Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

pragprog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 276 posts

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#141

Post by rcarmo »

wyager wrote: post #64
nerdjon wrote: post #7

I have to ask others, have people had good luck with this? I have tried to do this multiple times, with multiple models of Pi and every time after 6ish months it just seems to completely stop working. I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card. Am I doing something wrong or does the hardware really not want to be run consistently in this manner? I have since decided to just run some home automation VM's on my m…

Pis are horrendously unreliable. Even if you pull out all the stops to make them work reliably (like disabling SD card writes), they don't. The broadcom chips they use are complete garbage. I was hopeful I could use the watchdog timer to make a pi more reliable (by restarting it when it inevitably crashed). Guess what? The internal watchdog timer doesn't f*cking work! You'll notice that every project using pi hardwar…

Modern Pis have effectively zero (pun intended) relationship to the original ones. The kernel issues were fixed, and as long as you keep them cool, you can go a long way even on SD cards.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#142

Post by vladgur »

xxpor wrote: post #94
iandanforth wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle network security? I wouldn't trust an IoT device on the same network as any of my family's computers or phones for example.

In addition to all of the "use Z-Wave/Zigbee as much as possible" comments (which I personally do), for stuff where there's no choice like Roombas, I have a separate SSID on a VLAN that can only talk to the internet, my DNS server running Adguard, and HA (which is on the main network). I also have stateful rules that allow connections to be initiated from the main network to the IOT network, but not vice versa. I als…

How do you setup a separate VLAN and SSID? None of the "pro-sumer" wifi mesh setups under $500 support VLANs

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#143

Post by rcarmo »

melenaos wrote: post #54

I just implemented the foundation of my home automation. I installed NodeRED on a raspberry pi and it communicates with arduino through MQTT. The good thing with this is that i control the hardware parts woth arduino and the automation logic with NodeRED. NodeRED is much easier to use than HomeAssistant because of the extensibility and the use of NodeJs. I have implemented an arduino library that makes the developmen…

I second this approach. My home automation is 98% HomeKit (via homebridge) and 2% Node-RED (for a few custom MQTT message translations and a dinky little dashboard with metrics).

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#144

Post by asveikau »

Macha wrote: post #99
kkielhofner wrote: post #5

Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various…

They've also been pretty hostile to OS packagers trying to let you run it without dedicating an entire device to it, most publicly NixOS but they indicated they planned to insist the same against Fedora and Gentoo too: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326 That behaviour kind of makes it hard to trust that it won't lead to the next Marak situation.

I run it in a VM and don't mind it; it's got the updater, it feels pretty self contained.

I even do USB passthrough to give it access to my z-wave stick.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#145

Post by heurisko »

antsar wrote: post #125
nomel wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... for the off->on transition and another for the on->off. It'd be nice to set a rule that defines a level rather than an edge and have it internally do the transformation The "solution" I found was to poll, and use "choose", and sometimes some helper switches for state, to do what is needed. But, I think at any reasonable level of complexity, you're better off using one of the three python components: the one bui…

Matter is interesting. But... > The project group was launched and introduced by Amazon, Apple, Google, Comcast and the Zigbee Alliance, now Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA). I'm having a real hard time believing that anything user-beneficial will come of this, unless you're willing to sell out your smarthome and privacy to big tech.

> I'm having a real hard time believing that anything user-beneficial will come of this, unless you're willing to sell out your smarthome and privacy to big tech.

At this level, the way data is handled is vendor agnostic.

I see Matter as more akin to USB, or indeed, the internet, as the idea is that devices are supposed to be able to communicate via IP, not just by ZigBee.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#146

Post by rcarmo »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #92

Anyone have success with remote cameras? Services like Arlo and Ring seem straight up awful but also rolling my own seems like more effort and headache than it's worth.

I have ESP32 cameras that (mostly) work with HomeKit (there are a few memory issues on the ESP32 side), and a full blown HomeKit camera that "just works".

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#147

Post by seanw444 »

contravariant wrote: post #17
kkielhofner wrote: post #5

Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various…

Does anyone know how Home Assistant compares to node-red? As far as I can tell Home Assistant is better at building a dashboard of things, but node-red is better at actually automating specific actions (unless you want to grapple with HA's YAML based scripting language). Is this about right? Is it possible to combine Home Assistant and node-red, or has Home Assistant outgrown the need for something like node-red?

I was thinking about getting started with HA, and then I saw the YAML. Dear God. May just be the ugliest scripting language I've ever seen.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#148

Post by rcarmo »

amelius wrote: post #48

How much convenience does this bring? Is it life-changing, or is it more like nice to have?

It's very handy to get off work, grab a mug of barley coffee, sit on the couch, say "Siri, let's watch Movies" to your watch, and have the TV turn itself on, the audio routed to the AV system, and the Apple TV set as input.

All the above is done by Siri talking to the Apple TV (which is the home hub) and homebridge nudging the TV and inputs via plugins.

And _nearly_ all the above happens solely inside your LAN, except for the speech recognition (which may or may not happen on-device if you have a recent iPhone nearby).

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#149

Post by djanogo »

bpye wrote: post #106
djanogo wrote: post #42

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version…

I'm still running an 8th gen HP micro server, but I would run something else if I could get >=8GB memory and 4 SATA ports for relatively cheap. I haven't seen anything that gets me there yet though.

Nope, no OEM wants to make that, not enough market for it. However you can buy NVMe to 6xSATA adapter, but your case might not fit those drives,

I planned on buying NVMe extension cable, cut a slit in case, run the cable outsidde, plug in NVMe to 6xSATA adapter outside of the case and keep the SSD's outside, this would need reliable external power supply for SSD (Amazon sells them for ~$30, but I don't trust them).

I believe you will get to ~10-15w with this setup, at which rate you could build regular ITX/MATX case to hold all SSD's with i3-10100 and be at ~16w idle.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#150

Post by rcarmo »

wyager wrote: post #68

I've been doing a bunch of home automation work recently. Here are some observations I've made: 1. Most extant home automation software is totally unreliable garbage. Buggy, slow, poorly designed. You want to reduce the amount of code you pull in as much as possible. 2. Raspberry pis are totally unreliable garbage. The hardware is just bad. There's no way to make them reliably operate for long periods of time without…

I would like to challenge that assertion that Pis are garbage. If you use a recent hardware revision you should not have any issues, mine have outlasted the ODROID I had running homebridge for a few years off an EMMC.

Also, I git push my automation services to a server using https://github.com/piku, which isolates them in (simple) sandboxes. Zero issues for a long time now, and with Docker pull restrictions coming up soon, I can certainly put up with npm taking a while to update Node-RED...

Post reply on HN