[00:00:00] Katherine Druckman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Reality 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman and today it's just me and Shawn. So I'm talking to Shawn Powers. Doc is busy at an event having a lot of fun. I, I believe, and, and, and, uh, coming up with some really cool ideas that I'm sure we will hear about next time. But in the meantime, Sean and I are going to talk about home automation.

Open source home automation. Oh yeah. So yeah, we're gonna have a, a really great show and oh, don't build it up. It's probably no, no, no, it is. We're gonna learn some really cool stuff from Shawn or, or that's what I'm gonna do. Um, and you know, this fits into our overarching theme of, of privacy and, and user agency.

So it's gonna be really good. Um, but before we get started, I wanted to take a moment to thank our. Patrons people who contribute on Patreon and coffee and, I wanted to thank, and, and I'm, I'm only using first names here because , I'm trying to, uh, you know, not, I, I don't know how, to, what extent I wanna call people out.

Uh, seeing as we're privacy nerds here, but thank you to Steve. Thank you to GDk, thank you to James and thank you to Carlie. So there you. Thank you very much for all to all of those people and to everyone who listens and, um, yeah. Visit us on our website. 

[00:01:22] Shawn Powers: Yeah. Was that one of those, like, I don't really know who they are, so like thanks chief.

Thanks. Big guy. Thanks. You . 

[00:01:29] Katherine Druckman: No, those were real names and or initials. Those was whatever I have available to me basically. So. So, yeah. Uh, I, we, we appreciate that and we appreciate everyone who emails, us feedback and comments on our newsletter and subscribes to our newsletter and all of those things. Um, So, yeah.

So 

[00:01:48] Shawn Powers: yeah, it's gonna be exciting. So normally when I, when I'm on the podcast, I feel like the least privacy focused or privacy educated person. And, um, I, I learn stuff. This is one of those times where I actually feel like it's a real, uh, contribution that fits into the theme of the program because it absolutely is.

[00:02:06] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. So this is, this is a struggle that I think a lot of people have. We want, we want the cool home automation we want, uh, maybe we want cameras to monitor the exterior of our house. Maybe we want our lights to come on at a certain time or perhaps our coffee maker. I don't know. But, um, but cameras. Yeah.

Yeah. I am personally not all that comfortable with some of the big providers of that type of technology. So we 

[00:02:34] Shawn Powers: didn't even talk about cameras. Right. We didn't even talk about cameras beforehand, but that I that's something else I recently did. So, um, this might be a full length podcast episode. 

[00:02:44] Katherine Druckman: I know this is gonna be good stuff.

So, so. So Shawn, you know, the goal here is that Shawn is going to give us an overview of, of his system really. Uh, but really his experience, how he got here. Um, we wanna know it all basically, because this is a, this is an, this provides a really great alternative from the kind of Alexa, Ring, um, whatever, right?

Yeah. The, 

[00:03:07] Shawn Powers: the commercially you're expecting yeah. The commercially, uh, advertised stuff where the advertisers know that you're looking because they're creepy. Right. I mean, that's yeah. There's not a whole lot of advertisements for open source alternatives to cloud based. Exactly. Exactly. And there didn't so yeah, so.

And there, there haven't always been great options either to be honest. Um, my first foray into home automation was with Samsung smart things. I'm sure you've heard of 

[00:03:34] Katherine Druckman: smart things because I have, yes, I haven't smart things. 

[00:03:36] Shawn Powers: Hub myself. Oh, you do? Okay. So I, I have three, believe it or not, not because you need more than one in a home, but because I had one.

For my house. And then I had one at my farmhouse and then they don't bridge together. So I had to have a third one out in the actual barn, which was too far away to communicate. I know it was, it was kind of a pain in the butt. Um, and I, I really liked the idea of home automation to save energy, to add convenience and you know, it was new technology and I'm kind of that cutting edge kind of guy and smart things was the first platform that had an open.

Platform mm-hmm and I mean, there's like a thousand asterisks around that, right. Because yeah, it's all still cloud based, but they allowed you to import code or write your own code. In fact, on my get home repository, I was there the other day and there, I think there's actually smart. Things stuff that I coded, so, or not coded, I'm sure I copy and paste a it from somebody else cuz that's how I roll.

But, but that's what coding is for me. Yeah. Yeah. That's what coding is. but um, just to make it work with like third party plug ons or plug ons, plugins for supported add-ons, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, uh, it worked decently well as. It relies on the cloud. In fact, almost every one of the home automation platforms relies on cloud based stuff, which again, I'm not always privacy first when I'm thinking about things that wasn't even my biggest concern about my data being in the cloud.

Obviously I have both Alexa apps or both Alexa devices and Google home devices in my house. So clearly privacy was not a forefront issue. But the problem is when everything is done in the cloud, if your internet connection goes down, your house doesn't frigging work. And so there were times where our internet went down and we couldn't get the lights to go on and off, which seems like such a silly first world problem.

Yeah, I know. So there's, I mean, there's so many things that I, I grew and how I did things better. The first one that, that was a prime example. Right? The, the internet goes down and we can't turn lights on and off is ridiculous. And so whenever I do house lighting, now, it's always smart switches, not smart bulbs.

If that makes sense. Mm-hmm I, I just like dumbed light bulbs. One because they're cheaper, but two. Yeah, because they come with a physical switch, you know, I mean, you can turn them on and off with a switch just like normal, but they also can be controlled, uh, programmatically. And so that was the that's like if I had to say a first not privacy related, but practicality related thing is, um, Yeah.

Have some physical switches because also if you have somebody watching your house, you don't want to have to install an app and log in for them on their phone, with your home stuff to turn the lights on and off. No, that's weird. It's yeah. It's just a matter of where like, oh look, look at all this convenience we have , which is so not convenient in the least.

Uh, so anyway, yeah, that's, that's the first thing. Um, there's other problems then too, because a vendor like Samsung really wants you to buy their products. And so guess which. Which products work best with Samsung smart things, probably Samsung products, Samsung smart thing products. Exactly. And so, um, I really, I tried to move away from smart things, but it, it was kind of difficult and home assist...

I mean, there's a couple open source options, right? Like hubitat. I think, I think that's one of them. I maybe. Maybe I'm just thinking of my wrong silly play on words, but I'm pretty sure it's called a hubitat. Like it's a hub and a habitat habitat. Uh, some open source thing. There's um, uh, there's a couple others, but the big one nowadays is home assistant.

I mean, I think everybody's heard of home assistant and it's been around for a very long time, but. The past couple years, it's really gotten amazing. And, um, I, I kind of had a falling back in love with home assistant and it turns out that some of the things I appreciate most about it are that everything is local.

Um, everything is local. There's no cloud that you have to connect to. And so, um, because there's not a specific vendor, all of the smart things device. You can connect directly to home assistant, you know, they don't have like a, a platform that they're trying to push kinda like Roku. I always liked Roku because okay.

They don't have, uh, their, their streaming, at least they didn't. I mean, it's not like they're competing with Netflix, right. Roku wants to. Make every platform work. And so if you got, if you got a Roku, it wasn't better on one platform than another platform. They were just the, you know, trying to facilitate things and same thing with home assistant, right there.

There's not a home assistant line of products that they want you to buy anything they want. They have motivation to make every possible, uh, home automation device work. And so that means that it's more compatible than any other platform. It's so cool. So, um, Yeah, I could talk about it. Uh so tell me, okay, so yeah, ask me a question, cause I'm just gonna talk.

So 

[00:08:54] Katherine Druckman: once you identified home assistant as a promising alternative, um, how did you get started? What, what did it take to switch over? From the smart things ecosystem to sort of the roll your own home assistant version? 

[00:09:08] Shawn Powers: It's tough. So if, if you are already in the, you know, in an ecosystem, uh, some ecosystems are easier to, to migrate from than others.

Um, going from smart things. Two home assistant was honestly pretty difficult. Now I believe you can actually control smart things, hubs with home assistant, but that's, I, I, I don't know what that gets you really, because it, it still requires a cloud. It's still the smart things platform, you know, it's just like another hook into controlling it.

So that is not what I wanted. Okay. But for me, it was a having two platforms active for over a. Because okay. As you 

[00:09:45] Katherine Druckman: gradually 

[00:09:46] Shawn Powers: added under home. Yeah, exactly. I, I no longer added things to, to smart things. Uh, I would only add things to home assistant and at, at one point it felt silly and I was frustrated because the automation system in home assistant got so much better.

Then smart things that I really wanted to use them for some of the things that smart things was still doing, you know, when I just too lazy to switch it over. And the problem, what makes it challenging is, um, Z-Wave, I don't know how familiar are, how familiar you are with the different protocols and stuff with home assist or with home automation technology, you know, there's vaguely 

[00:10:24] Katherine Druckman: only that I've used them.

There's Zigbee, Z-Wave and they, you know, they run they're different 

[00:10:29] Shawn Powers: yeah. Yeah. They're, they're two different, very similar. But different platforms and smart things used both Zigby and Z-Wave, um, most of their device, I don't even remember which I, I think they actually make both types of devices even, but they're kind of a pain to, to migrate Zigby devices and Z-Wave devices.

you have to like, get the instruction manual for the device, which, you know, I'd had it installed for years. I don't know how to do it. Mm-hmm and then you have to like, look up the process to like put it, like, because it's not just a pairing mode, like Bluetooth. It's not like you can just like, okay, I wanna start over.

So put it in pairing mode and now connect to a new one. Oh no, no, no, no. You have to put it in exclusion mode. And the old device has to like relinquish control. Okay. Yeah. And then once the old hub, and if you've lost that old hub, so it can't release it. So to speak, it's possible. The new hub. Can recognize a device trying to, uh, get released.

It's so bizarre. It's a weird, weird, uh, set of protocols. So you 

[00:11:38] Katherine Druckman: have two very, so you would have two different scenarios here. A lot of people who, maybe who are listening, maybe are in the position where you were, where they have an old system. Yeah. And they wanna replace it. They they're no longer comfortable or they don't find it convenient or for whatever reason they want to go all open source.

They. Want to switch to home assistant, but then you have another group of people who maybe are like me, um, who don't have a lot of automation set up. I think the only thing I had on my smart things hub was my door lock or something. And then I did, I don't even use that anymore. And anyway, um, but maybe focusing on.

A situation where you may have started completely from scratch. Yeah. Let's say you have nothing. No, no smart device. You know, nothing automated, no lights, switches, no cameras, nothing at all. And you're starting from scratch and you have gone to home assistant.io or whatever it is, I can't remember. And, um, yeah.

So, so in putting yourself in that position, Um, let let's talk about just basics. What do you need to get? What would you need to get started? 

[00:12:42] Shawn Powers: Yeah, so, uh, just to finish off the last complicated, like, oh yeah. Unfortu the other. No, no, it's, it's a good lead in no, it's a good lead in because even with all of the frustration I had from migrating those devices over, it was still so worth it to be on home assistant.

Okay. So even, even if you have all these issues that you have to work. It's still worth it because okay. Home assistant as a platform is just so much nicer. And I don't say that just as like an open source enthusiast who like, ah, stick it to the man. Oh my gosh. That's just so nice. And so the interface looks amazing from the demo.

It is. Yeah. The interface is amazing and it, you know, there's apps and there's everything else. Um, so I guess the, from, from the word go, there's a couple different ways you could install it. They, they actually make some devices that they resell. I think like home assistant yellow is coming out on a platform.

I, I, I don't know all, all of the new sell the hardware. Yeah. Like they've sold different versions of hardware with the software. Pre-installed um, okay. I didn't know that, but that's, you know, that's just so that you get, you know, you know, it's fully supported and you, you know, and you're supporting the developers, et cetera, et cetera.

But I have, I've had it on multiple devices. So when I had both going side by side smart things and home assistant, it was running on an old raspberry pi I think it was a raspberry pi three that I had it running on and it worked fine. Uh, when I decided to go all in and do all the difficult. Heavy lifting to switch everything over.

I upgraded to an Intel NUC, uh, just a, it's not a brand new NUC, but it's a, you know, fairly powerful as like an i7 processor on the little NUC and everything. And I wanted to have enough power so that, um, As the system grew. I wouldn't worry that I was overtaxing my old raspberry pi, you know, sometimes while I love raspberry pis, especially like a raspberry pi model three, that's pushing the envelope.

yeah. And it's really pushing the envelope of how much they can do. Right. And so, um, yeah. Went with an Intel NUC and then, and, um, what I really, really, so there's, there's a lot of things I really like, and it's hard for me to pick something. Go ahead. Can we 

[00:14:47] Katherine Druckman: pause just for a second, because you just said that magic word.

Um, Intel and I have to put it in here. I have to, to mention that I actually now work for Intel. I am an Intel employee, which is very cool, but I need to disclose that in case, um, we wax poetic about why Intel NUCs are awesome. but, but, so before I asked the next question, I wanted to make that very clear. however, yeah, I am actually very interested in what additional capabilities, you know, the NUC would give you over the raspberry pi.

Yeah. For the, yeah, like at what point we do get to the point where you, you need that extra, that extra capability? 

[00:15:24] Shawn Powers: Yeah. So for me, I wanted to be able to add third party add-ons at some point, and right now I'm not doing a whole lot with it, but I mean, because it's a, it's a complete system, you know, I could run my home's, DHCP server on it.

I could run, you know, Lots of services because it's running, it's a, it's a Linux operating system, right. And there are, uh, third party repositories for plug, you know, additional plugins so that you can control them with the home assistant GUI. I mean, there's, it's a really cool thing. And I wanted to have that, uh, that potential to, um, To grow.

And also, I mean, to be quite honest, boot time, right? It, the, the home assistant operating system, it's all containerized and stuff. So it, it installs multiple containers and a dockerized system underneath and running Docker. On a raspberry pi, man. It's a slow BootUp, but you know, with, with Intel NUC, with my Intel NUC, it's, you know, it starts right up.

It's it's awesome. Um, yeah. Yeah. And I'm not gonna wax too poetic about Intel because then it'll sound like it's an ad and it's not, no, definitely 

[00:16:27] Katherine Druckman: not an ad, but we would like to know how to get our, our, our get up and running with home assistant. So, 

[00:16:32] Shawn Powers: yeah. And that's, it is nice because it was a, okay. So that's actually, that's another good point too.

So, I mean, installing it, if you install things. If you've installed things on a raspberry pi, it's not challenging, but it's not the same as installing on a regular computer and installing on the Intel NUC. It was, you know, just like install the, you know, plug in the USB drive and just click, install, install, install, and it's, and it's running.

So that, that was nice. Um, but home assist. Okay. So. The big aspect for me too, is I had to not lose functionality. And I know you said start from scratch. Sorry, but that, wasn't my experience. It's hard for me just to sit. 

[00:17:06] Katherine Druckman: No, yeah, no, that's true. But in terms of, uh, startup. Yeah. So 

[00:17:11] Shawn Powers: process it, I couldn't lose functionality going from smart things to home assistant, you know, I, I couldn't.

My family would not like that a whole lot. And while I made sure that we had switches.

[00:17:24] Katherine Druckman: Dad, why does nothing work? 

[00:17:24] Shawn Powers: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And while we have switches for things, you know, that's great. Um, but my family had grown used to, you know, telling Alexa or telling Google to, you know, turn on the porch light, you know, something silly like that.

And if I couldn't do that anymore, uh, they would, they love me. They would be okay. But deep down they would be grumbling. Right. And so, 

[00:17:44] Katherine Druckman: And they would keep saying it and nothing would happen. 

[00:17:46] Shawn Powers: Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a couple things. Uh, one, I don't think there's any creepier. Um, Uh, example of cloud-based privacy concerns than, you know, the Google home or the Alexa devices.

Right. I mean, they just listen all the time and it's just creepy is pretty. 

Okay. It's kind of an extension 

of that. Yeah. So, yeah. Um, and so I. I really wanted to make sure they could still verbally say things and have them work. And there is a way, so there there's this, um, add on it's like Nabu Casa, which seems like it's probably a reference to something that I don't get.

Uh, but it's the name of a, a company that the developers of, uh, home assistant own, you know, that's like their company or whatever, and you pay a certain amount per month and they automate hooks into, uh, the Alexa and the Google home so that you can use it as a, as a direct. Thing, just like you would with smart things.

And it's the kind of thing where you're supporting the developers, but also it's really super easy and convenient. Just literally log in click. Okay. And it just works like before it's still Google and Alexa though. Right. I mean, it's still creepy in my, in the back of my mind. Okay. And so, um, I I've tried using Siri, uh, you know, the, the third, the, you know, the, the bastard stepchild of like, yeah.

And. I found that not only do you not have to pay to integrate it because home assistant integrates with home, what is it? What is it? Home kit, you know, Apple's home kit. Oh, uh, Apple's. It integrates smoothly without any, any additional need to do anything. Um, But also then Siri becomes the verbal, you know, interface that works so well.

And I thought, wow, now I'm gonna have to buy, you know, apple home devices all over yeah. Home pods for all over the house. And so I bought one to start to make sure it was gonna work. Uh, but it turns out, uh, if you're, if you're a home that uses apple products, Siri is in everything. So I never bought another home pod because I don't need it.

I just talk to my watch or I talk to my phone or I just talk out loud and my watch hears me without like, needing to get it out or anything. And I can turn lights on and off just by saying, Hey, Siri do something. So it's, it's really nice. Uh, and that it doesn't cost. It's built in if you're an apple user and have that stuff, but then even better.

Apple devices do voice recognition on the device, right? Locally. Yeah. Whereas the other ones do not, you know, if, if your internet goes down, Google home and Alexa will not understand what you're saying and they will not be able to do anything. If your internet goes down, Siri completely understands what you're saying and will send the, the instructions to your local home assistant server without any problem.

So all that voice recognition happens on device. It doesn't require the internet now. Disclaimer. When your internet connection is up, I'm a thousand percent sure it goes to apple servers. there's not a question in my mind. Yes. It's definitely going there, but, um, it doesn't have to, you know, it still works when your internet goes down and you can still use voice stuff to turn things on and off.

And so, yeah, I haven't, I haven't gotten rid of the Alexa in the Google home stuff yet, but we're going to, we don't use it anymore at all. 

[00:21:07] Katherine Druckman: Huh? Well, that's interesting. Yeah. Um, It's it's nice to know that that, that is an easy transition to make. Um, so I'm curious. So along the lines of internet connectivity, yeah.

I'm curious about a couple things and, and also local processing. So. One thing is, I wondered about your camera set up. I wondered in particular, are you doing any local processing of, let's say object recognition, there are various open source packages out there to do that locally. You know, this is a person versus a dog.

There's something called Frigate. I started reading about, I don't know if you've, you know, anything about that, but the other thing is, um, Related to internet connectivity would be web access remotely accessing let's say, oh, yeah. Or, uh, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about either or both of those 

[00:21:54] Shawn Powers: things.

Yeah. Um, I'll start with the web access part, cuz that's a shorter story. Um, the Nabu Casa thing, like where you can pay monthly and they, you know, will give you Google or Alexa access to. Devices, you know, where you pay them and they do that for you. That also gives you a, um, a commercial reverse proxy that is very smooth and connects to their, uh, mobile app.

However, you can also just port forward into your, um, Home assistant box, you know, on your router, your home router. And that's what I, that's what I've done. I just have a port forwarded into my system and, you know, using the dynamic DNS. And that's what I set the mobile app to connect to. And it worked perfectly fine.

So you don't have to use any paid stuff to make the remote access work to your home, assistant. It, it will allow you just, you know, forward in a port and then connect that way. In fact, to get a little nerdier, I actually use reverse proxy so that I, you know, don't have to use a weird port and I can use the name and it's secured by SSL and all that kinda stuff.

So it's very, very possible using just open source tools. You don't have to pay for that feature to be able to connect to it remotely from outside your house. The video stuff I use, uh, ubiquity, um, stuff. Okay. Like all of my, all of my video surveillance stuff is all using unify products and my rationale there.

Um, Is because it doesn't do any cloud processing. Right? You actually, you have to have a server. Um, you know, I have a, they call it like a cloud key or something, which is a bit of a misnomer because it's not cloud based. It's, you know, you're you own the hardware, you are the cloud, so to speak. So all the recording is done locally.

All of the, um, Uh, motion detection is done on the cameras or with that local device. And the only cloud connection is they allow you to log into their global reverse proxy system so that you can just, you know, wherever you are, go to unified.com and log in, but that's. You don't have to do that. And they don't store any of your, any of your video or data and they don't, they, they just don't have access to that.

That's all stored on your local hard drive. So that's what I do. And the nice thing about it is. Home assistant again, they don't have a product line of their own. They wanna integrate with everything. And the unify protect the video system is one of the things that they, uh, very clearly integrate with. So, um, I recently installed their doorbell.

It's a just called a G4 doorbell, something I don't even there. When you say 

[00:24:33] Katherine Druckman: their doorbell that's, uh, unifi, the brand is unifi? 

[00:24:36] Shawn Powers: So, uh, so the, the company is unify. Uh, yeah, the, the company is ubiquity and their line of. That stuff is unifi. U N I F I, and it's unifi protect is their video system. 

[00:24:49] Katherine Druckman: Okay. So you can find that at ui.com it looks like, oh yeah, 

[00:24:53] Shawn Powers: that's their, yeah.

It used to be U B N t.com. And I think they realized that was kind of a weird, um, URL. So yeah, just ui.com. 

[00:25:01] Katherine Druckman: Okay. Here, here's a, a quick question for you. When I go to, when I did a quick search, I end up on a page that says unify video is an obsolete product line. 

[00:25:10] Shawn Powers: Oh. So yeah. Now it's now it's called unify protect, 

[00:25:13] Katherine Druckman: unify protect.

Okay. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. They just 

[00:25:16] Shawn Powers: rebranded. Okay, cool. And it's if there's a frustration. So with the unified video again, Early adopter. Right. So I had, when it was unified video, I had that you could run the software on your own server. Like they just had an open source software. You could run and use your own everything.

Um, with unify protect, they insist on you using their hardware, which still runs Linux and stuff. Um, but honestly their hardware's not expensive and it's very convenient. So I, I don't mind that as much. Uh, but anyway, yeah, what I, what I like about it though, is, you know, it's all done locally and you can do it with other products.

I mean, you can, you know, there are other. Self-hosted video surveillance stuff that doesn't use the cloud, like ring, you know, ring is horrible. Everything is in the cloud. Um, but there are other products like unify. You know, you can do locally. But what I like about it is, uh, like I said, with, with home assistant, they don't have a product line, their own, they wanna integrate with everything.

And so when I installed my doorbell, the unified doorbell now mm-hmm, all of a sudden in home assistant, I have a fancy motion detection device that I can use for any sort of automation I want. Uh, that is outside of unify. I mean, unify uses motion detection so that they then start recording.

Right. And, you know, they have like two way audio and all that sort of stuff. But because, uh, integration with home assistant gives you access to those sensors. Now. When it detects motion, I can automatically turn the porch light on or I can do all sorts of any, you know, anything with automation. It has, I think it has a temperature sensor.

So I can use that to see what, what the temperature's like outside and all of those, uh, sensors that would normally be proprietary to the doorbell manufacturer are now opened up so that I can use them for other things in home assistance. So I really, really like that. 

[00:27:02] Katherine Druckman: That is cool. What kind of storage do you use with that?

[00:27:05] Shawn Powers: So it comes with, uh, again, they have a unit, the, the cloud key gen two or whatever. Yeah. It comes with a, the way you use. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I have. I have one in my house and I have one out at my farm, uh, for the same exact things, video surveillance. It also, that device also, uh, works as the controller for your unify network.

If you use unify networking stuff, which a lot of network geeks. That stuff because it's affordable, but really high performance. Anyway, that's, that's another whole episode. Uh, but, uh, it comes, I think it comes with like a five terabyte drive. It's uh, it's not amazing. I mean, it's two and a half inch spinning media drive.

So it's, uh, maybe a little sluggish when you're trying to like retrieve. You know, recorded video, but it's, it's usable, it's workable and it seems to work. I've had it running for years without any, any issues. So, um, it's all contained and I think you could probably replace the drive if it fails. I've never had to do that, but if I did, I'd probably replace it with an SSD.

If it was like a one that's designed for lots of reading and writing. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, that's, it's really nice to integrate with home assistant though, because I, I can open up my dashboard, my home assistant dashboard, and I get a glimpse of, you know, it get, it shows me a screenshot of the current, my front porch and any other video cameras that I happen to have connected.

It will just show me a quick snapshot so I can get a quick view of everything without opening up a second app. 

[00:28:32] Katherine Druckman: Do you use any of the, the features, the energy efficiency kind of monitoring. I noticed that that is a thing in home assistant. And I wondered if that's something that you use.

[00:28:41] Shawn Powers: It is that's fairly new and I'm ashamed to admit no, I actually have, um, connected to my, um, uh, my circuit box, my, my circuit breaker panel in the basement, like where the power comes into the house.

I have a Z-Wave device that detects incoming and outgoing. Uh, well, I mean, it would detect outgoing. I don't have solar panels built into like, To the grid or anything, but it detects, um, current and I have, that's one of the devices I have not moved over to home assistant. So it's sitting down there doing it's going on the wishlist.

Yeah, it is because I have it and it's running, still talk it's, you know, trying to send data to a smart things, ho hub that doesn't exist anymore because I used to, I used to monitor that and it, it just shows daily usage. It it's not per circuit. The one I have is not per circuit. It's just the, the entire home.

Uh, but yeah, they added that recently. And it integrates of course, with lots of different products that will allow you to track your usage. And if you have like solar panels or windmill or whatever, you know, production and potentially storage, if you have batteries again, all integrated into one thing so that you can trigger various things based on that, let's say you're cooling your home with an air conditioner.

That's connected to your smart thing. And you notice your battery is getting low. Maybe you turn the air conditioner, you know, Temperature up a little. So you don't suck up the remaining batteries that you have. If you don't wanna, you know, use grid power, it there's just, the automations are really, um, easy to configure and they allow you to do things that, uh, you would normally have to do manually, like, oh, uh, we seem to be using a lot of electricity today.

Maybe I could. Turn the, the temperature, well, just have home assistant do that automatically, you know, it's it's uh, 

yeah, if you hit a certain threshold, 

just, you know, exactly. Or, you know, a combination of things like, you know, I have lots of temperature sensors, you know, if I notice that it's 98 degrees outside, uh, maybe I don't make the, the air conditioner, keep it at 60 in the house, you know?

yeah. That's 

[00:30:39] Katherine Druckman: probably a bad idea. Yeah. You know, it's so power in, in Texas. Anyway, power used to. Pretty cheap. You, the, the markets were very competitive and you could get really good deals. And so people, you know, I, I think I personally, I didn't pay as much attention as I probably should have. Um, because it wasn't all that expensive.

And now that ship has sailed. Yeah. And, you know, and, and it's, it's. Depending on what part of the country you're in, um, in the us, it can be very, very expensive and now seems like a pretty great time to investigate, uh, some home home automation for energy efficiency. 

[00:31:13] Shawn Powers: Yeah. I mean, we were talking to you and I were talking to a, another, a mutual friend cause we won't call out.

Yeah. Like, I mean almost 50 cents a kilowatt hour. Yeah. That's I mean, that's, that's just, that's mind blowing. 

[00:31:23] Katherine Druckman: Think I pay about 13 these days, 

[00:31:26] Shawn Powers: but, um, yeah, that's about what I pay in, in town here. It's about 13 and it's pretty consistent. I don't think mine varies. Whereas you, I mean, Texas is a different beast.

As far as like rates go, you can lock in rates 

[00:31:35] Katherine Druckman: or most people I think are way higher than that. A lot of people are paying like more like 25 cents. I just locked in a really low rate. Yeah. 

[00:31:42] Shawn Powers: But yeah, but yeah, I mean, that's the, you know, it's almost like DevOps for the real world, right. Because yeah, using these automation things based on, you know, based on data, you can make automated decisions.

And it, I really, really like that. And the more and more, uh, things I add to home assistant one. The more, I'm happy that I got a real box to install it on, you know, so I'm not overwhelming a tiny little raspberry pi. Uh, so I'm not worried that I'm overwhelming my, uh, you know, my NUC with all these things that I'm adding, like processing video and, and all that sort of thing.

Um, but also it just makes it, it's kind of like the, what I always pictured, uh, a, a home automation thing would be right, uh, gets out of your way. And adds value, you know, and, and some of my, so the question that you asked me to answer at the very beginning, and I just avoided for some reason, because I'm a jerk.

Um, you know, when you're, when you're first starting, you know, if you, if you just install home assistant, what, what value can you get from that? And for me, one of the most valuable and incredibly simple things I do is in our kitchen, we have, there's probably five light circuits. Um, I have. Um, the Phillips hue strip that goes around, right.

This like recess in the ceiling. And then I have a couple Phillips Hugh bulbs that are screwed in to the ceiling. And, um, I just, I literally, right now I've just taped the power switch on for those, because this was before I went to my whole switches, not light bulbs. and. There are, you know, there's like a switch that controls like some down lights in a different part of the kitchen.

And my kitchen's not that big, but apparently I have lots of different lights there and like there's a light above the coffee machine. All of those things are now part of an automation that is tied to a motion detection device, which is something that carried over from smart. The smart things kit that I bought originally included like, uh, like, oh, a motion detect and a detection device and, oh, this and oh, that, and that has been an incredibly powerful.

Um, home automation that everybody in my family has just now gotten used to. When you walk into the kitchen, all the lights slowly, not slowly, but they fade up really nicely. So it's not just a harsh, like click they're all on. They fade. Which doesn't seem like a big deal until you see it happen and it feels magical.

and so you walk in and then just the lights come up. And then when there's no motion for 20 minutes, the lights go off. And I also made a condition so that when it's nighttime and it's like, you know, there's not light coming in from outside. Um, it's kind of darker that one of the switches has a really harsh downlight, you know, that.

If you want to see clearly in the daytime, you want that to come on to like illuminate things. But at night, if you turn on those lights, it's like, holy cow, you know, I it's so bright. And so once I have it timed to the sun, when the sun goes down, that light doesn't automatically turn on. Now, if you want that extra brightness, you just hit the switch, you know, manually because it's tied to a switch, but little things like that have made our home, uh, Almost the definition of a smart home.

You know, it's, it's much more user friendly and it's automatic. We never have to worry about turning the lights off in the kitchen. And my next step is going to be doing that with all of our bathrooms, you know, uh, just, they make switches, you know, a lot of people have switches in their bathroom that detect motion and shut them off after a while.

But they're kind of dumb and yeah, I want to do other things. I want to have our exhaust fan automatically turn on when the humidity level goes. Because my motion detection thing also has a humidity, uh, sensor. And so I can turn that switch on when the shower's on and now, you know, even if you forget to turn that on, it'll turn on until the humidity goes down and then it'll shut itself off.

Just things like that are what I think of when I think of smart home. 

[00:35:35] Katherine Druckman: I think of things. I, I always, you know, I don't know if I'm, that's just the way my mind works, but I think of like disaster prevention, I think of things like leak detection, you know, if you detector, you know, shut off all the water, when you detect leaking, you know, stuff like that 

[00:35:49] Shawn Powers: is, or at least notify me.

Right. Yeah. And I mean, you you've been a friend of mine long enough, you know, that my basement has flooded multiple times. And if I would've just bought like a, just a cheap. Moisture detection device and put it in the basement. So I'd get a push notification, some sort, uh, they, yeah, just the notification.

Just the, yeah, that's the thing. If you had the sensor to tie it in and they make sensors that are expensive and they make sensors that are cheap and you tie it to a, well, it, you can tie it to a 433 megahertz. Device, which is another whole episode because the RF stuff, instead of Zigby or Z-Wave, there's like, there is another way that's, uh, cheaper and nerdier.

And, um, anyway, I, I won't go too deep into depth there, but yeah, you can get a, you can get a water sensor and if it detects it, it would send me a push notification because last winter. Um, a pipe froze and I, it was actually our external spigot, which is supposed to be one of those frost free things, but apparently it wasn't frost free enough because it froze and broke a pipe.

And I didn't know it. And so our basement flooded, we had like a foot and a half of water in the basement, uh, which. Put the furnace underwater. So the furnace wasn't working, our hot water heater was underwater. Obviously the fire was not keeping our hot water warm and it was the middle of winter. And the only way I noticed is because, uh, it started leaking out of our basement, uh, like foundation.

Down to the road. We live on a hill and it, we saw it coming down the driveway from seeping through the basement and the whole road was covered in ice that led to our house. It was terrifying and sure enough, I opened the basement door and I hear, 

[00:37:33] Katherine Druckman: oh, no, that would've been in a good time for an automated valve shutoff system.

Yeah. Or even a 

[00:37:40] Shawn Powers: notification. I mean, that's the thing it had been going. I think it had been going a couple days and I didn't notice, oh my, because the basement just slowly filled and it was only when, you know, we saw it out in the road, uh, that we didn't notice our house had gotten a little chilly, but I mean, it's winter in Northern Michigan that happens.

And so, yeah. Ugh. Right. Just a notification was saved so much. Yeah, 

[00:38:03] Katherine Druckman: well on the to-do list. Yeah. Um, do you, do you do anything that's, that's unusual. Do you have any like weird quirky things that maybe, uh, other people have not thought of that you've, that you have automated? Or, I don't know. How's your birdcam?

[00:38:15] Shawn Powers: Um, So, yeah. And bird cam will actually, I have unifi cameras now that there's a super cheap $29 one that, um, I'm going to power with solar out on a, on a bird feeder all on its own. And it will record motion. I'm actually looking forward to that. I'm hope to have that up by winter. Yeah. Um, as far as other things I do that, that other people really don't.

Um, I don't, let me, let me open up my, my, my interface here. I don't think so. I'm pretty plain, 

[00:38:45] Katherine Druckman: um, really, really quickly while you're doing that. Did, did you answer the, the question of, are you doing local video processing? 

[00:38:52] Shawn Powers: I can't remember. Oh, no. The, so, um, I am not using a tool. I'm looking at my. looking at my thing.

It looks like, oh, my smoke detectors are, uh, connected and they just have battery levels. You know what I mean? They have other things, like I could get a notification if they're, if it had tech CO2, but it would also go beep beep beep. But the battery notification is nice. Um, because then I know when the batteries are getting low, but like I have my air conditioner tied to it.

Um, but no, as far as video, uh, processing goes, unify does. Uh, I, I don't have to, and I, there's probably a plugin for home assistant to do like recognition of things, but like my doorbell, I don't have the, the, um, the option turned on to like detect a person or a dog, but they have that built in. I just don't use it.

I just want motion, you know, if there's motion, I wanna see it. So, 

[00:39:42] Katherine Druckman: yeah. Makes sense. What is the ongoing maintenance, like, is it pretty simple to keep updated? And, um, do you ever, do you ever have to get into any kind of troubleshooting nightmares or 

[00:39:52] Shawn Powers: very rarely?

The, the home assistant developers are very, very active. It's a very active community. There are multiple updates a month and it's a pretty simple, like when I log in, it tells me if there's an update, I. Update and it'll automatically update itself, you know, the containers and the underlying operating system.

It, you know, keeps them both updated with just a click, which is nice. Um, as far as the, the devices themselves, uh, I've had a couple flaky devices, like for example, our living room has, uh, a light dimmer. Uh, it's, it's a lamp dimmer pack. It's like a plugs into the wall and you plug the lamp into it and it dims it based on, you know, just like power or whatever.

Um, Sometimes this past week, it was no longer noticed by the Z-Wave network. Like it just said it was dead. And so like unplugged it and plugged it back in thinking that would fix it. And it didn't. But then I went into the Z-Wave, you know, panel for lack of a better word in the, in home assistant. And there was a button that said heal network.

I literally clicked heal network and everything has been fine ever since. So I mean, that's magic. Yeah. And that's been once in like the. Forever so that sounds easier 

[00:41:01] Katherine Druckman: honestly, than, than proprietary, uh, home automation systems that I've used. I have used also in the past a wink. Um, oh, okay. Yeah. That's a whole other thing I know.

I don't use that anymore. It's basically obsolete at this point, I think. Um, but where I'm going is remember back, we we've been around a while, right? Yeah. in the open source world. And remember back. Using, uh, more open alternatives, let's say really required you to be an enthusiast, a tinkerer, a, you know, somebody who was into DIY, but it seems to me that home assistant.

And this was that, that 

[00:41:36] Shawn Powers: competes with proprietary. Yeah. And, and this was that, I mean, for a very long time, you had to edit YAML files when you added devices. Uh, you know, you had to, and I mean, YAML files are notorious for deal indentation and stuff. but as it's matured and there's more developers and it's it's, so it's so active that now more and more stuff is just GUI related.

Like you used to have to manually write automations with YAML files, but now. All done with a really nice GUI. Um, there was an awkward transition phase. 

[00:42:06] Katherine Druckman: I would rather write YAML files. Yeah, because that sounds easier. 

[00:42:10] Shawn Powers: And there are things like, so my, my preferred method for adding a gooey is when the gooey edits the underlying text files so that if you want to edit the text files, you can, and it doesn't break anything.

Brilliant. Yeah, that's how I like things. And home assistant has a weird mix of that. Some of the things edit Yamo files, some of the things have like a system registry, which just smacks of windows and makes my tummy turn. But, um, for the most part it's, it's, um, pretty easy to maintain and. The, the community itself is so active that if you have a specific problem, it's very likely somebody else has already solved it, which I just love about bigger open source projects.

Right? I mean, 

yeah, me too, coming from the Drupal world. Yep. A hundred percent. I've never encountered a problem that was unique to me. Yeah. 

It's so it it's so refreshing to be able to find a solution for a really obscure device that I bought from some random website. And not only does somebody else used it, but they've like solved the problem and, or written, you know, code that makes it.

All of a sudden work. And that's the thing too with home assistant, because there's so many up updates, they're constantly improving it. Um, I'll install an update and then I'll get a notification. It says we've detected something on your network. And it's like, they now support this product that was never supported before.

And I'm like, oh, well, how cool is that? And so like, I, I can't think of one off the top of my head. I, I guess yesterday they now support. Ther like thermostats, which they hadn't supported nest because Google was really weird about it. But when I clicked on it, it's like for a one time, $5 fee. I'm like, I, I don't care that much.

So I, I haven't done that. Again, it's, uh, it's neat that they detect things on your network. One it's $5 fee. I don't, I don't know. I didn't read. I was literally gonna look this up. Yeah. I, I, I don't know. And I'm sure it's legit. Like I said, they they're really good about if, if something costs money they're providing value, you know, it might just be that they have written code that will help you sync up 

[00:44:09] Katherine Druckman: familiar.

Okay. So I have a Nest. They changed 

[00:44:13] Shawn Powers: their. Oh, their API changed a couple years ago. Changed, I 

[00:44:17] Katherine Druckman: wanna say in 2019 or something like that. So you like, you can't register a new device? I don't think with if this then that, I think that's, that sounds 

[00:44:25] Shawn Powers: familiar. It was when Google bought them shortly after Google bought them, they made changes to what you couldn't.

Couldn't do sense. Of course. Yeah. 

[00:44:31] Katherine Druckman: Timing. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:44:34] Shawn Powers: Mm. So if you're looking for a, a, a thermostat that works incredibly well with pretty much everything, eco B, I'm a big fan of echo B. Oh yeah. I have that to my home. That's yeah. Cause they integrate perfectly because again, they don't have a, you know, echo B doesn't have a.

Their own thing with the exception of some of the echo BES have Alexa built in, which is 

[00:44:53] Katherine Druckman: weird. I do not have that. I don't understand why that's a thing. 

[00:44:56] Shawn Powers: Yeah. Yeah. It seemed to the one that I bought for the farm. I didn't realize it had Alexa built in, but sure enough, there's a thermostat. And if you say, Hey, Alexa, it will answer.

It's so bizarre. um, yeah. It's I 

[00:45:09] Katherine Druckman: get it. If you, you don't have to have an additional device to talk to your thermostat and tell it it's too hot in here. Too hot, 

[00:45:16] Shawn Powers: help. 

Yeah. But it, it it's awkward too. It's it's not it's, it's like half of an Alexa. it's just, uh, it's not quite, I didn't 

[00:45:25] Katherine Druckman: before I decided I didn't like, uh, Amazon echo devices in my house.

I used to have an echo dot in the bedroom where I could say, you know, Alexa, please turn down the temperature, a couple degrees, like in bed. That was that's the, that was the killer feature right there. Yeah. But yeah, that's uh, well cool. What, what have we not, what have we not talked about? I feel like we've covered it, but, you know, without going too, in, in depth, which would require, I think an additional episode, what I'm hopeful, uh, for is that people will, uh, maybe, uh, email us with some questions and we can pick this topic up again. 

[00:46:03] Shawn Powers: I bet. Yeah, that would be cool because there's a lot more, uh, you know, to talk about and things like, you know, I just briefly mentioned the RF stuff, you know, like the very inexpensive, um, hardware, but you have to have.

You know, another, uh, way to interface with it. That's, that's kind of the, the geeky frontier now, right? Like home automation with home assistant is it's like retail ready. I mean, it, it just works, you know, I mean, everything is GUI, it just works fine, but things like using RF interface devices and using MQTT to send messages back and forth and subscribe to different, um, Channels on.

Yeah, it it's pretty, it can get really geeky, but it doesn't have to, to be effective. So yeah, there's, there's lots of deep dive stuff, but we won't go there here. 

[00:46:51] Katherine Druckman: Here's a, a, a question I don't think I asked and that is so. Backing up a little bit. I, you know, I think of home automation, I think of you because you, you wrote a lot about it, but even back in the Linux Journal days and yeah.

You have been a home automation enthusiast for many years. Mm-hmm um, how many, how many years is it? And how many of those have you used home assistant? 

[00:47:12] Shawn Powers: Oh, goodness. Um, I used home assistant on and off the whole time. I mean, I'm bad with, I mean, there was like the before times and, and now, so it's harder.

Yeah. Time, no meeting anymore time meeting, but, uh, years and years, I mean, you know, I haven't been actively, I wasn't even really active with Linux journal, you know, at the, at the end of the production cycle, even so before that, uh, so it's probably. Uh, I mean, five years ago was the end. So I mean, probably 10 years ago I started or something, you know, using home automation and I used home assistant on and off.

Like, it's what I always wanted to use. But at first it was just so difficult. 

[00:47:52] Katherine Druckman: Right. So you seen the evolution into like, oh my 

[00:47:55] Shawn Powers: goodness. Yes. All featured. It used to be so difficult that. You know, I mean, I was a, I was a Linux geek, right. I mean, I wrote for Linux journal for Pete's sake, but it was the amount of effort for the amount, you know, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze 

[00:48:09] Katherine Druckman: I can't, yeah.

You only have so many hours in the day and 

[00:48:12] Shawn Powers: yes. Project and it wasn't something I was passionate about home assistance specifically enough to make it worthwhile. But now using anything else seems silly because it's such a. Central hub for, uh, creating automations based on lots of different things. And, and it has so many hooks into it and out of it and yeah, it it's great.

So, um, I I've seen it. I've seen it bad. I've seen it. Good. And I I'm excited about where it is now to the point where I even subscribed for the Nabu Casa thing, even though I wasn't using any of the features, just because I wanted to support the, uh, the company. Um, I'm actually not right now. Truth be told, but, um, I want it to succeed because it's such a great platform that has remained open.

I mean, it has not been bought and I hope it's never bought out by a company that then only supports, you know, certain things. So if you're thinking about, um, diving into home assistant, maybe consider buying one of their hardware devices, you know, it supports them and you're guaranteed that it'll work perfectly on that kind of stuff.

So, yeah. Cool. 

[00:49:18] Katherine Druckman: Okay. Um, yeah, this is really great information. Honestly, I went. Just, um, for selfish reasons, because I wanted to pick your brain about home automation, because I would like to, you know, I would like some security cameras, but I don't want them to be connected to people. I don't want them to be connected to, I want yeah.

Have full control over my, uh, own automation. So, uh, yeah. I suspect other people listening might feel the. 

[00:49:44] Shawn Powers: And I've and I've done. I mean, you can do things where you connect the individual cameras to home assistant to, without a third party thing, you know, I mean, just the, uh, R S TP or R T SSP, whatever that, that URL is, you can connect a direct feed right into home assistant.

And I think you can even do some motion recording right inside home assistant, where again, you're gonna want a more powerful device, like an Intel NUC. Plug, plug, plug. hashtag I am Intel so, I mean, that's possible. You can, you can get more, um, you know, open source friendly. I just like the unified stuff because, um, I, I was using that at the farm for notification and, and stuff before home assistant was really other good.

I mean, I installed the unified stuff at the farm when we bought it and that's been, you know, five or six years ago now. So, um, Yeah, again, it integrates with everything, whether it's a, a third party company or just an individual camera that you got from Amazon with a really, you know, janky interface that you just want to connect locally, you can do that.

[00:50:49] Katherine Druckman: That's awesome. Well, cool. Well, thank you so much for, for, um, for sharing all of that. Uh, I am going to pay special attention when I'm doing this transcribing because, uh, I don't know. I think I'm, I'm in the market for, for a little home assistant here. Um, So, yeah. Thank you for sharing all that and thank you everyone for listening.

And please let us know if you have any questions. I suspect Shawn might be willing to answer a lot of them. 

[00:51:16] Shawn Powers: I'm always around answer questions. Yeah. 

[00:51:18] Katherine Druckman: Maybe we'll see a video series. I don't know what, maybe 

[00:51:20] Shawn Powers: it's on my it's on my list of things I wanna do on YouTube, but we'll, we'll see how that goes. Yeah.

[00:51:25] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. Again, only, only so many hours in the day. 

[00:51:28] Shawn Powers: Yeah. Unfortunately. And I gotta sleep for so many of them. 

[00:51:32] Katherine Druckman: Me too. Okay, great. Well until next time, I'm sure. Uh, I'm sure we will talk to you again soon. 

[00:51:40] Shawn Powers: Yeah. Thanks again. I appreciate you listening to me, pontificate.