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76 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
76 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
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date = '2026-05-17T23:57:15-06:00'
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draft = false
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title = "Katchi, a dragon's best friend"
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tags = ['kobold', 'esp32']
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+++
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## A smart-home for a Dragon
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{{< typeit
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tag=h3
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speed=50
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breakLines=false
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loop=true
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>}}
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"It's the Future..."
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"Dumb homes are so 2010"
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"Is all of this really necessary?" — Concerned Friends
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{{< /typeit >}}
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### Smart-homes
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The present state of smart-home choices is fairly acceptable. You have your major players, Google, Apple, Amazon and
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their associated services like Google Home or Alexa. These systems are fairly easy to set up; plug in the new device,
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type in some credentials or type a prompt on your phone, and done. Most of these systems rely on a central hub that
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orchestrates the entire smart home.
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But all these systems have one fatal annoyance. They all require access to the internet.
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### Internet dependency
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In recent years, it is common to run into issues with major providers. Privacy concerns, outages and the forced
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obsolescence of existing systems put a lot of pressure on me when building my first smart home. Sure the big players
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make it easy to set up and use, but for me the non-monetary cost was just too great. Besides the limitations in software,
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knowing that if I had an internet outage, or god forbid, the provider has an outage, I would be shit out of luck in
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turning off my lights turned me away from major providers.
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### So what did I use?
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After spending a lot of time frustrated with my options and dealing with the difficulties in automating and doing what
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I wanted with my smart-home, I went down the rabbit hole of options and found
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[Home Assistant](https://www.home-assistant.io/).
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Unlike the big-name smart-homes, Home Assistant is a self-hosted option that runs on your own hardware and locally
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connects to supported devices. It supports a wide range of [devices and integrations](https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/?brands=featured)
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and is fairly easy to set up.
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I wont expound on it much more here, but I will link to the [getting started](https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/), [documentation](https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/)
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and [community](https://community.home-assistant.io/) for more information.
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### So what's the problem?
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Of all the amazing options that Home Assistant gives us, it has a fairly significant miss; that being Smart Speaker integration.
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## Home Assistant Smart Speaker
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The options for Home Assistant smart speakers are quite limited, they only offer one official product as of the date of publishing this post.
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{{< externalLink url="https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/" >}}
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While the Home Assistant Voice PE works decently, it is the only off-the-shelf option for Home Assistant which considering
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all the freedom Home Assistant gives us, feels quite limiting. However, there is a solution.
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### The Solution
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Thankfully we are not constrained by the limitations of existing hardware thanks to microcontrollers, specifically the ESP family of microcontrollers.
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Using [ESPHome](https://esphome.io) you can create a whole myriad of smart devices based on the [ESP32 microcontroller](https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32). It provides a very diverse
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family of options that can fit nearly any use-case. Think of it as an alternative to Arduino, where instead of writing C code
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you can write yaml configuration files that dictate and configure your ESP device.
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Knowing this, I set out to make my own Smart Speaker.
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## Katchi the Kobold Smart Speaker |