My own apartment, in Montreal
The lab where every idea is tested before it is offered to a client. A multi-room apartment with a balcony, lived in by a family, on an ordinary home network.
Where it started
- A different app for every brand of bulb, thermostat and camera.
- Cameras sending everything to the maker's cloud, with a subscription.
- No backups and no alerts when something failed.
What was done
Local serverHome Assistant on a dedicated quiet mini-PC, plus a second server for storage.
Zigbee networkAbout twenty lights, sensors and thermostats on a local network, no cloud.
Per-room dashboardThis site's style comes from it: one tile per room, scenes a thumb away.
Wall tabletAn always-on wall panel that turns into a photo slideshow when nobody is using it.
Cameras, no subscriptionLocal recording and person detection with Frigate, alerts in the app.
Energy and peaksConsumption tracking and automations during Hydro-Québec peak periods.
3-2-1 backupsEncrypted off-site backup every night and a local copy every week.
AlertsDisk, backup, server offline: a phone notification before it becomes a problem.
Secure remote accessThe dashboard from anywhere, with no open ports.
The result
One app for the whole family.No more camera subscriptions.The system keeps working during an internet outage.Failures are caught and fixed before anyone notices.
What I took from it
The most important part is the least visible: a solid network, tested backups and monitoring. That is what I include in every project.
See the dashboard in the demo