Posts About smarthome

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Planning a Home Server Room and Smart Home

When considering the wires that will need to run through the house, it’s helpful to envision the dream end product. A rough image of that dream homelab is outlined in this post. However, before proceeding, keep two things in mind. First, I’m not a network engineer, so it’s important not to blindly follow my directions. Second, much of this may be considered overkill and can be built up gradually. This project is as much a hobby as it is practical, so I eventually plan to assess the equipment I already have and explore different setups with cost in mind.

Homebridge and AlarmDecoder

A few months ago we got Pi-hole and Homebridge up and running in our current house. The goal was to test them out and see if they would be a good fit for a new, dream house. In that same spirit, we went ahead and ordered AlarmDecoder so that we could hook up our existing DSC alarm to Homebridge as well. While the installation process was a bit more intimidating than Pi-hole, it was still approachable and has been working out well for the past week. We’ve documented some of the pros, cons, thoughts and references for when we revisit this during the new house build.

Setting Up Pi-hole and Homebridge

When thinking about the ideal home server room, it helps to have actual experience with as many of the tools as possible. So, I thought it would be good to try out Pi-hole and Homebridge running on Raspberry Pi’s in our current home to see how they hold up over the next year. Initial experiences show that Pi-hole and Homebridge are everything they claim to be – set and forget once you’ve gone through the smooth setup process. However, IP cameras through Homebridge will require some more love and testing. They are quite complicated to setup, and perform quite poorly so far.

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