Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

I actually wanted this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmiVlyAfTnw&feature=youtu.be&t=127

Love this scene.

Our was bought new and it was used for 6 years! 6 years with 1mb of RAM ffs.

To be fair, probably cost a pretty fortune...

Coding our old one was fun. It could only access 4 8Kb chunks of RAM at any one time. To use more, you had to switch between different memory banks.

Also, to write to disk (5.25" floppy"), you had to code the read/write block by block.

I used to drill holes in 3.5" discs and format them as High Density to get extra storage space.

Think the only programming I ever did on it was with BASIC and very basic BASIC at that.

Ok, this sounds like an Altair 8080? In which case you probably win.

Not that it's a competition, when I first started learning to code formally I used punch cards. My teacher was of the old school where they preferred to teach the maths before allowing you to move on to the 2GL and 3GL languages. They had a pretty cool collection of what were nearly museum pieces, including an amazing "laptop" that weighed 20kg and had wheels!

Just remembered their ~50kg 2Mb hard drive :D

Right, so was it an an Altair 8080? The suspense is killing me...

My dad learned with punch cards. He said he'd work on his little program for an hour after which it would be posted off to a bank. A week later you get the output back and it'd say "error".

You know how you write a bit of code, run it, and then have a series of errors to fix before it "works" but still gives the wrong answer? That, but with a week wait each time

Close. It wasn't Altair but used the 8080. Was built from a kit. Very good guess.

Now I'm doubting myself. Might have used an 8088. Really can't remember. Either way, right ballpark.

Is this you?

Although I somehow remember it was an Altair in the screenplay/novel.

Nah, I didn't learn to smile until the internet taught me how.

https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-microphone-was-never-supposed-to-be-a-secret-2019-2

Hue Bridge and a couple of ambient white Gu10 bulbs arriving today. Pretty excited to see how they change the way we live.
IoT is the future!
The Nest Thermostat has made us far more conscious of Gas usage and saved us over 1000kwh this January compared to last January. Energy saving is the new Cycling.

The Nest Thermostat has made us far more conscious of Gas usage and saved us over 1000kwh this January compared to last January. Energy saving is the new Cycling.

Tell me more, how has the Nest done this?

Our gas bill is a joyful £70 per month. I think most of it is heating water for showers/baths, so am tempted to just build in an electric shower. I don't think our heating is contributing greatly, but I'm blind on the usage... I have it on for 90 minutes in the morning, 120 minutes in the evening, but only to 19'c... this is with a Hive, which isn't smart really.

Tell me more, how has the Nest done this?

2 adults, 2 children living in 4 bedroom, 3 story house. Our boiler is some industrial thing from the 70s. S plan heating plus hot water but our main shower is an electric one. Previously only had on off programmable style controller. No thermostat. Probably not actually the Nest itself, moreso actually having some sort of thermostat and accepting that I don't need to be able to walk around in my pants 365 days a year . Putting a jumper on and living at 19deg won't kill us. Auto away is pretty cool. Seems to only be on for 1.30-2.00 hrs a day at the moment.
I'd like to be able to get more stats from it though and having temperature sensors in other rooms would be a huge plus. So many areas where they (Google) could improve it. Smart TRVs etc.

I think this has been asked before but is there any ability to see what is triggering my hue lights? I have one light that seems to be turning itself on at random times. It's one of 2 lights in my hallway (in the same group) and the other light only turns on when it should do so I'm not sure what's triggering it.

I've forgotten it and added it again but the problem persists.

The answer is no.

The best I could do is to go through the Hue app and look at each of the routines, and also any motion sensors that were set up in accessories.

Then to go through the Hue website to look at the connected apps: https://account.meethue.com/apps

Then go through the connected apps to see which might have routines that are taking effect.

For me... it was a Nest fire alarm which I'd set to "simulate being at home when it detects I'm away"... except it wasn't very good at not doing that when I was home.

Oh, and what I intend to do is put Home Assistant in place and pair it with Prometheus and Grafana, so that I can get visibility on all of this and see the correlations easier. But this is not a high priority, so I'll probably get around to it next year.

Cheers, I suspected as much. Home assistant gives a decent log of when things turned on and off but not what caused it.

Where do you see connected apps? I know that ifttt, Alexa, Home Assistant and Harmony remote can all control my lights but I can't see anywhere that actually lists these. If I go on "From other apps" on the Hue app there's nothing there.

I linked the connected apps bit.

You can only see it on the Hue website.

Cheers. There's a lot of stuff linked there including a lot of apps from the 1st gen bridge that I had, hopefully one of those was the problem.

It's not a particularly obvious website, I'd been on the main hue site and there's no obvious login option on there.

It's a few weeks since I removed all of my smart home tech, and while I'm not exactly missing it, I've decided to put my spare raspberry pi's to use again, one of which has been loaded with hassio. I'm approaching it much differently this time round. Last time I jumped straight in at the deep end and tried to add too many things at once, which caused them to break or not work correctly. This time round I've set myself a few ground rules:

1. I want everything to exist only on my local network (that means no apps or third party cloud)
   
2. Everything must still operate as if my gran (or similarly not technically minded person) could walk in and use it
   
3. HA will be used only to integrate devices and not as a front end (hence the importance of step 2, and the reason for keeping it local only)
   
4. Appliances/devices will only be made smart/automated if there is a genuine benefit to it
   
   

As you can imagine step 1 and 2 could rule out a lot of tech, and involve a bit more diy, but it should mean that it's safer from a security standpoint, and also prevents me from taking the all at once approach again.

So far I have set up HA with mosquitto to link it to a sonoff rf bridge flashed with tasmota, which receives signals from my 2 code rf door sensor that accurately shows the state of the front door. It can also receive rf signals from my cheap wireless doorbell and send push notifications to my phone using pushover. After a lot of trial and error I have now figured out to send rf signals and control rf plugs. I have also managed to set up a device tracker for presence detection using our asus router. With all of this I have an automation running nicely to have the downstairs lamp come on if it's within 1 hour of sunset (or any time after) if the door is opened and mine or my girlfriend's phones are on the wifi (our new router is so powerful they usually latch on at the end of our road).

The benefit of this is that it was super cheap (18 for bridge, 10 for doorbell, 7 for 2 code door sensor and 15 for three rf plugs), but it's also a local network only setup and actually useful.

My next plan is to fit flashed shelly1 switches into ceiling light crowns so that switches can be used as normal, but lights can be used for automations. I also plan to integrate some of the cheap PIR motion sensors into automations soon. My bike shed is quite close to the rf bridge so trying to figure out if I can link it to my house alarm somehow.

I should have said that while I'm not planning to use the UI as a switch panel, it is nice to have as a home monitor to check if windows etc. were left open or temperature etc. I also use it as a test ground to figure out if my rf codes are working in automations.

While it's tied to my local network only and I'm not going down the DuckDNS route, I have another pi running with openvpn and pihole so am technically always browsing on my home network.

device tracker for presence detection

In case you aren't aware of it, GPSLogger is an open source Android app that can transmit your location to your homeassistant instance.