Home automation

December 16, 2024 — August 24, 2024

computers are awful together
confidentiality
cryptography
faster pussycat
diy

Upon persuading the gizmos in your home to talk to one another.

See also home networks.

I feel like this should be easy, but my experience of using Apple and Amazon devices has been that they never do what I want. Also there are standards wars between various proprietary apps, and the whole thing looks like a security nightmare.

Figure 1

1 Dongles for bluetooth, zigbee, thread, etc

2 home-assistant

A DIY option: Home Assistant. Turn a little raspberry pi into a home automation hub.

The rule of thumb seems to be that Zigbee has the most support for generic hubs, followed by Matter

3 Thread and Matter

4 Securing doors

TBC

5 Meross devices

Cheap on Amazon. Can sorta work with Homekit. Pair using an Apple HomeKit device, then integrate as a “homekit device”

6 Tuya devices

If you must use these, and don’t like their suspicious cloud-based app, you can try to use them locally.

It seems like they will still report back to their corporate masters over your wifi though.

7 Incoming