I’m starting a new project related to my new hobby, and will be writing notes as I progress.

Quite some time ago, I wrote few articles on FOSS frameworks for Home automation. Life took me to other directions and I didn’t had time to properly followup with latest changes nor write about it. Fast forward to 2 months ago, I finally got some time and restarted looking at what’s new. This article tries to capture my findings and updates.

Seems multi-arch images are not taking off as fast as I hoped, so I was forced to make few of my own to accomodate for Home-assistant, Mosquitto and Letsencrypt certbot running on Raspberry Pi (ARM32v7) and on Orange Pi Prime (ARM64v8).

IOT is a great thing: you buy a cheap controller, program it, see it working and, all of a sudden, start depending on it in your daily life. But, what if someone gets to your network and starts turning lights on and off? What if it’s not only lights, but irrigation systems, garage doors or worse?

You built some Docker images for your laptop, but also for bunch of those Raspberry/Orange/Banana Pies you got around? You hate building an image per platform, tagging them, remembering tag and then matching tag to your architecture… All of this sound too complicated?
It is! But, it can be simpler.

You have some coding skills and know at least basic C/C++? You want to add more features and improve the quality of the code? Found something cool and want to document it? Read on to see how each of the 3 OpenSource firmware look “under the hood” and how does their development process and code look like.

Now that you got your firmware compiled and loaded to your favorite ESP8266 device, it’s time to connect it to your home network, configure attached sensors and connect it to MQTT. In this post, I’m examining a process of doing initial configuration and connection using 3 favorite alternatives and will share the overall look and feel.

After struggling to setup a proper blog on Blogger, I decided to give Jekyll + GitHub a go. I’ll have to migrate few pages and shut Blogger down, but that shouldn’t be a big deal.

I’d like to share some of my experiences getting and flashing one of the precompiled firmware options and will also explore a process of building your own firmware to better suit your needs.

You are here because you are already aboard the Home IoT bandwagon, so I don’t need to explain how interesting, exciting and fun it is, but are also here because you are not happy with the stock firmware Chinese vendors are providing for many of the ESP8266 based devices. Luckily, community took this issue in their hands, and over the course of year and a half, we saw 3 amazing OpenSource projects that are addressing this (and many other) issues. In the next few blog posts, I’ll try to compare 3 most popular OpenSource firmware options from multiple angles, and hopefully help you decide which one to go with. This post is an overview and introduction into different options, with a very high-level comparison between them.

Once you decide to install devices in your network and start using them in your daily interaction with your home, they start having their own lifecycle. You don’t have to feed them and sign them lullabies when going to sleep, but periodic check and maintenance would ensure your home runs great and you have a lot of fun using it.

Automating your home is a fun task, if for nothing else, than for the learning path you will cross during this process. Learning curve can be quite steep for someone that wasn’t exposed to overall Home IoT systems, so in this post, I’ll try to explain how your home ecosystem could look like, what are the layers, how they interact with each other, what are the software (and hardware) option for each layer and try to offer some pointers for further investigation.