December 31 2020
TweetThu 31 December 2020
My last attempt at doing the Home Automation/Domotics/Whatyacallit a few years back mostly involved buying expensive widgets, determining they are shite, or marketed at US power and outlets, and then discovering that setup and upgrades generally involved one ore more of downloading a random .exe from random websites, soldering, or tracking the ongoing battle between hardware manufacturers and hobbyists.
Thankfully, things have gotten a lot better in the last few years. One of my personal projects in the time off over xmas this year was finally fiddling with Home Assistant, which got done on the houses's brand new Kubernetes cluster (but, more on that later).
It's been, quite honestly, a breath of fresh air. I might be a little unhappy with HA devs racing to the bottom in terms of what market to cater for (but that's purely a selfish concern), but it's...refreshing to see an ecosystem of support build around something.
It also helps that manufacturers like Shelly are openly suporting offline use and flashing their kit to something like Tasmota. One of the key concerns last time was just how flakey it all was - and subject to the whims of manufacturers.
I'm still working on the trickier parts of integrating the random assortment of Internet of Shit devices at home, but this is a very promising start.