Forgive me I’m totally ignorant about home automation.
Is it a hobby to you or have you found significant time/energy savings? Or both?
Part hobby, part time and energy savings. One thing I love about Home Assistant is the integrations with so many devices and services. I have smart switches., remotes, smart plugs, energy monitors, RGB bulbs, thermometers, etc.
It’s a slippery slope of wanting to integrate absolutely everything! My doorbell, alarm system, thermostats, garage door, door locks, and so on.
Many are local “smart devices” using ZWave and ZigBee, and others are cloud integrations with other services.
I’ve gotten to a point where the Home Automation routines I rely on are so useful that I get annoyed if I ever have to do things “manually”.
Couple examples:
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I have a remote by my bed that, when the goodnight button is pressed, turns off all the lights, sets the HVAC back to programmed mode, puts our computers to sleep, arms the alarm, locks the doors, and closes curtains.
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I have a button by my garage door that sets an “auto arm” toggle that opens the garage door, unlocks the door to the garage and the waits for me to close the garage, at which point it arms the alarm, turns off the lights, locks my computers, turns off the HVAC, closes curtains, locks doors, etc.
That’s pretty dope and I see how it could actually really help my ADHD if I had an “everything off” button. Thanks for replying.
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Community scripts has home assistant, both lxc and VM options. Use the VM version and you can get HA up and running super quick.
https://community-scripts.org/
Also shout out to community scripts! If you run proxmox and aren’t using community scripts then you’re about to hate yourself for all the manual builds you’ve done.
Fuck. I almost wish I didn’t read this.
I have not been using community scripts, and I feel an amount of silly. Thanks!
This video is a good starting point. If you’re already running proxmox you’re definitely ready. 👍
I’d recommend using matter over thread, as I’ve had issues with ZigBee, although that might just be incompetence. I use smth by aqara for a thread bridge, and it all works great with home assistant.
I’ve been looking for some smart outlets, and it seems impossible to discover which ones can be used with normal well-known protocols and which can only be used through a phone app locked into a cloud service.
Zigbee.
You will need an antenna /hub though. I use a sky connect antennae, it’s all locked into my house.
If you have to go wifi, tplink /tapo literally have a “local only” mode when you firewall them out. The only issue is they warn you you can’t operate them unless you’re connected to your home wifi. Which is rather the point.
So, if I’m reading things right, anything that runs on Z-Wave or Zigbee will necessarily run locally, because those are mesh protocols?
Anyway, thanks a lot. Those are really simple keywords to check.
Yep.
My favorite smart outlet switch though was recently sold out and it’s an Aeotec smart switch 7. Zooz makes something similar though I think.
I’ve got it set up on Home Assistant so that whenever certain devices in my home are detected on or off via watt usage minimum changes I monitor on those smart switches, it toggles the Lutron Caseta (best smart light control there is) lights via commands for different rooms in my house.
I also have things like waterproof outdoor gate sensors made by Zooz that are smaller than a single stick of gum where the small flat watch battery in it lasts for almost a year and it will alert me when the gate opens or closes, but only when I’m a certain distance away from the house’s geofence I’ve set up.
You will also need an overall little USB stick to connect to your Home Assistant server device (like a NAS or Raspberry Pi) to control everything, but there’s one that’s made by Aeotec that does both Zigbee and Z-wave long range protocols. Z-Wave LR (long range) works really far too… like I think around a mile potentially, if you have a nice clear line of sight signal.
The Hook Up had a great video on this. He compared a lot of different options and ranks them based on functionality with and without internet.
Check out the new IKEA Matter over Thread stuff. They have two smart plugs (an indoor single plug and an outdoor double plug). You can flash one of the esp-idf example images to an ESP32-C6 and plug it into your HA server to turn it into a Thread Border Router for under $10. Everything on Thread uses a fully local encrypted mesh network that by default has no Internet access (leave NAT64 turned off in the HA border router add-on).
P.S.: Make sure to update the firmware on the devices (which HA can do), as several don’t act as routing end devices until after the first upgrade.
I have several US V2 plugs from athom.tech and they work great via home assistant. They just sit on WiFi don’t call home and are reliable through hoke assistant
I have plenty of iot devices. Like anything that goes online, it’s how you set it up. If you know how to monitor traffic, it’s not terribly hard to get these things to behave how you want them to.
Home assistant!
swap out those mechanicals windows for mechanical linux and then we’ll talk
I use Arch BTW.
Like just huge arches instead of windows or even doors, Arch is all you need.
I thought Emacs is all you need?
Real programmers use memes to program the machines of the world.
Tfw you come to your first day of work in critical infrastructure to maintain drivers and highly critical network applications and they’re all written in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE
Just play Zork all day until you get fired. They’ll think you’re coding!
Incorrect, you need
According to this documentary, you’re wrong!
I never thought about how a physical arch relates to physical windows. Interesting.
I am more of a hydraulic Linux person myself
You must feel compressed.
Likely not, the whole point of hydraulics is that the fluid is non-compressible!
That’s pneumatic Linux, though.
Actually it’s GNUmatic Linux.
Well, you shouldn’t keep a gun next to it, unless you want the printer to take ahold of it and rob you.
Why On Earth would you keep a gun NEXT to it!? That’s just asking for problems. That printer knows if it gets a hold of that gun, it’ll look like a suicide, not a murder.
