IoT

It seems like every manufacturer of anything electrical that goes in the house wants to be part of the IoT story these days. Further, they all want their own app, which means you have to go to gazillions of bespoke software products to control your things. And they're all - with very few exceptions - terrible: That's to control the curtains in my office and the master bedroom, but the hubs (you need two, because the range is rubbish) have stopped communicating. That one is for the spa, but it...

I've spent more time IoT'ing my house over the last year than any sane person ever should. But hey, it's been strange times for all of us and it's kept me entertained whilst no longer travelling. Plus, it's definitely added to our lives in terms of the things it enables us to do; see them in part 5 of my IoT unravelled blog series [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-part-5-practical-use-case-videos/]. But it also remains a complete mess and I want to demonstrate why based on some recent exp...

Two of my favourite things these days are Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] and Home Assistant [https://www.home-assistant.io/]. The former is an obvious choice, the latter I've come to love as I've embarked on my home automation journey [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-part-1-its-a-mess-but-then-theres-home-assistant/] . So, it was with great pleasure that I saw the two integrated recently: > always something... now you are in my @home_assistant [https://twitter.com/home_...

As I progressively make my house smarter and smarter [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-part-1-its-a-mess-but-then-theres-home-assistant/] , I find I keep butting against the intersection of where smart stuff meets dumb stuff. Take light globes, for example, the simplest circuit you can imagine. Pass a current through it, light goes on. Kill the current, light goes off. We worked that out back in the 19th century and everything was fine... until now. Here's what I kept seeing with my "smar...

What. A. Week. Blog post every day, massive uptick in comments, DMs, newsletter subscribers, followers and especially, blog traffic. More than 200,000 unique visitors dropped by this week, mostly to read about IoT things. This has been a fascinating experience for me and I've enjoyed sharing the journey, complete with all my mistakes 🙂 I topped the week off by spending a couple of hours talking to Scott Helme about our respective IoT experiences so that's the entirety of this week's update - Sc...

This is the fifth and final part of the IoT unravelled blog series. Part 1 [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-part-1-its-a-mess-but-then-theres-home-assistant/] was all about what a mess the IoT landscape is, but then there's Home Assistant to unify it all. In part 2 [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-part-2-ip-addresses-network-zigbee-custom-firmware-and-soldering/] I delved into networking bits and pieces, namely IP addresses, my Ubiquiti UniFi gear and Zigbee. Part 3 [https://ww...

The first few parts of this series have all been somewhat technical in nature; part 1 [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-part-1-its-a-mess-but-then-theres-home-assistant/] was how much of a mess the IoT ecosystem is and how Home Assistant aims to unify it all, part 2 [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-part-2-ip-addresses-network-zigbee-custom-firmware-and-soldering/] got into the networking layer with both Wi-Fi and Zigbee and in part 3 [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-par...

In part 1 [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-part-1-its-a-mess-but-then-theres-home-assistant/] of this series, I posited that the IoT landscape is an absolute mess but Home Assistant (HA) does an admirable job of tying it all together. In part 2 [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-part-2-ip-addresses-network-zigbee-custom-firmware-and-soldering/] , I covered IP addresses and the importance of a decent network to run all this stuff on, followed by Zigbee and the role of low power, lo...

In part 1 [https://www.troyhunt.com/iot-unravelled-part-1-its-a-mess-but-then-theres-home-assistant/] , I deliberately kept everything really high level because frankly, I didn't want to scare people off. I'm not ashamed to say that the process of getting even the basics working absolutely did my head in as I waded through a sea of unfamiliar technologies, protocols and acronyms. I wish I'd had just the fundamentals down pat before going deeper and that was my intention with the first part of th...

With the benefit of hindsight, this was a naïve question: > Alright clever IoT folks, I've got two of these garage door openers, what do you reckon the best way of connecting them with Apple HomeKit is? https://t.co/i0RmjSMkkD — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) April 25, 2020 [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1253966820010127362?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] In my mind, the answer would be simple: "Just buy X, plug it in and you're good to go". Instead, I found myself heading down the rabbit hole into a world...