I actually missed that on my first pass.

Thanks for the heads up!

I also love the breakdown of costs. It’s one of those little things that shows their mentality.

PhD level and up are notorious for over specialisation.

My university had a personal assistant, dedicated to 2 professors. Half their job was to make sure they made it to lectures on time. They still managed to be late sometimes.

The rule of thumb with servers is

• Performance
• Reliability
• Power usage
• Noise
• Size

The trick is to remember you don’t actually need much performance. A home server isn’t generally a powerful machine. What matters is that it is always there.

A raspberry pi would actually make a wonderful server. It’s power efficient, small and quiet, with enough grunt to do most jobs. Unfortunately, it falls down on reliability. Arm servers seem more prone to issues than x64 servers. Pis also seems particularly crash prone. Crashing every 3-6 months isn’t an issue for most pi usages. When it’s running your smart home, it’s a pain in the arse.

I eventually settled on a intel NUC system. It’s a proper computer (no HDD on usb etc), with a very low power draw. It also seems particularly stable. Mine has done several years at this point, without a crash.

Bigger servers are only needed when you have too much demand for a low powered option, or need specialist capabilities 24/7. Very few home labbers will need one, in practice.

It’s also worth noting that you can slave a powerful, but power hungry system, to a smaller, efficient one. Only power it on when a highly demanding task requires sorting.

Fully agreed that it needs to be done right. I’m definitely not the best person to try and write it.

It also needs to be area specific. A predominantly republican area would need a different message to a predominantly black community.

Has Amazon ever actually said it wouldn’t sell the results of face tracking to data brokers? I can easily see it happening. It’s a lot of tasty data to them.

A better option might be a leafleting campaign.

It would need to bypass the “I’ve nothing to hide” effect. E.g. “Does your friend have an ex they don’t want to know where they are? Facial recognition would easily put them on your doorstep. Would you like a visit from them?”

Leaning on the ICE issues right now would also work in some areas.

If someone mocked up a few variants for different demographics, that could actually help.

Also, does anyone know an easy layman alternative to ring, that is more ethical?

They are excellent in the hobby world. It’s generally when you need to do a bit of quick logic, an ESP32 can be dropped in to do it. E.g. change the colour of an led depending on a sensor.

They also form the core of a lot of IoT devices. Simple sensors and relays that can connect to WiFi and throw up a simple web interface. ESPhome, tasmota and WLED exist to make this extremely easy.

They are basically the hobbiest electronic multi tool. Powerful enough to do most jobs without bothering with code optimisation. Cheap enough to throw in and leave there.

Or you could realise you are in a group focused on a single bit of software and do a 5 minute investigation into said software.

We are in a forum talking about Home Assistant, an open source piece of software, aimed at patching over the annoyances and games the various companies you are complaining about play.

It lets you control them all from one piece of software, so you don’t need 20 apps on your phone, and the spying they support. It also lets you isolate the devices on their own vlan, cut off from the internet completely. All control then goes through software under our control.

The database it’s talking about is basically a scoring of how nicely the various devices play once you have deloused and neutered them.

It’s a community attempt to fight back against big data etc. This is why you are being down voted hard. You’re interrupting with a rant about the very thing we are fighting.

If you’re trying to fend off the CIA then your worries have merit. My goal is to limit casual data leaks and bypass attacks.

Normal worst case, someone can see when I turn lights on and off. Or mess with my thermostats. There are easier ways to gather that info.

Can you actually back up any of those statements, particularly when we are dealing with things like ZigBee, tasmota, or espHome?

Home assistant is used by a lot of security savvy people. It’s not to their benefit to leak data like that.

Local control also means you can isolate IoT devices from the internet. You can make it so they CAN’T exfiltrate data. You can wrap your insecure IoT devices in a secure wrapper.

The database is for how well devices work in this environment. Will they work fine, or throw a fit and stop working.

The aiming is still a problem. The Hubble is relatively small. Even then, it can’t track fast enough to image the moon, let alone the earth’s surface.

Any useful reflector would be measured in Km^2 . Aiming that, with the same precision as Hubble would be a tall order. Added to that, the mirror would have to be light enough to launch. You’re basically trying to aim a sheet of tinfoil, as large as a stadium (minimum), with active tracking.

I’ll take compatible.

Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.

Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.

End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.

Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.

Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.

First off, have you got HA up and running yet? That should be your initial focus.

There are 3 main options.

• Old laptop

The cheapest option, but only if you have a spare. It doesn’t need that much grunt. You definitely want to check how much power it draws however. It’ll be on 24/7 and the cost of that can mount up.

• Raspberry Pi (or other single board computer)

This is a good “play around” option. It’s one of the cheapest choices as well. Unfortunately, Pis can become a bit unstable down the line.

• NUC, or other mini PC. The small mini PCs are my preferred recommendation. They are powerful enough to do more complex tasks, but power efficient enough to not be problematic. They are also a lot more reliable than the SBCs.

As for other hardware. Z wave is the best, but also more costly. ZigBee is cheaper, and still very functional. WiFi does the job, but needs a bit more planning. I personally use a mix of ZigBee and WiFi.

If you’re buying WiFi hardware, I would try and focus on esp based options (ESP8266, ESP8285, or ESP32). You can replace the firmware in these, with either Tasmota, or ESPhome. I personally use sonoff and/or athom hardware, but there are plenty of other options.

This might help finding appropriate hardware.

https://templates.blakadder.com/

That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.

Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.

For nieve signal distances, that can sometimes be true. That’s not how starlink works however. It bounces the signal between satellites, each adding latency. Overall, fibre wins in almost every situation.

The bigger problem is saturation. Most things you can apply to radio waves can be applied to light in a fibre. The difference is you can have multiple fibres on the same run. This massively increases bandwidth, and so prevents congestion.

Just checked the numbers. Starlink is up at 550km. That means a minimum round trip of 1100km. In order to beat a fibre run, you are looking at over 2000km distance. Even halving that to (optimistically) account for angles, that’s still a LONG run to an initial data center.

Which one do you have, and how have you found performance? Their prices seem in the sweet spot.

The Vision AI S250 seems like an excellent option @£499

There are options around that price, but they have issues.

That looks good, but is completely budget blowing for my little garden. 😩

I’ve heard the wires are a pain and tend to break. I’m definitely erring towards one using GPS.

Definitely worth looking into. I get nervous of online required hardware. It has a tendency to brick.