#smart home

[victusinveritas]

Well, at least we managed to avoid this so far.

[seriously-mike]

Copied from Facebook:

Someone open sourced a home automation platform that runs entirely on your own hardware - and it supports over 1,000 integrations out of the box. It's called Home Assistant. And it's not a smart home app. It's a complete, self-hosted home automation OS - local control, no cloud required, no subscription, no company in the middle reading your data. Here's what it actually does: → Controls lights, locks, cameras, thermostats, sensors, and appliances from one dashboard → 1,000+ integrations: Philips Hue, Google Nest, Apple HomeKit, Zigbee, Z-Wave, MQTT, and more → Automations that run locally - no internet connection required, no latency → Energy monitoring dashboard - track solar production, grid usage, and battery storage in real time → Full mobile app for iOS and Android with location awareness → Works on Raspberry Pi, home server, NAS, or any x86-64 machine with UEFI → Monthly releases - 2026.3 shipped last week Here's the wildest part: Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple HomeKit all route your smart home data through their servers. Home Assistant runs on a Raspberry Pi in your closet. Your automations fire in milliseconds. Your data never leaves your house. Your devices keep working when the cloud goes down - which they will. Amazon discontinued Alexa Classic. Google killed Stadia, Inbox, and a hundred other products. Apple required a HomePod hub. Home Assistant has shipped a new release every single month for over a decade. 85.5K GitHub stars. 37K forks. Still going. 100% Open Source. Apache-2.0 License.

GitHub - home-assistant/core: :house_with_garden: Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.

:house_with_garden: Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. - home-assistant/core

This disenshittifies a whole lot of things. Now while I don't put much trust in IOT and smart home hardware, using only two remotely controlled electrical sockets and a smart bulb that I originally intended to run through IFTTT, I welcome solutions that skip the corporate middlemen, their services and servers that can be shut down at any moment, leaving you with a lot of useless electronic scrap.

[archihaven]

Source: http://georgianadesign.tumblr.com

[jeffertu]

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[flowercrowncrip]

In happier news I got a smart thermostat and can control my own heating now!

ID: a screenshot of a phone showing a thermostat app. The goal temperature is 20 degrees and it is currently 18.9 degrees. The humidity is 52% / end ID.

Before I had to instruct my carers how to use the thermostat and timer despite not being able to see the controls, so this is a huge step up!

[stealerofmemes]

How to turn your home into a smart home:

1) buy good books

2) read good books

3) back to step 1

[wanderingmindthoughts]

it's ALIVE!

just a couple days ago I was complaining about having difficulties installing a modern linux distro on an almost 20-yo laptop, but I finally have linux AND home assistant running on it!

my purpose for this project is to build a smart home system that is as low-tech and low-cost as possible, which us a perfect excuse to reuse devices that have been gathering dust for years. enter: my mom's old work computer, a toshiba satellite pro that runs winXP and hasn't been used since 2018.

obviously my first step was to replace the extremely laggy winXP with a linux distro, so after an unsuccessful attempt at installing mint I looked up a list of low-resource distros and decided to try linux bodhi, simply because it required the least RAM. I put it on a bootable usb, was VERY satisfied with how well it ran, and I was able to install it permanently with no issues. it was such a relief! I was fully ready to spend a week trying out minimal distros, so I'm very pleased to have gotten it right on the second try.

(during boot it still throws the errors I showed on my last post, but thus far it doesn't seem to be affecting normal use)

next step was to install home assistant on it. at first I wanted to do it "the proper way" and run HAOS inside of virtualbox, but I quickly found out that this laptop's processor doesn't support virtualization. I had no option but to install home assistant core (rather than home assistant OS), which runs on your linux distribution like a normal server; no virtualization required.

the core version of home assistant has just the basic functionalities, and it is no longer officially supported... but it seems like it has an enthusiastic enough user base to maintain an "unofficial" version of it on the snapcraft store. installing it was as simple as running a single command on the terminal (amazing stuff, honestly).

so, all in all, I have:

an unofficial version of home assistant

managed via snaps

running on a minimalistic, niche linux distro

installed on a repurposed toshiba laptop from 2007

my next step is to set up a routine that cuts the power off a smart plug when the laptop's battery reaches 100% charge, and turns the power back on again when it reaches 30%. I going to need buy a smart plug for that (ugh), but I want to avoid degrading the battery as much as I can.