One of the worst things about building kind of a smart home is that all the different catches you buy end up inevitably trying to make their own ecosystem, and none of them really want to play ball with each other. And in some ways, they will to a limited extent, like they may have Alexa or Google Home integration. They might integrate with like Apple Home kits, but that’s kind of the extent of it. They all want their own bespoke apps and they want you to use their little private thing like Samsung has smarter things, Govi has the Govi app, LG has the LG matter thing and there’s protocols that are meant to sort of fix all this.
But in the interim, I’ve got an amazing solution. So I used to use the Google Home app and it was fine. It had basically all of my cameras, my lighting and my Wi Fi. I bet everything I could hear, but then certain devices wouldn’t work here. It all started when I had the Google’s Wi Fi and I did a video on like how terrible it turned out to be, especially after the layoffs. Anyways, I started buying equipment from other companies like ubiquity, and their cure does not work with Google’s home. You can’t see your camera feed. And I didn’t want to use yet another app for every little device in my house, so I found a solution where I can put everything in Apple’s Home app on my iPhone.
Now, these two camera feeds are not coming from a home kit, or at least official home kit feed. These are from my ubiquity cameras that I have physically in my home, but I figured out a way to get them into the Apple Home app. Now in my basement, I have my little server rack set up with my ubiquity new gateway. But right here plugged into it is a Raspberry Pi. And running on that Raspberry Pi is this thing called Homebridge, which is a software package that will run on a lot of different types of hardware. It’s very convenient to put it on a Raspberry Pi, but what it will do is it will emulate Apple’s Homebridges. So the devices that are compatible with apples home network. This is so cool. Okay, so the whole thing is built on this big plug in model.
And right now I’ve got things in there like I’ve got my Govi, my Govi light right here. I’ve also got like my unify for all of my unified devices, but then I also have like my web OS, this TV, but it’s so cool. So you can just come in here and you can say, okay, I can start typing Samsung and I can just set enter. And there are hundreds of plugins people have developed to work with everything like air conditioners and broad link Samsung TVs and older TVs. They basically reverse engineered every single device’s protocol and they make it show up inside of your Apple’s home kit system. So back to this example, these two camera feeds that are actually running here. This software running on this Raspberry Pi connects to the cameras directly. Then it’s actually running a version of FFM peg on the device to then stream that back as home devices. And hilariously, it even connects to Apple’s icloud thing to use the facial recognition features. And it’s just using my local networked cameras that I have locally and it’s feeding back into the whole system. This is brilliant.
Then I have devices to just natively support Apple’s ecosystem, like my cassetta light system that I have as replacement for every one of my life switches in my house. So I can control literally any light in mouse. I’ve actually forgot where half my light switches are because I just ask Google or Alexa or Siri to just turn on that light and it doesn’t for me. So this all works in concert with all of that.
So now basically I can do anything in my home. I can control any light. I can turn off the doorbell. I can start my dryer. I can do anything in my house with my voice using Siri at least. What’s cool is there’s an open source project that’s actually pairing this with something like the Whisper LLM and like Llama 3 as a local sort of LLM powered thing. So you can get rid of Siri in this equation too. And it all plugs back into it. Since we already have the app that can control every device in a house, it’s the perfect stepping stone.
So now we can have a fully locally running AI that controls your whole house without having to go and like have it host on Google or by apple or somebody. And you can do all of this locally and you can control it. You can make your own macros, you can teach it things and it will do what you want. And you don’t have to be blocked in anyone’s ecosystem. It’s just perfect. I’m babysitting this little granular, and she follows me around, makes noises. There are my videos. But she’s adorable.