Welcome to episode 330 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on April 14th, 2023.
This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you today, Ben and Scott take a break from the cloud to talk about some other tech, mainly how they use home assistant from home automation of devices to monitoring network attached storage or their NAS devices and some of their tips and tricks for how they've run in configured home assistant.
Have you ever thought about putting a smart lock on your office door? No, I can't . So maybe for those who are watching video on YouTube, I have these two really big French doors on either side of me and they're both, well, one goes to the exterior so I can totally lock that one. Nobody's coming in, but the other one's basically a big glass bifold door and yeah, no real good way to lock that one. So we'll see. Maybe someday, but uh, not today.
Not today. I could, cuz I just have a normal office door. But that's one of the steps I need to do because otherwise kids can barging in. Remember to shut it today. It's not locked , so fingers crossed. Oh, they don't come flying in. All right, we shall see. So I got one for you today. We're gonna take a little bit of a diversion. A diversion, although I don't think it's too much of a diversion from what we were just talking about in terms of controlling my home from my stream deck. Is it.
It's in the same vein, but I would like to talk to you today about home assistant. So we've talked about stream deck automation in the past. I think we've talked a little bit about home automation, so smart locks and what else, outlets, things like that. But I, I was getting kind of annoyed. So I live a multi PC life. I have a MacBook and then I have two Windows laptops that are here for work as well. So I spend my day going back and forth between two Windows laptops and a MacBook.
And when I'm on those devices I want things to be the same, particularly when it comes to peripherals. So that's pretty easy to set up as far as things like my mouse and keyboard, my mouse and keyboard. I'll go into a USB switch and I've just got a little button on there. I hit the button on the top and it switches and cycles between 1, 2, 3, 4 and I'm just switching between PCs that you know, all have the same USB cord plugged into them.
But what was really irking me that it wasn't the same was my stream deck. I like that consistency of the same buttons being in the same places and being able to execute all of the same actions along the way.
So what I was doing was on my Mac I have a whole bunch of home kit controlled devices and those home kit controlled devices or my non-home kit devices that are exposed to home kit via HomeBridge, I was writing shortcuts and then exposing those shortcuts as.app files as just apps that I could run. And then just from the stream deck launching those apps and and letting things get to where they needed to be. That didn't help me at all in Windows Land.
Like there's no button on the stream deck in Windows Land that says, hey, run this Apple shortcut and there's not even a REST API or, or anything like that that you can call, or at least not one that I could find that was gonna make any of this work. So I kind of needed a new way to interact consistently with all of my devices from a stream deck across multiple computing platforms. So in my head that meant having a little bit of glue to hold it all together.
And I know in the past you've mentioned home assistant, particularly when you write dashboards that consume terabytes of data a month on your data plan and take you down and and pull, you wonder Yeah. I don't, I haven't had that happen again though. Good. It only happened once. . That's all good.
So I went down the path of doing home assistant and I just kind of wanted to talk a little bit about it being that you're a home assistant aficionado and, and you're doing it, I kind of wanna wanted to walk through maybe a little bit about what I did along the way, what I discovered and maybe you know, some things that I am missing in my life because I just don't know that they exist yet. Alright. And hopefully I don't let you down with my home assistant.
Officina. . I'm gonna make up words today too. We shall see. I hope you don't. I have high hopes for you. I have gone down this route I think about two years ago I switched everything over from, I was using the smart things with Samsung and I switched everything over to home assistant.
I think it was about two years ago now and I actually put a couple tablets in the house where we used to have alarm panels and hooked up our alarm to HO assistant or our sensors rather our home sensors for our alarm to home assistant, which I'm still working on two years later. But it is absolutely an interesting path to go down. There's a lot of things you can do with it.
I will say because I've always been smart things in home assistant, I have not paid much attention to Apple Home Kit, like I get all my devices so they tend to work with not Home Kit and I don't really care if they work with Home Kit or not. So that might be where we differ a little bit. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts, your questions and your whatever else you have on home assistant.
. Uh, well when it comes to, I'm hoping the whole matter thread thing bakes out someday and, and this all kind of gets fixed and you don't have to worry. About be so nice. Uh, a and ecosystem for a thing. But for the most part my philosophy is everything should be in home kit cuz that meets the wife acceptance factor. It's, it's at a significant threshold and my wife can use things in there but then there's just other stuff that I want to do with it that maybe my wife
doesn't want to do. So, you know, we're both in Florida so we have sprinklers in our yards. I like to be able to control my sprinkler from my phone kind of thing. Like it would be nice to see the weather and control the schedule on my sprinkler from the same place that I'm turning lights on and off. So that's where I need kind of a, a little bit more glue to kind of bring it together and make things work along the way.
So I think I set out on this path cuz I had a couple distinct goals, like I said the first one being I need to execute home automations from my stream deck, like very specifically from my stream deck. And I need them to run the same across multiple platforms. So that means I need a stream deck plugin that's going to work on both Mac and Windows and then let me do things against it.
And Home Assistant kind of fills that gap for me and gets things to where they need to be so I can turn on my camera and turn on my lights and I, I can do other nifty things like see temperatures and like you said, sensors are kind of first party citizens within, within home assistance. So you, you do get some really cool capabilities in there.
So for everything that I wanna be able to do for my streamed deck, like if I look down, I've got my camera, like my webcam here, I have my key light over on the side there so I can turn my key light on and and turn my key light off and, and that's over on a, a smart plug. I can control my fan which sits up above me, like my ceiling fan and my can lights and then I can also take a look at things like the temperature and the speed of the fan.
You know, am I rotating at a hundred percent 50%, things like that. And then, you know, home assistant itself, I think the really cool thing about it is beyond being able to do all this stuff for my stream deck, like I found there's some added benefits to it with the dashboards that are built into it. So I've got a bunch of old Kindle fires laying around the house that okay, you know, we bought for the kids couple years ago, they're like older Kindle Fire HD eight s or or things like that.
I they're like 50, $60 devices I think today. Yep. If you went and bought 'em. I took those and through an app called Fully Kiosk on those I, I don't know if you're familiar with with Fully Kiosk. I am. That's what I have running on mine.
Yeah. So it's an Android app that lets you turn an Android device into basically a lockdown kiosk mode kind of thing where you can com point it to a URL and then lock down to the URL and because Home Assistant is all just web-based but it's all running locally like kind of web server locally within your home, then it's nice and easy to take fully and point it just at a URL and say hey displayed this thing. So now I've got a couple of tablets laying around the house that anybody can
just pick up and unlock. Uh, they can control lights and see cameras and you know, if the sprinklers happen to be running and they need to shut 'em off cuz they wanna go outside and do something like you can just do that all from the tablet and it's just a slider or a button click away or, or a button press away which has been super kind of nifty to just see it, it all working and then add a benefit of fully kiosk if folks ever go down this
path, there's a free version and there's a paid version. The paid version gives you access to the sensors on your Android devices as well. So you can turn your tablets into things like cameras within your house too.
So if you were to take that tablet and say mount it to a wall and plug it in so it was there all the time as as a kind of a smart home control center you can have it do things like unlock the tablet when you walk into it and be able to view the camera on that tablet as like a native security camera in your house without having to go out and purchase anything extra. So super cool. It's definitely like not an easy tool to get on board with though it was some trials and tribulations to get it all.
Running. I didn't know you were gonna do that or I would've sent you the videos I just posted in the chat and Discord about wall mounted dashboards for home assistant with a fire tablet and fully kiosk and he like will go through and walk you through all of that stuff so you can just watch the YouTube video and follow along. That's a kiosk part. I think the kiosk part is easy. That's configuring an app that like home assistant itself. It was the whole home assistant stuff.
Is a bit of a beast to get up and running. It's not like sitting down with one of the inguez be it you know, Amazon smart home device or doing Home kit through you know, hey whatever kind of thing. Or even Google Home, anything like that. Like it's a bit of a geeks kind of paradise. It's, I would say it's not Premiere Mortals the way it's set up.
I don't think I've ever played around with as much yammel as I have with this and I've done some pretty complicated things in in Kubernetes and I was like this goes above and beyond. Like I broken so much stuff just by having bad yammel and and lack of a linter.
Yes I would agree with that like home assistant in and of itself and that was one thing that was like on the fence of, to your point, Amazon or Home Assistant or Wink or one of those where it is geared, I would say more towards just normal consumers. They wanna plug it in and click a few buttons and get going. Home assistant has significantly more work involved than getting it set up and configured, especially depending on which way you went.
So I don't know which way you went when you set up home assistant mine is running on a raspberry pie for, so I set up the whole raspberry pie with home assistant and then I had to go figure out the right Z-wave and ZigBee SB adapters that I wanted to use with the raspberry pie and would work with the raspberry pie and all the devices I have.
And then above and beyond that I actually went out and bought a power over ethernet hat for my raspberry pie so that I could power the raspberry pie off of my Unify network switch that's P oe. So theoretically I can do a remote reboot anytime on my home assistant by just cycling the poe on this particular port on my switch.
Gotcha. If anybody wants to go down this path, and I didn't know this when I started, there's a couple installation paths for home assistant and the functionality that you get on each installation path varies. So if you install on a raspberry pie, you get one set of functionality. If you install via Docker container, you get a kind of similar but a subset of functionality within that. Limited. Yeah so it's definitely more limited.
So, so you get more flexibility and control cuz hey it's a container, right? Containers are a nice, super, super easy and simple. I haven't found anything that I'm missing. So I, I went with the container install and unlike you, I don't need to have ZigBee or anything like that. Like all my devices are already somehow smart, home connected or they're already connected to a web service someplace. So that could be like my security cameras are all just
Arlo cameras. My smart outlets tend to be TP link, like casa kinds of things. You know, sensors like temperature sensors, motion sensors, those are all tied to my thermostat, which is an NI cobi and all that stuff just kind of ties together and comes in. So it, it wasn't so much that I needed to run home assistant as a smart home hub. I just needed it to be like an aggregator for all the web services and not let, let me come in and click the buttons and do all the things with. It. Got it.
See and mine is my hub like 90% of my smart home house will work if I lose internet because everything is connected locally. Like my doorbell is a local connection locally connected, all my ZigBee Z-Wave, all of those are connected right to home assistant on a switch on a battery backup. So there's a lot of my house from like the smart switches perspective, some of the sensors that would continue to work.
Now granted I don't need light switches if I don't have power, but if my internet goes out, most of my stuff would continue to work probably with a couple exceptions. Yeah. You know, power going out mine mine's all on a Docker container running off my nas so as long as my NAS stays up I'm, I'm good to go. But I have other problems if the NAS goes down cuz I also run pie hole in a Docker container on my NAS. . Yeah, my scenario is very much I want this to be my hub for my entire house.
I use it in a similar way. So I put a screenshot in the chat of just kind of like the big overview dashboard that that I put together along the way for, you know, different rooms I wanna be able to view and and being able to control things within those various rooms. Yeah, you definitely went more nerdy. Like mine is very much, well and mine is geared a little bit more towards the wife acceptance factor because of the way I use mine.
So the screenshot I just put in Discord is my main panel that is on both of our tablets. So we have one tablet by the back door of our house where we used to have an alarm panel and then we have another tablet in our bedroom where we used to have an alarm panel. And the way I have mine set up is all of these, if you're home is wired from an alarm, there's actually power going to that alarm panel from wherever your alarm is wired into.
So all of my tablets are powered off of u s BBC via a low power, the five volt to AMP connection. Mm-hmm that is actually coming from where all of our alarms are centrally wired into. And then I put this tab or this panel on those two tablets in those two locations. So we can turn off lights, we can turn on sprinklers, I mean the kids use it to see the weather. I have a weather radar map on there,
the doorbell is on our panels. So if someone comes and rings the doorbell, the kids know hey I can go run and look at the tablet and actually see who's standing at the door versus like running to the door and yelling who is it? Which kind of gives away the fact that somebody's home at least a little bit. But that's where I went with my panels and I've created a few other ones that I use for myself. But that's kind of the route I went with home assistant and tying all
those different devices in. But then to your point, these same switches for lights, for sprinklers, for the shades in our house that go up and down, I can also control all of those from my stream deck.
And I started playing with sensors. Not all the sensors work, but if you connect your phone or your tablets or any of those, you actually have sensors in there for like your phone battery and your iPad battery and there are a slew of sensors to your point that you can can connect a home assistant and actually watch all of these different things through Home Assistant that maybe you couldn't do with one of the Amazon Google Smart thing. Wink one of those.
Yeah, so it's a, I started down a path of thinking this is gonna be just for smart devices in my home and then it kind of became a little bit more cuz it, you know, simple things like, oh great, I can see the weather with the weather forecast and have that side by side with the weather projection that's coming outta my sprinklers so I can see like, hey, into the future, when should I be turning this on, turning it off if I wanna do it manually.
But there's all these integrations for other things that aren't necessarily smart home, but you really might want to be able to just see what's going on and control them. So I'm, I'm a big Plex user and there's a Plex integration and if you turn on the Plex integration, when somebody's watching something on, on the Plex server, I can actually see like, oh hey the kids are out in the living room, they're watching the Plex server, here's the user that's logged in, here's what they're watching.
And if I want them to get off the tv, I don't even have to get up and walk out there, I can just hit the pause button straight from home assistant and you know, I put together like a little dashboard like you said, just for myself. Like, Hey, I'm gonna run this for my phone or, or from my iPad and, and it's gonna be kind of a dedicated view just for me to be able to do things like that. You can also control Xboxes and all those kinds of things.
So I've got it set up so that I can remote control my Xbox, like hey, boot it up and turned it on ahead of time. So if it has to downloaded any updates, it'll, it'll go ahead and and get all that stuff into where it needs to be. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
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Yeah and that's one thing I like you mentioned some of those that'll also do Rokus, it's supposed to do Apple TVs. My Apple TVs haven't always worked that well with Home Assistant. It also, I don't know if you've, I can't remember what NA you have. I think you have, I have a Sonology nas, it pulls in for my sonology nas. I was just looking 59 different entities so I can actually monitor, like drive Health of all the drives in my NAS through that fan speeds.
I can't even remember what all I should go look and see C P U loads when it was last booted disc temperatures cashed memory, I was just kind of flipping through here. Yeah, different, there's a bunch of different sensor temperatures in the nas but I can watch all of those different details about my NAS right in home assistant as well. I didn't even think about doing the nas but it turns. Out you think about watching your nas. Yeah. So so that, that would actually be an interesting one.
Space continues to be an issue on the nas just as uh, life continues to go on. I I I need, I need, I need more terabytes all the time on that thing. It's been really kind of fun to go down that path and configure some of this stuff. There were a couple things I think that got me when you go out and you watch YouTube videos or you just pull up like articles on home assistant, everybody's stuff always looks super crisp, right? If you showed me your picture of your dashboard, I would go like,
that's awesome, it does that out of the box. And the answer is like, no, it really doesn't do that out of the box. There's probably a little bit of work that you have to put into it. To me the power in this stuff is being able to put the integrations in and then being able to put this UI on top of it that makes it friendly and easy to use. But building out that UI was really just horrible like it was, it was not fun in any way,
shape or form. So I think a couple of things, if you go down the path with installing home assistant, I like if anybody has access to a NAS or you know you just want to kind of run it locally in a VM or you have an extra raspberry pie around and you wanna kick the tires and try it out like this has been one of the more fun like geeky smart home things that I've done in a while.
Like it was super frustrating but also made me feel like, okay good, I'm doing something that's in my domain in my wheelhouse and like it's, it's kind of fun to play around with this and put this together. So once you get it installed, the very first thing that you should do is go and install the home assistant community store, which is hacks and just get that out of the way.
Like so there's this thing out there, it's super easy to get on board with, you just go to hacks hacs.xyz and you do that and then Hacks gives you access to all of these cool integrations like kind of extra integrations, particularly front end integrations, like all the pretty layouts and the weather cards and all those kinds of things. So one of the things you'll run into with Home Assistant is there's this thing called Lovelace, which is kind of what all the dashboards are built on by default.
And Lovelace is a hot piece of garbage. Like it's very limited in what it does. You wanna be able to do things like I, hey I want to configure a new dashboard and I want it to be in a grid with 10 columns and I want each column to be 200 pixels.
Like yeah not gonna happen with Lovelace, but you can go out and you can install these extra integrations which are basically just like JavaScript integrations that sit on the front end and you control 'em with Yammel and then they just do all the rendering and and all the things for you. So the home assistant part, I think getting it installed is the easy part. Like you pick,
hey am I gonna do Raspberry Pie, am I gonna do Docker? Like you said, that depends a little bit on you know, maybe what you want to do with it. But from there like the next step is building out that first dashboard. And I wouldn't recommend anybody go down the path of trying to build a a default dashboard. Like just go out and install a couple integrations that'll make your life easier. So the first one is layout card,
which is this awesome grid-based thing. Basically like I said, you can come in and you can create a new dashboard and you can say hey this dashboard has four columns and each column is an equal width of 300 pixels. And then that can be like the dashboard that goes under your tablet cuz you know your dashboard is 1200 pixels wide and you'll kind of be off to the races and
running. The other thing that you should do is you should install a front end integration, which is called Mushroom and that brings you these things called mushroom cards. And mushroom cards are just way prettier than all the defaults built in cards along the way. Like you know, you install this thing, you hook it up to your smart stuff and then you go to like the overview or like whatever the default dashboard is and it's just a bunch of check boxes and it
looks like garbage. But if you spend probably, I don't know, I probably spend about four hours on a bunch of different dashboards kind of like playing around and moving things around and getting used to it. I could probably create a new one pretty easily in like 30 minutes now if I really had to spin up a new one and get it moving around to wherever it needs to be. I'm trying to think what I installed through. So this is one thing for me.
Sometimes the UI is not always straightforward, like where I can never figure out how to see what I installed through hacks. Hacks is rough. So if you go into hacks and then integrations and scroll all the way to the bottom, it'll show you what you've installed there. So I only have two Integr, I only have two integrations in Hacks. I have Hacks itself,
which is its own integration. And then I have uh, my Arlo cameras needed a plug in that was in Hacks cuz it's not from the kind of mainline home assistant repo. Everything else that I do in Hacks is a front end thing and front end things are all just about the way cards display and look. So each one of these things that you see on a dashboard, which is like a button to turn a light on or a slider for controlling dimming on a light that's all rendered in a card.
And this is where I was really impressed by it was you have all this flexibility when it comes to bringing in all these default cards. Like if you look at your Alexa app and you're like, okay great, I I would really like that weather tile to look differently. You can't do anything with it. Same thing in Home Kit or Google Home. Like you're locked into that ecosystem And this was, I could make it look however I wanted. I could put a background on it.
Like if I wanted to have you know, each dashboard with a picture of the room that it's actually in behind it, I could do all that stuff and just make it look however I wanted to. And that was the really like powerful part to me was having these kind of different integrations or different ways to do things. Right? Like you know one of the really fun ones is Mushroom has a card for lights where you can always have the dimmer slider visible.
So if you're used to maybe like Home Kit or Google Home or things like that, typically when you click on a light it pops up another window and then you have to slide your finger up and down to do it. In my home assistant dashboards, the sliders are always visible, they're always right there. So I can just tap the light to turn it on and off. I control what that action is and then the sliders just right there.
Like it's just a quality of life improvement that I don't need to click on eight things to get it done. I have not used Mushroom, I'm installing mushroom Better Sliders right now. Mushrooms really cool. If you look at the screenshot that I put in the chat for like my overview dashboard, like it's got all these like little cards where you can just pull in entity information. So that's all just chips. So they, they're they're called mushroom chips or you can see like I have a section for
my rooms. So each one of those is an entity mushroom card. So it's just a straight entity card. Like you would have like hey pull in a sensor. So I had it pull in like the temperature sensors for those rooms. But because the cards are adaptable when you click on that room, like say you click on my living room, it takes you to a sub view dashboard which then has all the devices in that room and then it's got a nice big back button so you can kind of go back to the
overview dashboard. So for all that stuff, like when you're in my living room, I wanna be able to control the Plex server and my Xbox, but I don't always wanna see those things. So that's the other thing is you can control all that navigation and and just kind of get things to where they're a little more user friendly. Which was something that like I definitely needed to be able to throw this on a tablet and you know, get my wife to be able to u.
To use it. Yeah, I haven't played with Mushroom, I'm gonna have to go do that. So I found a different one. I wonder if it's this, I wonder what the difference is. I found mushroom dash better sliders but it wasn't just mushroom by itself. A. Mushroom comes with its own set of sliders in it. So you might wanna just try those and see. But the cool thing is like it's just an installed away from you.
Like you can go into hacks. Yeah and it's, you know, it's all a gooey if you want it to be a gooey, which I highly recommend cuz Yammel is fricking horrible. You know you just click add this thing and it, it refreshes your web browser and then boom you're done. Like you just go add that new integration and And you're off to the races. Yeah. There's also some nice add-ons that you've installed. Have you got 'em played with the add-ons that you can install yet?
This is a big difference between raspberry pie and docker installations is I don'ts have, I don't have an add-on store in mine. Oh. So in my add-on store I have a couple installed one, there's an SSH add-on. So I can SSH and like configure stuff via SS H and I use that one a ton.
The one I use all the time is someone actually wrote a add-on for Visual Studio code and I think they maybe ran into some copyright stuff because now it's called Studio code Server, but it's essentially Visual Studio in the browser running as an add-on to home assistant. So when I need to go reconfigure yammel or reconfigure files, I can essentially open up uh, visual studio in the browser right within home assistant and go tweak code on those files. I. Got a tip for you.
So in the hacks store there's an integration called config. Hold on, I gotta blur some stuff in here because , it has like my longitude latitude in it and somebody might figure out where I live. Let's see, what else do I need to blur? So Stephanie,
no I think that'll be okay. All sounds good. Whatever. I'll blur, I'll blur some more in here just in case cuz I don't, I don't know what I'm gonna expose to word or not but if you install this thing called config, you don't need an S ssh add-on or anything else like that, you can, you just get a new item in your kind of sidebar which is config and then all your yammel. So your configuration yammel. Yep.
And then all your sub yammel for you know, your sensors or your groups or your scripts, even your themes, you can just all do them right from within the web browser there. You don't need visual studio or anything else. So the reason that I don't miss add-ons is from everything I've seen add-ons are basically just more docker containers. Like you can think of them as as just containerized apps that are now gonna run alongside your home assistant installation.
So for most of the things that add-ons give you the nicety of it is there's a one click button within the home assistant interface to go say, hey go install this add-on. Yeah. You know, if you wanna do like MQ for message queues or like rabbit or things like that, there's a one click button to go ahead and do it. But you can always just go configure that service yourself cuz all that stuff is it's, it's just a really a docker container at the of day.
Another docker container. Yep. You can always go spin up those containers on your own and and get 'em to where they need to be. But I highly recommend that config add-in too. Like that was a huge quality of life thing because before that I was either S SSHing to my NAS or going into the NAS web interface and using like a text editor on there and that was not fun. Have to hop back and forth save add. So now you can just edit all the yammel from within the web interface.
Yeah, I'll go look at that. That's a lot like with the studio code server add-on does only it gives you, so I get all that yammel but then I also get one more pain to the left where you can browse through all the different files and see the whole file structure and all that and modify the various files. You can do that in config too. Yeah, in the config somewhere too. Okay.
Yep. The only thing that you can't do from config is create a new file but once you have kind of the set ready to go, it's not too bad to do. Got it. I can't get to mind right now because I installed Mushroom and now home assistant needs a reboot and I'm waiting for it to reboot. . If you do config, it's a card so it just goes on its own dashboard. So it's basically a little bit of yammel that goes goes onto its own dashboard and and gets itself running So.
Nifty. I'll put the Yammel in the chat for you if you wanna try config because it's just go create and new dashboard and pop that yamble in there and you'd be all set. And pop that right in the dashboard. Yep. The other thing I've done with mine, I don't know if you've played with this Scott, this is part of my ZigBee thing and I put a screenshot of this in the chat as well, is I can also do energy monitoring in home assistance.
So I have smart light switches and those smart light switches have a sensor for the energy that is essentially going through the light switch. So in the dashboard that I posted, you can see that today in particular, the boys apparently left their bedroom light on because their bedroom has used more energy than any other light in our house today. As it does. Yes.
Yeah. So that's another nice one. And I can't remember, I know you can do different energy monitoring as well with various platforms and different devices, but for me too, having this just built right into light switches, as I'm putting all these light switches in, I can go add 'em to my energy dashboard and now I can start charging my kids for leaving their lights on because I know exactly how many kilowatt hours they used in their bedroom. , it's not a bad way to do it.
So some like my CASA outlets come with that monitoring built in. I think uh, Eve has some thread devices that come with that all built in as well. So it becomes one of these things that you, you, you almost, I wish you didn't have to be so premeditated about it, like when you buy it, but you can totally, totally go down that path and kind of make it all work. Yes, absolutely. Anything else you came across ran into, oh,
Adam was asking . So I've, I'm gonna ask you this question cause I'm curious and Adam asked it in the Discord chat. Do you put all of this smart device home assistant network devices on their own segment and network? I do. So I run a separate V A N for my smart devices and because most smart devices don't run on a five gigahertz network, I,
I have a dedicated 2.4 gigahertz network for them running as well. Uh, so if you come into my house, there's kind of Scott's geeky wifi and then there's Scotts HU wifi underscore iot, ot, which is what all my I O T devices join and add onto to. And I found that just to kind of be the easiest way to do it.
Like there's just a ton of like smart home stuff is garbage, right? Like it is, it is the internet of garbage when when it comes to that and stuff is insecure stuff does not like five gigahertz stuff. Typically doesn't like modern wifi authentication protocols. like you're never gonna do WPA three on a smart device, like let alone your, you know, hp like in my case I've got an HP printer that's like five years old sitting
next to me. That thing only does wpa a like yeah, all that stuff is like segmented off in its own area and I live a much better life that way. Most modern from what I've seen, most modern routers include things like Euros have this, euros have a button that says like, Hey turn off five gigahertz for five minutes so I can go join this device to my network. Like I don't even wanna have to mess with that stuff or remember that the button's there, I just go like, Ooh, it's a smart device,
join it to this network over here. It's on its own subnet. It's all static iped into its own, you know, uh, DHCP range. So I just know what each thing is and it all just kind of works for me that way. I have a network, I have not started moving stuff over yet. It is been on my very long list of things to do.
I'm curious with yours, like this is one thing I've started thinking about. One, it's a lot of ports so I could put it on a separate vlan like the tablets that are controlling the smart home, some of that. But then when I start monitoring things like printers and controlling the Roku devices from these and wanting my iPhone to communicate with all my home assistant stuff and all of that, it's a lot of like, I feel like you start opening up those networks so they can communicate
seamlessly with each other anyways. Granted, you don't have to have every port open and,
and they're not all in the same network. But for me, when I started segmenting stuff out, it started turning into a lot of different ports and protocols to figure out so that certain devices that stay on my home network, my phone, my laptop, my printer, my nas, my Unify stuff and then my IOT network and yeah, the getting everything to communicate properly the way I wanted to started seeming like a lot of work.
, I think it comes back to kind of how we provisioned our smart homes and that they're a little bit different in that you have this dependency on smart things and, and ZigBee, again, most of my devices already come with other cloud services that are actually kind of the command and control centers for them. So all I really need to do is have that tablet be able to talk to home assistant or be able to talk to home kit like, and that's easy. Got it. Right.
It's all command and control in the cloud. I don't have anything that has a dependency on running itself off of Home Assistant or off of Home Bridge or, or anything like that along the way. So you're kind of essentially proxying everything through the internet. Your smart home devices are connected to the internet from their v a n, your other stuff is connected to the internet from the other V A n and they both, as long as they can both communicate with the internet most of the time you're fine.
Yes. But I think like it's, it's not a conscientious decision that I made. I think it's more a byproduct of when I set out to do all the smart home stuff. Like I started with home kit land, so I needed everything to talk to Home kit, which really meant that everything was basically a command and controlled in the cloud. If I'd started out like you and, and command and control running locally,
like I think that would've been a different story. I think we, we, we both ended up in similar places as far as like how we interact with it and what we do with it. But the general approach and how those things landed and made it into our homes is vastly different. Right. And for me, having that iot network, I'd really have to sit down and figure out, and I start, I've started doing some of this because I have three different networks.
I have a work network, a network that all the family stuff is on and then I do have that IOT network that I wanna start moving stuff over to. So I've already gone down that route for some things like the printer, what ports do I need opens that I can print from either network and have the printer on one network or like I had some group, uh, some chromecasts for a little bit. How can I actually cast from my laptop on the work network to a
Chromecast sitting on a family network. Now again, I could say, well I need to move that Chromecast or that Roku to the IOT network and then open up those ports so that my computer can cast to Roku or to uh, Chromecast on another network. But it is some work to go down and figure out. And there's a lot of people that have documented what different ports and protocols all these things use.
But that's where some of I've gotten stuck and it's like I don't have eight hours to go , move all my devices and then go in and figure out all the ports that need to be open and then go in and reconfigure all my firewalls so that the work network can communicate with smart home. The home network can communicate with smart homes. Sometimes the work network may need to get to something on the home network. The home network never needs to get to anything on the work network.
And then my wife said, don't ever let anything happen to you because if something does, our house is gonna take over the world and I'm not gonna know how to stop it. Yeah, the worries about Skynet are, are totally valid and and real there. So I hear that same thing as well. I I think like there's, there's a bunch of different approaches you can take with it. Like there's the over the top there's the more midline base approach.
I think in general, if you can go down the path of at least having your devices on a separate subnet kind of segment them out that way just so they're like logically controlled, like, you know, I probably have 80 to 90 different things that are just talking to the network. Like it's way easier to have those in their own space where I can kind of control 'em and see what's on there and, and what's going on.
The other thing is over time I've, I've found like I want the ability to block things like outgoing internet for some devices, right? I I just wanna be able to stop my smart TV from reaching out to the internet all every 10 seconds and saying like, Hey, ping Samsung with, you know, what this person is watching kind of thing. It's not fundamental to the performance of the device. So if I don't need to do that then I, I don't need to do, I don't do that. So I control a little bit of it myself.
Adam was saying he can barely get his wife to use a password manager. And Adam, I feel your pain. . I am the same way. Scott, password, what were you and we talking about this, were you and I talking about getting our wives to use password managers or was I talking about that with somebody else? I've gotten my wife on the password manager train. We should, we, we can talk about that one sometime too.
Maybe we'll come back and visit that one in, in a, in a month or so. So yes, thanks for talking about smart home stuff today. I unfortunately have to drop and get on with the rest of my day. Oh. Yeah, you have your meeting coming up. All right. Yes. Go to your meeting. Thanks Scott, it was fun. We'll talk to you next week. Great. Thanks Ben. Yep. Byebye, if you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes.
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