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May 21 2024
Extending Wi-Fi
another video covering the range
May 5 2024
How Much Does Your smart home cost?
A very interesting article covering the cost of running smart home devices. here
February 18 2024
Why you should get satellite Internet
If you have been wondering about Starlink and if you should get it then this article is worth a read. link
February 17 2024
Wrong about Zigbee and Zwave
An interesting read about Zigbee and Zwave. I have personally decided on Zigbee and only use Wi-fi devices when absolutely necessary. link
Related tutorial on site
- My Zigbee network notes
- Control Zigbee Devices Using Zigbee2MQTT with Home Assistant
- Practical Guide to Using and Managing Zigbee Devices
Newsletter 17th July 2023
Hi
This month I want to give my opinion on what I consider to be the state of the smart home market and hopefully get to hear yours.
Home automation is in the early stages and creating a smart home today is no easy task.
If you have tried to turn your home into a smart home you will no doubt encountered several problems but the most important one is The lack of standardisation.
- Does the device you are thinking of buying work with your existing setup?
- Will you need extras hardware to support it?
Google, Amazon, Apple and many others recognised this situation and are embarking on a standardisation program called connected Home over IP.
This is the goal of the working group
If the Working Group succeeds with this goal, customers can be confident that their device of choice will work in their home and that they will be able to setup and control it with their preferred system.
Out of this came the matter protocol which is in the early stages of being deployed.
How successful this will be in simplifying smart home creation is not known but I’m sceptical.
A recent article by Stacy on IOT is closer to my thinking. She related an article on 9 verge writers and what they have in their smart home. The article is here.
Suffice to say it wasn’t really pretty.
I feel we are still many years away from the day when you can buy a smart home device,unbox it and within minutes it is recognised on you smart home network and able to interact with existing smart home devices.
Instead we are likely to see islands of smart home devices controlled by their own Apps.
Basically we will get a collection of gadgets.
In fact when you think about it is it really necessary for your robo vac to talk to your smart home at all.
What is the Incentive?
How difficult is it to turn on a light switch or adjust the thermostat?
It’s not really difficult and so why automate it.
That I believe will be the opinion of most people today.
What Do you Think?
I would be interested in hearing your views please use the suggestions page
- Do you agree or disagree?
- Is there anything holding you back from making your home smart.
Rgds
Steve
Newsletter 27th June 2023
When Things go Wrong
Hi
Just when you least expect it and when you really don’t need it something goes wrong with the network.
So what do you do?
Well first you need to try and locate the problem. Sometimes this is easy and other times not.
But three things that you can do now to make it easier are:
- Get familiar with basic networking
- Get familiar with basic troubleshooting
- Get your network documentation up to date.
If you are new to networking then I would recommend you take a look at the basic home networking course.
Then you need to make sure that you have a network diagram and and know how to login to, and manage the devices on your network. So you need up to date network documentation.
Finally you will need to troubleshoot the problem as explained in home network troubleshooting.
Now you should be ready for when things do go wrong.
Rgds
Steve
May 1 2023
If you are looking a smart home hubs and control systems then this video may be of interest.
After watching video I decided to take a look at hubitat and put my thoughts down in Hubitat vs Home Assistant Quick Guide
June 4 2023
Does making your home smart increase its value?
This is something I’ve often wondered about and still not sure of the answer. According to this article it does but I still remain to be convinced.
May 25 2023
A Good overview of smart home devices to get you started
April 19 2023
SmaHoo (Smart Home Outlet)
Open source project being launched that looks like shelly and sonoff mini. Comes with http and MQTT support and doesn’t look like it is meant to be part of a proprietary network so you just control it with what ever you want. link
March 17 2023
Wemo Puts halt on Matter
Having just yesterday published a tutorial on the Matter protocol this article came to my attention.
It seems that Belkin have stopped Matter development and are rethinking their approach to the smart home.
From a personal viewpoint I was shocked when I looked at the Matter specification as it is almost 900 pages long (899 to be exact).
I was tempted at the time to ignore it and wait and see. It seems I’m not the only one to think that way but probably for different reasons.
Anyway it will be interesting to see the take up of Matter, and it is something I will be following going forward.
February 24 2023
Alexa losing Money How will it affect Smart Home Users?
Recent loses in the Alexa division have made analysts question the future of Alexa. Although it is likely to continue it will probably not be free. See here for more details.
January 24 2023
How to convert your home’s coaxial cable into Ethernet lines
This article I found very Interesting because my own house is wired with coax for TV and didn’t realise that this was possible.
I did look at the costs and what they quote is only true for a single connection point.
The actual adaptors are on the expensive side but they may come down.
Using homeplug adapters is still cheaper.
Here is the article
Here is also a very good article explaining how a MOCA network works
Hi Steve,
May I ask you a question?
I have 8 dashboard switches on my NR-dashboard. Every switch present a value in byte order. So the first switch must send a 1, the next 2, 4, 8. I want to add all the values of these switches to 1 number (0-255). If I unswitch an switch I want to substract that order value from the total. So the value represents the state of these 8 switches. I
My problem: If i change a switch, how can I scan all those others switches to get the total value?
Canb you help me? Kind regards
Hi
You need to store the value of each switch in a context variable and using a function node. You ca also store the sum. When one switch changes just update the sum.
This may help
https://stevesnoderedguide.com/node-red-variables
If you are still stuck let me know and I’ll put together a simple flow using inject nodes to simulate the switches.
Rgds
Steve