For those of you who use Raspberry Pi’s in your home environment, I’m curious as to what you use them for. What applications are you running on them? Do you have your Pi’s setup in a cluster?
Wireless Z-wave module, door sensors, fire alarm, motion sensors, hidden on/off switch. Raspberry itself works as the camera and has motion detection if needed. Event notices are sent using xmpp.
Very interesting. So you basically have an alarm system in software then? What do you use for software? Do you have an arm/disarm function?
Raspberry Z-wave module came with rudimentary software, that was just awful. Documentation and debug tools were utter crap and I never want to do that kind of trial and error bs ever again.
I basicly use the software to pass trigger events to linux and handle the timing and remote UI. Linux commandline clients then handle sending messages, capturing images/video and sending captured material to a cloud server.
Software allows remote control through webpage, that you can access either directly in LAN or through an obscure server that uses reverse SSH to get past your firewal.
I blocked the shady SSH connection and only use it directly through my VPN.
I assume by “Raspberry Z-Wave module” you mean the RaZberry z-wave addon board, and I couldn’t agree more. I tried to get that thing going with another home automation package and gave up after a few hours of fucking with it.
That said, these days I’m using Home Assistant on a RPi with a Nortek z-wave/zigbee combo radio USB interface and I couldn’t be happier. If you’ve never used HA it’s worth trying out; used to require a lot of scripting but now it’s a beautiful and polished system that has all the tweakability a nerd wants with a nice high-WAF GUI. They have a plugin that does exactly what you’re doing and makes a virtual alarm system out of existing sensors.
I also agree block connections and use a VPN to access it, I do the same thing.
