One of the hardest things about being a techie and working in crypto is being privacy minded... while also craving to experience all the goodies of modern services. Take for example a Ring Doorbell: It would be nice to have a video of who comes up to my door, but it would be against my entire ethos for somebody to be able to find out everybody who came to my door. After all nobody needs to know how often I order Burger King.
Enter Home Assistant, it's an open source project that tries to integrate all the smart home appliances on your own hardware. I made a post recently about setting up a voice assistant, and yeah... i piped one of my voice assistants to ChatGPT... but i get to choose when that happens and it's not like somebody is always listening... HI NSA.
So Frigate is quite an amazing little program. It's a software Network Video Recorder (NVR) for IP Cameras. I have been using it to assist in light control and security.
With the help of zones, and it's object detection system I have set up notifications if a cat gets onto the counters, it turns on lights depending on where I am and what time of day it is. It also takes little clips so I can see which cat stole the sponge from the sink or possible which cat needs to go to the vet if they ate some chocolate(hopefully not).
I can also read the license plates of cars that pass in front of my house and open the outside gate when my water is being delivered.
It's not exactly the easiest software I've ever set up, but I understand why it is the way it is and it allows me to feel served by technology instead of being watched by it.
There are also a wide variety of facial recognition options, which could log you into the right Netflix profile when you sit down... or play a Spotify playlist to a device in your location. By far my favorite use is setting room occupancy to keep my electricity bill down, but it's very noticeable how much it's missed when I walk into a room and the lights don't respond correctly... Make sure to get a good wifi router ;)
Home Assistant is second in popularity only to VSCode in terms of code contributors, with such a massive community it's be nice to have more representation here on Hive.
