Show HN: Bitdog – a completely hackable home automation toolset | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bitdog – a completely hackable home automation toolset

30 pointsbitdog_io16 comments

Hello Hacker News,

My co-founder and I have spent the better part of years developing a completely hackable Home Automation toolset that runs on a Raspberry Pi, or any machine running Linux.

With just a Raspberry Pi and a $45 Z-Wave dongle (https://www.amazon.com/Aeotec-Z-Stick-Z-Wave-create-gateway/...), you can run a complete home automation system!

Our hub will support any Z-Wave or Z-Wave plus device.

We are cloud hosted service that doesn't require you to purchase any proprietary hardware. Our hub software runs on NodeJS and is completely open source. We encourage developers to make a publish extensions.

We of course have published an app that allows the creation of dashboards for quick actions, reports, detailed logging, automations, and integration with Alexa. We are currently working on integrating with Google Home.

We consider our differentiating features our reliability, focus on privacy, and configurability.

Our site is https://www.bitdog.io

Thank you,

-Artel DeVries

A similar project is Home Assistant, which has a bajillion and one plugins (everything from Plex to garage door openers to online air quality APIs). https://www.home-assistant.io

I have also been keeping an eye on Mozilla's IOT project[1], which also runs on an RPi.

1: https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/

That is a great point. Home Assistant has a ton of plugins. What we have though is an app that works out of the box, doesn't require poking holes in your router, and most importantly, we allow you to report on your home automation data for up to two years.

> We consider our differentiating features our reliability, focus on privacy, and configurability.

Just curious: What data are you basing this on?

> We are cloud hosted service…

And that doesn't strike you as incompatible with your nods toward privacy and reliability?

Yea, I'm interested in toying with home automation (especially if I can tie my garden into it), but it all has to be usable without the internet.

We are achieving this by not selling or giving away our data to 3rd parties.

Personally, I'll need a stronger commitment to this than a comment on HN. Also, can you answer my first question?

Artel, while most comments here have been pretty destructive, almost all have been asking what are the differences between bitdog and hass, and you failed to address this point. What's the point of posting something here if you are not going to answer basic questions from people giving feedback?

Is there a page that differentiates why this is better than some of the OSS options available? HomeAssistant and OpenHAB are the two main options I know of, and both support way more than just z-wave.

The page mentions the product is open source, does that mean it's possible to run it without sending all of my data to your servers?

I'm all for new competitors for home automation, but if I have to sign up for a trial or pay a subscription, I'm less likely to even bother trying it if there isn't a huge advantage to do so..

How would you compare this with home assistant?

I think it's cool your tackling this space. I would love an open source system that supported my Control 4 hardware. Having to swap out hardware is a deal breaker for me.

Nice!

We appreciate the welcoming feedback!

Very :)

Grab the reins, not grab the reigns. Immediate grammatical turn off.

Thanks for the great feedback. If you would like a free subscription for a year, let me know.

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