The 'Internet of Things' or whatever you want to call it – controllable peripherals, ubiquitous connections, stuff like that – is a pretty cool concept. I want to be easily able to do things like ask 'when will my laundry be finished?', or have my central heating come on when I start heading home. Not because it's massively beneficial, but because it removes some minor annoyances.
The technology is there, and has been for a while. But the proliferation of mindless, unforgiveable security flaws, pervasive surveillance, proprietary cloud-based networks, shitty software and bad UX generally – it's really mad. It really makes it difficult to want to use any of these devices.
I'd love some kind of proper, non-half-baked-and-riddled-with-holes solution for home automation, but I reckon I'd probably have to build it myself.
Well, one major problem that I see is that, we aren't required to learn about any of this stuff before we buy it and most of the people who's job it is to set this up would gladly do it for less than someone who knows what they're doing even though they know nothing about it. The entire world is set up incorrectly for something like IoT. We try to get as cheap as we possibly can with everything and we try to skimp on any labor cost but set everything up fancy as hell. That's always going to leave you with security holes because security doesn't make money. Not unless someone starts getting punished for the bullshit security they are putting into these things.
For the local hardware, I use Arduino Nano clones, nRF24L01+ mesh networking chip, whatever sensors/actuators, and the MySensors library. Encryption and packet signing are both turned on.
On the gateway, it is just a serial console opened up to a Arduino Nano and nRF24L01+. I use Node-Red on the machine the serial gateway is plugged into. I also use the MQTT broker Mosquitto as my backing store for IoT data, from any of my machines. I design my architecture around that.
To connect between physical areas (from house to hackerspace), I use Tor Hidden Services, giving each endpoint a .onion address. With that, all my computers on the .Onion network can talk with each other as if they are on medium-high latency hub. And it also solves the problem of "staticIP/port forwarding/firewall rule change/dynDNS" crap. I drop Tor, set up a hidden service, route 22 to Tor, and off it goes. All I need do is keep track of that onion address.
And that provides me devices I have complete control over, utilizing a cloud of computers I own. I'm looking in how I can blend in IPFS as well for logging capabilities.
The 'Internet of Things' or whatever you want to call it – controllable peripherals, ubiquitous connections, stuff like that – is a pretty cool concept. I want to be easily able to do things like ask 'when will my laundry be finished?', or have my central heating come on when I start heading home. Not because it's massively beneficial, but because it removes some minor annoyances.
The technology is there, and has been for a while. But the proliferation of mindless, unforgiveable security flaws, pervasive surveillance, proprietary cloud-based networks, shitty software and bad UX generally – it's really mad. It really makes it difficult to want to use any of these devices.
I'd love some kind of proper, non-half-baked-and-riddled-with-holes solution for home automation, but I reckon I'd probably have to build it myself.