The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering – Stacey on IoT

• esphome

  227 7,780 9.9 C++

  ESPHome is a system to control your ESP8266/ESP32 by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems.

  

If you're up for some light soldering, I'd recommend picking up a few Sonoff Basics and/or wall plugs and then flashing them with ESPHome (https://esphome.io/). These devices are simple and cheap ($5-6 each), basically just an ESP8266 chip connected to a relay, a button, and a status LED. You have to solder to attach four pins to the board so you can flash it, then you can close it up forever. Future updates happen over-the-air.

I am far from being an electrical engineer, and found that these guides, plus a few YouTube videos, got me to the point where this feels routine. I now have over a dozen in my house, controlling all manner of things.

I've also had fun installing temperature and humidity sensors to Wemos D1 Minis ($2-$3, basically just an ESP8266 chip on a development board) to monitor climate around the house. During the winter, houseplants really like to have higher humidity... we bought a bunch of dumb humidifiers at goodwill, installed Sonos Basic relays inside them, and set rules for them to turn on when the humidity in the room drops too low.

• templates

  83 309 9.2 HTML

  Tasmota Device Templates Repository. Your one stop shop to get templates for devices running Tasmota! (by blakadder)

I use Home Assistant and a mixture of Z-wave and wifi devices. The way I choose wifi devices is by finding which ones can have Tasmota firmware flashed to them.

For example, in Australia, many hardware stores sell “Grid Connect” devices. This is a cloud solution for the likes of Arlec. However, most of these devices can be flashed with Tasmota. This removes the cloud and keeps everything in house using MQTT. Security is WPA2 and TLS. I run my IOT devices on a separate VLAN and use 2.4Ghz network as it seems to have more coverage and is more reliable.

Here is a list of >2000 devices which can take the Tasmota firmware:

https://templates.blakadder.com/

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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