Anyone Automating Their Home or Use 'Smart' Devices?

Community
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Oh yeah, I have the Piper and nest on an IoT wifi interface on the pfsesne box, cannot talk to Lan.

Also should I mention PoE cameras? Finally put in some reolinks and the OEM software is impressive! I thought I’d have to buy blue Iris or go through months of hell getting zone minder working. Now I just need to apply security to the reolink VM I need to spin up. The idea is to use a win10 vm I have to run the client and save to a zfs dataset on my freenas, and use vlan tagging or even a whole nother interface on pfsense plus port forwarding. I want to go further though, wondering what can be done to add some layers of security.

Right now they are on the lan behind Nat, I use openvpn on my phone to access them when away

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That is the only legitimate reason to get smart devices for your home. It makes the life of disabled people so much easier. However if you are young/healthy I would say no to “smart” devices. Especially the ones that require internet connection. It’s unnecessary hassle if they go wrong.

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I do not have any real automation yet. I dont plan to go the “commercial” route with any automation in the future.

My goals are minimal and security focused. I would like to have magnet switches on my door locks and garage door to detect their position. This is simple enough to accomplish with RPi or Arduino. When I start, this will be my goal.

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I have seen some guys use Ras Pis for HVAC and power control. I would recommend against this since you have mains and HVAC equipment hooked up to it. Because it is not UL certified if you house lights on fire insurance companies will not cover the damage.

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There are safeties on the furnace, you know this.

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I 100% agree that a RPi should not be used for mains power. My application will be low voltage, 5-12 volt DC power.

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That is all cool that was for those who get carried away.

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I’m now finding the limitations of Reolink’s software if one is not using their NVR, such as lack of video review via the app and windows client even when connected to the LAN- and thanks to another thread- not too happy that the Reolinks are phoning home right out of the box. That said… its darn convinient I do not have to set anything up to get push notifications. I was thinking I would need to buy blue iris.

I still might buy blue iris so that I can segment these Reolinks, firewall them to stop talking to Reolink homebase and leverage blue iris to be my source of notification and review of video. As it sits I get a notification of movement, then I need to VPN in to get into the samba share to then download the video for review, so blue iris is probably worth the $$.

Anyone use the built in webcam software on synology boxes? How do you like it. I had a chance to get a Synology 75% off MSRP from a friend and passed on it (already use FreeNAS)- then later realized I should have bought it for so many reasons- easier GUI (FreeNAS kicks my ass), lots of extra features like the camera software, low power consumption, 4 port iscsi support for my ESXI boxes etc. Damn…