I’ve recently moved house and have a bit more space to get back into a neglected hobby, electronics. The nice thing about electronics now days is that you can whack in a cheap micro-controller that does most of the heavy lifting and then fit together sensors, switches, relays, radios and pretty much anything else with pretty much minimal experience much like a jigsaw puzzle.
An interesting project is a good way to scratch this itch so I have decided to try make my house a little smarter. After much research it appears that most home automation and IoT devices are security nightmares as they rely on outside servers or blindly trust other devices they connect to. This also means that any cloud connected device is beholden to the company remaining in business and providing on-going support for it.
My conditions in anything home automated are:
- No Internet Access – I don’t want my individual devices ever needing to access the internet.
- Ability to Reprogram – I want the ability to overwrite whatever is put there by default by the vendor
- Locally Hosted – Both the data and brains of the system must be locally hosted.
- Must be non-smart consistent – By this I mean that how one interacts with devices physically should not need to be changed. No always-on switches that break when turned off.
- Must not rely on central software – This leads on from the previous point in that things should work even if the central controlling software is unavailable. No pressing a switch and… nothing happens due to the server or WIFI being down. Everything that interacts with the real world must have the logic built directly in and work independently as much as possible.
This provides an ideal opportunity to relearn electronics by creating the circuits that are useful to have and to document the whole process in case it helps someone else or at the very least provides some entertainment.
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