The Chronicles of NERD-ia: Making a Smart Home That Works Most of the Time

It is 1:00 on the dot. I want to thank y'all for being here. I told uh told folks last night I expected like four people in here on Sunday afternoon talking about smart homes. Who the hell wants to hear about smart homes, right? So I brought my own chat. Yeah. Well, holy crap. Like I submitted this on the CFP. Like what the hell? Let's see what happens. Like I'll toss this up there and see if anyone and this is the one they picked. Like usually I talk about like AI and social engineering and stuff, but no, we're going to talk about smart homes. So, yeah, [clears throat and cough] making a smart home that works most of

the time. Um, I'll let you know right now it it certainly won't be all of the time. Okay. Uh, it is what it is. Uh, before we get too far into this, I want to know how many of you know how to solder. Okay, cool. Cool. I don't have to make this a TED talk. I was just going to be like, "Thanks for coming to my TED talk." Uh, it's a very handy skill to have when you're playing with stuff like this, but it's not required. We'll talk about that in a minute. I was just curious. It's awesome. We have so many geeks here. I love it. I love it. Okay. My background because you care about me

or something. Uh, I am a cyber guy. Been a cyber guy for a long time. Worked in the army uh as a contractor. Spent about 10 years and was a security manager for the second regional cyber center. We ran the network infrastructure across North America and I helped deploy the army's active directory. So I am a cyber guy indeed. Um now I work for no before. How many of you have heard of no before? How many of you knew before? Huh? Funny, right? Okay. Uh and my job is actually what's that? >> Okay. >> Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we've been around for a while. I've been there almost 10 years. So now I get to go around and

talk and stuff like that. Yay. So I may be a little ADHD. Um these are some of the hobbies that I have. Yeah. And some pictures to kind of go with it. 3D printing, smart home stuff, playing with AI, Christmas lights, laser cutting, engraving, fixing vintage car audio stuff. Uh working on cars and uh like rebuilding engines and stuff. We homestead, which is fun to get snakes and stuff in the chicken coupe. Uh, and uh, I do all kinds of crazy crap, including playing around with a lot of AI and stuff. Um, one of the things I really love doing is playing with stuff like this where I'm taking camera feeds, feeding it into my uh, uh, my uh,

home assistant here. and I told it to be a little snarky with the responses. So, it it tends to do that. I was showing some of the other folks last night some of the things that are coming up on on it now. It's I think it's getting snarkier, which is fantastic. I love it. So, I mean, this is all the kind of crazy crap I do. Now, why am I talking about this? Well, basically it's something I love to do and I'm finding more and more people are interested in it, but they wasn't me. Okay, they're interested in it, but it's not one of those things that there's a lot of information on how to get started. So, I

wanted to cover some of that. This is totally informative and fun. So, things to know when it comes to smart homes and stuff. There's a lot of choices out there. You can keep it simple or you can complicate the hell out of it, which is usually my choice. Okay? Um, it is something that you are probably going to tinker with a lot. So, keep that in mind when you're trying to do this stuff. Uh, I will be upfront. When I came up with this talk, I lived in one house and I had a very stable, as stable as it can be, smart home thing going on. Uh, we'd lived there for over 10 years. All of the cool

stuff was working. And then I moved to a new house that we built and I got pulled for this talk. So, my examples of crap that works are kind of out the window. [laughter] I'm still I'm still trying to get it to work, but it helps remind me of the steps we have to go through. So, keep that in mind. It's kind of an ever evolving process there. Understand that, yeah, things are going to fail. And one of the big things that a lot of people fail to do is consider the consequence. If something goes wrong with a smart device, what happens with that? And I can tell you right now, if it impacts something my wife likes to do, let's say

I'm on the road, it is a very negative consequence. Okay? So, we'll talk a little bit about that here in a second. Uh, not something you want to do if you don't have to. It can be expensive. you can keep it cheap. There are the the pre-built stuff. There's a lot of cool sensors and devices out there these days that work really really well. They just tend to cost a bit more. And when I say they work really, really well, they're still not perfect. So, keep that in mind. You can spend a lot. One of the things I found is really cool, Amazon has the Amazon resale part, which are like returned items. And a lot of times you

can find some of this stuff like dirt cheap like switches and stuff on there that are like new. And I've never really had a problem with one that came to me as a like new, but it's 20 30 40% off. So keep that in mind if you want to go that route. Um, knowing how to solder can be helpful. We kind of covered that. And it can be a steep learning curve, but it's got better. It's been getting a lot better. And there's a lot more resources out there than there used to be. When I first got into this, it was really hard to find good information. I usually had to go to Reddit, and Reddit is a

dumpster fire, so you never know what you're going to get there, right? But [clears throat] YouTube has really helped a lot. Okay. Um, it does drive my wife crazy. So, the fun part about our house is we built on a couple of acres in the woods. She wanted a farmhouse. Like I always say it's like a hobbit hole. She wants that and I want like LED lights and crap everywhere. And we kind of clash on that a little bit. So we were building the house. We had a lot of discussions about that. I finally told her, I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to make an automation so when you leave the house and it detects you're not there

anymore, all the cool lights come on." Right? I'm like, "This is how I'm going to have to deal with this." But it it absolutely drives my wife crazy. Is it useful? Absolutely. One of the my favorite automations is one of the most simple ones and that is when I hit the end of our street driving home um my phone basically contacts. It's constantly doing GPS updates and tells Home Assistant that I'm coming home and before I even get to the driveway, the front porch and the the driveway lights are turned on for me. So, I haven't come home to a really dark home in a really long time. And my wife didn't realize how much she liked that because I had it

at the old house until it stopped working. And she realized that, hey, wait a minute, some of this automation stuff can actually be pretty cool. Um, I'm working on using some ESP32 devices to help around our chicken coupe. Chickens? Yeah. So, right now I have a smart plug that manages an exhaust fan when it gets too hot in there. I'm from Florida. It's hot as hell. So, I want to try to move some of the air through that. I'm also using an ESP32 device. Uh I'm setting that up to water the garden and manage all of that kind of stuff. It works really, really well. Um the camera setup that I've been working on in

there, I've got mostly done. I'm using ESP32 cameras. And the idea is the chickens come in in the evening and it will count the chickens and let me know if any are missing. That's always a nice thing to know. And during the day, it'll tell me which ones are freeloaders and which were actually laying eggs for us, which is also a nice thing to know. And most importantly, I want it to identify if there's one of those freaking snakes in the nesting box because there's been more than one time now I walked out there, opened the thing, and about had a heart attack. You saw me with that big yellow snake right there that came out of our nesting

boxes. Right. So, there are some very useful things you can do with Smartome stuff. That is one of them. I've probably pulled pulled them out of there four or five times at this point. Um, and they don't care. They're not like mad. They're usually full from eating eggs. But, uh, yeah, I don't like it. It's going to give me a heart attack. So, a long time ago, I started my journey with this and I heard about the automation stuff through a friend, this guy Ken. And Ken Ken did some really cool stuff, but this was back when it was super specialized. It was these devices that were really tough to do. And they only went in like

these huge big mansions and like big dollar homes. And he actually started a business installing home automation. I'm like, that stuff is cool and I am broke. So, I just kind of liked it. I thought about that for a long time and then eventually Home Assistant started getting real popular and I found out it would run on a Raspberry Pi and then I found out about some of these little devices that you could make sensors out of that were cheap that could do and so I just nerded out from that point. Um, Home Assistant is what we'll talk about mostly here. It's open source. It'll run on a Raspberry Pi. It'll run on like a

Raspberry Pi 3. It'll do like a Pi 0W if you really want it to. It's going to be slow if you're doing things to uh uh like compiling code for ESPs or something like that. It will be slow, but it can give you a good taste, which I really like. So, this is critical. If you have a spouse or partner, get their engagement before starting down this route. I made that mistake and just started smarting things and that was not always great. And plan ahead. You really that's like the biggest thing that you do is you plan ahead and kind of look at the security things because the minute you have to come back and change

everything, it gets ugly. Now like in my case, I have a lot of my devices and my cameras are all on VLANs. So I have a separate VLAN for my cameras. Can't get to the internet. can only get to an NVR that I have and then I pull from that. Um, a lot of my ESP devices and stuff are all on its own subnet. But then I discovered out in our workshop where I have my day-to-day uh office that uh the wireless bridge I have was stripping VLAN tags. So now all my VLANs out there were broken and I have to kind of fix all of that and open things up to let them in until I can get a new bridge

that doesn't freaking strip VLANs. So planning and checking that stuff will make it a whole lot easier. You don't want to have to keep redoing it. I promise you. [clears throat] Now parts, few ways to tackle this. It depends on what you want to do. If you want to get advanced, if you want to stay beginner, there's a couple ways to go after this. Um fun things versus mission critical. Like one of the fun things that I want to do is follow me audio through the house. So, we built this house from scratch. Um, it was like a custom build in the middle of freaking nowhere. So, u my builder was awesome and let me pull wires and cables as it

was getting built. And one of the things I did is I pulled speaker wires throughout the house where I was dropping ceiling speakers and then ran them back to a laundry room so that I can do that. Well, now what I want it to do is instead of her having to carry her little Bluetooth speaker around everywhere as she goes room to room, I can track that and I can switch zones on the receiver so it follows her around. That's pretty cool fun stuff, but it's not critical. Stuff like what I'm talking about with the chickens, um, I'm also going to be looking at their feed levels, water levels, that's a little bit more critical. So, you have to treat that a

little bit differently than the fun stuff. You got to know what's your technical proficiency. Um, network cables. How many of you know how to terminate network cables? Right. Awesome. I love that. Um, it's a skill I don't see enough of these days, but uh I pull a lot of cables. I've spent a lot of time on the outside of the house putting ends on cables. Uh that's very very helpful if you know how to do that stuff and you don't have to rely on wireless um familiar with AC and DC voltage and electronics. I'm going to caution you some of the things that I use that I love and especially even the smart switches for like lights and things like

that. You're playing around with 120 volts and if you don't know what you're doing, you can really hurt yourself with that. So, look at different ways of doing that. Instead of like a built-in switch, maybe you do a smart plug that plugs into the outlet and then your thing plugs into that cuz you don't want to burn your house down and you probably don't want to die. So, keep that in mind. Um, and then budget. Budget is a big deal, too, because some of these things can get expensive. Now, some of the options. Home Assistant. I love Home Assistant. Like I mentioned before, it's open source. It's very powerful because it's powerful. It has a bit of a learning curve. So, um,

if you're con if you're used to using YAML files and things like that, it's very helpful. I am not a coder, but I learned how to read YAML files. I learned how to deal with JSON and things like that. Um, it can be very useful like that, but it's super well supported online. Pretty much anything that you have a problem with has been documented by somebody online. So, I really like Home Assistant. There's Habitat, which is another one. You can buy these boxes. And I understand this is really easy to set up. I haven't used it, but I've heard people use it. It's really easy to set up, but it's kind of limited as to

what it's going to integrate with, and you're going to see some of that in all of these different things. Um, Home Assistant has hundreds of integrations. Like, it connects to just about anything you can imagine. Um, I have an integration that directly connects to my uh weather station out in our garden. It like pulls that data in, pulls data in from my Synology NAS. It pulls in UniFi stuff from my network. Like it connects to everything I could ever want it to do, but it's a hell of a lot harder to get all that stuff working. So, um, some options that you can use. Yeah, Apple HomeKit works well with the infrastructure. It really, really kind

of hurts and struggles when it comes to doing automations. um it's very very limited on the automation side compared to some of the stuff you can do like in home assistant and what I'm talking about is putting together a lot of conditions like if this is happening only then will you trigger this automation when this other thing happens like you can look at time of day you can look at all that kind of stuff a whole lot easier than you can in something like the Apple one um Alexa is great for voice control um has reasonable support But Jeff Bezos is involved. So, it's a privacy nightmare, right? [sighs] I can't say enough bad things about

that. It it it comes over to like the Ring cameras and all of the stuff. How many of you saw the uh Super Bowl commercial, right? Where it's like you can track dogs, you know, your dog ran away, you can track it through other people's cameras. And wise people went, but can't you track other stuff through that, too? And like why are you why the hell is that happening? Okay. Um, there was uh I'm from Tucson, Arizona, and the gal's mom, I can't remember her name now. Damn it. She uh uh she was a newscaster. Her mom got like kidnapped and stuff. They pulled video off of her phone at the doorbell and she didn't

even have a subscription. Thanks, Ring. Like, it was useful there. But Amazon doesn't care at all about privacy and it's got Jeff Bezos. So, keep that in mind. Um, they are great for voice control. Although I I've been watching people talk about how it's actually getting worse as they do new generations. Now, when they did Alexa, the idea behind that was people would just order crap off the Alexa. It'd be like, "Alexa, send me some toilet paper." And it would know what you wanted. It doesn't do that. It's never done that well. God only knows what you're going to end up getting. And so people haven't used it and so they've lost like billions of

dollars on the Alexa project. So I kind of feels like they're backing off on the hardware and not making it quite as good as it used to be.

>> Yeah. I have no idea how

>> there are some automations it supports, okay? But it's just very very limited. So, well, with HomeKit specifically, you can pick up like smart devices that you have in the house and you can tell it to turn on and off the lights and you can do some things like that pretty easily with it. you just can't get advanced and it doesn't connect to a lot of other things like if you want to do your own sensors. So, it's just very limited but it seems to work okay if you want to go limited. So, yep. Smart things works okay has limitations. Um I use the hub now for this simply to connect Z-Wave device that I have. Um

I've had it forever. It's an old old version. It does pick up a lot of my other devices. So, I can do some things through through smart things, but it is also somewhat limited. Now, what I do is Smart Things feeds into my home assistant and gives me alternate um entities for the different devices that I have. So, I can always lean over to that if I want to, but I really only use it for my Z-Wave door uh door lock, honestly. And Google Home is good for feeding a dumpster fire. Uh, there are no other redeeming qualities to Google Home, okay? Or any of the Google Well, I won't say that my TV has like the Google

automation thing in there and I can connect to it and and do stuff and that's kind of cool. But other than that, they have like totally screwed their users a couple times and it's just it is a dumpster fire. So, I highly recommend staying the hell away from that any chance you get. If you already have it, you can try it a little bit, but it is very very frustrating. So, local or cloud. And this is where I really really don't like a lot of these things. I don't like cloud stuff. I don't like my data going out to somebody's cloud. I don't like camera feeds going out to clouds. I don't like all of that stuff going off off

property. Plus, I live in a rural area, so sometimes the internet stops working and then everything really sucks. So, I try to do as much as I can locally. Now, that doesn't mean everybody has to, but there's a big push for doing a lot more of that without relying on third parties. And one of the big problems with cloud stuff is sometimes they just go, "Ah, hell, we're not going to support this API anymore. Good luck. Have a great time." and the devices that you have, they're they're kind of crap unless you're sticking yourself in their uh their little sphere. That's happened a number of times now. Um Philips Huegh keeps doing stuff with their hardware

and just oh look, we have a new version out. It's exactly the same as the old version, but doesn't support any of the old So now you need a new hub because we're not supporting that version of hub anymore. And it kind of sucks for people. So I like to do things locally as much as I can. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigGB, Z-Wave protocols. Um, I like it because matter, we'll talk about matter a little bit, that's really pushing uh some of the local control stuff a lot more, and I love to see that, although I currently don't have any matter things uh on my thing. I do a lot of these things using ESP32 boards and local Wi-Fi.

Uh, but I also have a lot of uh light switches and stuff that are um that are ziggp. So, I like those protocols. I like keeping it local. I will say this, sometimes the cloud stuff, especially if you're like tying to uh chatgpt or claude or something for a backend for like a conversation agent works super well compared to trying to do it locally. But but so we'll talk about Home Assistant here. This is where you can get it. Uh it is open source which is really kind of cool. It does update a lot being an open- source project. It never install like a0ero version of the software. All right. Wait till everything else breaks

for everyone else before you install it on yours because it does have a habit of doing that. Um, there's a lot of developers, huge community, many vendors, and YouTube is full of these videos. Uh, it's not hard to get going, especially if you purchase the hardware, but it can be hard to figure out how everything works and what entities are and all that. That's a little too deep to go into here, but something to keep in mind. I've run it on Raspberry Pies. I've run it on Pi 3s and Pi 4s, and it ran pretty good. Then what I did is I I was doing a lot more stuff. So it was a little bit slower than I wanted. I moved

up to using a mini PC. This was a Chrome box that was flashed with a uh uh a firmware that let me run Windows or No, it was No, it wasn't Windows. I just ran Home Assistant straight off it. But it worked pretty well. It was like an i3 and it did okay. It was much faster than doing it on a Pi. And honestly, they're cheap. Like I think I picked this thing up for like 20 bucks on marketplace and then just flashed my own stuff on it and now I run it on Proxmox. I have a Proxmox server and I just made a virtual machine out of it and I run it off of

that. So it's kind of overkill, but I already have it running. So why run another device on everything when Proxmox is already there for you? So there's lots of different ways that you can do this. It'll run Docker containers um however you want to do it, but it's very very flexible on that and you can run it a whole lot of different ways. Side note, how many of you have priced like an 8 gig Pi 5 lately? My god, what the hell are they thinking? I mean, I know memory is expensive, but like I hit a MicroEnter a couple weeks ago. They wanted like 150 bucks for a freaking Pi 5 with 8 gigs of RAM. That's insane.

So, I don't necessarily recommend going that route. You can still get used Pi4s pretty cheap and they do work pretty well. It's a great way to get your feet wet to try it out and see what you think. Protocols and devices. This is where it gets really, really confusing. Some of you may have heard of this Wi-Fi thing. Okay, that's beautiful. I love it. It's great. It's a great way to get started. It's also a great way to flood your network. Okay, so I've when I started getting into this, a lot of my switches and stuff uh like door switches or light switches and stuff were all Wi-Fi and before you know it, I mean I've got 80

or 90 devices floating around there and uh it's just getting a little bit too crowded on there. That's one of the reasons I moved over to Z-Wave. Um a lot of things still share the same uh 2.4 24 GHz or or 5 GHz stuff, but it's off my network. So, when you do these IoT devices, most of them fall back to 2.4 GHz. We're seeing more of them supporting a 5 GHz band, but most run on 2.4 GHz, and most of them only support up to WPA2. WPA3 is just a little bit big for a lot of them. When you buy devices, a lot of these devices that you buy commercially still use an ESP32 chipset inside and it

just doesn't run WPA3 very well. We'll get there, but for now, just know you're going to have to do that. I try to hardwire everything I possibly can instead of doing Wi-Fi. Like my TV, I ran lines there to hardwire my TVs just to keep more stuff off the Wi-Fi. Um, and that's one thing to consider when you're doing this for sure. Um, TPLink Casa. These are the switches I've used a lot and they work really well. I haven't had an issue. It is cloud-based though and that's something to remember. So, it is cloud-based. If the internet goes down, you're not controlling it. What I really like about the TPLink Casa and some of these switches like that is

they work manually. you have the actual switch to push, which is really important when you have a spouse and your smart stuff goes dumb, that they can still push a button. I've seen people go all crazy and build like uh um dashboards on tablets and things like that, and that's how they control everything, but when it goes dumb, that is not a good thing. So, I really like these. They work well. They're pretty low cost. Um, you can buy them in like one packs or three packs and a lot of times they're like 10, 15 bucks a piece, which isn't [clears throat] too bad. You do have to wire them. You do have to make sure you have a neutral in whatever

boxes you're putting it in. And here we usually have a neutral. It's usually not click uh plugged into the switch. It's pushed in the back, but there is a neutral available at the boxes on newer homes. Okay. If you don't have a neutral, a lot of these things you can't use these kinds of switches. Uh shellies are cool. I like these little things. Some of them are really tiny. They're like an inch and a half by an inch and a half and you stuff them in the box behind your switch and you can tie the switch to it and then it becomes the smart switch for the lights. So when you physically flip the switch, it sees that

go low and then turns on the lights for you or off the lights. I really like these. I can get them usually for anywhere from 12 to 19 bucks depending on if they're having sales on them or not. Um, they can use from 8 amps to 15 amps and you have to be careful about that. So, if you're putting it on a high load device, you want to make sure you have one that's rated for like 15 amps. Uh, if you're just putting it on a set of lights like outside, um, six amps is usually more than enough, especially since everything's LED these days. Um, but the other cool thing about these is they run a

Bluetooth proxy. And Bluetooth proxies are really cool. Basically, it takes your Bluetooth, converts it to Wi-Fi, and sends it around so that you don't have to be in range of a Bluetooth device. It proxies the Bluetooth, and it'll transmit out Bluetooth stuff all over the place. And that's kind of awesome. So, it comes built in on these. They're fairly cheap. It can be hard to fit all of the wires plus a Shelly device in the box. The other thing they do come as though is like they'll come with a single switch, a double switch, or I think there's a triple where they're all in the same little box. Instead of having to have three of them in there, it'll switch

three different things, which is also super nice. I currently have one up in my sophet in the front of my house uh where the electrician put in an unswitched device for like flood lights in the yard, but it also does the Bluetooth stuff. So, my wife can actually connect to Bluetooth out in the front yard when she's doing stuff and it all works well. So, they're cool little devices. Um protocol ZigGB is one that I use a lot of. That's my network up there in the top right. Um, I'm just getting all these things in there. ZigGB is kind of a mesh network that just seems to work. It's well supported. Um, and it's been very, very fast. Now, the device

down in the bottom right is what I use to control it. You see that yellow thing on the network, the coordinator? That's what it is. I got it from AliExpress for like 30 bucks. It plugs in PoE and it has a Z-Wave radio or a Ziggby radio that I can control all this stuff with. It's really nice. It's self-healing. The beautiful part about ZigGB devices is if you have ones that are hardwired like switches, those will often act as a repeater for the signal. So, you have the I have the coordinator on one side of my house, but because I have these switches, it continually retransmits and builds the mesh network out of that stuff. So, I

really like ZigGB. Um, I got the garage door sensors. So, it's a tilt sensor. When my garage door comes up and it tilts, I know the garage is open, just sticks on there. The batteries last forever and ever. Uh, light sensors, water leak detectors, and all of my door sensors. When you open any door in my house, those are all little Ziggby devices. And the batteries seem to last uh usually about a year or so on it. I I've been getting out of those. So, I really do like the Ziggb protocol. Um, these are MO switches. You can get these on Amazon. I got a threeack of them for like 40 bucks, I think, and they work

super super well. Um, Third Reality, that's my actual in the bottom right there. That's that garage door tilt sensor that was like 19 bucks and it works well. Now, a lot of these companies are starting to they used to be really just ZigGB, but they're moving to this new standard called Matter. So, I'm seeing Matter over Thread, Matter over Wi-Fi. We'll talk about that here in a minute. Um, it's to make things better. So, there are options with these now, but Third Reality makes some really cool stuff, too. Um, Accara, these are some of my other door sensors um that I use for open close on the uh around the house. batteries work good. They make

doorbell cameras. They make all kinds of stuff. One of the things you got to watch out for, like on Amazon, it'll say requires an Accara hub. It usually doesn't. It requires a Ziggby hub. So, keep that in mind. You don't have to buy a hub for all of these different brands most of the time. Um, I actually have some IKEA stuff. That's a water uh a leak detector I have under my sinks. That's Ziggby that I got from IKEA. Now IKEA is dropping a lot of their Ziggby stuff. So I was able to get some at like dirt cheap prices. Like I want to say I got I got a handful of these things for

like three or four bucks a piece because they were on clearance. Now there's still some available out there depending on where your IKEA is. I have no idea where one is around here, but they're moving to Matter stuff and their stuff actually works pretty decently too. I've had no problems with the IKEA stuff. [clears throat] Um, Bluetooth. I use things like uh in the top right there, you know, the temperature, humidity sensors. I have those around. And because I Bluetooth proxy all over the freaking place, it will actually read back into Home Assistant from just about anywhere. And they're cheap. That I think I got that two pack. That was a Goi. I think I got that for like 18

bucks for two of those. That's that's an easy buy right there. Uh, Bluetooth has that limited range, but the proxying helps. That's my Bluetooth network right now that you can see on the bottom right there. Um, ESP home is basically the tool you use to build out these little ESP devices, which I'll show you a few of them here in a minute. Um, that's all I have to add to it. Bluetooth proxy active true in my YAML and boom, it's on. So, it's it's so easy to be able to to do all this kind of stuff. I love it. Um, that's for you, Libby. Sorry, guys. Little inside joke there. Had to throw that in there. All right.

Um, protocols and devices, Z-Wave. A lot of people have had good luck with Z-Wave. I don't see a ton of Z-Wave or I don't know a lot of people that are using a ton of Z-Wave anymore. Um, but like my front door lock, that's what it is. I've had a Schlage and the quick sets and they work really well. And I can tell you right now, it's super handy to be laying in bed and the wife goes, "Uh, did we lock the house?" And I can pull up my phone, look at it, and go, "Nope." Click, and it's locked. Keeps my fat ass in bed. [snorts] That That's an important thing. Yay for automation, right? That's another one

that she likes. Um, I do see less of these in Ziggby, but they work well. This is what I use my smart home hub to connect to. That's the only damn thing. One of these days I'll probably get another radio. Um, Thread. So, Thread is a networking protocol. Self-healing, low energy. It's like ZigGB. It's kind of one of the newer things that are going on. I personally don't have any Thread stuff because you need a different radio or another radio to be able to do that. And I'm getting tired of adding more radio. ZigGB Thread plus the Wi-Fi and all that kind of stuff out there. Um, but it's getting to be better now. It is

decentralized, but you need a thread router. Some of the new generation like Alexexas and stuff like that will work as a thread router. It's like the only thing they do that's worth a damn that and voice like um reliability still seems hit or miss, but it should be improving over time. Um, matter is not somewhere I've spent a lot of time yet, but it's basically a communication standard that is supposed to let all of these things talk together. So, matter over Wi-Fi, matter over thread, all of those things can kind of talk together on there. And it's starting to get a lot more um adoption. So, again, that's what IKEA is switching to is matter over

thread, I believe. So, I'll be playing with that a little bit. Um, I do hear it's got some stability problems, too, but it's a fairly new protocol people are working through. Uh, motion and proximity sensors. There's two kinds that I wanted to talk about here. One's a PI. We're used to PS, you know, they're the passive infrared ones. Those are great till you're sitting on the toilet and it doesn't see you move and turns off all the lights on you. Okay, it happened to a friend, not me. But you have to keep doing this, right? How many of you have had to do that somewhere to keep the freaking lights on? It drives you crazy. Yeah. So,

that's a PI and they're great for detecting motion if something walks into an area. They're not great at presence. Now, these proximity sensors that do presence are super cool. These work on mmwave, like millimeter wave technology, and they can actually sense your heartbeating, which is super cool. So, you can sit still and they still realize that you're in the room, which is something that was missing for a very, very long time. Um, back when I just used Ps in my studio for all my studio lights at the old house, every once in a while I wouldn't be moving enough and all the freaking lights would turn off, which is really inconvenient in a webinar. So, um, these

are really cool. The one that you see on the right there, that's one of the ones that I got recently. Uh, you can actually do zones. So you can say where you're looking for proximity within five feet and then from six feet to 10 feet and you can actually trigger based on the different zones and how far the the person is. So you can have one that goes just for your couch wherever it is in your room. You can have that kind of stuff happen which is really cool. It's also things you have to think about when it comes to writing the automations. So real quick, yeah, it can work with pets. Um, you can also

turn sensitiv sensitivity down sometimes so it's not or one of the things that you can do like on this one specifically is you can say don't trigger on anything lower than and then you put in the distance you want from the ground. So that's kind of nice if you have a short dog. Sweet. You don't have to turn on, you know, lights every time it walks through a room. Um, this one also is cool. You'll see it also in the RF blaster side of things and infrared blaster stuff. It does infrared blasting, so like turning on TVs and infrared devices. These are about 19 bucks. Um, ESP32. So, these I love. I absolutely absolutely adore these. I

have them all over. Um, here's some examples of a couple of them here that I really like. Pardon me as they stick in here. There's tiny little ones like this which are ESP32 S3s or there C3s. This is what I do a lot of my Bluetooth proxies on. So, it's got a USB port for power. I plug it into the back of the TV and voila, I have a Bluetooth proxy in that room and it works super well for that. You can also use them to detect presence moving through your house based on triangulating some of the Bluetooth stuff that comes off here. So, that's another cool thing. They have the small ones. This is kind

of a mediumsiz one right here. Um, this is a larger one that actually has um a digital audio converter or digital analog converter. It does audio. This is what I'm probably going to be using on my network to do that roaming. Just one of these. It's like 20 bucks on Amazon. So, they're in a lot of different forms and they do a lot of different things, but uh fairly inexpensive. ESP Home makes them super easy to set up and program and get back into everything. It also does a lot of security. You have API keys. It has encryption. Like the communication is encrypted on these. I really like these devices and they are so cheap. That first one that I showed

you there, I was getting those for about three bucks a piece from uh AliExpress. Um, there are some of them that come commercial. That one in the top right is one that I have that controls LED lighting. It runs WLED. It's an ESP32based. It even says it on there. And if you get into there, you can reflash it with ESP32 and just take the whole thing over if you want. That's kind of cool. I like that. Um, on the bottom right there are a bunch of those um, S3s that I got. Again, those were like two bucks a piece. So, bring on the Chinese packages, which my wife loves. On the bottom left is a Laura

radio 433 MHz. That's based on an ESP32 also. So, like the meshtastic stuff that you see around here, a lot of that also runs ESP32 chips. Um, super cool, super fun. [sighs] Radio frequency. I hate it. The some of the biggest problems I've had are my stupid ceiling fans, right? How many of you have ceiling fans now that have a remote? Okay, it's always RF and it sucks trying to pick that up and reprogram things. Um, it doesn't mean you can't do it, but it's a pain. The thing in the top right is a broadlink um RF uh IR blaster that I have that will pick up those certain things. It'll also do um RF as well. The key to this is you

have to set up this programming thing where you tell it which switches you're doing and you have to trigger a thing to record that uh whatever that signal is and you have to go it's just a pain in the butt, but it's doable. Again, the bottom right is an IR blaster too. It's horribly time consuming. Be ready to drink and cuss. That's that's what I can say with that. All right. >> What's that? No, no, you don't need that to drink and cuss. That's true. We proved that last night, I think, at the Yeah. Okay. Um, how do you make it always work? You don't. Plain and simple. It's not going to always work. Stuff is always breaking

over stupid things. You're like, "Wait a minute. What happened here? Why why is this not working all of a sudden?" Um, it is kind of nice when you use things maybe to keep an eye on the important pieces. Um, like make sure that it's showing up on the network and stuff like that. That's fairly easy to do. And then it can alert you if something drops off the network. Um, things will fail. But here's the thing. Again, you need a backup. So, if you're going to automate your light switches, make sure there's a manual switch the wife can go over the spouse and push the button and actually turn it on when it doesn't work and you're out of town on

the road. Because I have learned that's not a good thing. They don't like that. You call home like, "Hi, honey." And they're like, "Let me tell you a story." Not a good idea. Okay. Um, plan ahead as much as you can on these things when you're doing it and just know that things are going to fail. Um, planning. I was lucky enough to build a new house and one of the things I did, this is actually a shot of the J hooks I did up on my rafters and I pulled cable all over the house. All kinds of cable. I pulled uh pull tape and I set them up like that so it's not sitting on top of everything. You may

not have that option, but if you do have that option and you're not afraid of being an addex, it's a good idea to hire hardwire as much as you possibly can. Like I said, um, Wi-Fi networks, mesh is wonderful. I love that that works, but talk about crowding your your bands. If you're throwing a bunch of little stuff on there and you have a bunch of meshed access points, you're you're really beating up on some of your Wi-Fi bands there. So, um I was able to to do this in the new house in the last house. It was not an option and could be quite a challenge. Um things to consider interfering devices. I've had ESPs

that I was using near microwaves [clears throat] and uh it didn't work out so well for me. Shockingly enough, somebody decides to make a cheese crisp or something in the microwave and next thing you know, devices are dropping off the network. Keep that in mind. These sorts of things can happen. Um, one of the things, the voice ones, and I'll talk about voice briefly here in a minute. Voice absolutely doesn't like being under your TV. Trust me on that one. Okay. Um, understand how do you operate it? what what can I do uh to power the devices because some of them are battery and some of them eat batteries badly. So, wherever you can hardwire them is

great. If you can't, check reviews on it and see how quickly it eats batteries. Plus, you can do things on like proximity sensors where you lower the distance that it's always scanning and that will help your batteries a lot as well. Um, and understand again, do I have the knowledge and skills to do stuff? Ring doorbells suck. I'm going to say that right up front. That's something I learned. I don't like Ring doorbells. They're really hard to deal with. Also, thank you, Bezos. Um, smart devices don't do well on circuits that get switched off, like light bulbs. I had it in my in one of my houses. You turn off the switch and okay, cool. All

the lights are off and then you turn it on and one of them inevitably wouldn't reconnect to the Wi-Fi for whatever reason. So, then it would start flashing like red and then the wife is texting me like, "What the hell is this thing doing again?" Okay. So, don't do things that you need like that uh with that. Best automations are ones that lay low and you don't even notice. That's the beauty. Like coming home and the lights are on when you get home. She didn't even notice that. Keep in mind when you're doing uh like the ESP stuff, some USB cables are only for power, not data. And you can rip your hair out if you

think you have one that's for data. And by God, no, it's just for powering. Okay. Kind of needs all four wires. Important thing. Um, and I'd rather to pull out my toenails with rusty pliers and try to get the voice stuff working. All right. Voice is still a giant pain in the butt. I have the official home home assistant one and I have one that I made myself out of a Raspberry Pi and both of them suck. A lot of it has to do to the back end of it, I think, because I'm using Oama instead of going out to chat GPT, but they're still slow. And I will give Alexa and them credit for doing a really good job on that um

with their devices because Yeah. No, the other day I actually asked it, hey, what's the status of the garage door? I kid you not, the light was flashing and I was like, whatever. I told it to cancel. I kid you not. I got up in the morning, was drinking my coffee, and it came up and finally answered me the next day. I was like, "Come on, man. It's not that hard." Okay. And there are ways you can try to make it a little easier, but we're not there yet. I'm sorry to say. Okay. We're not Jarvisy yet. Um, AI thoughts, I locally host an Oama instance. Uh, other LLM seem to work, but they do burn up tokens and stuff, so

you have to pay for that. currently using Quen 34B. I've used Quen 38B and it's all worked pretty well, fairly well, as well as it can. That's what's giving me descriptions of pictures and stuff for my security cameras. And I love AI agents, but I have concerns the way people are connecting things and just letting agents loose on networks. Be really careful with that. Uh we talk about that a lot through work, too, because agents are really cool. How many of you have played with openclaw? Right. Okay. Security show, right? We all know that. So, it is what it is. Um, cool things you can do. Have an exhaust fan in that chicken coupe. Um, I use it

tracking the chickens that are laying and which ones are dead beats and will end up in the freezer. Um, looking for predators in the coupe. Uh, things like that. I can do the irrigation stuff for the garden, which is super cool. I love that. the porch lights, things follow me, audio, turn on and off lights when I walk into my office. So, I got coffee in one hand, I got my water in the other hand, I walk into my office, the presence detects my phone, it turns on my overhead lights. I freaking love it. Then I don't have to be over there trying to hit stuff with my elbow to turn on the lights in the room. So, um

you can have it do the uh image stuff. You can turn on the studio lighting like when I start a webinar. Um, I can actually tie it back to my uh Google calendar and tag it so when a webinar starts or something like that that I do, it'll actually turn on all all of my lighting for the studio for me and an on air sign outside to keep the kids and stuff from coming in. Um, Samsung TV in the foyer. Uh, I'm setting that up to switch video when something triggers in the driveway and it'll keep an eye on the network devices and NAS devices and alert me if something goes wrong. This is all stuff that you can do. These are

dashboards, not my dashboards because they're pretty. Mine looks like ass. Okay. Um, but I'm not there yet. I'm just trying to get devices working at this point. But you can do a lot of really cool stuff with like tablets and your phone. So, in summary, a lot of moving parts. Um, think things through. Cost depends on you. You can DIY or make sure you have a backup for the critical things. Um, for example, uh, plug, 110 volt plug, smart plug on the freezer. That's awesome until it decides to shut off for no reason and then you don't know that your freezer isn't running. That's happened to me. And that was an expensive ouch that the

wife was not happy about. Um, so make sure you're careful with stuff like that. And try to do as much as you can locally so you avoid that vendor idiocy that's out there. Some resources. Paul Hibbert. This guy is hilarious. Uh, great with doing things on uh on Home Assistant and he's funny as hell. Um, he's a big nerd. Hates Bezos. It's awesome. Uh, Network Chuck, he does a lot of stuff, but also covers Home Assistant quite a bit and some of that stuff. This is one of his uh he does like install videos and stuff, too. Hands-on Katie. Okay. She does some super cool stuff with home automation. she um is apparently against wearing

undergarments in the top half and uh you're kind of like that may be a questionable choice. Okay, so you like that or don't like that. It's one of those things that but even my wife is like that's a cool automation so she puts up with it but apparently that's her shtick but she does some really cool stuff. So anyway that's me if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn and happy to chat for the rest of the day here. Thank you so much. Have a great day. >> [applause]