Disaster recovery and virtualisation

[therealdb]

What are the projects you're working on?

Summer is over, and that (unfortunately) means more time indoor and (luckily) more time to build things.

I have almost nothing in my backlog and it's boring

I appreciate a couple of (crazy) ideas.

[rafale77]

For me I just removed the vera which I used as pure ser2net device for zigbee and replaced it with a conbee 2 stick. The idea is first to consolidate my 2 zigbee network and get rid of the philips hue 2 hub which would enable me to have only 1 zigbee mesh. If this is successful then I would work on bypassing home assistant for zigbee network control and bridge openLuup into deconz.

If you really want a big project, you could look at doing deep neural video processing. This is a very large topic I invested a couple of months on and enabled me to replace video movement detection with specific object detections along with facial recognition. All done locally of course. Coding is done in C or Python. I know that C is right down your alley!

A little further down the road I am thinking about replacing all my amazon echo with a local version likely based on Rhasppy when that project gets a little bit more mature and I find the time and courage to make the jump.

Other than that, everything just works... I have had no need to touch or tinker with anything...

[akbooer]

My once four, then three, and recently only two-Vera home system is now down to one, with Vera hosting my beloved four-button MiniMote hand Controllers, a few lights, and a couple of meter readers. About to clone this to a UZB and see how that goes. Shelly now doing some switches, lights, and timed thermostats.

I really need a replacement (WiFi) for the MiniMotes, but don’t see anything suitable. May have to make my own (3D printer anyone?)

Other than that, the Prolog-based plugin for openLuup HA logic is coming along very slowly.

Not doing anything right now, though, since we have a power outage (internet runs on UPS.)

[Black Cat]

I invested in a 3D Printer...eventually.
Turns out there not that expensive after all. +1 to a Ender V2. Easy to put together and great youtube support.
The hardest part has been learning CAD- Autodesk, probably should say the most frustrating part, but now fairly conversant and can design complex designs.
That was my winter, now we are looking at Spring & Summer and the end of lockdown.
The EnderV2 is turning out adapters and wall brackets, quality is better than good and is merchantable.

[a-lurker]

The problem may be that we are all caught in liminal time due to COVID.

I had thought I would get the Sonos system to issues voice commands to Alexa but I'm not sure what the point would be, except for some idle amusement.

Something else I would like to know; how to calculate the R value (insulation effectiveness) of our house (metric units only please). It seems to me that when you get a step change in the outside weather, which can be a significant step change where I live. Then the inside temperature decays exponentially to meet the new outside temperature. Depending on the R value of the house the decay will be rapid (poor insulation) or slow (good insulation). Any idea how to calculate the R value, given the outside temp step change delta and the inside temperature change that results after x time? A few points: assumes the outside weather changes abruptly. No heat sources inside the house or though windows. Convection of heat may affect results.

[therealdb]

Lately, I've

• built an integration with SmartBot push buttons (with retry, ack and battery and status report back to luup)
• bought a Kuando BusyLight and integrated into my routine (so, when I'm on a call, it automatically turns to red)
• built an app with integrated notifications on my home PC (dark, entryways, etc) via MQTT.
• built a couple of new wifi-based sensors (light, temp, humidity and distance)
• finished my tablet dashboard
• built a system to track electrical consumption, in preparation for solar
• built a new system to rotate my exterior color lights (milight+hue)

@rafale I'll probably do some image recognition for the cams (I did for a customer, but it was in cloud) and a couple of more sensors.

@akbooer finding a wifi remote is not easy. because wifi isn't really suited for battery operated devices.

@a-lurker summer here in South Italy wasn't bad as I was expecting. we managed to do very good, even if cases are rising again lately. I never got so much spare time for sure, since I used to travel a lot for work (and pleasure) and I'm at home, beach excluded, since my last vacation in Miami+Bahamas in February. I have voice enabled announcements via Alexa and my wife loves them. I have a good insulated house (very new), but I'm not sure it'd be easy to do.

[akbooer]

@therealdb said in I'm bored :

because wifi isn't really suited for battery operated devices.

Indeed so. Curiously, this was the promise of ZWave - that is was low power. Ironic, then, then many of the major failings of Zwave (certainly in the Vera world) were based around battery devices (polling, or not, etc.)

There are low power WiFi devices and (single) buttons, but truly hard to find anything more capable. Maybe that's the one things that will keep my Zwave system going (albeit on ZWay, not on Vera.)

[rafale77]

I would not confuse the vera failures with zwave failures. Battery operated devices operate brilliantly with zwave. Vera's problem was around the background "maintenance" they thought was going to make user configuration easier. It just made it a complete nightmare.

There are now cheap low powered wifi devices but... I would still prefer not to mix up low bandwidth network for home automation with the high bandwidth of wifi as it will (at least until full wifi6 implementation is effective) eat up wifi bandwidth. It is more of a scalability issue than anything else. Once you start having a lot of devices, the wifi band airtime will start getting congested which is why for these types of appliances, I try to avoid wifi. The amount of wifi channels is also very limited as the trend is to broaden channels to allow more per device bandwidth and to also to use more and more channels to support more devices simultaneously...

[Matohl]

This winter I will work on my project to get small ESP sensor connected to a RPi to warn me if the plans needs some water, in planning for several years. I will also as @therealdb work with the tablet dashboards- And integrate some electronics into my Millenium-Falcon, Tie-fighter models. (Yes, I'm still married)

[CatmanV2]

Finally fixed Mrs C's iPhone locator. Adding some more logic now we're actually going out of the house (for a while)

What I'm toying with now is some ideas for
a) Smart shower (assuming I get another job that means I need to get up and get in the shower)
b) IR control for scene setting per my old Philips Pronto and (to a lesser extent) my Harmony. The Harmony hub is the obvs choice, and given my Harmony One is on its last legs this may be first.

C