Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

Anything on someone else's servers is at risk - from malicious hackers, or carelessness. Snd any privacy policy is subject to change, or ditched if the company is sold.

Security is a balance - too much, and you have no function. Too little, and you may as well leave your door unlocked.

I have Tado heating, but don't use the geolocation function. Instead, I have an open source GPS tracker on Android that sends my location only to my own server.

This is the beauty of stuff connected to hass.io. Its all limited to local network, unless you make it available externally.

Spent yesterday afternoon figuring out how to flash a sonoff basic with tasmota and integrating it into home assistant. I've wired them into my bedside lights, and configured them as lights in hone assistant. They now work seamlessly with my UI and alexa. That was easy.

Praying i don't arrive home to a pile of ashes where my house was due to poor wiring...

How do those things work, do you have to wire them inline to the mains cables? Sounds a bit messy.

They have a live and neutral in, and a live and neutral out. My bedside lights had 2-core cable so it was very easy, i just cut out the existing manual switch, and wired in the sonoff.

The tasmota flash is quite cool though, allows you to use the button as a standard on/off, and also shows the state change on home assistant. It can also be set to emulate a wemo switch or hue hub, so you can control with alexa, without linking alexa to home assistant.

If you wire them inline to a mains cable, you need to have it inside a choc box (with secure cable grip) and have the earth connected across a block.

^^ This is what i plan to do with my radiators

I want to use sonoff on my radiators, which are rated to 10A, as are my sonoff basics.

The radiators are wired to a fused spur, but can be wired t0 13A plugs, per the instructions.

It's a bad idea to use the 10A sonoff, given you want the breaker to trip before reaching the limits of the sonoff, but is it a bad idea to use the 16A sonoff POW?

EDIT: actually i think regulations state that i shouldn't do this, may look at alternatives...

Does anyone want 3 netatmo smart valves for £157.50? I appear to have accidentally ordered twice as many as intended and am reluctant to go through the returns hooplah.

Anyone want 3 sonoff basics for a tenner? Never used, still running standard firmware, no boxes, and pin headers soldered into the pinouts ready for custom firmware. I need the ones for higher amps.

Yes please!

I have got my HomeAssistant server up and running on the Raspbery Pi, along with my Unifi controller and dnsmasq for DNS and DHCP. All sweet.

HomeAssistant people: can I program it to perform some action(s) in response to events that I can see happening in the logbook?

I would like to turn on a smart socket when i see a certain Hue light turning on. The light coming on and off is visible in the logbook.

Any pointers on where to start would be welcome..

I figured out - use an automation.

The syntax is pernickety isn't it?

Once you figure it out it gets easier.

If you want a few things to happen in an automation it might be easier to write a script, then run the script in an automation.

Finally got gpslogger playing nicely on home assistant, and working with unifi_direct

Now to try and set up maps...

Realised that Tado doesn't work without an internet connection, and they adopt whatever state they were in before the internet drops out.

For giggles, I'll ask Tado if they plan on developing a bridge that acts as its own server.

Anyone bold enough to try a 'smart lock' on their front door yet?

I would have no hesitation only we're probably changing our front door soon so waiting until then.

As i understand, if your wifi is on the blink, they just default to most recent state and work like a conventional door lock.

I guess I should contribute to this as I've gone a bit crazy and need somewhere to document just what I'm doing to my new flat.

So this is still a work in progress but the plan is roughly:

Internet

• 10MB Sky Broadband via BT Openreach... there's no fiber or cable on our street, this is the best one can achieve with low latency
  
• 4g mobile internet via 3... this offers higher bandwidth but at higher latency and will be bonded as a peak use and failover to the Sky Broadband
  
  

Network / Wi-Fi

• Draytek Vigor 130 to terminate the ADSL
  
• Ubiquiti EdgeRouter to bond the two WANs together and be the ADSL PPPOE
  
• Ubiquiti ToughSwitch to be the LAN
  
• Ubiquiti Amplifi for the mesh Wi-Fi
  
• Raspberry Pi and Pi-Hole for local DNS scrubbing
  
  

Power / Storage / Computer

• Synology NAS for 22TB storage
  
• APC SMT1500i UPS for power redundancy
  
• Custom fanless low power PC for Plex server
  
  

IoT

• British Gas Hive for heating
  
• Philips Hue for every lightbulb in the flat, all white ambience
  
• Google Home, we have 2 x Home Hub (kitchen and bedroom) and 1 x Google Home in the living room
  
• Roomba robot vacuum cleaner
  
  

Entertainment

• ChromeCast Audio linked to stereo
  
• ChromeCast HD linked to TV panel
  
• Nvidia Shield for Plex client
  
  

Security

• ADT alarm system
  
• Nest doorbell (still to acquire)
  
• Remote control exterior door lock (still to acquire)
  
  

At present... we have:

• Voice control over all lights, heating, entertainment systems.
  
• Motion detectors for lights in the hall, bathroom and storage room.
  
• GPS controlled lighting and heating to prep the house before we get home.
  
• Scheduled floor cleaning when we leave the house, every other day.
  
  

Some of this is still to be wired up, and I'm just about to build a rack in the store room to hold all of this so that it becomes invisible.

I guess the one thing I haven't figured out is what to do with the Philips Hue light switches.

I want something like this I guess:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samotech%C2%AE-SM200-Switch-Philips-Dimmer/dp/B07D5KJ4B6

But they don't seem to be on sale any longer.

How is the robo hoover?

https://twitter.com/internetofshit

It's excellent.

We have 900 sq/ft of floor space, and this is mostly wooden floors except the bedroom which has one of those natural fibre carpets (they look great, but are terrible for dust and fibres).

The Roomba I chose was one with soft rubber brushes (no scratches on the wood) and it uses vibration to make dust and dirt jump into the path of the vacuum.

The killer feature isn't really that it does the work for you, but that it reaches place you cannot get (deep under the bed... evidence from taking my old place apart is that we never did that as well as we thought we did) and that it can be scheduled (because it's always clean now... and there's something really nice about just knowing the floor is always clean).

The caveats that come with a Roomba don't apply to our flat, i.e. it cannot do stairs and therefore cannot do upstairs and downstairs without being manually moved. But our flat is all one level, so it's fine.

We have a handheld battery powered vacuum (a cheap Hoover as it was reviewed better than the Dyson and fuck buying anything from the pro-Brexit Dyson company) and can use that for the stairs to our floor, and spillage where we just want to do a small patch rather than whole floor. We've not yet needed this though.

For controlling the hue, have a look at iConnectHue. They offer quite a bit more functionality than the Philips apps.

Yeah, but aside from voice control everything so far has sane fallback to manual things.

I can go adjust the heater manually, the light switches work, the stereo I can manually put on, the TV can fallback to the freeview digital signal.

So far, aside from voice control, there's nothing here that requires internet.

And so far, everything I've got is from a company that has made a huge bet on it and isn't a startup that will vanish overnight.

I'm still an engineer enough to not think this shit will all break.

iConnectHue

i

Yeah... we have nothing Apple in the house.

But the Hue is trivially programmable and aside from redshift (done from the Raspberry Pi) I haven't yet found something that the default app couldn't do: https://github.com/deuxpi/redshift-hue