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I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

robdobson.com

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Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#311

Post by nucleardog »

casenjo wrote: post #269
nucleardog wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it started with a single wifi lightbulb. My wife often gets into bed with the baby. If the baby falls asleep before the light is off, she doesn't want to get up to have to turn the light off since it will wake the baby. Now she can just turn it off from her phone. Kinda just expanded from there. Now a good chunk of the regularly used bulbs in the house are "smart". Basically what it means is that if you turn a…

> The lights in my office come on when I walk in if it's dark, and when I unlock my computer it shoots a message out over a MQTT broker which my automation takes as "someone is occupying this space now" and leaves them on. When I lock my computer, two minutes later if no motion is sensed it'll turn them off. What did you do to send the message when the computer locks/unlocks? This is an exact use case I could make us…

So, short answer: an MQTT client. On lock/unlock I have a MQTT client called to publish a message to a topic. I think I'm using HiveMQ's mqtt-cli because it was the most immediately obvious option for my OS.

Working out from there:

* I use Windows as the host OS for my desktop. You can use Task Scheduler to set a task to run on lock/unlock. I have jobs set that mute/unmute my audio and call a MQTT client to publish the messages to the broker.

* Those messages are picked up by Node-RED. It's a ladder-logic-ish environment for automation. It has flows that control all the bits of logic based off of all the various data sources including MQTT.

* Node-RED calls Home Assistant, which handles providing a UI as well as actual integration with all the various bits of hardware (light bulbs, z-wave controller, etc)

I quite enjoy this stuff (which is probably half of how I got here), so feel free to ask if you've got follow-up questions.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#312

Post by nucleardog »

Maha-pudma wrote: post #154
Maha-pudma wrote: post #61

I don't get it. What's the point in these systems? Genuinely. Why would I ever need this? Just like a "smart" doorbell, fridge, meter. I would love for someone to be able to explain the benefits to me over the normal, cheap, completely working "dump" version. The only "smart" device I own is a TV and it is crap, worse thing I've ever bought.

I'm replying to myself in an effort to reply generally to everyone who replied to me, thanks for your use cases. I can see some of the reasons and benefits and to me, no offence meant, the seem pretty trivial, especially when you take into account the privacy issues. I have dumb timers for lights I want on at certain times, dumb movement sensors for outside lights that only turn on at night, my boiler has a timer whi…

As one of the general use cases, I'll hop in on the privacy note. That is, there are zero privacy issues from my end.

Nothing leaves my house for any of this. I can rip the internet out tomorrow and everything will keep working. None of the devices even have a route to the internet.

The Z-Wave stuff is all Z-Wave+ and is supposedly pretty secure in its own right, but is just general RF and talks to my controller which is plugged into my server via USB. None of this stuff can talk to the internet.

My light bulbs are 802.11, but they connect to a dedicated wireless network which bridges to my "IoT" VLAN.

My IP cams are all wired and connected only to my IoT VLAN.

A VM runs Home Assistant and Node-RED (both open source) which sit on my general LAN as well as the IoT LAN. That provides my interface and controller for all my smart home devices.

Another VM runs Blue Iris to act as my DVR for my IP cameras, do motion detection, etc.

All communication between everything is either done directly or through a MQTT broker running in a container only accessible on a bridge internal to the hypervisor.

All the VMs and containers run on a server running Proxmox sitting in the corner of my basement. The IoT VLAN does not even have a route out to the internet. DNS only resolves a couple internal hosts.

Basically this is "I already had a server running in my basement and I dug out an old piece of MikroTik gear". It's not gonna be simple for a non-technical person, but for most people on HN it's likely not a huge investment of time/money/etc.

There's no need to go roll your own interface for "how to communicate within your house". Z-Wave, 802.11, and ethernet all work perfectly well and provide you lots of great options to work with in existing hardware and existing physical and link layer technologies (cabling, PoE, switches, etc). They don't need to be insecure or privacy-violating unless you let them.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#313

Post by VLM »

zrail wrote: post #285
VLM wrote: post #280

I have 30+ zwave devices on my homeassistant and some years experience going back to the X10 and insteon days and here's my comments on the article and other folks comments: 1) TLDR does not like the effort required for hard wiring. Solution I used? Never hard wire end devices. Makes it easy to take it all with me if I move. Pairing is insanely simple and done in infinite comfort in my office chair not on top of a la…

Wait so you have a separate HA for every room in your house? What benefit do you actually get from that? Edit upon further reflection: I’m doing something very similar. I have one bad mesh right now with lots of repeaters to transit my ridiculously long house. The house is a barbell with the “house” part on one end and an office on the other, separated by a garage, with a detached shed in the back yard. My plan is to…

> Wait so you have a separate HA for every room in your house? What benefit do you actually get from that?

I could. Its just a docker image and a $15 usb stick, so... The benefit is as per the linked article the hardware (and software?) doesn't scale beyond 100 devices or so, and I'll never have more than 100 devices in one room...

My house only has a couple dozen zwave things so I'm not bumping up against the scalability limits as seem in the linked article so I'm all good.

Strange room idea: Since I have presence detection I could redirect incoming connections from my phone to the current room LOL. "Microsegmentation" also makes some strange possibilities for security.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#314

Post by adanto6840 »

vonnieda wrote: post #206
adanto6840 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this on a prior home and then removed almost all of them just prior to moving. I haven't re-installed them in the 4-years we've been at our new home simply because the "failure rate" was so frustrating to me. I don't mean hardware failure, I mean "intermittent, rare command failure" -- I've never experienced quite the same level of annoyance/rage from anything else, versus hitting a switch and having it either…

Are you saying you would hit the physical switch and it wouldn't activate? I don't think I've ever experienced that. Early on, I would have command failures when the dimmers were powerline only, but with the dual band ones (RF mesh + powerline) that they have been selling for the last 5+ years I don't think I've ever had an error.

Yep, exactly. It was pretty rare, and I think it mostly occurred on "3-way" switches that were capped/originally wired as 3-ways but changed to be normal switches with Insteon links to get the dual-switch functionality.

It only takes once-a-month of hitting a physical switch, then having to do a "double-take" and re-hit it to get the light on, before the proverbial rage boils quickly.

All of mine are indeed the newer style RF + powerline; I also had my Insteon hub fail once, which was frustrating because it required some re-pairing that didn't "just work" IIRC. I was using a dedicated Mac Mini running the Indigo macOS app.

I may give it another go in my office at some point, we'll see.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#315

Post by seized »

casenjo wrote: post #269
nucleardog wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it started with a single wifi lightbulb. My wife often gets into bed with the baby. If the baby falls asleep before the light is off, she doesn't want to get up to have to turn the light off since it will wake the baby. Now she can just turn it off from her phone. Kinda just expanded from there. Now a good chunk of the regularly used bulbs in the house are "smart". Basically what it means is that if you turn a…

> The lights in my office come on when I walk in if it's dark, and when I unlock my computer it shoots a message out over a MQTT broker which my automation takes as "someone is occupying this space now" and leaves them on. When I lock my computer, two minutes later if no motion is sensed it'll turn them off. What did you do to send the message when the computer locks/unlocks? This is an exact use case I could make us…

Indo the same idea but use a ZWave smart plug with power use monitoring with my monitors plugged into that. Watts > some number = I'm working.

Via zWave2MQTT and NodeRed it triggers other logic like throttling RClone uploads.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#316

Post by seized »

gorbachev wrote: post #253
abstractbarista wrote: post #246

Wow, this guy is either willfully ignorant of ZWave technical realities, or just doesn't have as much knowledge in the realm as he purports to have. Basically every gripe listed has to do with using old original ZWave devices. If you started a 150-node mesh today with strictly ZWave+ devices, an Aotec ZWave hub, and perhaps Home Assistant to control and automate it all, you'd have a much more consistently positive ex…

The thing that stuck out to me in that article was complaining about failures. I would think, if you have 150 components of anything, you're going see failures on a fairly consistent pace, especially as time goes by. For example, I'm replacing LED lights that were supposed to last for decades every 6 - 18 months in my house, and they aren't even the smart kind. The one thing I'm not happy about my small z-wave setup…

For Home Assistant, look at ZWave2MQTT. ZWave devices use that as their hub, Home Assistant is a client. Now restarting Home Assistant doesn't cause problems. I was ready to ditch ZWave or Home Assistant until I switched.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#317

Post by Shebanator »

jdeibele wrote: post #279
Shebanator wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have some knob and tube wiring in my home (which is 96 years old). I've ripped out most of it over the years, but it is amazing how reliable it actually is.

Were you able to do that without digging into the walls? My house had a bathroom and the kitchen upgraded by the previous owner and we did the basement but most of the house remains on knob-and-tube. I've gradually added GFCI outlets to each circuit. They're not grounded, unfortunately, but they do trip if something were to go wrong. And it allows us to plug in 3-prong plugs without using those horrible 2-to-3 adapte…

We ripped open the walls. This was done in the context of a larger remodel and then a rebuild of the back of the house after a fire.
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