Build a Linux smart home office
Creative ingenuity and the ability to cram a network stack into the smallest of things have gifted us, over the past few years, some pretty cool home innovations. Legacy (classical?) home dwellers may see little merit in upgrading to a smart home, but we have some uniquely Linux ideas that may persuade them.
Having a smart home needn’t mean having Alexa (the voice of Amazon’s Echo) eavesdropping on your every word. Nor does it mean the nameless entity within a Google Assistant reporting back to the mothership whenever you leave the bathroom light on. The Mycroft home assistant can do all the good bits of these voice devices, but without the more chilling data-collection aspects. Best of all, you can run Mycroft on a Raspberry Pi.
But there’s more to smart homes than shouting at small robots. As summer makes its way across the land, good citizens will be collectively donning short shorts and firing up their fans and air conditioners. Some may find themselves having to shoulder the expense of a new cooling machine ; others will want to see if their current one can be hacked and tweaked to make for a more economical summers. Through the magic of OpenHAB, we’ll show you how.
For many of us, the pandemic has seen our homes become unwitting extensions of the workplace, and depending on your line of work that may be the case for some months to come. So we’ve got a couple of projects for smartening your home office setup, too. Rescue yourself from Zoom meetings and banish Google’s office suite with the open-source powerhouses Jitsi Meet and Collabora Online. And since Docker is all the rage, we’ll look at how we can harness its power better using the Portainer management engine. This will make it easy for you to add any service you can imagine to your self-hosted smart home office, so let’s get started!
A smart home office?
Take a look at some great tools that can make a smart home smart, and a home office, er, official.
To the cynic, all this new smartification of everyday items seems to involve putting networked computers in places where they’re not needed, and needing dozens of companion apps on your smartphone to keep tabs on all these smart things – and in so doing, opening all these devices (and possibly your phone too) up to attack.
Some manufacturers are better than others at keeping their IoT things secured, and many attacks could be prevented by users changing default credentials. Since 2016, Raspberry Pis no longer ship with the SSH service enabled because it’s too easy to spot them when they’re exposed to the internet.
Watch this!
But there’s a lot of smarthome projects that are fun, safe, and will bring some degree of joy to your home. Lots of these are variations on standard Pi maker projects – we really like, for example, Elio Struyf’s project documented at www. eliostruyf.com/diy-buildingbusy-light-show-microsoftteams-presence. This uses an LED array as a status indicator for outside your home office.
The pandemic has gotten lots of
