SwizzleStick

Well it’s exactly what I asked for, can’t argue 😂

We settled on Puck for the name. It rhymes with what’s said when weird noises come from its direction…

Why not. I would love to see your detached robotic ass.

I printed special little stilts to raise one of our tables the 10mm extra it needed to be able to go under without getting wedged. It still tries fornicating with the cat tree - a different problem to solve.

Never lost it’s ass though, one to look out for there.

Same setup here, with two little Lenovo boxes. HA gets one all to itself.

The hardware doesn’t completely go to waste though. It’s handling all the cameras so having all the CPU, RAM & storage immediately to hand for expansion is great. No need to pass through peripherals either - just plug em in. If it goes to shit, putting a display and keyboard on it is no problem.

It would definitely be a size thing for adding Ethernet (PoE or otherwise) to small boards like these. The ones I am using are already bigger than they ought to be - the bottom half is just a glorified serial interface and power input for USB. The esp plugs into this through pin/header. If I were less lazy, they could be about half the thickness in a final product. No PoE I suppose also keeps them cheap, which is always good for me. The casings were my first ‘proper’ design and entry into resin printing.

The Tapo kit I have found to be a good balance of price, features and quality. I have a Tapo C310 mounted outdoors at another building, which has done great in all weathers. Initial setup does require the app/service last time I checked, but it can be made to serve RTSP locally after that. Very good for the ~£30 price point.

Eggs, baskets, and lessons being taught about how it’s not a good idea to heavily skew their ratio.

Ok so the combination is:

• This camera board
• This external antenna
• This project
• A shell I designed myself in SketchUp (skp download). Note that’s not the final version, as I lost some design files.

And the finished item:

All assembled, they will give a decent enough feed to frigate for the basics. Just don’t expect miracles in the resolution or framerate departments. 3fps does fine for my use case of tracking critters.

Gladly. I’ll collate a few bits later - time for work.

New to me & bookmarked. I am sure I have some crap lying around that this would work with.

Thank you!

For hardware, anything that can provide a local rtsp stream is a good place to start. I run cheap and cheerful mix of tapo, unbranded and homebrew esp32 cams. Offload the motion/object detection and alerts to something that can pull in the feeds, and isolate the cams to local network only.

WiFi usually ok, but at least hardwire the power to save future grief.

Using frigate to manage mine, which is running under Homeassistant - another project worth looking up.

A few images, featuring Freddie the visitor:

Depends how you want to use it.

We don’t have set schedules because utility prices are insane. Instead:

• Manual control as desired by setting thermo, with shortcut buttons for set temps
• Button to blast the heating for an hour regardless of temperature and cut off afterwards
• Presence detection to shut it off if it’s on when there are no users home (also lights)
• Watchdog to turn off and keep trying to turn off if heating has been on too long or without demand. Can happen if something sticks or drops off

Magic :)

What dongle exactly and have you updated the firmware on that?

I have an old conbee II & they pair up just fine. I use a blueprint to take action on the zha events they fire when buttons are pressed.

No Alexa here for more reasons than just being a voice assistant.

None of them would particularly useful to me even if I didn’t hate them, due to a lot of hearing loss. Real voices are hard enough and the ones from a speaker are worse. Anything from a PA system is unintelligible.

Most things we have automated with sensors, schedules and buttons. Not much else to be done that can’t be done with a few seconds of infrequent manual input, or shortcut software button on device.

I think I’m dead set on this. It’s nice to see others getting along, but I’ll never want it.

Agree. I do not speak to the machine. It does not speak to me. It is a happy arrangement.

I can see the use as an accessibility aid, but nothing more.

Oh nee :((

It’s a Synology NAS so will work with the Synology DSM integration: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/synology_dsm

There’s definitely ways to poll the sensors of other devices though. I had some janky sensors set up before for monitoring a standard Linux box.

We’re doing fine here:

Aber Deutschland ist geschmolzen :(

Whatever way you go for setting up the systems themselves, I’ve found dwservice.net to be perfect for accessing systems with only a browser.

The host component is Mac, Windows and Linux compatible. The clients need only an account at DW. Hosts tied to your own account can be shared with others.

Depending on host OS, you get screen, terminal and fire transfer access. Sessions are logged if you need to review who’s accessed what.

Free. Donation optional.

I condensed down from a power hungry tower server to a couple of thinkstations and a nas. Much nicer on the power.

🧠 + a few slapdash notes in a password manager. It’s very organic, very human.

Occasionally leads to situations like this.