This month we’re going to look at some of the reasons smart homes can work against us. We’ll be considering hardware issues running self-hosted systems as well as what happens if vendors decide they don’t want to provide certain services any longer, if they want to introduce a subscription charge or that they simply become bankrupt and can no longer function. Finally, we’ll be looking at ways that we can mitigate these problems by having stable equipment at home and running services to keep traffic in our home networks.
The first thing to discuss is unreliable hardware running any self-hosted systems. Your author experienced problems for a number of months when running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi with micro-sd cards, followed by reliability problems using a virtual machine on an old desktop PC. Understandably, during this time the spousal disapproval factor was a thing, while we were both very frustrated with constantly needed reboots, failing microsd cards and so on. Lesson one is to purchase suitable kit to ensure a good experience. Your author’s home runs a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as the main host and is booted from a 240GB USB SSD, which has proven to be a rock-solid combination and provides enough RAM and processing power for everything that’s required.
One of the earliest protocols to be used for home automation purposes was X10. This was first designed in the mid-1970s and could operate both using radio frequencies to communicate with devices and also as a signal injected over the mains power lines. This was originally controlled using dedicated controllers, but devices with serial port connections eventually became available, which were used to enable devices to be computer controlled. While being largely superseded
