Smart House

[diffrentcolours]

I've finally got round to installing Home Assistant on my file server. This is the first time I've played with virtual machines since transplanting the hard drives from an Intel box to an AMD box, and I needed to purge and reinstall bits of KVM / QEMU to get it to work.

Of course now it's up and running it doesn't do very much on its own. There are various things it can theoretically do which I'm interested in, including tracking Gary around the house using a tag on his harness. But my starting point is pretty simple - measuring temperature and humidity in every room in the house.

The design principle is pretty solid - I plug a USB Zigbee stick into my fileserver, and it should be able to reach devices across the house. I buy some Zigbee sensor units from AliExpress for about a fiver a pop, pair them with the contoller, and deploy them around the house. Home Assistant handles monitoring, logging, graphing and alerting. Maybe I need a Zigbee router/repeater unit on the landing because my house is basically a Faraday cage, but that should be the only complication.

In practice, I've pretty much immediately hit a brick wall with this. Either I choose between ready-to-use units (which tend to use WiFi and are much more expensive per-unit), or I go for something slightly more homebrew and run into a host of problems. I've seen advice that you shouldn't use Bluetooth (as Linux support isn't good enough) or Zigbee (as Linux support is too good for the devices out there), the two cheap low-power alternatives. Or I go the ESPHome approach and solder things together myself, which is pretty much a non-starter at my skill level.

I suspect I'll end up just buying some random units from AliExpress and seeing what works, but it's frustrating that I either have to do this kind of expensive, slow trial-and-error or pay through the nose for what should be cheap kit.

Comments

[otter]

It all sounds so complicated

[diffrentcolours]

Yeah, it makes me a little mad. When DIY is so frustrating even for a technical person like me, it's hard to advocate to other people that they should move away from Alexa, Siri and friends for their home automation and escape those big spying corporations.