From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation

From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation
When I left Elastic, one of my goals was to dive deep into home automation and finally "level up" my setup. Looking back at where I started when we first moved to Graham, it’s almost comical. Back then, "Home Automation" was just a few Philips Hue bulbs and a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant that didn't do much. It was essentially a glorified light switch connected to Alexa. Fast forward to today, and the Raspberry…

Nova’s Fast dev API

Nova’s Fast dev API
Today's been about getting this thing set up properly. I'm not a developer by trade, but I've always been a coder. That being said, I consider myself a prototype developer, so my projects tend to be loosely managed. I wanted to grow this project up a bit, so I took a step back to think about how it's going to work and decided that I wanted to focus on an extensible API first. The Machine…

Nova Assistant: It was only a matter of time

Nova Assistant: It was only a matter of time
My house is definitely smart to the extreme. I have a lot of automation that runs all aspects of the house, security with AI, and dedicated servers for automation and AI. One example of how I have already wired some of these things together, is a Python service using Ollama & Llava as a false positive checker for Frigate. That being said, all of this private goodness is still connected to Amazon's Alexa ecosystem for…

What years of SBC addiction looks like

What years of SBC addiction looks like
I am a relentless tinkerer. I'm constantly trying to wire something to something else and often single board computers are the glue to some random home automation problem. It's been about 6 years since I started using Raspberry Pi, Arduino and the like regularly. This morning, I wanted to build a little device to monitor a camera feed like a baby monitor and I thought a Raspberry Pi Nano would do perfectly for the job.…

Network & Home Automation Apps

Network & Home Automation Apps
In all, I have quite a few components keeping my home automation system running. Some are apps I use every day, some are for managing different parts of the infrastructure and a few are for entertainment. Nearly everything here runs in docker on my NAS or one of two dedicated docker servers. Home Assistant powers the automations and connectivity between a wide range of smart devices. Security system, locks, lights, HVAC, weather, various sensors and…

A love letter to Docker Compose

A love letter to Docker Compose
Today I moved my Home Assistant setup from the NAS it's been on for 3+ years, to my frigate server. With Frigate processing 15 cameras for objects, both the CPU and GPU rarely rose over 10%. I had noticed some response issues with Home Assistant and had eliminated all of the options except giving it more power. I wanted a clean slate with Home Assistant and planned to import what I needed as I added…

Shop Server Rack – Tower 2

Shop Server Rack – Tower 2
Always trying to improve organization and make things tidy. Moved all of the network and server hardware in my shop to a studio rack I was no longer using. Formally, Tower 2. Top to Bottom AI Docker Server i7-12700KF, 64GB, 5TB SSD, RTX 4070 and RTX 2080TI Ollama - Primarily used by OpenWebUI, but also regularly used as an API via Python. OpenWebUI - UI for Ollama Chat Qdrant - RAG data store for encoding…

Digging a pointless birthday trench

Digging a pointless birthday trench
Today is my birthday and I'm spending it knocking out a task that has been nagging me for months. I had originally tucked an outdoor ethernet cable between the house and shop. I wasn't able to get 10Gbps speeds to link between the two due to what I thought was distance, so I ran a fiber cable and combined them in a cable conduit that had been sitting on the grass for months. The reason…

Outdoor Temperature Sensors for Home Assistant

Outdoor Temperature Sensors for Home Assistant
Recently, I have had a few things I want to monitor temperature of with Home Assistant. The chicken coop needs one for Kim's peace of mind. She likes to know when it's cold so she can turn the heater on. There is also a absolute floor where we would bring them into the garage or something. Now that the pond has fish, I'd like to monitor that as well. I have tried a few coop…

Python Nerdery: Data Scraping for Home Assistant

Python Nerdery: Data Scraping for Home Assistant
One thing I want to monitor in Home Assistant isn't supported in any traditional way. I want to know how much propane our generator has, and I only have a local provider website to work with. Enter Python to load a browser, log me in, grab the data and send it to home assistant. Add the script to cron and you are done. import logging from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options…