The Brains of My Smart Home (with Costs!)

[@GregGranito]

Jealous of that backhaul. My house is 110 years old. Running Ethernet is daunting. Great vid.

[@FutureSmartHome]

Hey thank you! Our house is about 90 years old, it was a pain! Ran most lines up the main plumbing stack which ended up working well.

[@HATipsByLarry]

I agree, cat 6 ethernet and UPS's are the way to go. Also i am using a Dell R630 rack mount server i bought used for $350.00 USD. Its running Proxmox Virtual Environment software. Running HA in a VM on that along with a lot of docker containers, running various programs. Running HA in a VM is the way to go,. I'm also using a zigbee/z-wave combo dongle. I have serval z-wave devices i had when i was using a Samsung smartthing's hub. Most of my overhead light wall switches are z-wave.

[@FutureSmartHome]

That’s an awesome setup! Some definitely similarities. I also have HA in a VM on the Mac but might be upgrading at some point in the future.

[@mokolabs]

I would try moving your home hubs to the very top of the rack for increased signal strength.

[@davidraph]

If I want to build a Home Assistant and Homebridge on the same computer, what computer do you recommend? A Mac mini with VMs, but on the CPU and memory side? Or a PC with Windows 10?

[@FutureSmartHome]

Personal preference based on your environment of choice. I lean Mac

[@morells09]

2:01 man you can get a bundle of 6” CAT6 cables for fairly cheap lol but I respect using what you already had on hand at the same time

[@FutureSmartHome]

💯

[@ryanfiller]

This video is awesome, I wish more people got into granular detail like this. But wow, I wish the “wife deprecating humor” wasn’t so prevalent on like every smart home video ever.

[@FutureSmartHome]

Glad you like the video! And you’re right, it is prevalent, its fair feedback and I’ll take note of it in the future.

[@jimbates6227]

I agree with your criticism of WAF comments in most home automation videos. I am more tech-focused than my wife. After having a career in IT, I've decided to take a walk-before-I-run approach with our home automation. She enjoys the automation we've done so far. That's because I have been sure to make it easy to use and to make it rock solid. I've had some failures and I now consult her before diving into something new. She's reached a point where she wants apps on her phone and tablet that let her do the control I've been doing thus far; like setting the home security system, lighting control, etc. That tells me my slow approach is working. I suggest the tech-focused always use this approach with their less-tech family.

[@robert.wigley]

Slightly confused where you refer to the optical cable also carrying power at 9:50. That's not possible. Optical cables don't carry power.

[@BenCos2018]

yep haha most likely he made a mistake and meant to say cat 6 or something like that tbh

[@FutureSmartHome]

It’s the Samsung Frame “One Invisible Cable” www.amazon.com/Samsung-Invisible-Connect-Cable-Frame/dp/B07S18XXL5 and it does carry power. But I probably shouldn’t have referred to it as optical. It’s some sort of composite cable.

[@BenCos2018]

@@FutureSmartHome ah that makes more sense