this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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Home Assistant. Offline smart home automation you can control.
Home doesn't have to be 100% dumb in 2023. But you have to do a little work for it.
Bonus: your smart home will be more capable and interconnected than any of the commercial smart home options because they are all busy trying to control the entire ecosystem and sue each other. (maybe Matter changes that but I'm not holding my breath)
Also for security cameras, connect them to something like a Synology NAS so you have the recordings locally and then configure a firewall to block the cameras from any internet access.
Viewing the cams remotely just means using a VPN to connect to your network and then connecting to the NAS.
It's possible to maintain privacy/control and still use modern tech.
One thing I would say is that the camera stream will hammer those disks. They will always be busy. I chose not to run this way and instead loaded up a W10 VM with Blue Iris. I have the vm on a dedicated VM server with raid1 SSDs.
My Synology has large disks and does other duties. That’s the main reason I didn’t want that extra I/O.
What kind of SSDs? I hope you bought enterprise or you are going to get a nasty surprise in about a year…
Eh, even if your prediction came true, it is not so nasty if it happens. I have others and rebuilding is an inconvenience. I also have backups.
I went for the Crucial mx500 ones. They seemed to have the more positive reviews when I last checked. We will see.
I use Enterprise drives in mine set up with Synology Hybrid Raid and a full copy of the NAS on another "NAS" (it's actually a USB attached storage from QNAP).
Also, set the video streams to h264 or h265 and the bandwidth is lower.
It's been fine so far.
I'd you're rich enough to own your own security cameras I think you can afford some hard drives.
That’s ridiculous. The disks were far more than the cameras. And why be wasteful of those costs I’ve already shouldered? I am as miserly as I can be when spending on my infrastructure.
If you can't afford the disks I'm wondering how you can afford a house
But I mean, that's the price of security cameras. You just gotta accept you will need to cycle disks every once in a while, and delete old data.
Why do you think I cannot afford more disks? Or a house? You incorrectly assume too much and seem unnecessarily argumentative.
I have already bought the disks and see no reason to work them overly hard for camera surveillance. I worked out another solution that others might be interested in. That’s what this thread is about.
Maybe I should have clarified a bit then, but
I really don't see why you would need to own security cameras if you don't own a house? If you're renting that's not your job, and if you live in an apartment.. Well, why do you need security cameras in your apartment? Unless you own the building?
My point was mostly that like, a couple of disks is not a big expense, and not something I feel is worth fussing over, personally.
“If you’re renting that’s not your job”
Yes, I’d love my landlord to have 24/7 recordings of all my activities, that’s not fucking creepy at all
I swear some of you don’t really think much outside of figuring out what’s convenient for you
Well I did not refer to record inside your home. Usually security cams are outside facing your front lawn, if anything. Also with you having access to the recordings, not the landlord controlling it.
I am positive plenty of renters run surveillance cameras for a myriad of valid reasons. Maybe they don’t trust their landlord or they are nonresponsive, or simply don’t want their belongings stolen or messed with, or have troublesome neighbors or roommates, etc. The world is big and varied with many solid reasons. Open up your scope a bit.
My neighbor got one because their delivery packages kept getting stolen.
Well, I guess that's true. You're right, I probably should have thought a bit more about it, sorry
No worries. We all do this on occasion. Striving to improve is on my daily “To Do” list.
I didn’t realize living in a rented house/apartment puts up a magic barrier that keeps out all security concerns that owners have to worry about.
Also, for security video storage, you don’t (or at least shouldn’t) just slap in some generic drives and go. There are specialized drives made for the always on, always active setup you need for that, and they are much more expensive than standard drives. I just upgraded my NAS with 4 8TB drives, and those cost me just under $1k.
Perhaps he can afford things because he knows how to apply his knowledge to be more frugal with things like this. If you can work around disk lifespan limitations, you'd be wasteful not to do so.
What tics me off is a lot of the big box store brands of cameras don’t allow you to save locally - they don’t bother putting in the feature because then they couldn’t sell you a cloud storage subscription, or they just have the audacity to lock it behind a paywall so you have to pay a subscription to use your own damn hardware.
What do you use for a voice assistant/ speaker mic set up?
That's the only thing holding me back. And the Mycroft stuff blew up. :(
Honestly I rarely use voice controls for my setup. It’s all time/motion triggers. Voice commands are for weird one offs.
This is HomeAssistant’s year of the voice. It’s all built in now; they just released wake word capabilities.
It's really easy to control it with voice by basically replacing Google assistant on an android device. Look up the Wyoming Protocol interaction in Home Assistant
Not OP, but I use Google Assistant at the moment. Gonna switch as soon Home Assistant makes it possible.
You can use Sonos speakers or any generic smart speaker that is not bound to a brand (like Google /Alexa)
Pro tip, Ikea smart speakers are rebranded Sonos at lower prices, and come hidden in all kinds of furniture forms.
However you don't need to wholesale jump to HA and lose voice. For $8 CAD I got the Nabu-casa HA cloud assistant and SSL proxy (portal to your home HA without need to punch holes in firewalls) and their cloud assistant integrates with Google or Alexa.
So you can tie everything together and then move things over to the HA ecosystem as you have time, eventually cutting the Google/Amazon limbs off.
Thanks for this. I am going to look into it.
You supposedly can connect Google home/Alexa to Home Assistant but it's not for the feint of heart. I'm just starting this and it's not a weekend project. Might be a few days before it's up and running.
The main issue holding me back is that I don't want Amazon to link my house electronics to my actual account.
I set it up on its own VLAN and I'm starting to onboard it but hit a bump when it asked for my Amazon account credentials. So when I have some free time, I'm going to create a dummy Amazon account that will be used to control Alexa. Probably hook it up with a Privacy credit card set to burn after the first purchase with a limit of $5.
There is a plan to integrate these more tightly into Home Assistant, but it won't be for a while.
Google because they have the best voice control and I've already given them my data through Gmail, search, and for many years chrome. It's the one compromise I make because the product is good enough it's worth the cost to me. But if you don't want them having your data, your voice options are pretty limited.
Ooh whenever I have the budget for this it looks amazing
It can be a bit of work, but if you’re a tech geek you’ll enjoy shopping for / making compatible devices and getting it all set up.