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Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment
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this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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HomeAssistant...this is the way!
Never in a million years would I buy always-online trash when I could just use Home Assistant and control my devices locally.
Also, ESPHome is crazy good. It's honestly not that hard or experiensive to take a dumb device and splice in some non-cloud home assistant capacity w/ ESPHome
If I can't run it with home assistant, I'm buying a dumb device instead.
Trying to buy an automated feeder for my cat was a nightmare. Why does everything have a camera and require an internet connection to China? Everything was on tuya! It's fucking ridiculous. You don't need cloud processing for this shit. Finding something that's just a timer with a battery backup that wouldn't fail to feed my cat if the power or internet briefly went out took way too much effort.
Trying to set up home assistant for my parents' house, I started seeing the point of all the cloud stuff. My dad wants to have home automation but he completely lacks the technical skills to run and maintain a home assistant instance and he's completely unwilling to learn. Even after I've done all the difficult parts for him, he always manages to have trouble. The majority of those troubles could be avoided with a cloud managed service. I'm guessing there are way more people like my dad than there are who could be assed with setting up a 100% local smart home. Because that does require more than a little bit of technical inclination.
hey, I understand what you are saying. and it may be difficult for the average user to maintain an operate homeassistant. is it the same for their cloud offering, i.e. nabu casa. in case you evaluated that, i would love to hear your take on it. (i have been with homeassistant for 3 years, and totally enjoy it, but i do share the concern that it is not well suited for the non technically inclined)
If anyone is still looking for one, I got myself this model (the one for 2 cats but it works the same): https://petlibro.com/collections/granary/products/petlibro-granary-automatic-pet-feeder?variant=39426616557615
The company has other models with wifi and cameras as well as an app but this particular model is just a dumb timer based machine.
Yeah, I ended up getting a cheaper shittier one to test out if it would work out well but that's pretty much the one I settled on upgrading to eventually. It's a bit harder to get cheaply in Australia.
Any chance you'd know the answer to this (or a better community to ask in) -
I need something I can hook into a projector's HDMI port. All I need from it is mirroring my phone and occasionally playing Plex. I don't really want to get a smart device if I don't have to
Nowhere near an expert on the subject, but I wonder if a Raspberry Pi will suffice?
Not sure. I know you can run Plex, but idk about phone mirroring
Remote control is the fiddly bit with the Pi. You can use a wireless mouse but it’s a bit meh. I’m just waiting for the day for someone to solve that dilemma, then our “smart” TVs are being forcibly made “dumb”.
This may be a bit convoluted, but I think its the only way. You have to install 2 apps on the PC and phone. One for controlling the PC, and second for your phone to stream the display to PC. The first one, I don't know any good one but maybe some simple SSH is suffice. The second is scrcpy. It is an app that lets you stream your phone to the desktop/PC
Edit: Forgot to mention, to SSH to your desktop from the phone, you can use JuiceSSH or tmux
you need a !sbcs@lemux.minnix.dev single board computer with a touch of linux to setup the image.
Just took a look there. Man they really seem to hate anything that isn't 1000% open source or made in China.
This is probably what I'm gonna end up doing, but hopefully I can find a better community
Not sure what you were expecting. You're not going to find much support for Windows or Mac which means you need both good tools and support so it's open source or bust. The only time I ever run into problems is when Chinese developers like OrangePi require shitty windows flash utility for flashing rockchip IMG files.
I've been eyeing one of those Intel HDMI sticks for this. I have been using my steam deck for stuff lately and KDE connect is really good, or leverage something like Kodi.