I think I've been operating this way for a long time: My notes, software and wiki are almost all in plain text -- source, markdown or org mode in Emacs, usually -- and open image/video formats (jpeg, mp4) and synced with a replaceable combination of services (git, Dropbox, Syncthing, etc.). It lets me switch the conduits/pipes regularly, to whatever works best for my needs at the time.
When the zombie apocalypse finally hits (or the Internet implodes), I still have everything important, in plain text.
I did pretty much the same thing. The issue wasn't cats (I have two, but they'll gladly let anyone pet and feed them), it was that I can't hear the doorbell from my WFH office. I wanted to flash the light. I already use Home Assistant for loads of stuff.
I tried ESP32 and a 433MHz antenna thingy, so that I could continue to use my cheapo bell. That proved unreliable (a press got picked up, at best, about 90% of the time).
Then I went through two zigbee buttons. The issue is that Amazon and other delivery drivers appear to use a hammer to press doorbells. That's the only explanation I can think of for the state of the buttons after a few weeks.
I finally just caved and bought the cheapest (still expensive) Ring doorbell and disabled the camera. It's been solid, but I feel dirty and regret it each time I pay the annual bill. It's my last cloud-enabled device, but I can't afford to just keep throwing Zigbee buttons at the gorillas who deliver my packages.
I have an Amcrest doorbell and run amcrest2mqtt which sends messages that get picked up by Home Assistant. Keeps everything local and means I don't have to pay for a Ring subscription.
My only complaint is that when I blocked the doorbell from the internet, it just started rebooting every few minutes. If I cared, I'd tape over the camera, but I'm not too worried about someone spying on my front yard via my doorbell camera.
If someone's targeting me specifically then I feel like it's easier to just watch my house in person. Plus there are all the neighbors with (I assume) their doorbell cameras that would also have my house in view. And this threat would have to, I don't know, run CV on the feed from my camera to see when I leave or when my car leaves, then figure out if everyone in the house left so they could break in?
For this to be worth doing with hacked cameras instead of in person, you need to be monitoring a lot of camera feeds. But to get any useful info out of it, you need to spend a lot of time putting together data about a single feed. And unless you've already evaluated the target, you don't know which feeds are from valuable houses.
I just don't buy this as a real threat for any but the most valuable targets.
That's an excellent point. I don't think HA is anywhere close to being something that could carry a separate professional services industry, like many more mature projects (e.g., Redis, MQTT or whatever). It's just moving too fast. But I could imagine in the future it developing a "long-term support" version model.
A section I cut out of the blog before posting was my experiences with Z-Wave. Most of my smart plugs are Z-Wave, which was part of my issue with Zigbee coverage/instability (smart plugs are good routers/repeaters).
I like Z-Wave, but the stuff is expensive and options (for different types of devices) are fewer, so I've generally followed the economic incentives and ended up with many more Zigbee devices (38) than Z-Wave ones (7).
Also, Z-Wave is more power-hungry. I have one Z-Wave motion sensor and I need to change the battery every few months. My double-As in my Zigbee motion sensors last two years.
Would you mind (somehow) sharing the source of your current node-red configurations? I'm having quite the same setup, but I really liked your approach and I would love to speed run by taking a closer look what you have. Free time is especially hard to come by now with a young kid :)
I keep it up-to-date religiously and rarely run into breaking issues, but I have occasionally. I keep an eye on the release notes (https://rc.home-assistant.io/blog/categories/release-notes/), so I usually have at least a week's notice when a breaking change is coming and can adjust. I used the Met Office integration in some of my automations (setting a fan's speed based on the outside temp) and spotted that it was going to be disabled, and switched to Accuweather before this month's version came out.
I've been thinking about setting up HA, but I'm a very lazy home admin. It's likely that pretty soon I would fall to an update cycle of about once every second year.
Sounds like that would be a major pain though. Is there a pressing need to keep it up to date? Could it be treated as a set up and forget forever system, like I did with my NAS years ago?
You can yes, but the problem is: Once you buy some new device you're going to want to integrate it and that is when you start running into problems without upgrading.
But yes it will work forever in terms of it not being cloud-connected. Of course with the exception of integrated devices that don't have any local access.
But yeah it's a pain if you don't do it monthly because you have to manually go and find all the intermediate changelogs and read through them. Or you just pull the trigger and see what breaks and then google how to fix it. Which is what I tend to do.
Author here: Yeah, I cut that out at the last minute, but my feeling is that if you need to use the dashboard, the automation has failed. I put the app on my wife's phone, but she almost never uses it. She does use a touch screen on the wall, though, to bump up the heat, but that's about it.
I like the energy dashboard a lot, it has literally all data in a single view including cost and PV. There's nothing to automate: the dashboard is the point.
I also don't automate my lights. I don't want to automate my lights because our life isn't run on such a tight schedule. It always ends up less useful than a light switch in the wall.
What I do want is to turn off all lights in one go when we go out, and quickly glance at the status of lights all over the house.
Even if we assume that's true (I very much have my doubts), this is a totally self-inflicted problem as a result of bad design: there's no reason a garage door opener should rely on a remote server instead of local communication.
You don't even have to go so far as saying they should change the embedded software. Here is the problem:
> The MyQ integration was introduced in Home Assistant 0.39, and it's used by 3.1% of the active installations. Its IoT class is Cloud Polling.
"Cloud Polling", meaning they don't have a way for an API client to register for state change callbacks. I'm sure this is why there is so much traffic - if Home Assistant wants to support triggers based on state changes (eg door opening, turn on home lights), then it needs to repeatedly check the status so that it becomes aware of the change in a timely manner.
(Personally I only buy/use devices with local control, and generally cut them off from Internet access. Just saying though)
If it's not on a remote server, then how would you know when people leave/arrive at their homes? You'd miss out on so much sweet, monetizable personal information. Won't anyone think of corporate profits???
As they themselves admit in that statement: There used to be an official way to integrate locally, but they discontinued it (myQ Home Bridge) and they're hard to find today (inc. huge markups when available).
Perhaps they updated the statement since then, but they're not accusing them of "basically" DDOS: they literally say DDOS now. Which of course prompts the question: is the problem that the CTO doesn't understand what DDOS is, or are they intentionally painting HA as malicious somehow?
TBH, that's better, as that is a problem that could be fixed. Even if we had to switch to a tilt sensor and just retain control, that'd be much better than their approach.
IOW, this real reason is better than their dumb comment about "unauthorized use".
Great read. The first distribution I used was TAMU (https://archiveos.org/tamu/) in 1992, when Linux wasn't yet at 1.0. I had to download dozens of floppy disk images. In those days, getting X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor. My five kids (all in their 20s and 30s now) grew up running Linux. It's still the OS I choose when the option is available.
> X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor.
The flexibility also allowed you to accomplish neat things.
I was spoiled by high res 21" workstation monitors at school, so my laptop with a 640 x 480 screen was very limiting. But, telling X that the LCD was a multiscan monitor made every other scan line go to /dev/null-- the effect was a pseudo-resolution of 640x960 with scrunched up, but very readable fonts. Ran that setup for years.
Same here for RH 5.1 in ‘98. I spent most of a summer messing around with trying to get the proper video modes working on my graphics card and learning the ins and outs of X configuration. Then came the sound card…
When the zombie apocalypse finally hits (or the Internet implodes), I still have everything important, in plain text.