Home Automation - vo.rs

Backing Up Home Assistant So a Dead SD Card Isn't Fatal

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 15:58:00 +0000

Home Assistant setups have a way of quietly becoming irreplaceable. You start with a couple of automations, and eighteen months later you’ve got fifty entities, a dozen carefully tuned automations, a Zigbee network with thirty devices paired to a specific coordinator, custom dashboards nobody could reconstruct from memory, and integrations held together with credentials you set once and forgot. All of it lives on a single SD card in a Raspberry Pi, and SD cards do one thing reliably: they die. Usually without warning, usually taking everything with them, and — this is the part that stings — usually at the exact moment you least want to spend a weekend rebuilding.

mmWave Presence Sensors: Automations That Stop Turning the Lights Off on You

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 14:51:00 +0000

There is one bug that turns people against home automation faster than any other, and it goes like this: you sit down in the study with a book, the light is on, and eight minutes later it switches off and leaves you in the dark. You wave your arms like a lunatic to bring it back, settle down again, and eight minutes later it happens once more. After the third time you rip out the automation and go back to a wall switch, muttering that smart homes are a scam.

Frigate: Local NVR With Real Object Detection

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 13:44:00 +0000

For years my cameras were dumb. They recorded to a hard drive around the clock, motion detection meant “a shadow moved”, and reviewing footage was an exercise in scrubbing through six hours of swaying branches to find the two seconds that mattered. Every cloud camera that promised “AI person detection” wanted a monthly fee and a copy of my front garden uploaded to someone else’s servers. I wasn’t willing to pay a subscription to watch my own doorstep, and I was even less willing to stream it off-site.

Node-RED for the Rest of Us: Automations Without a Cloud

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 12:37:00 +0000

Every home-automation platform eventually asks you to write logic, and every one of them makes the simple things easy and the interesting things awful. “Turn the porch light on at sunset” is a one-liner anywhere. “Turn the hall light on when someone comes home after dark, but only if it isn’t already on, and dim it instead of blazing if it’s past midnight, and don’t touch it at all if the film-night scene is active” is where the wheels come off. In a YAML automation that logic becomes a nest of condition: blocks and templating that you cannot read a fortnight later, let alone hand to anyone else in the house.

Zigbee vs Z-Wave vs Matter: Choosing a Radio You Won't Regret

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 11:30:00 +0000

The first smart bulb I ever bought talked to a hub that talked to a company’s cloud that talked to my phone. When that company sunset the product line, I had a paperweight with a colour temperature slider. That experience taught me the single most important lesson in home automation: the protocol you pick outlives almost every device you buy. Bulbs die, sensors get replaced, your taste in wall switches changes twice a decade. The radio standard underneath quietly dictates what you can buy for the next ten years and whether any of it keeps working when a vendor loses interest.