I had a few free hours recently and decided to have a go at a long-simmering idea: To improve how I manage multiple email accounts. As someone who struggles mightily to cope with distractions (I have the attention span of a gnat), I was hoping to consolidate several separate interfaces into one, simpler, less distracting, more focused client.
Sadly, I wasn’t quite successful – my work emails remain out of reach. But I learned a lot and ended up in at least a better place.
One huge and welcome change in the last decade or so for Web development is that secure connections are ubiquitous. Free certificates are available and most hosting providers make it very easy to obtain, use and renew the certificates automatically. This site, for example, runs on Amazon Web Services and enabling https took not much more effort than ticking a few checkboxes.
Browsers, like Chrome, Firefox and Safari, have also played their part, by gently steering users toward secure connections, warning about sending sensitive information over plain text and switching to https automatically, when available.
My last post was my first in a long time and I’d forgotten how hard they are to write. After a couple of days, I got sick of looking at it and just chopped out a whole bunch of detail and posted it. Here’s a quick follow-up with some bits I left out.
Zigbee vs Z-Wave
Visualisations of my Zigbee (left) and Z-Wave (right) networks.
Zigbee and Z-Wave are low-power, mesh networking protocols aimed at home automation. I lean more toward Zigbee. As mentioned in the article, I started out with several Philips Hue devices (bulbs and motion sensors), which use Zigbee under the hood, and that’s probably the main reason why I have more Zigbee devices (38) than Z-Wave (seven), but not the only reason.
Almost three years ago, deep in the pandemic, my kids got me my first Raspberry Pi. That started me on an adventure with Home Assistant, mostly because it was one of the first search results for “what to do with a Raspberry Pi.”
I’m still going, and learned much since then, so it is time for a quick update.
Snippets from my Home Assistant dashboard. From lighting, through heating and even some infrastructure monitoring (Pineapple, Blueberry and Watermelon are the Pis in my house).
What hasn’t changed
At the start, the foray into Home Assistant was tentative, but what attracted me to it then only got more compelling over time. Being able to use devices from many different manufacturers, without getting stuck in any walled gardens, is still hugely important. I don’t have to decide between an Apple home, an Amazon home, a Philips home or a Google home. With Home Assistant, I can make my home out of the best bits from (almost) anyone, using Home Assistant’s integrations.
For the past six weeks or so I’ve been playing around with home automation. It’s a rather large and complex subject and I’ve only just started, but thought it might be worth writing up what I’ve found so far.
The adventure started when the kids gave me a new Raspberry Pi for my birthday near the beginning of May. I installed Home Assistant on it and, a bit later, Node Red. Then, over the next few weeks, much to my wife’s dismay, I purchased 10 smart light bulbs, a few motion sensors and half a dozen smart plugs – gradually changing the house into a version of HAL. Each time she would come home from work, some wall switch or another would stop working as it did… She’s been very patient!
