One of Those Guys

[diffrentcolours]

Last night, after a very pleasurable theatre trip with cosmolinguist, I ended up messing around a bit with the smart plugs I bought ages ago.

I have actually been using these plugs somewhat. They're on the house WiFi and that lets me remote-control them through a browser and set timers for them. They also have a mechanical button if you want to interact with them in a more traditional manner - that's basically a hard requirement for any home automation stuff I do, after the time I visited a friend and had to poop in the darkness because the bathroom lights couldn't be switched on until he reinstalled a Raspberry Pi.

But having resurrected Home Assistant on my fileserver I figured it was time to actually get these things talking to each other. I still find HA overly complicated, and I'm not quite sure what the difference is between an "app" and an "integration". I hit a few dead ends following this guide but eventually got to the point where I could use the Home Assistant web UI to control the plugs rather than the built-in web UI.

That doesn't sound like much of an improvement but it's actually quite exciting, because now anything I can do with Home Assistant, I can do with the plugs. I installed up simple speech-to-text and text-to-speech integrations in HA, and now I can talk to the HA app on my phone, tell it to turn the plugs on or off, and it does so! And tells me it's done it in a northern voice called Alan!

It's another small step on the HA journey and I'm still not thinking about temperature monitoring around the house, but it gave me a nice little dopamine hit.

(by this time it was 2am and E prodded me to come to bed, so I excitedly demonstrated this to him and then went to sleep)

Comments

[otter]

Finding joy is the whole point of such things, I think

[barakta]

Sensible home automation ftw!

And yes, hardware options are vital. As is having something that isn't dependent on DodgyCompany retaining the software or not going bust (unless you plan for that obsolescence).

[diffrentcolours]

Yeah, open hardware and no cloud dependencies here. At some point I intend to have an entirely non-Internet-accessible network for "smart devices".

[barakta]

*nods* I think we have a mix, some stuff can be accessed externally but only via certain VPNs or something. But our system is stupidly homebrew so if Kim falls under a bus, I'm 90% stuffed!

[apiphile]

had to poop in the darkness because the bathroom lights couldn't be switched on until he reinstalled a Raspberry Pi.

this is one of the many reasons i am suspicious of too much in the way of smart tech.

[cosmolinguist]

"poop in the darkness" is such an evocative phrase for the ominous possibilities that await. :)

[diffrentcolours]

Honestly I'm thinking about using it as an album title.

There's a new album out by Darkswoon, might as well have a Darkpoop too.

[cosmolinguist]

It was the happiest I've seen you about being awake at 2am in a very long time. :)