Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

There's a lot of industry momentum behind this at the moment. It's been a bit of a car crash in terms of the specification, which has been defined as it is being implemented against, but the number of industry players who are investing in it means it has a decent chance of success.

I've got an HP MicroServer N40L you can have for a forum donation if you want.

It's old but they're very reliable and they're so popular that you'll find a guide to running most OSs on them. Has 4GB of memory and a 60GB SSD and can take another 4 (or maybe 5) HDDs.

I'm mostly happy with my WD PR4100 which has hardware encoding for plex server if you like that stuff.

I'm being forced over to the latest hardware OS very soon so that may change but it's been pretty decent since late 2016.

the PR2100 (2 disk version) may be worth a look though not sure it has the same features.

They just aren't stable enough - my guess (and it is just a wild guess) is because of power problems.

At the risk of teaching grandmother to suck eggs, what are you powering them with?

I've got one of these that was recommended on here and zero stability problems:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00YSA0WI8/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_8VFZ7RRFVWND8MH9TM3K

This is with one Pi running a Pi Hole and Unifi Controller and another running Home Assistant OS with a Home Assistant setup which is now fairly complex...

Storage could also be an issue, I've got a gold A++++ or whatever rated micro SD card in the Pi Hole / controller but a NVME SSD for my Hassio setup (which did corrupt once when I was using an El cheapo micro SD but has been all good since).

To say I'm no expert on this shit is an understatement but as I understand it stability issues are normally power or storage presuming everything is installed correctly.

Interested in the solution to the question from @mmccarthy because I've recently been playing with casting from Home Assistant but all my media files are currently on my Mac.

I've heard good things about Synology NAS's and you can even run Hassio on them but not sure I'd want to do that.

Edit: I've actually got Samba running on Hassio so technically I am using my Pi as a NAS, but I've only put one film and one mp3 on it as a test so can't say anything about how reliable it is yet...

I went with a NAS because it is physically a tidy box and it is less hassle to run. I have a basic 4 bay Synology DS420j which I'm happy with, would buy again.

I rsync an encrypted copy of the data I care about to a cheap OVH VM somewhere in France for off-site.

I've got one of these

Me too. All the Watts.

Ditto on the fancy schmancy cards.

I'm probably viewing it a little negatively at the moment, as my Hassbian Pi3b is inaccessible at the moment, as it one of my Pi-Hole Zeroes

I'm tempted to just chuck everything on an old laptop instead.

Just received notification that the Mycroft Mark II is shipping at last.

In September.

For $299.

And it looks like this.

Anybody want a couple of pre-order reservation codes?

competing standards.xkcd

Oh Hell yes I know this. But the big Players seem interested.

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I too would choose Nest

Went for Nest via the BT Shop. £20 cheaper than anywhere else.

I guess CCTV doesn't get discounts. Arlo looked nice but there weren't enough good reviews to make it the first choice.

I've got an HP MicroServer N40L It's old but they're very reliable

Amazingly reliable as it's been the Plex server for years!

They just aren't stable enough - my guess (and it is just a wild guess) is because of power problems

Good guess.

Mine are super stable, very reliable. But I do have a ups so that would be it

Does anything like the below light switch exist but with a second light switch that acts as a remote instead of the ugly car fob looking thing?

The only switch for the light at the top of the stairs from the living room is at the top of the stairs. Due to the layout it would be massive pain to get a second switch wired in so remote option would be far better but I just want a normal light switch downstairs that I can just put on the wall rather than a remote I'll just end up losing.

strong text

I learned last night that we had experienced a powercut while we were away, which explains why so many things were grumbling.

I've had a UPS on my wishlist for a while.

Any recommendations?

I put a UPS device on my computers. I have an APC one, just a home consumer one. A 1500C I think it is this one https://www.amazon.co.uk/APC-Smart-UPS-SMT-Uninterruptible-Interactive/dp/B003IR1CG8

Don't spend a wild amount, there are no features you really need... Just a battery and the battery only has a shelf life of 5ish years give or take, it may reach a decade but budget for replacing every 5 years. The only consideration is how much power you need to draw for how long.

I don't bother with the management software, or usb connection.

I just use the UPS to get through all temporary drops in power and to protect hardware from surges in power too. It's just a buffer of electricity.

If the power is out here then my computers will stay powered on for about 15-20 minutes. This being a NAS and 2 PCs and a few PIs.

With that in mind I focused on how much power can be drawn rather than how long it stays up... A few minutes of uptime is good enough 😁

I still lose internet as my switch is in another room and not on UPS. But computers are ok with network outage and will reconnect once the switch is back on. I'm merely protecting my computers.

Not once in 20 years have I lost power for more than 5 minutes, so using a UPS like this is fine.

If all your devices are SSD perhaps you don't care, but with spinning disks a UPS feels essential.

With all that in mind... This is a cheap insurance policy against one of the most common reasons hardware is damaged.

Thinking of hue-ing my kitchen. I was fairly skeptical at first but after fitting all the lamps in my lounge with hue bulb I'm sold on just not having to turn off multiple lamps/lights at night, not to mention the different schemes etc.

Got 10x GU10s to replace & getting a 3x pendant light fitting installed this week. Is there anything more clever I should be thinking about than just getting the pendants installed on their own regular switch and buying a switch cover to hold the hue switch?

Nope. That's all you need.

It takes a while to do the app setup with so many bulbs, but that's basically it.

Oh... spare batteries for the switch.

The kitchen one turns out to be the one you will flatten soonest. Not overnight, lasts months... but have the batteries in a drawer for when you need them.

I forgot to say - thanks for this.

I'll likely have a small separate one for my desktop, and one for all of my networking / servery type stuff (although I'm running a lot of things from an old laptop now, so have the advantage of an inbuilt battery backup).

Anyone got any experience using Tasmota firmware? I've got a Sonoff 4chPro3 which I'm planning to use on the lids of my bin store (don't ask) and I can't work out whether you can run interlocks when the unit is in Hue emulation mode for Alexa compatibility.

Depending on the wiring you may be able to put something like this in https://microcosm.app/out/BG6xi (you'll need a neutral) so you don't have to replace all the bulbs and it works with the existing bulbs.

You can also get the IKEA smart bulbs that work with Hue (although it can be a faff to get working) and are cheaper than the Hue ones.

Dredge but how did you get on with this?

Good timing! The Shelly and wall switch arrived yesterday, looks like a nice well thought out piece of kit once unboxed. I went about trying to fit it immediately, using the wiring diagram in the wall switch packaging, and it would switch the boiler on/off using the physical switch but not the app. I then switched to the wiring using the diagram for the Shelly 1pm with a standard physical switch and it would switch on/off using the app but not the physical switch. Furthermore, the little square on the light switch doesn’t light up when “on”, so the only way to know if the boiler is on is to go outside and listen to it.

I think bridging the connection between L and L1 might solve it, but tbh it’s just slightly off the mark so I refitted the timer clock and am pondering my next step.

Of course if you weren’t bothered with having a physical switch, then it would be perfect, but my wife is anti-tech so it needs to have a physical switch with an indicator to pass the WAF.

Interesting. I would rather have a physical switch for sake of having one but might do this as a mean time fix. Do you have a link to where you bought it?

Bought direct from the Shelly website

https://shop.shelly.cloud/shelly-wall-switch-1-white-wifi-smart-home-automation#565

https://shop.shelly.cloud/shelly-1pm-wifi-smart-home-automation-1#51