How and Why

I have a lot of projects. Too many perhaps. As I move them forward, I plan to document the steps. Depending on how much time I have, these posts will have varying levels of detail.

One of the big projects I’d like to undertake is to move my home automation off of external cloud services and run things myself. Partly, because I’m paranoid about security, partly because I don’t want to find something I like suddenly obsolesced because big corp decided to kill it (I’m looking at you, Google), partly because I want to learn and build some skills.

The grand plan is to setup a collection of services on a range of devices. Some of the decisions about platforms will be based on what I have on hand. Sometimes, it will be driven by wanting to learn something new. The current plan includes:

  • Set up home assistant
  • Set up MQTT to ingest sensor data and enable work flows
  • Build some of my own sensors
  • Hack existing sensors to bend them to my will
  • Setup a media server

Things I’d like to accomplish:

  • Automate some gardening tasks
  • Integrate alerts and from various security devices
  • Create a dashboard with a touch screen
  • Stream any media to any compatible device

Skills I’d like to learn/improve:

  • Programming (Go, PHP, Python, bash)
  • Designing and implementing microservices
  • 3D modeling and fabrication
  • Electronics design and fabrication

Enough introduction. Lets jump in. Parts of the big picture will be done in a sequence that only makes sense to me.