Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

OK, It's not the Nvidia Shield, Chromecast Ultra, Sony TV (it's not connected to any network) or my Thinkpad. Harumph, will need to be more drastic in the turning off and on again of things.

Found it.

It was my work mobile, a Nokia 8. Ho hum.

Anyhow... I've now got the Amplifi set up thus:

• Wi-Fi is the roaming wifi network across the whole house and outside in the street too.
  
• Three zoned wifi networks (Front, Mid, Back) with split radio bands (2g,5g), i.e.: Wi-Fi Front 5g is the 5Ghz network at the front of the house... so this is 6 SSIDs in addition to the roaming one.
  
• All of the stereo devices and Google Home Hub, Google Mini, are connected to the closest 2g.
  
• All of the video devices are connected to the closest 5g.
  
• All phones and laptops are on the roaming network with automatic band selection.
  
  

This works really well now.

And because they're all on the same subnet (the wired and wireless all run from the Ubiquiti EdgeMax router DHCP and subnet so are all visible on the same network regardless of appearing as 8 different networks - wired, wireless, and the 6 zone and band specific wireless) everything can see everything else... the speaker groups work across multiple Wi-Fi networks and there's no congestion anywhere.

I'm happy :D

I wanted to do similar with zoned SSIDs for my static devices, so that I can tie them to the best APs. But I ran into limitations with how many networks I can have on my Unifi setup. Is that changed with Amplifi or am I doing it wrong?

I also have a guest network in there, so that visitors only get public side access, not internal vlan.

So in total I would need 6 SSIDs:

mainwifi, guestwifi, ap1-2g, ap1-5g, ap2, ap3

(Only one of my APs can do 5g)

I just sent the controller setup and can see that a max of 4 wireless networks (SSIDs?) are allowed per WLAN Group. Not sure what a WLAN group is.

More research needed.

Each Amplifi Mesh point can have 3 networks:

1. The common roaming one defined by the Amplifi hub.
   
2. An alternative SSID.
   
3. Split bands on the alternative SSID.
   
   

All I'm doing is using these to the max to zone out the house according to Mesh point, and choose frequency according to device needs and bandwidth (mostly to ensure there's very little congestion when I do want to put 4k video streams over the wireless).

I was thinking similar, re: speakers - having a satellite speaker with separate amp seems cheaper & better than having powered monitor speakers, particularly given that the difficult bit will be the power supply for either.

OK to do this then I think I have to put the roaming SSID into each of the WLAN groups, since each AP can only have one WLAN group assigned per radio band.

Dod you have to do this kind of duplication?

Today's mystery is that I have something on my network that I do not recognise

Obligatory bash.org reference

Yep. I have my whole house wired up with speaker wires which terminates in the loft. Each room currently has a cheap pair of satellite speakers (around £30), and in the loft there is an amp (£20) and chrome cast (£20) per room, I have thrown a google home mini in each room to control the system, so full multi room for around £100 a room

I've gone from internally amped monitor speakers with lots of ChromeCast Audios... to just having 1 stereo setup in the front room and then using Google Home Hub or Google Minis throughout that house.

They are far lower power in standby, and I noticed that I was either in the living room listening to music or really all I wanted was background music as I pottered around.

So I've opted for synchronised background music across the whole home which is adequate, and then really good speakers on the ChromeCast Audio in the living room.

It feels far more discreet as a system as the standalone monitors were quite visible everywhere.

I have got the SSIDs configured how I want them now. It was a bit more faff than it sounds on the amplifi system.

I'm erring towards ceiling speakers just now - I'm about to rip the floors up a bit above the kitchen / living area, so the disruption is happening anyway.

As a fallback, the advantage of the @Sam_w method is that the amp is fairly easy to hide, speaker cables easier to chase, and satellite speakers are less intrusive than most powered speakers.

I'll do a bit more reading through this thread, but anyway: will be moving to our new house in a few months and there's no infrastructure there at all. Have signed up to get optical fibre into the house and will set up some basic wifi using googles wifi repeaters but keen to get to grips with something substantial after that. I'm thinking network controlled audio and power throughout. Any tips on where to start?

I've been really disappointed to discover that Google Wifi doesn't support IGMP proxy or snooping which means that it doesn't support IPTV (youview plus services like BT Sport or Eurosport) either via wireless or cabled connection.

Turns out that Netgear Orbi is the same. Anybody know of a mesh wifi system that definitely supports IPTV?

Pretty sure BT have a mesh / WiFi repeater system, not sure what it’s called, but their current TV boxes won’t support it.

I gather that multicasting is a challenge to implement on mesh networks, doesn't explain why none of them seem to support it via their Ethernet ports though.

Fair point. It would only be multicast up to the router though, presumably once “in home” it can be distributed easily enough. Maybe an opportunity for them to sell you a multi-room TV package once the primary STB has the capability to stream channels / recordings onwards (which AFAIK it currently can’t)

Moving away from mesh Wi-Fi discussions.

I picked up one of the Lenovo 8" Google le Smart displays for £80 in the sales.

Has now replaced the DAB radio in the kitchen. The sound quality is pretty good for a small unit and it's nice to ask cooking questions/set timers/watch videos/listen to R4 or R6 without touching things with greasy /floury hands.

That looks really nice and a better deal than the Google Home Hub.

What's the sound quality like?

I've seen a lot of reviews saying the Lenovo is better than the Google one.

How easy is it just to get a web page up on these things, does it have a browser?

I reckon kitchen is the best use for these voice assistants. I've got an echo but same kind of thing when I was cooking tonight: radio, 4 different timers (each with a name and the lights flash in the living room when time's up), conversions from cups to sensible measures, etc

There is a browser but it isn't exposed as an interface you can use, there's no keyboard either.

This means there are frustrations.

You can ask for a nut roast recipe and it will show you a few and it will use the browser to render a web page and go through the ingredients, prep and steps... But...

If you know a specific web page with a recipe and it's not one of their partner sources... Then you will not be able to get that web page to open on these assistant powered devices.

So it's great, for the narrow set of things it does.

We mostly use ours as a radio, a set of timers (you can create and name lots of concurrent timers, great when cooking something complex), as a light control, as a clock, and occasionally to look up random things.

It's never going to be hi-fi quality but it's way better than the Google Home or Mini.

Thanks for the reply.
As long as it is better sound quality than a (generic) laptop,
or a re-purposed mobile,
it can go on the list of 'Things to Ponder'.