Selfhosted

I have a rule that "Nothing will be automated that cannot be manually overridden."

Well, actually it's my wife's rule but it's a good rule nonetheless. As a result, there's a big panel full of relays in the basement that is the "last mile" for anything climate control or security related.

There have been a few times when it's been handy. Like when the exhaust fan isn't working and I don't want to debug the ESP32 controller today so I just flip it over to "Manual".

Internet of things sucks, but lan of things is pretty cool

I just bought my first home and as soon as I'm decently unpacked I'm going to start my journey on self hosting.

Currently planning:

• Small i5 HP Pro SFF PC for hosting large apps (going to config for Linux and power it off until I get more mature
• Raspberry Pi4: pihole and home assistant
• Raspberry Pi4: NextCloud, Deck
• ZigBee router thing:
  • Nest thermostat came with the house
  • adding light bulbs and switches
  • want a smart doorknob but the security bothers me. Schlage Connect™ Smart Deadbolt, Z-Wave Plus
• NAS
• Jellyfin
• JBOD on SFF?
• flashing old Netgear nighthawk into wwdrt
• OS Ticket to replace NextCloud Deck for a JIRA type solution to manage projects and major house items.
• ZigBee thermometers for better Nest accuracy
• ZigBee motion sensors for entry ways and bathroom
• smart plugs and motion sensors for basement TV lights

Not sure what else to add. Open to advice or suggestions.

And it probably needs to connect using WEP

It got hacked and now I'm really, really dry.

I just shopped for a humidifier, purposely avoided anything "smart", I ended up with a really fucking simple one, it has a hydrostat and can aim to automatically reach a level you want (40-50-60), has 4 speed,1,2,3,auto and sleep.

And the whole thing is nothing else just a wicking filter sitting in water that has a fan pointed at it, I think Technology Connectios would be proud of my purchase.

I will have to disinfect and change filters, but no need for distilled water like with ultrasonic humidifiers, and I boil my water and let it cool back to room temperature before adding it to the humidifier, hopefully that will help with staving off build up of bacteria

I was an idiot and bought a high end TPLink router, I can't even use Vlans without signing up for their back door service.

Smart, you don't want some hacker to drown you remotely.

This has been my approach and it has gone okay so far except for 2 issues that are quite a pain:

1: you have to thoroughly research what you buy. Does it work on an isolated vlan? Just because it works with home assistant does not guarantee this. Many home assistant users are comfortable with some degree of data collection and an integration does not mean that it will work local only (nor does it mean that all features will work). If it does work local only you may sacrifice some features. Cameras are a good example. Most cameras with object/person detection do this in hardware, but not all. If you circumvent the Internet connection and proprietary app you may sacrifice this, or more likely alerts

2: there is 0 regulation binding a vendor to the terms of service agreed to at the point of sale, including making significant and sweeping changes. Case in point: I got a chamberlain myQ garage door opener. It worked well and opened my garage door. Integrated with home assistant via the API. However, chamberlain serves a lot of ads for upsells and services via their shitty app. They decided that users circumventing the app and not seeing that you could give amazon drivers access to your garage to deliver packages (seriously) or buy shitty cameras was unacceptable so they updated the TOS and revoked API access for all users. The only way it works now is via their app. I sold mine and built a ratgdo

Another example is Philips hue: while they have been able to be used local only for over a decade Philips has decided they’re going to start a subscription security service with all the devices that entails based around the hue hub. At some point in the near future if your hub updates it will require you to sign in to a Philips account and be online. This one’s way worse as some people have thousands of dollars invested in hue. I have like $300 in the fancier white hue bulbs but some people on the HA forums and reddit literally have their house decked out with like 80-100 bulbs, many of which are the RGB. Kind of silly but they do work very well, flicker free, good color, and last ages. I still have some from like 2016 going strong. Luckily here if you have the bridge on an isolated vlan it won’t update and worst case the bulbs work with ~~zwave~~ zigbee but the principle of the thing is ridiculous. It should be illegal for a company to change the terms this far after the contract of sale

Other examples too. Many car manufacturers (Mazda, Chevrolet, ford) because api access limited data collection for them to sell, some companies are openly hostile to home assistant and when an integration is created they will go out of their way to break it (Ariston, bambu), etc. see https://github.com/unixorn/internet-of-trash

Yeah, companies have abused that to release buggy, incomplete products faster and only make the software stable and feature complete if they make a good profit.

New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!

My house has manual windows, manual locks, and a dumb garage door controller... because I work in IT.

I do have a few smart appliances (environment reporting) but they are only allowed on the banishment VLAN so they don't get to interact with any single appliance inside my network. All they see is internet and nothing else.

FYI I learned About VLANs that it is in no way „locked down“. I can spoof the MAC address of a known device from a specific VLAN and I’m in that VLAN. Yes your devices can’t reach the internet/other devices by default but it won’t stop a bad actor.

We have water, heavy water, hydrogen infused water, nitrogen infused water, ice-9, h2o2...what will they think of next?!