For over a decade Philips Hue offered lights that work without sharing your data to the cloud. This is changing soon and we need your help to make some noise to convince them to revert this decision.
Okay, so let me tell you about my doorbell, from a #networking perspective.
When you push the button by the door, it sends a message over the #zigbee wireless mesh network in my house. It probably goes through a few hops, getting relayed along the way by the various Zigbee light switches and "smart outlets" I have.
Once it makes it to my utility closet, it's received by a Zigbee-to-USB dongle, through a USB hub (a simple tree network) plugged into an SFF PC. From there, it gets fed into zigbee2mqtt, which, as the name implies, publishes it to my local #mqtt broker.
The mqtt broker is in the small #kubernetes cluster of #raspberrypi nodes I run in my utility closet. To get in (via a couple of #ethernet switch hops), it goes through #metallb, which is basically a proxy-ARP type service that advertises the IP address for the mqtt endpoint to the rest of my network, then passes the traffic to the appropriate container via a #linux veth device.
I have #HomeAssistant, running in the same Kubernetes cluster, subscribed to these events. Within Kubernetes, the message goes through the CNI plugin that I use, #flannel. If the message has to pass between hosts, Flannel encapsulates it in VXLAN, so that it can be directed to the correct veth on the destination host.
Because I like #NodeRed for automation tasks more than HomeAssistant, your press of the doorbell takes another hop within the Kubernetes cluster (via a REST call) so that NodeRed can decide whether it's within the time of day I want the doorbell to ring, etc. If we're all good, NodeRed publishes an mqtt message (more VXLANs, veths, etc.)
(Oh and it also sends a notification to my phone, which means another trip through the HomeAssistant container, and leaving my home network involves another soup of acronyms including VLANs, PoE, QoS, PPPoE, NAT or IPv6, DoH, and GPON. And maybe it goes over 5G depending on where my phone is.)
Of course something's got to actually make the "ding dong" sound, and that's another Raspberry Pi that sits on top of my grandmother clock. So to get there the message hops through a couple Ethernet switches and my home WiFi, where it gets received by a little custom daemon I wrote that plays the sound via an attached #HiFiBerry board. Oh but wait! We're not quite done with networking, because the sound gets played through PulseAudio, which is done through a UNIX domain socket.
SO ANYWAY, that's why my doorbell rarely works and why you've been standing outside in the snow for five minutes.
We're living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
@pluralistic Being one of Chamberlain's many enshittification victims, I bought a "ratgdo" (Rage Against The Garage Door Opener), a small $30 circuit that hooks to a Chamberlain-brand garage door opener and lets me control it locally with #HomeAssistant. I then disconnected my opener from the official MyQ site and deleted their app.
Yes, you didn’t imagine it, we did a One More Thing during #HA10… 💚 Home Assistant Green is our new affordable smart home hub. It’s designed to be the easiest way for everyone to start with Home Assistant, for just $99. #homeassistant
It's my daughter's second birthday! I setup Sugar Labs on an old laptop MacBook Air. The laptop had a broken keyboard so I bought her a cheap fun keyboard and mouse combo.
Sugar Labs is neat, it's got a simple UI which will help her learn how to navigate and a few simple programs for her to play with. It has a simple Python IDE but it might be a little while until she's ready to play with that. It has a web browser too so I might setup some custom Home Assistant dashboards so she can change the lights, control her train, etc. And I'll see if I can setup Signal or alike so she can call her grandparents.
I remember playing on our family Amstrad CPC when I was 4yo. It came with BASIC and it was my first exposure to coding. I want my daughter to have the opportunity to be a creator of tech instead of just a consumer of tech.
Die Firma #Haier hat entschieden, dass man ihre #Haushaltsgeräte nicht umweltfreundlich PV-kompatibel steuern können soll und setzt den Entwickler des #Homeassistant-Plugins unter Druck.
We’re very happy to reveal the update to our logo during the 10th-anniversary event! We will slowly roll it out over the coming weeks. #HA10#homeassistant
Hey you! If you ever, ever, use #github, #gitlab (etc) you need to read this. Every #maker, and most everyone else, ESPECIALLY those of you who are NOT #developers. (Contributors/devs usually have local copies already.)
The first hour of my day was just wasted chasing down an error in #HACS that turns out to be "Dev deleted their repositories on github and now #homeassistant is mad"
#GIT ONLY WORKS IF YOU HAVE YOUR OWN COPY. The downloads and tarballs are not the same thing. They are partial copies at best. Even "forking" (on the same site) can be deleted at the original author's whim.
To actually have your own copy, it needs to be somewhere else. On a new site (if the original is on #github you can put your copy on #gitlab) or even your laptop. And when you can, use your copy instead.👿
New features for our new data tables, create helpers directly from the automation editor, the tile card now supports locks, easily adjust the name of a device on the energy dashboard, and improved audio with ESPHome for Assist.
For today's #HomeAssistant adventure, I added some custom features to the (relatively) new tile card. Turns out, it's expandable through custom components, and the whole process is relatively straightforward!
I started by adding a "button" feature that shows one or more buttons that support the "more-info", "toggle" and "call-service" actions for now.
...and then I ported the 3-in-1 brightness, temperature and color slider from #mushroom, because I like that a lot more than HA's implementation of having one slider per row :comfyblobcat:
We recently got a wifi-enabled hot tub. Some enterprising soul had already created a HA addon to work with it, so I set about implementing #observability, #automation and #alerting.
Amongst other things, it now starts heating automatically if there's plunge pricing on #octopusenergy Agile
I continue to believe Zigbee delivers on the important things that Matter and Thread keep promising, but actually:
• mature
• widely available
• affordable
The one thing Matter over Thread devices can claim is that they work without a hub… except they don’t; the hub still has to be built into your Nest display, Apple HomePod, etc.
I have hundreds of low power, local-only smart devices from a dozen or so brands and it all… just works together.
Sad news: one of our neighbours has had the AUDACITY to un-pair their Bluetooth toothbrush from our home automation server.
Now our house has no idea whether or not they’re using the correct pressure, brushing an appropriate number of sectors, and achieving sufficient strokes-per-session.
Not all home automation stories are happy home automation stories. Sigh.
A gorgeous new login page, a new design for the thermostat card, a numeric tile card feature, options for the default dashboard, the history dashboard showing long-term statistics, and more!
Dis moi l'fédi, tu as déjà installé quelque chose pour rendre connecté des volets roulants ? L'idée serait de programmer des ouvertures et fermetures, surmener via Home Assistant ou un truc comme ça