alt Hacker NewsBought our home almost 20 years ago, and the former owner (apparently) owned a now-defunct home automation business. The upside was 100% X10/Insteon power and light controls, top alarm panel, environmental controls and so on running off of a wall-mounted "SmartLinc" touch panel. I expanded the system with Axis cameras and a Mac Server running Indigo and SecuritySpy (non-subscription), which enabled remote monitoring and control, but it all operates locally.
In a moment of weakness, I bought a D-Link wireless (wifi) water detector for the sump pit (it was on clearance for $30); it relied on a D-Link Home cloud service (free) that was closed down a few years ago.
Not wanting to toss it, I repurposed a spare Chromebook 14 that I was going to recycle and turned it into a Alpine monitor for the water detector, which I'm powering from the Chromebook's USB port (if power is lost in a rainstorm, I need to know about it before the sump pit fills up).
An immediate issue was that the D-Link firmware tried to "phone home" every 24 hours and would drop from the local network, since the server was kaput, and I had no clue what response it was expecting from the server to keep it alive. Solution; "reboot" the unit by interrupting USB power (with a Pico and MOSFET) every 23 hours. There's no question that home automation should work without the internet.
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I recently had a similar issue. But instead I decided to go with industrial controls. I bought a Contactor with a NC and NO connections. I put a float switch in series with the activator coil circuit. So when the float triggers: NC->O and NO-C, which turns off the water and turns on the pump.
Contactors are built to run giant industrial motors for years, nevermind my little 1/4hp pump.
The way I built it lets my mother bypass it by unplugging the pump from the control box and plugging it right into the wall outlet.
So, hopefully it lasts years. If it doesnt, anyone can bypass it
I don't like the idea of a Chromebook sitting between me and knowing my cellar is flooding.
Every cloud service will eventually get shut down. The problem is that nobody wants to put the effort into reverse engineering the product to fake out the cloud service until after the cloud service is gone and the reverse engineering is much more difficult.
Here's what you do. Skip the detector, Just put the whole laptop in there. when it goes offline, You have water in the sump.
every single sentence was a level of jank that i could never imagine subjecting my parents to. could you code custom firmware for the dlink btw? your fix sounds like good ol' redneck engineering but for the smart home :p
Insteon remains incredibly solid. The new company is super slow with new product because it's tiny, but the hardware remains incredibly good long-term. It doesn't clutter common wireless bands and by nature of being stupid, Insteon devices cannot really be hacked.
My rules for home automation are largely the same as the article, first and foremost the existing physical UX of switches and stuff should always work, and ideally automations should be nearly invisible: They should subtly be convenient and monitoring should be useful, but nobody should be confronted with a weird change of lifestyle because a house has automation. And nobody should ever need an app to use their house.
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> Solution; "reboot" the unit by interrupting USB power (with a Pico and MOSFET) every 23 hours
Reminds me of a possible apocryphal anecdote I heard about Alan Turing. He loved going on long bike rides, but one day his bike developed a distressing habit of slipping the chain. After the third time it happened, he realized it was due to a broken tooth on both the front and the back gear. He went back home and calculated how many revolutions of the pedals it would take for both broken teeth to line up when they were at the critical part of the rotation, and he built a little mechanical counter that would click on each link in the bike chain, and at the calculated time, a little arm would reach down and clasp the chain, holding it in place long enough for the teeth to re-engage.
He showed the device to his friend, who said "Why didn't you just buy new gears? You could have gotten both for a dime." And Alan replied "Oh, that's clever, I didn't think of that."