My Smart Cabin in the Woods

My name is Kyle Ranken. Uh actually I realized that this is my 15th scale uh that I've been to and spoken at. So which is kind of weird when you I've see a lot of friendly familiar faces here. Um so yeah it's great to be here. So um my background is I sort of started off as like a system administrator back when that's what we called ourselves. Kind of pivoted over into security. Um, since then, in between, I've written a number of books about Linux and wrote a column for a long time for Linux Journal magazine. Um, but today we're going to talk about my smart cabin in the woods. So, as a brief introduction, I'm sorry, but I was never really that into home automation. I'm sure there's probably a couple of people in here that are really hardcore into home automation, and you want to like walk into your house and be like movie mode and then all the, you know, disco time and like the disco light comes on, all that stuff. I was never really into that. I'm fine with light switches, frankly. Um, and so most of the I didn't really have a use case that I found compelling. When I was talking to a lot of my friends who were really really hardcore into home automation, they would tell me all the things that they were doing like I guess I don't know. Um, but and and also I should I should also preface this by saying if you are super hardcore into like Home Assistant and and you were hoping to have a talk that does a deep dive into like really hardcore tweaks and tuning or like configuring ESP232 chips to like custom do this isn't that talk. This is like a general purpose anybody never touched home assistant or never touched anything before. This is a general purpose audience kind of thing. We're not going to get really into the into the woods here. All right. So um I wasn't in the home automation then I got a cabin in the woods um actually and it sort of changed my perspective because I finally had a use case that I found home automation in particular something like home assistant could really help with but it's a unique use case when I talked to a lot of my other friends that were in the home automation stuff about that like oh yeah that's weird I that's not really the use case I was thinking of uh for home assistant that's not what I use it for exactly. Um, here's the other thing is I don't go to my cabin to cis admin. I go to my cabin to relax. So, my goal was to have a place where I, again, I have a use case which I'm going to get into, but the goal wasn't to turn this log cabin into some sort of crazy technological thing. Um, and for me to spend all of my time tweaking and tuning it and getting it just like I wanted things to be very offtheshelf, very simple to use because I go up there to not work. Um, at least allegedly. So, I wanted easy upkeep, but the other thing is I wanted local control. Uh when I was setting up some sort of home automation, I wanted to be able to manage everything myself there. So, it's like this weird balance of it not being too difficult to use and too difficult to maintain, but also locally controllable. This thing started as a security system actually uh which maybe makes sense. That's sort of the my primary use case, but then it expanded from there. And if those of you who have started getting into something like Home Assistant, you can probably attest to things tend to snowball once you have it initially set up um because you start realizing all these other use cases that you didn't realize you needed. So this talk what I'm going to talk about is just sort of introduce you to the cabin um and sort of the problems I faced. I'm going to give you my use case in particular for home automation in a cabin. Uh why I picked Home Assistant. There's a lot of different options out there for home automation. uh but we're all at a Linux conference so you know by itself just the fact it's a it's a open source uh software is a enough of a reason really but uh other reasons as well um I'm going to talk a bit about my security system that I set up there uh then go into some of the remote monitoring systems I set up at the cabin uh and then all the other things that I ended up kind of getting into a rabbit hole about uh because I had it all set up so why not do all these other uh fancy things I guess um and then I'm I'll talk a little bit about the current setup and then I'm actually going to do a live demo uh which I almost never do in talks u with a couple exceptions and usually I definitely don't do live demos that rely on the internet. So uh but we're going to break all those rules today. So stay tuned for that and we'll see how that goes. All right, so welcome to my cabin. Um wow, the image is giant and the text is going to be small. This is going to be fun. Okay, so I have a log cabin in a redwood forest. Uh it's pretty sweet. Um, it is remote. Uh, but it does have electricity. So, this isn't like a full off-grid thing. I have electricity. I have running water. I have flush toilet. All the things that you So, this isn't like super hard like hardcore camping out there. Um, like I said, I have the internet. Uh, but only through satellite. There's no other option out there. And also, even satellite's kind of weird because you're surrounded by these tall redwood trees. Um, and it's not ideal uh for modern satellite internet. Uh, but there's a little spot where you can put it just right and mostly it works. Um, so I use this as a weekend getaway. Uh, I work in tech all day long. Uh, I again I go up there to not work on tech for the most part if I can help it. Uh, so this is supposed to be a getaway from all of that stuff. I do do a lot of what I call work laxing. Uh, so this is a kind of a fixeruppper cabin. And so at least for the first the first year or so I've had it, uh, I go up there and start doing all of the chores and things that we need to do to to renovate it and, you know, like doing some plumbing, doing some, you know, ripping out this, putting in that, all that sort of stuff until I get tired, then I go and relax and read a book and out in the woods. Um, so yeah, I call that work laxing. So my home automation use case is kind of interesting. didn't actually want act I didn't want real like what you think of as automation. I didn't want to really automate the home. Exactly. I didn't want to be like, you know, automatically turn on lights and turn off lights and do all of that stuff. That wasn't really what I wanted. Um because I wanted to unplug. If you're up there, you don't ne if you're in a log cabin, you don't necessarily want to be surrounded by technology. You you kind of want to not be surrounded by technology if you can. So, I had to strike this balance. I was I wanted there's some features I wanted but I also didn't want to be surrounded by technology when I was there to unplug. Um so it required this very careful balance between a digital and analog life. Uh so a lot of it meant like a lot of the digital stuff was sort of hidden behind the scenes somewhere. Maybe you couldn't see that this was set up um but it was there if I needed it. My main use case for doing this was is the security use case. This is a place that I don't I don't live full-time. um and I'm not there all the time and so I wanted to keep an eye on things when I'm not there because it's it's somewhat remote. Uh my secondary use case that I didn't start out with but I ended up c uh adding is monitoring just sort of like the first use case is is the place safe but also um what's going on there when I'm not there. There's a lot of different interesting monitoring use cases when to just check on a place when you're not there that I wanted to set up and like in general just a lot of different a lot of different things that when you're not someplace that's like an hour or two away uh that you'd want to know about that kind of stuff is is really my use case. So, for example, did someone come by when we weren't there? You know, that would kind of be interesting to know. uh like to know that uh especially if they went got inside. Uh what's the weather like up there? So this is a you know this this place is over an hour from where I live. Um and because of where it's located, the weather there is different than the weather at my house. So in particular, it's it's a little bit closer to the coast. Um and so it might the temperature variation might be like 10 15 degrees. And it would be kind of useful if there's a heat wave in the summer at my house to look and say, "Hey, I looks like it's pretty nice up there. Maybe we should go up there uh and escape the heat." The other thing is um when you leave uh a place that you don't go to every but every so often, like there's a lot of things you end up wondering whether you did. Uh like did I actually lock the doors uh before I left? Uh all of that kind of stuff. if I wanted to be able to answer those sorts of questions. Uh because if I uh didn't and what's worse is you remembered, oh, I didn't lock the door, but now I'm an hour away. I guess I get to turn around and go lock the door, which is kind of a bummer. So, I had some constraints. Uh there's a lot of uh proprietary automation systems available out there uh to choose from. uh you can get all-inclusive, you know, like many different bigname providers provide you like all these different systems under their brand and they have their own little hub that does stuff. Um, of course, all those things assume that you're going to just be streaming to the cloud all the time, for instance. And I have the internet that I do have is metered. Um, I don't have like unlimited internet up there. It's metered. Uh, because again, I'm not there all the time. I don't need a lot of internet bandwidth uh in in a like a I'm not downloading a whole bunch of stuff up there, but I have I do it a little bit. So, I don't want a system that's constantly streaming all of my camera feed up to the cloud, for instance. That would be a a problem. It would suck up all my internet. Um so, I wanted local control. I most home automation systems, uh except for the ones I'm talking about here, many of them at least want to phone home. Uh that's like one of the first things they want is set up an account with us and start streaming all of your information to us and we'll we'll share we'll give you an account you can we'll share it with you u but it's kind of like our information and we'll we'll give you access to it. Um I didn't want any of that. I wanted to control everything locally. I wanted to avoid vendor lockin. Um it doesn't take a whole lot of searching on the internet to find cases where someone bought some sort of cloud- enabled internet of things device and then the company folds and then their thing is a brick. now uh unless some friendly open source community unbricks it or comes up with some sort of alternative firmware or something. I wanted to avoid all of that in the get-go and just and not be feel like I had to buy all of my devices from one vendor. Um that's just like a general philosophy, but it definitely applies here. I also wanted to protect my privacy as much as possible. Um I feel strongly about protecting privacy. It's a sort of a fundamental thing with me. Uh but in particular when you're talking about things in your home uh and doing things like setting up cameras or other things like that, it's even more important to think about the privacy use case and who has access to these like streams of of video coming from a place that you go in and out of and all that stuff. Um so in particular, home automation use cases I think are even stronger uh argument for privacy than some other some other technology. I also wanted something easy to set up and manage. Again, I didn't want to spend all my time up there tweaking and tuning this stuff. Uh, I wanted to go up there and it just work and not have to set stuff up. I wanted to be easy to set up, too. I didn't want to spend all this time doing all the setup. Um, whenever I wanted to do something new either, I wanted to be very easy. Uh, and I also wanted maximum support for devices. I didn't want this is part of the vendor locket, but not just that. Sometimes there's an ecosystem of of devices, and I didn't want to be forced to have to pick certain things. uh if I didn't have to and then be not exactly locked into them. It just typically those ecosystems the things are more expensive because they know they you kind of have to use their products and so I wanted to have ch uh like have a competitive marketplace for you know what temperature sensor I use. So I chose Home Assistant. Uh this is a free and open source software home automation tool. It's been under development for many years. It's been around for a long time. um which is great for a project like this because at this point it's very mature. Um it has a a large community supporting it and over the years each of these community members who are really into home automation would say well I got this home automation device and I actually want to start using it with home assistant but it doesn't work yet and then they would work together as a community to get this device working. Then repeat for another device a new device comes on the market people would figure out how to get it to work and set it up for home assistant. As a result, now it has this incredibly wide range of hardware support and much of it really kind of works out of the box. In fact, if you now I messed messed up with the Okay. Um, many smart devices actually advertise if you were to go to like say Amazon or something and look for smart devices, you can add the word home assistant in the search and many devices will will now advertise their compatibility with Home Assistant. Don't like take that as gospel when you see that. Uh, I would in general I would confirm by going to like home assistance forums or go to their site and kind of just do a little bit of research on yeah, it's compatible, but what does it mean to actually get it to work before you pull the trigger and buy something? But all the same, the fact that you have a lot of devices that are advertising that they work with Home Assistant is like a good sign. Um, the UI itself is pretty polished as as far as these things go, especially as far as like open source software goes. Uh, and it's pretty easy to use. Uh especially these days, I'm sure if there's folks here that used it a long time ago, you're like, "Yeah, it's really easy to use. You just open up a bunch of it can automatically detect a lot of devices. In in fact, in many cases, if you have a compatible device, it may even when I first set it up, it found things that I didn't know were compatible with Home Assistant because it just shows you all these here's a bunch of devices we found that we haven't configured yet. Would you like to set them up? And like, oh, I didn't even know that you could do that. Sure. Yeah, let's add that. Um, the emphasis also in the home assistant community is local control. In general, they want to provide an ecosystem where you can control all of this home automation devices locally and you don't have to depend on some sort of external service. Again, there's cases where that's not true. There's plenty of things you can use in home assistant that do, you know, use the cloud and you have to connect to a cloud account. But there's also in general the default assumption is ideally everything is local. Um, also it can run on Raspberry Pi and you don't even necessarily, depending on what you're using it for, have to have like the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi. If you're like me, and I know I am, uh, you probably have a bunch of different Raspberry Pies lying around because you upgraded. You used one a couple years ago and like, well, now I need a new one to do this other thing and now you have like a stack of these old ones you're not sure what to do with. Um, use one of those for Home Assistant. it's new enough to support Bluetooth, for instance, it's probably a decent a decent choice. And that's what I did. So, here's my security system. Um, so here's an example of one of the camera feeds looking out one of the windows. Uh, so like I said, my initial focus is on security. Uh, I started with a Raspberry Pi. I'm still using a Raspberry Pi. It's it's working fine for me so far as the main uh computer driving all of this. Uh I once I set it up, I connected it uh with my home network just VPN between the two so that when I'm at home I can what I didn't want to do is expose Home Assistant to the public internet and just sort of connect to it and hope that everything's fine. That's a bad idea. Don't do that. Um but I did connect it to my VPN at home. So when I'm at home I can and you'll see in the demo I connect the cabin and I go to my cabin. Um so the first thing I did was I added a real link PoE doorbell. Um, so this is sort of the first device that got me into Home Assistant, solving the problem of we would like to have a a doorbell. Um, and ideally a video doorbell. There are a lot of um proprietary video doorbells out there that you can buy. Um, some of them have uh some questionable practices about who they share your video feeds with and under what circumstances they share those video feeds. And I didn't even want to deal with any of that. I wanted can I have a I I like the idea of a video doorbell. It's kind of nice. Someone hits the door, you doorbell, you see a picture and otherwise you have a a security camera aiming toward the front of your door. That seems cool. Um, but I wanted it to be local. So, um, Riolink provides a PoE doorbell. So, PoE means power over Ethernet. So, when you're setting up doorbells, for instance, you're going to find there's a couple of different systems. Some are powered by u uh they they assume there's like wiring for your old school doorbell. Um, and then in that case, you have to worry about, well, okay, uh, well, how do I get the feed from the front door somewhere else? You could use wireless, which some I like hardwired security cameras. Personally, I'm not a big fan of a bunch of wireless uh, cameras uh, because it's easier for people to potentially listen in on that stuff. Uh, so I like wired. Also, um, power over Ethernet means if I run a single cable, an Ethernet cable to this thing, it both powers the device and provides a nice little network link. Um, and I've been I'm, like I said, I'm a system man. I've been crimping Cat 5 for decades now. Um, I still remember orange, white, orange, green, white, blue, blue, white, green, brown, white, brown. Um, and so crimping that, you don't have to crimp a cable. You can buy one, but yeah, just set up cables. You plug them in and it and it's powered. Um, this one in particular has really good uh, home assistant support. Um, there's a lot of nice features about the real link ecosystem in general. So, I added a doorbell. And then in general, there's a bunch of outdoor cameras as well that they sell that are compatible with Home Assistant that once they're on your network, Home Assistant just sort of sort of sees them. Um, and I didn't get this. There's probably fancy ones that have motors and they move around. I just got sort of the fixed place ones that that just sit there. But again, these devices um uh you can run completely locally. It doesn't rely on it doesn't depend on you signing up with some sort of cloud service somewhere that it streams all of your your video streams to. Um that said, the real link by device does like by default does like the phone home uh which I'm not crazy about. Uh so I just blocked its internet access um and it still works. So all you in particular, so I'm using satellite internet and everything sort of flows through that. has the option to pick per device and just sort of turn off internet per device. So, I have a standard practice now if I add like a real link device or a some sort of home automation device that's on my network. Um, I know it's going to probably want a phone home at some point. So, the moment it comes up, I see it on on my router and say, "Yeah, disable internet for that thing." And it's fine. Um, because it just needs to talk locally to Home Assistant. Um, so I have camera coverage on each side covering every entryway. Uh, which is useful. And um, yeah, you can't see that that because the I had to scroll down my images there. The image is too big. But basically, I it's auto detected in Home Assistant, which is really nice. Um, let's see if I can make this a little bit. Yeah, perfect. Um, it's auto detected in Home Assistant. So the moment it's on your network, it shows up as a device that can be configured. It knows exactly what type of device it is. it knows what its capabilities are out of the box, which is really nice. Um, and once you have it set up, you can monitor the live feed remotely. So, that means I can just connect to it and and click on the the camera image and start seeing a live stream, including audio. Um, with the doorbell, it has some other fun features where you can like send an alarm or you can press a button on your home assistant to be like, I'm not there right now, but or you know, leave the box at the door. There's stuff like that you can do. Um, which I don't ever do, but you could maybe you like that. Um, so once I have cameras, now I can remotely just kind of have eyes o over the cabin when I'm not there. But I also, it would be nice to have some notifications uh about when certain things happen. And uh it turns out that the these real link cameras have very basic, it's not like super sophisticated, but very basic person detection, animal detection, and motion detection that's built into the camera. So this isn't like some sort of add-on thing. There's plenty of uh support for you can do add-on devices where you like send some of the stuff to AI who's like, "Yeah, that looks like a dog or whatever." I'm not doing any of that stuff. Again, I'm not trying to get super fancy here. Out of the box, these real link devices um support basic detection. Like I said, it's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be. Um these are represented when these things happen. They are events that home assistant notices. A front door camera sees a dog or whatever, sees an animal. Um, and you can do then you can then do things based on those events happening. Um, and they call them automations in home assistant. And basically you can have an event that then triggers an automation and you set up circumstances when you're configuring this to do something. Tell Home Assistant to do something when this thing happens. Um, it's pretty straightforward for just about any the easiest notification to set up is when this thing happens, notify me via a phone app. So, Home Assistant has an Android and iOS phone app that you can install. Um, and and you configure it with your device and when you launch it, you can see the same thing you would see from its web interface. Um, but also once you have that set up, it will send you configure to send you phone notifications. So, it'll be like, yeah, this event happened. Um, and whatever you and you can can tell it what what to say to you like person at the front door or whatever. Um, I also added email notifications because the thing about Home Assistant um, notifications on the phone is they're kind of ephemeral. Like you'll see them like, "Oh, I want to see that." And then sometimes you have to like dig into an event log or something to see the history. And I kind of just wanted some sort of permanent like I get an email that that has the picture that it took when it detected a person at the door or whatever. So, um, I set up email as as well. What I typically do for camera notifications is I first thing I do is take a picture because that's fast. I want to capture the immediate moment that the thing triggered. Um, so I capture a picture and then I take about 40 seconds of video. And you can configure Home Assistant to actually start with 10 seconds before the event happened because it has this like ongoing stream from the camera. And so it says, "Oh, I detected a person." And home assistant will say, I will say, home assistant, take the previous 10 seconds before you detected the person and then the next 30 seconds after, record that um and and save it basically. So then I can go see that because I'm not I'm not saving live camera feed 247. I don't need that. But if it finds something, I kind of like it to save that and then I can review it later. Um so for example, notify me if someone presses the doorbell when I'm not there. That'd be kind of nice to know. a neighbor came by to drop something off. I wasn't there. Yeah, this cabin is not like super remote. Like it's a little cold little like neighborhood. There's some really cool neighbors there. Um but if someone drops by, it' be like nice to know. Um notify me if a person is detected and I'm not there. Again, a thing I'd like to know if someone's like walking around my property. Um notify me if an animal's detected. This is really cool if you have something in the woods. Um because there's there's a lot of animals uh that you may not realize are like roaming around your property uh especially because the other thing is these real link cameras and a lot of these security cameras have great night vision now and so like amazing in many cases night vision and so you see a lot of really cool stuff. Um so for example here's a here's what this might look like. Um, here's what the interface looks like if you're trying to configure a basic notification to notify me if someone's detected at the cabin front door when I'm not there. Now, how does it know I'm not there? I have the app on a phone and when I have the app on the phone, you can set up a trigger. It knows that I have an app. I I have its app on my phone and you can set triggers based on the fact that um I'm in the zone of the cabin, which means I am in the area around the cabin. And so it knows that because I have the app. Um, but again, this isn't like going to a cloud or anything. This is my phone app talking to my home assistant only. This isn't like it's phoning to some magic home assistant service in the cloud or something always logging my information. It's not doing that. So when front door camera person turned on, uh, which is what I called it, uh, well maybe that's what the event is. It doesn't matter. There's a front door camera. I called it the front door camera because that's what it is. uh if it detects a person, the way it it describes that is person turned on. Uh which is weird. Uh but it that's what it does. Um and if that's true, uh and and you can do other if statements. So and and if something either if something else does happen or in this case does not happen, does not match. So and if I'm not in the cabin zone, then you can add other conditions. In this condition, it's like send a notification and I have like a send a notification, send me an email and it kind of drills down and you can configure what those things do. But again, it's not that tricky. It's like add a add a trigger, add a condition, add an event, and it's pretty easy to set these things up, especially once you get the first one going. You'll find yourself just referring to that one and building on it as you do other ones. Um, this has led to pretty interesting notifications and it's led to ultimately what I call Fox News. Um, which let's Yeah, here we go. Um, so I get a lot of animal notifications and and just about every day, um, maybe every other day, um, I'll get a notification that animal detected with a little screenshot. Then I'll go and download the video and then share it with my family as the daily Fox News. Um, because we have a family of foxes that live, uh, around the property and they start roaming around and like I said, especially now it's the spring, so they're getting very excited. Uh, and so they're like every other day more or less I get some sort of new notification about I can keep up to date with what the foxes are up to. Um, mostly during the evening and and night, but sometimes during the morning um, as well. Uh, there's now a neighborhood cat that kind of like walks around. Um, and skunks and all the sorts of things you'd imagine in the woods. Um, deer don't get so close to the camera it picks them up. They kind of stay a little bit further away. Uh, squirrels of course, but foxes, the fox news is the most interesting to me. Um, so cameras are cool. It's nice to have cameras when you're monitoring a cabin, but there's, you know, plenty of other use cases I found like in particular remote monitoring. So, what I mean by that is like, uh, after that, some other sensors. Uh, so I have cameras, but I'd like to add some other sensors to my cabin. Um, most of the sensors that you use for this sort of thing typically are using Bluetooth or Ziggb or Z-Wave to communicate. So, what I mean by that is many of these things are little tiny devices and they don't necessarily want to add all of the overhead of adding like a chip to support Wi-Fi and all this stuff. Chips to support Ziggb or Z-Wave or Bluetooth are typically cheaper and they're smaller and lower power and stuff like that. And that's actually better anyway because if you have a choice, it's better to not have like 5,000 devices on your these devices on your local network if you can help it. Um, if they're on Bluetooth only or ZigGB or something, they're they're not talking to there's no you don't have to worry about them talking to the internet directly. Uh, so and most of these devices that's the case. They're using one of these protocols. Um, the Raspberry Pi typically uh supports these days all supports Bluetooth. So you get that out of the box, but you don't get Ziggb or Z-Wave. Um, the folks behind Home Assistant actually sell like their own standalone Home Assistant box you can get that has all of the stuff built in. Um, since I was using a Raspberry Pi, I got what's called a ZStick 10 Pro. Um, not a ZStick 10 amateur, but a Zstick 10 Pro uh because I'm a professional and plugged it into the Raspberry Pi and that gave me uh both ZigGB and Z-Wave support. Uh, next thing I got was a GOI branded Bluetooth thermometer hydrometer. Again, this is a go to Amazon, search for I want a thermometer that supports Home Assistant. Go. And then you'll see a bunch of stuff and like, oh yeah, everyone likes this one and I go to Home Assistant site and they like, "Yeah, this is super easy. It's detected out of the box. You don't have to add anything." Like, perfect. Buy it. Um, and so what I do with this is I monitor the indoor and outdoor temperature and fridge and freezer. By the way, even outside of like a cabin in the woods, the fridge and freezer temperature is like a core use case. If you're going to set up home assistant and you're going to do nothing else, get a couple of these thermometers, put one in your fridge and one in your freezer because inevitably you're going to leave the door open a jar just a little bit. Um either the fridge or freezer and the temperature is going to rise at some point and you won't know. Uh it might do it overnight. I might do it for a day or two. Then you go, "Wow, it feels kind of warm in my fridge. That's kind of strange." Or the freezer. Why is there water dripping out of the bottom of my freezer? um this you can set up these these probes and then tell home assistant when my fridge gets above a certain temperature for more than 30 minutes let me know and like oh yep someone left the door open a little bit doesn't even have to be a big you know just like a little a jar is enough to like start raising the temperature killer use case um the other use case I use it for here and if you look very closely you can see that this graph has outdoor south temperature and outdoor north temperature which is interesting because um we're in the northern hemisphere and so they get different temperatures there's different sides of the house. I kind of want to monitor both and then the hallway temperature. So, I just have a single probe inside right now. I want to kind of know what it's like inside. If you were to look closely at this graph, you would be able to tell me when I was there. Um I I went during this period of time twice. Um and you can and if you look closely, you can tell when uh because the rest of the time the temperature kind of flows along uh with the rest the outside temperature. But that's useful. I use it in particular for that case of like, oh, it's hot here or cold here. Is it any better up there? Uh, and I can go check that out. The other thing I added was a third reality Ziggby door sensor. So, this is like a traditional kind of like a a hall effect kind of gate. Uh, you'd see them like sliding glass doors or windows or any of the traditional kind of alarms there. This one uses Ziggby and you basically just set it up at a threshold. You put one side on one side of the door threshold and one side on the other. When they're together, it the doors closed and when they are separated, it knows that it's opened in some way. So, I set that up at a sliding glass door I had. Um, and that allows me to set up an alert like when that door is opened and I'm not there, let me know. It's pretty nice. Um, because especially with sliding glass doors, it's kind of, you know, it's weird. Um, so that's nice. I also added, and this is another key thing, um, is a water leak sensor. These are relatively inexpensive and they're basically look like a little they look like a a little bit larger Air Tag basically. Um, and you set them up, you get them linked with Home Assistant and then you put them under all of your sinks and anywhere where water might leak that you'd like to know that you don't obviously can see directly all the time. Um, just peace of mind. uh especially if it's someplace you're not all the time, it'd be kind of nice to know that there's a couple of gallons of water that are leaking out of a burst pipe when I'm an hour away and and won't notice for a while. So, set up those. Pretty nice peace of mind. Um I also installed a So, I'm not a smart lock guy, okay? Um I like doing lock lockpicking and all that stuff and so I'm like, "Yeah, whatever." I don't I'm not into like all of those sorts of things. That's not that's not me. However, um this particular smart lock is not a smart lock the way that you would traditionally think of it. Well, now I have a big keypad or some other thing and I take my phone and do all this stuff. Um it goes inside the deadbolt that you already have. So, from the from all you look from the outside, it's it's your it's the same door lock you had before. It's just the internal deadbolt mechanism gets replaced with this. Um and what that allows you to do is if the battery dies in it, it can't talk to the network or whatever. It doesn't matter. you can use your key and unlock and lock whatever. But what it allows you to do when the battery isn't dead and it is connected um is monitor the state of the lock and change the state of that lock um in remotely. So this solves my problem is did I actually remember the lock of the door? Uh I can now check and see whether that deadbolt is in the lock state or the unlock state. And if it's in the unlock state and I'm not there and I forgot to lock it, then I can press the button and and lock the door. pretty handy uh little device. Um, of course that's not it. There's plenty of other expansions. Uh, so uh things tend to snowball uh with home automation once you get started. Uh yeah, it's just it just happens. You you add one thing, you're like, "Wow, that was really cool. Imagine all the stuff I could do now. They have water sensors everywhere." Then you're like, "Oh, but you know, it' be really cool if I could remotely figure out like if I if I left like the oven on. That would be pretty sweet." Um, how would I do that? So, uh, there's this device called an Emporia Vue3 home energy monitor. Um, this goes inside your breaker box and it has little clamps and big clamps that go around all of your circuits in your in your breaker box. All right. And what this allows you to do is to monitor the power usage for each breaker. And when you're setting this thing up, and this is actually quite a bit of setup. This is if you're here for like the beginner guide to Home Assistant, don't do this. uh this is involved besides the fact you're dealing with electricity and all of that stuff. Um like if you looked at that like that's scary then don't do this. Uh because it is a little scary but you clip you clamp these clamps on every circuit and you label them and you label them in the in the device itself and then it knows what all of the circuits are for and it tells and it now measures how much current's flowing through each of those circuits. So it's kind of handy. Um, even handier, most people that get a system like this also have some sort of solar setup. And what they want to kind of know is what usage is going out and what usage is going in. And this is part of a larger ecosystem. And in fact, these devices support solar. Um, this is the one device where I broke the rule about phoning home. This one, um, supports not phoning home. Uh, but you have to reflash the firmware with like an open source firmware which I'm again it was already involved getting this set up. I wasn't quite ready to do that and like and it's not just like oh you have to log in and then like change the like install software. It's like you have to open the box and then like do a hardware flash and you have to clamp stuff on. Like I've done that stuff. It's like I'm here to relax guys. I'm not here to like flash ESP32 firmware um on this device yet. But maybe maybe talk next year. Maybe we will do that. Um yeah, this is so I I said that I didn't really want to do any of that home automation stuff. Uh and uh and mostly that's true. Uh but they make these really cool smart curtains and and what they do is they clamp on your existing curtain infrastructure and they they allow you to automatically open and close your curtains. and and it was just too sweet to pass up once everything else is all set up. And you're like, "What else could I do?" You know, it would be kind of No, one of the things I noticed is every time I come in the cabin, I unlock the door and I open the curtains uh let some light in. And every time I leave, I close all the curtains and I lock the door. It' be be kind I'm already can automatically lock and unlock the door when I leave. it'd be kind of cool to have a checklist of all the things I do when I leave the cabin and as many of those as possible it automatically does for me. That'd be kind of cool. So, that's how I convinced myself uh that this was a really important thing to to buy. Um in addition to that, I also I typically don't use a lot of smart plugs. This cost smart plug is one that does work well with Home Assistant. I had one use case where I had I wanted to set up some string lights, you know, some decoration, make it look nice and the plug that go over an archway and the plug that it went to was in this hard-to-reach spot actually behind all of my firewood. Um, and so to that meant every time we wanted to turn the lights on, you'd have to like remove some logs, unplug it, and like I didn't want to do that. So I now I have a smart plug um for that particular light. Um, so now I can turn it on and off when I want to. So yeah, so I did I did end up setting up a leave cabin button um that closes the curtains, turns off the light uh that one light and locks the doors uh for me now. So I did I did uh break down and do a little bit of home automation in that way. Um so yeah, what does that look like? Um it's like you're going to like a play or a movie theater or something, right? Yeah. Um, yeah. So, so I ended up the curtain next to it. I also set it up for that, too. So, now there's a whole thing. They both go. It doesn't play any sounds or anything. Doesn't play any like dramatic music. It just open yet. Um, it just opens the curtains. Um, all right. So, what's my current setup look like? Let's do a live demo. All right. So, let's see if I can shrink this a little bit because Yeah. Here we go. So, this is the interface. Well, that's actually probably too small for you folks, isn't it? So, looks good for me, but all right. Um, so the thing about Home Assistant is when you add devices, uh, you can assign them to zones. A zone zone in the home assistant. In Home Assistant, you might think of like as a room in your house or some section of your property or something like that. What it's basically a bucket uh that describes where this thing is or what this thing is is involved in. So, I use it mostly for inside. I define the rooms in the cabin and if I have a device in that room, then when I add it to home assist and I say, "Yeah, it's in the front door zone." For instance, the front door zone is all the things that are in the front door. What's in the front door? Um, like my camera, my POE camera, which you can see here. This is this is a live feed. So, there's no one robbing my cabin right now, which is good. Um, and you can see all of these uh you can see my mouse. You can see all these uh little notifications here, right? These are all the things that you can trigger. You can do motion triggers. Don't necessarily recommend that unless you have a place where you know you're not going to get a lot of motion. Um, but the cool thing is you can click on each of these things. So, like for example, would it be a good idea for me to to trigger some sort of motion thing? You can see an act you can click on it and see the history of how often this thing would would alert you if you did set a notification based on it, right? Um, and all these things like it has a a pet they call it the pet um notification. And I think it's actually more of like an well the other one they call it an animal but the same sort of thing they a dog or cat-shaped object. Um and yeah locking mechanism. I can lock or unlock things. Um outside I have the camera and I have a thermometer that tells me the humidity and temperature. That's nice to know. Um and again cameras in all the different places in the hallway. That's where I keep track of both my temperature. And once I set up that circuit monitor, then if I have a circuit that I know is specific to a particular room or area, then I assigned it when I added it to Home Assistant to that zone. So now I can say how much power is this room drawing uh overall. And that's kind of handy sometimes. It's actually really handy if you try to if you want to figure out what outlet a circuit what outlet belongs to what circuit. You can plug in something big and then look at your app and be like, "Oh yeah, it looks like this circuit's now drawing like an extra 20 watts or whatever." It's so it's pretty handy. Uh yeah, and the living room. So yeah. So um I do have curtains. You can remotely handle uh control the curtains. I don't have a camera in I don't really want to set a camera up inside. That feels kind of weird. Um, so I'm not gonna like do a cool demo where you see the camera live opening and closing or anything like that. Um, but yeah, I could I can remotely open and close this if I forgot. Um, and that's these are those lights that I thought were cool. Um, and yeah, I set up a couple of hot switch buttons here. So these are just a couple of like quick actions. So I it makes it relatively easy to script actions. you basically it's semieasy the way that this is one area in home assistant right now that even if you if you use the UI it's a little convoluted you have to like set up a couple of stages of things to set up a script it's a little annoying um and it's not entirely intuitive uh but it's still not too bad and then at the end you have a button you can press that does the thing um oh yeah and it monitors my energy distribution and stuff and so this is the default dashboard if you set up home assistant you will get one of these for free and whenever whatever you I by free I mean you don't have to do any any additional setup other than say this device belongs to this zone and create zones for your place your house based on what you want to see and it automatically will organize everything. Um so but and then they also have a you can set up a graphs one. This is one I set up by hand uh where basically I just said these it knows which items provide graphable data. And so when you say I want to set up a graph, it's like well here's some things you could choose from like yeah I want all those thermometers and graph the temperatures they get. And again here's a different example where you can see you can tell me uh the twice the two or three times uh we were there. Well actually just the two times that we visited the cabin recently because of the spike in the internal temperature. Um, and also energy consumption. And you can see that the little fridge that's there is not that great. Um, it can't really maintain 40. It's like one of those like dorm not not the dorm ones, but like the tall dorm ones, you know, and so it's they're not great, you know, but it's a cabin. Come on. Uh, it's fine. Uh, so it's pretty much empty, so it doesn't really matter. Um, the other thing I did set up was a security uh window here. And so I added a couple things. Notice this. I want to highlight this. The one downside to to doing in particular Bluetooth uh things with Home Assistant is that sometimes uh reception can be an issue. Now, this isn't a giant cabin. There's not a it's not that far away, and for the most part, it works, but every now and then there's enough interruption where it loses the connection, which is kind of annoying. Uh but see, the back door is locked. front door I know is locked, but recently it it dropped off the network and it'll have it'll reconnect at some point. And I so I decided to set like a security dashboard where just all the security related things, all my locks and doors and then camera like a like I pretending like I'm a security guard with all the camera feeds kind of going off off at once. All right. Um, one final thing I will show just briefly. I'm not going to get in the weeds of this, but I think it'd be useful for you to see the settings a little bit. Um, if you're So, here's the settings window. There's a lot of settings things you can do. One thing that's nice is it lets you know when there's an update to perform. So, you do this. You can update Home Assistant and all the software that you use from the UI. You don't have to like now open a terminal and none of that nonsense. You just go to the UI and do it. Um, but devices and services is what I want to point out here. See this discover thing? um this whenever you add a whenever a new device appears that you have not configured yet, it shows up there. So you go to this page and you're like, "Oh, there's all these devices I can support." And down here you can see the c all the categories of devices that this supports. So I have a Bluetooth device. Um I have a this this is those those temperature probes I was talking about. Um this is that uh circuit breaker thing I was talking about. And there's all kinds of other Yeah. Um this is the the curtains. Uh and there's all so any device would would sort of show up here. There's all these extra stuff. Oh, the sun is another interesting one. So there's a sun device which is outside. Um it's not inside. Uh and and it has events daily and so you can monitor that here. Um and there's nothing. This is built in because it what it does is it finds out it home assistant knows you tell it where you are and so it knows sunrise and sunset and that allows you to do things like if you decided to get some smart curtains. Uh you could tell it that you know about 30 minutes before sunrise it'd be like official sunrise like official sunrise and when it's actually starting to be light outside it's a little bit different. um at least at this where I this particular place is. And so like 30 minutesish before sunrise, it'd be kind of cool to open this one curtain that kind of gets you a view of the sunrise. That'd be kind of kind of nice. So then when you wake up and you have your coffee and you it if I'm there, that's the other thing is like don't do it when I'm not there. But but when I'm there, it' be kind of nice to just open like look at the sunrise and enjoy the the peace and quiet. Yeah. So you could do all those things because you can monitor the sun. can also be like if you wanted to when it's dark and it's nighttime, close everything if you wanted to. Um, all right. So, that's enough of that. Let's go back to the slides. All right. Future plans. I mean, honestly, he says it's mostly set up how I want. Um, I don't really I don't really need and now it's going to be recorded on camera. I don't really need anything extra. I'm just talking to the camera right now. Um, but uh it would be kind of cool to have some more smart curtains. Uh, they're real they really are sweet. Um, and there are a couple of more curtains that they It's expensive though. But but there are a couple more curtains in the house that that would be kind of nice to automate. It'd be kind of cool to set that up. So, I kind of would like some more of those. Um, I could improve image detection. I was telling you I rely on the Real Link built-in image detection. There's one camera in particular that got so many false positives for what it thought was a person that and I think it just has to do with the light flowing through shadows uh through the trees and stuff. It would trigger it all the time. So I no I have I have video. It's definitely not Bigfoot um as far as I know. But uh yeah, so I could improve it. Um, there are extra add-on devices you can add that basically add some sort of offboarded AI image detection kinds of stuff that you could use. If I can get one that's local, I might set that up. Maybe that'd be kind of nice. I might add some more window sensors. It'd be kind of cool to set I have door sensors. It' be kind of cool to know if like I leave a window open um when we're not there. That'd be kind of nice. Uh maybe some motion sensors. I do not want cameras inside, but it might be kind of nice to have like a basic motion sensor because it really shouldn't trigger unless like I don't know mouse gets in or something, but which it shouldn't, but that would be good to know too uh if that happens. Um and finally, so this is on wellwater and it'd be kind of cool to have a water flow monitor. Uh they sell these. These are also somewhat expensive, but you put them in line and they will let you know um how much water you're using. And in theory, if I'm not there, I really shouldn't be using any water. And if I start using a lot of water, that's a problem and it should really let me know. Um, all right. Uh, so thank you. Here's all the res all the devices and things. These are direct links if you would like to buy them uh for your own home assistant thing if you want to set up everything like this. Of course, the talk is there. Uh, thank you so much for coming and now I can open it up to any questions that anyone might have. Oh, thank you. [applause] So I am intrigued by how do you balance the security between having a lock that you can remotely trigger versus now having the security question of potentially having a software. >> Sure. Yeah, it's a great question. So a a com So this I think everyone heard because it's it was amplified, right? So, but B b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b basically like how do you deal with the fact that it's a smart lock and you could remotely unlock your house? Um that is that is true. However, um any the the threat model for that is someone who's still physically at your house. Um unlocking my house when over the internet when you're not nearby doesn't really help you as an attacker. Uh, and anyone who is a hardcore hacker who can't pick that schlage lock on the cabin, um, I just I shake my head at you. Uh, you should be able to pick that lock in like, you know, 30 seconds, you know, 60 seconds, um, and get in. Um, otherwise it's like a coordinated. So, I'm not that worried about it because I actually think the threshold to break into the cabin is through the smart lock is harder uh, in this case. Uh, because also this isn't like cloud infrastructure. This means breaking into my home infrastructure and compromising my home network, which is a whole other thing that I do things to make hard. Thank you. Yeah. Other questions? Just a quick question. Um, since a lot of home automation stuff out there tends to just assume that you're the only person in the house, how does it how does Home Assistant deal with having multiple people and giving them delegating to them like, "Hey, let them lock the door, open the curtains or whatever." >> Yeah. Yeah. So the way that home assistant handles that is you essentially add users. Um and you you to allow other people to interact with this you add a user they install the app in particular on their phone but by setting up the account they can also just open up a laptop or access like the web URL as well. And once they do that then they can access all the same things. There's probably fine grain access controls. If I don't do any of that I'm not I'm not ent this isn't work. Uh this is this is my cabin so I'm not going to do like ales on my cabin's network but um but yeah so you set up an account and then they can do whatever uh and yeah other questions there's a oh sorry we hit the mic >> well but but the the recording can't the recording can't so we have one over here then we'll get you next >> two questions one is uh one is how do you uh detect I'm not there so do you have any automations where you can just leave the doors unlocked, the curtains left and you leave the cabin and some of these automatically kick in or trigger. Yeah. So, so what happen? So, how's it Well, first, how does it know I'm not there? So, the way that it knows I'm not there is I have the app installed on my phone. Now, the again I want to underscore this app does not talk to some sort of Home Assistant cloud service somewhere or whatever and report my location. It talks only to the app itself or only to my home assistant server itself that's in my local network. So it knows where I am the because it's a phone app and I gave it access to my location and it knows when I'm within the cabin zone which is like an area a circle kind of drawn around that general area and so it knows that because of those connections. Um I have chosen not I mostly use that feature to avoid noise in my notifications. There's a lot of things when I'm physically there. Yeah. There's going to be a person outside the back door sometimes, you know. So, I I turn all that stuff off when I'm physically. I don't turn off the animal monitors though because it's pretty sweet. I've been inside at like the dinner table and get a notification that there's a fox outside. Now, I didn't see it because it was dark, but it was like like five feet over that way. Um, which is still kind of cool to know that they were like running by. Uh, but yeah, so I mostly use it to silence notifications. I don't do anything like when Kyle's not there automatically do all this stuff because I probably lock myself out of the house or something, you know? I mean, realistically, but then I can pick it. I I told you how easy it is to pick my locks. So, um >> one quick question. Uh >> in the uh Home Assistant uh dashboard or the UI, is there any coding that you had to do or is everything plugandplay, click through and set up? Yeah. So, so mo the stuff that I selected here is largely plug-and-play that I intentionally selected things because I don't feel like opening up a terminal and doing like a lot of like config file stuff. There was one or two cases where I think there was one case where one particular device I set up I had to go into um like a config mode and paste in something I found from a guide on the internet or whatever. But that's the ex I think they did that once for the most part. almost everything else is entirely like either you have to set some initial setup on the device like if it's a Bluetooth thing press down the button for a certain number of seconds so it's in pairing mode or stuff like that but once it's available to be discovered home assistant generally like discovers it and then you say yeah add it to home assistant it's all through the UI yeah so we had a we had a question up here yeah oh I answered it okay oh okay >> hi I'm curious with all of these uh sensors how many batteries batteries do you go through and how often do you have to go around just replacing batteries and everything? >> It's a great question. So, for the most part, these sorts of things because they know that they're being they are sitting alone in a house for a long time, they're designed to be very low powered um so for example, the curtains uh right um they have a battery pack that claims about eight months of battery life. And so that means, you know, twice a year, uh, next time you're up there, you go and you maybe charge them. Um, and there's battery notifications. Most of these devices also share battery notifications. So far, I don't think I've I mean, I've only set this stuff up for the last like six monthsish, and I haven't really I haven't changed any batteries yet. Most of these things are pretty low power. I would imagine I imagine like probably some of them annually I would have to go through and start like looking at. Uh yeah, there's one back there. >> Um I was just kind of curious being rather old school. Um when it comes to the automation, like for example, I I caught when you said you had the deadbolt that you could still put a key in there and turn it. Can you jump up off your couch and yank your curtains open or do you have to reach for your cell phone and press curtains open? I mean, how much of the stuff is now tied solely to the automated system versus manual? >> It's a great question. I intentionally select things that that don't require it other than like that. Whoa, let's wake you up. Um, other than uh that smart power outlet, you know, because it's hidden away anyway. Um, other than that, I don't do that. Uh, so the curtains, for example, when you um when you tug on them a little bit, it senses that someone tugged on them and rolled them in a direction. It's like, okay, I'm opening now. And the same when you close them, when you tug on them the opposite direction, it's like, "Oh, I'm going to close now." So, I guess you could really, you know, you could probably like hardcore like force it, but you don't typically have to. Um, so it has a not that one has a notion of not requiring like electronics to open or close. You can just like start pulling on it and then it'll still automatically kind of open or close. >> I have a question. So, what does your VPN infrastructure look like? >> Yeah. Um, super old school. Uh, I climbed the OpenVPN learning curve like forever ago. Uh, so same reason I use Screen instead of TeamX. I was like, "Dude, T-Max is so easy to use." It's like those screen key bindings are so burned into my brain. I don't even think about it anymore. Just stuff happens. And it's like OpenVPN. I already have it set up. Uh, and I've had it set up for like 20 years or so, like 15 years at least. So, so it's just an OpenVPN connection between my home. My home is sort of like the home base. And then there's a VPN connection. The cabin connects to that. Um, and I have a system there that just sort of forwards. The home assistant itself doesn't. That's something important to notice. Like you can get Home Assistant where you can get shell stuff on it that has a VPN plugin you can use. So you can do it directly there. I happen to have another like standalone little laptop up there that does just general purpose stuff for me. Um, that's always running that I do like a port forwarding thing, but and that does the VPN. Yeah. But it also means like from here I can VPN into my home and then show everyone my cabin as long as I'm on my home network I can see. That's the other thing is that this is not none of this is public to the internet. All of this stuff is on my home network only. So once you're on my home network yeah you can see some stuff but from the public internet you can't see anything. >> Hi. Um do you have a similar system or setup at at your regular home? And if it's not why? >> Yeah, great question. So, do I have a regular system like this at my home? I have a very minimal system. I do have a system like this in my home, but it's it's actually not nearly as sophisticated because that my use case there actually started because my main home didn't have a doorbell and was like be kind of nice if people didn't have to like manually knock on the door. They at least had the option to press a doorbell and it'd be and sure it's cool now to have a video thing. So, let's set that up. And so that's just sort of that was like the gateway drug that got home assistant in my in my real home, my regular home. Um, since then I really haven't added much other than some temperature sensors in my fridge and stuff like that. I really not that interested in like lights doing all this stuff. Um, I just wanted a little bit of monitoring. So I think I did a couple of water leak sensors and stuff like that, but nothing like I don't have like smart locks there or anything like that because I'm there, you know, so I don't have the use case is different. But great question. Yeah, I think we're Do we have time? Um, >> we have plenty of time. >> Sweet. All right. >> What are you doing for uh battery backup for all your devices and like if the power goes out that means everything turns off as far as your home assistant server? So, how do you have that set up so it comes back on and you can get access to everything? Yeah. So, for I don't have any power redundancy there. I haven't set it up like a data center or anything yet. Um, yeah. yet. Uh I have I have plans. Uh but they Yeah. So that's something I haven't done yet. Uh the main what I would call a server. Like I said, I have a I have one machine that's always running that's a laptop, like an old laptop. By the way, old laptops are the best home servers you could ever get because they have like a built-in 8 hour UPS. Um if you've ever priced an 8 hour UPS, uh they're incredibly heavy and expensive. Uh but a laptop has one built in. And so I just use the laptops for all my home servers now. Uh and it's always running and it has a built-in UPS. So if there's a blip, it probably didn't even go down. Um if it uh but otherwise like when I've had the power go out and when everything comes back up because I have PoE cameras, they just fire right back up when they get power. Home Assistant fires right back up and everything resumes. So I've had power outages up there for sure. Uh cuz I'm in California and power it's just a reality of life in California. >> PG& >> I'm a PG& customer. Yeah. So like power outages all the time. So but anyway and things just come back up. Power's restored and things come back up. Um it's it hasn't been a big deal. But it's true. Yeah. I don't have coverage when I'm not there. But because I've selected those things if I went there during a power outage, turn the key, open the door, put some wood in the in the wood burning stove and and we're good. Any other question? Also, I'm going to be in the hallway, too. You know, we can always chat chat there, too. Um, but any sort of final questions so I can clear the room for the next speaker. >> My question is like, what's the storage solution on uh your cameras? >> Sorry, I didn't I didn't catch that. >> How much storage is your cameras using? >> Oh, yeah. Camera storage. So, each of these cameras do support micro SD cards, so you can put those in. I don't use it. I don't use that, though. Home Assistant itself um also supports uh you know. Whoa, I did it again. I guess it doesn't matter. We're going to unplug this, but um Home Assistant supports uh you know, storing local storage. So, you could put like just an extra big SD card. It depends on how much you want to retain. In my case, I happen to have So, one of the other things I use my cabin for is off-site backup. Um not over the internet, but like the old school like carry a hard drive with you, right? Because if my house burns down, it'd be cool to have a copy of my stuff somewhere. So, like when I go to the cabin, one of my chores is bring a bring the hard drive from home up up there with me and plug it in. and then take the hard drive that's there and take it back home so it can get synced back up. Um, so I have like a big hard drive there that I'm already using just to have like an off-site uh backup. And so I I Home Assistant, it's very easy to say to connect to like you could either plug it directly into Home Assistant if you wanted to do it that way or like a if you had like NFS or a Samba server, SMB server or something, it can mount like a a network drive too. Um, if you're going to do a lot of video recording, I would recommend that. But otherwise, on the local SD card, you can at least get a probably a depending on how many events you have. Uh you could probably get like at least, you know, weeks or months worth depending on how big your SD card is for Home Assistant. >> Uh I have a question. Have you ever considered getting into like embedded systems software such as like uh motors and stuff to automate uh certain tasks even? >> Yeah, so I have not yet uh I have I haven't I mean not for this project. Um, two talks ago, two scales ago, I gave a talk about my um automated my um uh knitting machine clock that I made uh that knits a scarf uh every year. Um, and that's kind of like that although I cheated and used a Raspberry Pi uh but um but there's stepper motors and stuff and so uh and and I use Python and but anyway for the I'm not there yet with this. I think a lot of people that want to do that with Home Assistant, they do it because you can get these like ESP32 chips really cheap. Um, and they're very configurable. There's all kinds of guides online how you get this chip and I do a couple of other minor electrical engineering kind of things and you have a nice cheap sensor or a cheap some of these things that you buy off of Amazon for like 10 bucks you can make for like three bucks or something if you make it yourself. >> You can get like uh five for 10 on off of Amazon right now. >> Yeah. So, so it's a if you want to save money doing this or and you're willing to invest some time into learning the skills, for sure. But I'm my use case wasn't for that because I'm like I don't want to I intentionally did not want to tinker with like soldering uh for this particular project. That's for my other ones. Yeah. >> Uh the time is technically up, but there is a 15-minute break. So, if there you guys want to continue the Q&A for a bit, >> I'll just do the hallway con thing and so I'll be hanging out. People can Thank you.