- Location
- Williamsburg, VA
- Name
- Chris
So,
We moved into a new build house on 3 October.
It's been a flurry of activity, firstly getting all the boxes unloaded, and then getting all the "bits and bobs" as I call them set up..
The unboxing was particularly interesting. We sold the house in Reston (Virginia) in March of 21, and moved into a rental in Fairfax (Virginia). We knew this was temporary, so we only unboxed what we absolutely needed, leaving the remainder in boxes.
Well this time, we didn't have that luxury so all the boxes had to be opened. It's interesting what you learn to live with and without and an awful lot of what was in the unopened boxes became superfluous. I guess that's a good thing, but we certainly pushed our garbage collection people to the limit.
When we built the house, I had it fully wired with audio distribution in mind, and then some sort of home automation. 10 ceiling speakers installed, 6 in the living room, 2 in the master bedroom and 2 in the laundry room. LOML had dictated that she wanted to listen to music whilst she went about her daily activities. All the wiring was fed into what I call the "comms closet" which is off the garage in the space under the stairs.
I had had an Amplifi mesh system in the townhouse, and once GloFiber hooked me up to the innerwebs, I just plugged the Amplifi in and we had internet. But like any good engineer, I had a far more robust system planned. I had bought a Ubiquiti Dream Machine SE and 3 access points for installation in the house.
I had gotten the "low voltage" guy to install the speakers and AP's, so it was easy to stand up the UDM. I just shut down the Amplifi, hooked the UDM to the ethernet runs in the Comm's Closet and then ran through the configuration. The whole process took me less than 2 hours and I knew NOTHING about the UDM. Way to go Ubiquiti.
Then came the audio with the Yamaha AVR driving the speakers and the Sony Bravia KD-65X85K mounted on the wall above the fireplace. This turned out to be significantly simpler than I was expecting thanks to something call HDMI eARC which is a 2 way communication system between the AVR and the TV. This eliminated the need for multiple remote controls and/or IR repeaters.
The floor outlets are to be installed tomorrow, so I'll be able to hook up the subwoofer, do a system calibration and be done with this part, at least for now.
A couple of weeks ago, I stood up a Home-Assistant server on a HA Yellow device. I wasn't paying too much attention to the process as I was definitely multi-tasking at the time.
When I sat down in front of the computer to see how the process was going, I was completely gobsmacked. HASS (as it's affectionately called) had found EVERY device on my network. EVERY device....
The dashboard was chock-a-block full of data it was pulling from all the devices. Whoo boy. This was more than a little intimidatingly if I'm honest.
A couple of days ago I had some time to start spelunking through the enormous tranche of HASS data. There are "integrations", sample files, dashboards, etc to control virtually everything that you can imagine. The list on github is literally thousands of devices. Yes, all my devices are already there, so building a system to "control" them is definitely possible.
But back to the subject of rabbit holes. I could easily see HASS taking over my life, such are the possibilities. So, I definitely need to sit down and think about where I want this to go, and how much time I'm willing to dedicate to it.
Unfortunately, being an engineer, the attraction is strong as the satisfaction is in the doing for us. It's an affliction.....
If you got to the end of this, thanks.
If not, I understand
cheers
We moved into a new build house on 3 October.
It's been a flurry of activity, firstly getting all the boxes unloaded, and then getting all the "bits and bobs" as I call them set up..
The unboxing was particularly interesting. We sold the house in Reston (Virginia) in March of 21, and moved into a rental in Fairfax (Virginia). We knew this was temporary, so we only unboxed what we absolutely needed, leaving the remainder in boxes.
Well this time, we didn't have that luxury so all the boxes had to be opened. It's interesting what you learn to live with and without and an awful lot of what was in the unopened boxes became superfluous. I guess that's a good thing, but we certainly pushed our garbage collection people to the limit.
When we built the house, I had it fully wired with audio distribution in mind, and then some sort of home automation. 10 ceiling speakers installed, 6 in the living room, 2 in the master bedroom and 2 in the laundry room. LOML had dictated that she wanted to listen to music whilst she went about her daily activities. All the wiring was fed into what I call the "comms closet" which is off the garage in the space under the stairs.
I had had an Amplifi mesh system in the townhouse, and once GloFiber hooked me up to the innerwebs, I just plugged the Amplifi in and we had internet. But like any good engineer, I had a far more robust system planned. I had bought a Ubiquiti Dream Machine SE and 3 access points for installation in the house.
I had gotten the "low voltage" guy to install the speakers and AP's, so it was easy to stand up the UDM. I just shut down the Amplifi, hooked the UDM to the ethernet runs in the Comm's Closet and then ran through the configuration. The whole process took me less than 2 hours and I knew NOTHING about the UDM. Way to go Ubiquiti.
Then came the audio with the Yamaha AVR driving the speakers and the Sony Bravia KD-65X85K mounted on the wall above the fireplace. This turned out to be significantly simpler than I was expecting thanks to something call HDMI eARC which is a 2 way communication system between the AVR and the TV. This eliminated the need for multiple remote controls and/or IR repeaters.
The floor outlets are to be installed tomorrow, so I'll be able to hook up the subwoofer, do a system calibration and be done with this part, at least for now.
A couple of weeks ago, I stood up a Home-Assistant server on a HA Yellow device. I wasn't paying too much attention to the process as I was definitely multi-tasking at the time.
When I sat down in front of the computer to see how the process was going, I was completely gobsmacked. HASS (as it's affectionately called) had found EVERY device on my network. EVERY device....
The dashboard was chock-a-block full of data it was pulling from all the devices. Whoo boy. This was more than a little intimidatingly if I'm honest.
A couple of days ago I had some time to start spelunking through the enormous tranche of HASS data. There are "integrations", sample files, dashboards, etc to control virtually everything that you can imagine. The list on github is literally thousands of devices. Yes, all my devices are already there, so building a system to "control" them is definitely possible.
But back to the subject of rabbit holes. I could easily see HASS taking over my life, such are the possibilities. So, I definitely need to sit down and think about where I want this to go, and how much time I'm willing to dedicate to it.
Unfortunately, being an engineer, the attraction is strong as the satisfaction is in the doing for us. It's an affliction.....
If you got to the end of this, thanks.
If not, I understand
cheers
