| As one of the general use cases, I'll hop in on the privacy note. That is, there are zero privacy issues from my end. Nothing leaves my house for any of this. I can rip the internet out tomorrow and everything will keep working. None of the devices even have a route to the internet. The Z-Wave stuff is all Z-Wave+ and is supposedly pretty secure in its own right, but is just general RF and talks to my controller which is plugged into my server via USB. None of this stuff can talk to the internet. My light bulbs are 802.11, but they connect to a dedicated wireless network which bridges to my "IoT" VLAN. My IP cams are all wired and connected only to my IoT VLAN. A VM runs Home Assistant and Node-RED (both open source) which sit on my general LAN as well as the IoT LAN. That provides my interface and controller for all my smart home devices. Another VM runs Blue Iris to act as my DVR for my IP cameras, do motion detection, etc. All communication between everything is either done directly or through a MQTT broker running in a container only accessible on a bridge internal to the hypervisor. All the VMs and containers run on a server running Proxmox sitting in the corner of my basement. The IoT VLAN does not even have a route out to the internet. DNS only resolves a couple internal hosts. Basically this is "I already had a server running in my basement and I dug out an old piece of MikroTik gear". It's not gonna be simple for a non-technical person, but for most people on HN it's likely not a huge investment of time/money/etc. There's no need to go roll your own interface for "how to communicate within your house". Z-Wave, 802.11, and ethernet all work perfectly well and provide you lots of great options to work with in existing hardware and existing physical and link layer technologies (cabling, PoE, switches, etc). They don't need to be insecure or privacy-violating unless you let them. |