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

[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!