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Comment by nicolas_t | Hacker News Reader

I plan to have a smart house but when I do it, it'll be using an opensource solution running a software that I can debug myself, setup in a way that it can fallback to just being manual (so switches for the light would need to work normally if the system is not on) and I want things to be wired since I feel that most wireless solutions add too much complexity.

Basically any system like this should not be a liability and should not prevent reselling the house if I ever need to.

I'm not really sure smart house devices are ready yet for non programers to play with but as a dev, it'd be a huge amount of fun getting it to work :)

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The problem with open source is that the hardware is rarely "open enough", and the software is a small enthusiast niche so it's rarely polished and "complete".

I'd rather accept that the installation has a lifers of 10 years and just buy a proprietary system complete with service and guarantees, then rip it out and replace it all in 10 years.

Agree on wired - and also, smart switches etc have to be usable with standard light switches and power sockets otherwise you are stuck with a tiny selection of ugly fixtures.

Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io) is actually pretty great when it comes to software. It's got a nicely polished dashboard you can stick up on status screen / touch panels, a text-based but relatively straightforward configuration, and support for all kinds of general-purpose standards and specific platforms.

similar to OpenHAB it seems but perhaps more recent? like most open source it's a thing for tinkerers. I absolutely do not want to compile python-openzwave after making sure I have at least cython version x.., I don't find this kind of stuff straigtforward at all, and I enjoy a dentist chair more than a bash prompt :D

I'd rather pay for a proprietary system. The best thing would be an open proprietary system, i.e a future-proof and moddable one, but one where I have paid humans to do tons of testing and polish.

It's actually designed to auto-install most necessary prereqs (as pip packages) the first time they're needed, so the only real command line thing needed (if editing the yaml files doesn't count) is the initial pip install.

OK, maybe I had bad luck browsing the docs to stumble over the odd component (z-wave) that required manual compilation, cython and so on.

It's just that this component was the single component I needed...

I should write about my smart home setup, if nothing else, just to give you guys ideas.

I've designed and fabricated light and temperature sensors that I've placed in every room, and lights are controlled by a combination of Sonoff switches (they're great, I've written my own firmware for them (https://gitlab.com/stavros/sonoff) and YeeLight lamps (I've written my own library and cli client: https://yeelight.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, https://gitlab.com/stavros/yeecli/).

My sensor boards (https://github.com/skorokithakis/esplights) can also output RF and IR so I can control various devices in the room, like TVs and ACs. I've hooked this all up to a small Python script that talks to the devices over an MQTT server, separated the network for all this crap into a vlan with no access anywhere (other than the MQTT server and the OTA firmware upgrade server), and now I can successfully sound like a lunatic with way too much free time on the internet.

> and now I can successfully sound like a lunatic with way too much free time on the internet.

Had me at "I've written my own firmware for them ". :-)

It really really wasn't that hard, have a look through the code, it's just a hundred lines or so, IIRC.

Sweet lunacy, you make me envy your free time. How do you usually use the system? Automation? Remote control. I get what it can do, curious what you actually fo with it :)

Both, I have it set so lights go on and off when someone enters/exits the room, it logs temperature in rooms just because, and I have a task on my phone (using Tasker) with an NFC tag on my nightstand that turns everything off when I go to bed.

It's nice to not have to touch any light switches ever, you walk into a room and the lamp just slowly fades into light.

I know how crazy this sounds (because I roll my eyes at people who say "I have a task on my phone" too), but it's not really very hard to do. I control everything through an HTTP message queue I wrote (https://github.com/skorokithakis/gweet/) and a simple Android app I... also wrote... and... I should get fewer hobbies.

Hey Stavros, I'm curious about your lighting and motion detection setup. How did you get the lights to fade in and out? Is it purely in software (meaning the switches are permanently on)?

Are you using PIR for motion detection? Did you layer any logic on top of that to keep lights from turning off if you're stationary for too long?

I'm using YeeLight lamps (and of course I wrote my own library for them), which can fade in/out very easily.

I am using PIR indeed, I just added a timeout of X minutes, depending on the room, where you just eyeball X to be long enough that there will be motion if there's someone in the room, but not long enough that the light always stays on.

Appreciate the details. I'd love to do similar stuff but priorities, priorities, priorities.

Was not aware that there are actually useful NFC stuff. Last time someone showed it to me it was pretty meh and I've heard that Android had a terrible implementation (Beam something?). I might be living on old info but I so rarely see anything about NFC except for payments.

Yes, there is, you can get dirt-cheap NFC stickers that you can put places and use Tasker to detect them. I mainly fire HTTP requests when a sticker is detected, but I use them for other things as well:

* I stuck one with my wifi password on the back side of a painting, so I just tell visitors who want wifi "touch your phone to the boat on the painting" and they get a prompt to connect to the wifi.

* I put one in the car to set all volume to max and enable bluetooth and launch the music app.

* I put one on the nightstand to trigger night mode in the house and silence alerts and stuff.

You can do various things like that, it's pretty useful.

From my reading Apple doesn't allow NFC for anything aside from Apple Pay. Severly limits the usefulness for me sadly. I'd say I encounter 50% iDevices.

Serious question: How much would I have to pay you to consult on a new, high-end residential project? It's a 12,000 sq. ft. single-family residence.

Err, I live very, very far from you, but my email is in my profile, feel free to drop me a line if you want!

> I'm not really sure smart house devices are ready yet for non programers to play with but as a dev, it'd be a huge amount of fun getting it to work :)

For me I agree until it starts to feel like a job and you wish you had a home that let you relax and debugging wasn't a prerequisite of relaxation.

That's why for me the manual override is a requirement. The house must work even when I'm not finished or if I decide to refactor my implementation or if I decide to change software platform. I see a smart house as being a fun project to tinker with that can give me benefits but if the house doesn't work because of some software issue and I need to fix it before I can relax then that project would quickly not be much fun anymore.

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