New Adventures in WiFi

The Broadlink RM Pro universal RF and IR sender has arrived. I want to use this device to control some of my audio-visual equipment that only has IR control. Being wary of giving up information to some companies, I was keen to find a way to control this device without relying on the Broadlink e-Control  app. This led me to Home Assistant , which I'll talk about in another post . In order to get the RM Pro on the network, I installed the e-Control app on my Android device, but denied it from having any permissions, other than those that were necessary to get the device working. I then blocked any outgoing internet traffic from this device using my WiFi router, to permit local control over my network, but prevent the device from dialing home. I then commenced setting up the RM Pro in Home Assistant.

I found out about Home Assistant while searching for a solution that would let me control a Broadlink RM Pro  locally over the network. Already having access to a Raspberry Pi Zero W , meant that there was a reasonably low barrier to entry to get Home Assistant running. After a bit of reading , and given that I already had Rasbian Stretch installed on the Pi Zero W and am reasonably comfortable with Linux, I decided to install Home Assistant in a Python virtual environment (venv) . I also set up Home Assistant to autostart using systemd . The Pi Zero W is not really recommended for running Home Assistant, and I did run into some issues that may have been caused by low specs of the device. Specifically, I had installation of some pre-requisite packages fail, and some updates failed, which I suspect was due to some activities timing out. Also, the CPU usage would regularly sit on 100% for minutes at a time when trying to check the configuration or restart Home Assistant...

Okay, getting this reasonably innocuous-looking device into our home required some serious deliberation and consideration, but I have finally taken the plunge and purchased a Google Home Mini. I was already regularly talking to the Google Assistant on my WearOS watch and Android phone, so uttering the "Ok Google" hotword and issuing commands to my devices was already a regular occurence. In addition, my digital life was already heavily embedded in the Google ecosystem, so there probably wasn't much about my life Google didn't already know about. However, the prospect of having a device sitting in our kitchen which listens to our every word, was daunting. I was eventually seduced after seeing a friend talk to an Amazon Alexa on their kitchen bench, and after I was able to get comfortable that the device was only sending or uploading audio after the "Ok Google" hotword was spoken .

With a lot of smart home products coming on the market, and being discussed in my various news feeds, I was keen to start experimenting with some devices. There appeared to be a lack of products intended for the Australian market, and so after a bit of reading I learnt about Sonoff products manufactured by a company named  ITEAD  and purchased the following items. Sonoff S20 Smart Plug Sonoff RF Bridge Sonoff PIR2 Infrared Motion Detector My thinking was that I would use the S20 Smart Plug to experiment with some home automations, and use the RF Bridge and IR Motion Detector as the beginnings of a home security system. Configuration required installation of the eWeLink app by Sonoff. Unfortunately, when I sat down to start configuring the RF Bridge, I realised that potentially I was giving away more information through the app than I was willing to provide. My first pause point was the need to provide the password to my WiFi network. I also consi...

I'm now the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi Zero W , and an official case . As a result of some changes to the Xively service I can no longer use it as an intermediate data conduit between the CurrentCost  web platform and PVOutput  for my electricity consumption and solar generation data (as described in this blog post ). So, I've needed to find an alternative, and my plan is to use the PVOutput Integration Service on the Pi. I've installed Raspbian  Stretch. Here is a pic of the Pi.

I'm going to write a few retrospective posts here about some of the beginnings of my smart home obsession. My first foray into the the world of home-smartening occurred at the time we installed solar panels on our house. At the same time, I purchased some CurrentCost EnviR  monitoring device (which can be seen below) to record the solar generation data, and also our household consumption data. The device comes with current clamps for the solar and mains wiring in the switchboard, and a couple of RF senders which send the signal to the display above. At the time I also bought a NetSmart hub which allowed the display to send data directly to the CurrentCost website, for viewing and monitoring. Unfortunately the CurrentCost website was poor for viewing the data, so I was able to pull the data from CurrentCost into a service called Cosm (previously called Pachube and later Xiveley) and then to PVOutput , which is an excellent service for viewing and monitoring el...