Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

+1 to the above

And what you see there is no different to what it would look like on the outside the building, or in a nearby cabinet, or under a manhole cover nearby.

That's actually quite neat. And ADSL is hugely tolerant of the copper pair it runs over.

+1 to ^^

I patched the incoming BT line from the box outside onto one of the pairs of some cat 6 and ran it in through the external wall then straight under the floor and back up under the stairs, where it went into the master socket.

Never had any problems. The guy that bought the house once messaged me to say he was getting new broadband and the engineer onsite was wondering what the setup was as he could see the cable coming in through the wall then disappearing under the floor.
Told him what the situation was and that the standard "it was like that when I got the house".

text back 5mins later saying thanks from the engineer and all good.

+1 also. I did the same, albeit when I worked for a telecoms company so borrowed the tools and a bunch of consumables from one of the engineers so the job looked half kosher. Openreach guy couldn't give a shit.

And ADSL is hugely tolerant of the copper pair it runs over.

And not just copper: https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet-string.html

apparently on modern master sockets you can wire up the a&b coming in and they have a customer facing a&b from which you can extend the primary connection from for data to another (sub) master socket.

am gonna bin off the existing setup entirely, wire in a master socket where the cable comes into the property, then I've bought 30m more outdoor bt cable to go back out and then I'll run it round the front of the house and under the floorboards to the understairs cupboard like I wanted. later on I can cut out the first master socket and splice the cable coming in and the new extension in a junction box if i need to.

Buy a New master socket on eBay. Get some jelly connectors in case you need crimps.

I ran mine through a roof into a new partition wall. Took less time to do that ripping out the previous shit install.

pimoroni has 8gb rpi 4b in stock at the moment. non kit versions

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-4?variant=31856486416467

£75 though - that's a lot of moola for a slice of pi...

https://www.t3.com/news/british-gas-starts-to-turn-off-hive-smart-home-devices-forever

"Hive has announced the shutdown of the Hive Nano 1 Hub, effective from 1 August 2023, and the Hive Camera, also on 1st August. The Hive Leak Sensor will stop working on 1 September 2023."

This is the biggest problem with a lot of smart devices.

I have a Loxone Mini Server Go and Smart Socket Air which have been sitting in my cupboard for over a year. I don't know what they are and can't understand what they do, but I know they're something to do with smart homes.

For the both of them, RRP appears to be £450 excl VAT, so I'm keen to sell them (I nearly assumed they would have the value of a second hand broadband router and chucked them). Where do you smart home people buy your gear? Anyone on here want it?

Anyone any recommendations for a good method to back up Home Assistant to a network drive? There seem to be quite a few different options out there for doing this.

I don't understand with the obsolescence and lax security why people bother with this shit.

Another shit tonne of e-waste that'll end up on fire on some island.

That depends on how you have it running I would have thought.

Containers can just be copied in full (though may need to be stopped first - I have a cron job that brings one down, copies it to a NAS, then brings it back up).

If it is installed locally, you could write a shell script that uses rsync to copy the base directory & config to the network drive, and have a cron job that calls that (I do this on my main PC to sync document & image folders).

Yes, that would have been useful info. It's a full Raspberry Pi install using HA OS.

I think on a previous install I used to have some kind of script that copied stuff but it involved mounting network drives and shit which was a ballache.

Just wondering whether that kind of thing is better than just using an addon like this
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/samba-backup-create-and-store-backups-on-a-samba-share/199471/72

Any network backup is going to need mounting of some sort.

At least with an add-on, someone else is doing the heavy lifting, and you only need to plug in a few config details. And it's straight forward to install & remove.

But, you are relying on someone to maintain the addon, and make sure that it doesn't break anything when the OS / application updates.

Seems like it's worth a shot though.

Home Assistant 2023.6 release incorporated Network Storage into the operating system which makes backing up relatively easy.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/06/07/release-20236/#connect-and-use-your-existing-network-storage

I back mine up to Google Drive using Home Assistant Google Drive Backup, it works well and Google's servers are going to be more dependable than anything I can do...

Excellent, that worked perfectly. No more pissing about with FSTAB and cron jobs.

Looking at the inkbird WiFi units for a simple heater/fridge relay. I have the regular version hooked up but control unit doesn't quite reach the front of the fridge so a pain to adjust.

Are they any cop or are there an alternatives I should look at for temperature control with 2x230V relays?

I need a WiFi cctv webcam thing, to use as internal CCTV for when we are away. Would be good if it had an app that would alert me if there was movement. Bit like an alarm. Anyone got anything they can recommend?

If you’re on Apple then this
Aqara Security Camera Hub Indoor G2H Pro, 1080p HD HomeKit Secure Video Indoor Camera, Night Vision, Two-Way Audio, Zigbee Hub, Plug-in Cam Compatible with Alexa, Google Assistant, Works with IFTTT https://amzn.eu/d/c7SJwbE

I’ve got a load of Eufy stuff (anker brand) and have been happy with it.

Decent quality. Caught this complete arsehole yesterday morning:

https://youtu.be/kxzrvdFTETk

Haha amazing. Deserves to be free after that.

Thanks will look at them. Actually our baby monitor is eufy.

Maybe. She’s not the naughty one though. Expected better from her.

The camera this was captured on is a c120. I have a couple around the house and garage. Also have a for Ayla’s room and an e220 outside.