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[00:00:01]
Unknown:
This is a very sensitive subject.
[00:00:20] Unknown:
Just the turbos, mate. People are gonna be so confused. Allow me to explain. Before that, hello, and welcome to Freedom Tech Friday. For those of you that are new here, allow me to quickly explain what this is all about and why the hell we are here. FreedomTech Friday is a weekly live and interactive show hosted on the ungovernable misfits, ex, Nostra, and YouTube feeds. We go live for one hour every Friday at 9AM eastern or 2PM UK time, but you can also catch up later on the Ungovernable podcast feed. On Freedom Tech Friday, we like to cover the latest latest news and trends for anything relating to Freedom Technologies.
That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between. Essentially, if there's a news item, tool, or topic that that can help you take back some control in today's digital Panopticon, we want to talk about it. My name's Q and A. I'm head of customer experience at Foundation where we build Bitcoin focused sovereignty tools. And usually, I'm joined by two of my good friends, Max, the CTO, chief technical officer at the Ungovernable Misfits Empire, and, usually, although he's not here today with us, Seth, who is VP at kWallet. As I mentioned, the show is live and interactive, and we rely on you guys to steer us towards the topics that you want us to cover or to send us your Freedom Tech related questions.
There are many ways in which you can get involved, all of which really help spread awareness for the show. That includes commenting or asking your questions in the live chat. Hello. I can see that a few people hopped in already. Welcome, gentlemen or ladies. You can submit your topics or questions ahead of time before the show on X or Nosta. You can boost us on Fountain or any of the other podcasting two point zero apps. And finally, you can send questions or tips, via xofourchat.com. And you can also share the show on x or Nosta. Aside from last week's bubbling and awesome Nosta live chat, you guys know who you are. We have no baller boost support on Fountain this week for well, sorry, for last week's show. But top support come from Rev Huddl, who sent 721 stats and said, there's so much information packed into these discussions that I find myself wanting an article to reference based on each recording.
I suppose now with AI, I can make one for myself. Yeah. I'm sure you probably could. Or you could also check the, the transcript, which I believe is, available in in Fountain as well. And all I'd like oh, go ahead. To interrupt there. Rev Huddl, if you're listening.
[00:02:50] Unknown:
If you do make that and you put it through AI and say, can you make this into a article and, like, break down the topics as, like, a follow through, like, someone can do a step by step on the things we're talking about, share it with me, and then we can get it on Ungovernable Misfits, with all the other articles and stuff. It'd be quite nice to have, like, each Freedom Tech Friday as a show, but then it's also we also have it on record that people can go back and, go through.
[00:03:20] Unknown:
That's a good idea. Maybe a little bounty out there for, for some people to, to get involved and support the show. That'd be a great way to do it. Anyway, without further ado, you've already hopped in. Well, allow allow me to reintroduce. Max, how's it going? Are you well?
[00:03:35] Unknown:
Very well, mate. Very well. A little bit disappointed. Our good friend has, ditched us again. But Yeah. Do we know do we know where he's off gallivanting? No. It's the life of a rock and roller, mate. Don't ask. Don't tell.
[00:03:49] Unknown:
He he is a bit of a bigwig these days. Yeah. The life of a VP.
[00:03:55] Unknown:
I know. I know. But, yeah, good, mate. I'm excited about this topic because I've sort of nudged you a few times over the last, maybe, I don't know, eighteen months or something since you first talked to me about this. And, I think it's something that, well, I wanna do myself, but I actually think it's really overlooked by a lot of the more privacy minded people in this space. And I think that it's, I don't know, like, it's a it's an opportunity for someone not just to say, I'm gonna be a complete Luddite and just not have any tech, but to have that middle ground where you can still have some, creature comforts and money saving points and, just, like, use technology without being completely owned. So I'm excited.
[00:04:49] Unknown:
Yeah. It's, it's definitely, a rabbit hole. So if you're in the market for another rabbit hole, stay tuned because, things are about to get good. It's it's a rabbit hole that I've been going down myself, fairly recently, actually. I think we spoke about it once on on the Bitcoin brief. And, it's it's very much a subject matter that I'm absolutely not an expert in, but, I'm kind of, you know, heading down that road and and wanted to talk about it and see what, what the other ungovernables in the in the livestream chat are, are thinking about it and whether they're running something similar. Before we do dive in, just wanted to say hello to everybody. In the live chat, we've got Bon, Clem Fandango, Vibrant, Cyla Thorne brought B2C wrestle.
Dad's here. Hi, John. Clem Fandango. And we've already had, five zaps come through, Max. Nostergang with 10 zaps. Delta Mike Thank you very much. Delta Mike with 420 sats. Vishon with 500 sats, Bob with 2,345 sats, all up, and, Rev Huddl. Yeah. We've just been talking about you. I don't know whether you meant you heard it, but, he said, good morning. Chicago bit devs last night was excellent. Jealous about that. That sounds good. I like it. Anyway, onto today's topic. Today, I wanna dive into, as I said, a rabbit hole that I've been tumbling down this year, and that is, connected home or smart home tech.
It's something that's kind of blown up generally in popularity in in recent years. You know, you've you've only got a walk for thirty seconds outside in my local area, and you'll see multiple Ring doorbells, Internet connected doorbells. And I'm willing to bet that every single person, in today's live chat has got at least one relative that's definitely got an Alexa nestled somewhere in their home.
[00:06:42] Unknown:
Smart home Yeah.
[00:06:43] Unknown:
Yeah. Smart home tech is is it's literally everywhere, isn't it? You've got lights, plugs, cameras, thermostats, speakers, fridges, ovens, door locks. But the sad thing is that a lot of these devices, if you kind of use them in a, I guess, you know, the most simple way or a naive way, they they can quickly become a bit of a privacy nightmare because the these kind of devices, particularly some of the popular ones, they always like to to phone home to big brother because, as we know, data is kinda like the new oil these days, and it's it's very much, valuable to to, you know, the usual corporations.
So today, we're gonna explore why that's a problem, although that's fairly evident, and what the basic building blocks of a private smart home could look like, and how you could get started without being, a turbo nerd or programmer, a massive budget. We're gonna have a bit of a well, the main focus, in terms of the practical advice is gonna be on a a piece of software, open source, piece of software called Home Assistant. And then we're gonna dive into the different devices that can communicate locally, the, the trade offs of taking this path because it, you know, it certainly isn't the easiest way to achieve having a smart home. And as I said, you know, the caveat at the top of the show, this is definitely not a master class. It's kind of, a rabbit hole that I've gone down. It's kind of a like a field report, of somebody who's kind of exploring what's possible whilst trying to remain as, evasive to the usual suspects of, you know, Apple, Amazon, etcetera, as possible.
So, Matt, before we dive in, I'm curious if you've ever dove into or had any kind of smart home or connected tech within your, various different abodes.
[00:08:35] Unknown:
Yeah. I have. And it's the reason that I wanted to learn more about this. Where before I had kids and a missus, I had disposable income, and, I used to buy dumb shit. And one of the things I used to really love was those, like, Phillips Hue lights. Mhmm. And I, like, replaced my entire house with Phillips Hue lights and had them, like, dimming. I know it was like a lot of I should have bought Bitcoin, but, you know, I bought those days. And, as I'd wake up, the lights would come up with me, and they'd dim down. I got the different colors and stuff, and I absolutely fucking loved it. And then I actually sold all of them for Bitcoin. I actually, like, sold all my light bulbs and, like, all the kit. And I've always wanted to have those again, but I didn't wanna what I didn't want people to know when am I home, when am I leaving, like, what like, my patterns. So I was like, I'm not gonna have that. And then I also now want security cameras outside and inside my home.
So I want those, but then it's like you can get this Nest stuff or whatever, and then that's all in the cloud. I'm like, well, I definitely don't want to, like, literally big brother myself, but I want to have the security, for the safety of my family. So there's a lot of things that I want that would be useful, and there's always that, like, fuck. Then I'm just spying on myself. Like, I'm I'm literally, like, putting a spy in my own home that's, like, really stupid. So loads of stuff I want, don't currently have. Maybe you can tell me that I can have it, and there's a clever workaround.
[00:10:17] Unknown:
Yeah. There there certainly is. As with all things, there are trade offs, and we're we're gonna dive into those shortly. But I guess before, before we kinda dive into the nitty gritty of, like, Home Assistant, what it is, and how you can use it, I guess it's worth outlining somebody who to somebody who's kind of never, kind of dove into this or doesn't understand the the kind of attraction here. Like,
[00:10:40] Unknown:
why do you think people look to to smart home tech? Like, it it it's only a fairly recent phenomenon. Like, what people why are people diving into this, do do you think? I think a couple of reasons. One, just before I I jump into it. Yeah, Barn Miner has made, a lot of changes to our vernacular, and Fart nine probably is one of the greatest he's come up with. So thank you, Barn. That has Yeah. As well. Before you do that, has anybody bought fart9.com?
[00:11:08] Unknown:
No. But they should. To. Yeah. Yeah. Well, why your why your go on.
[00:11:13] Unknown:
I was just gonna say, there might be, like, a fork further down the the road, and it's like a a Fart nine option. You see if you can buy it, and then Yeah. I just it it fails on DNS resolution, so that doesn't mean somebody hasn't bought. I don't know. It just says this site can't be reached. Fartnine.
[00:11:31] Unknown:
Oh. Fart9.com. No idea. But, anyway, yeah, why do people go anywhere? Tech rather?
[00:11:38] Unknown:
I think a few reasons. One is energy saving, reasons. Like, you know, are your lights turn off when you leave and all that kind of stuff. And, oh, you're gonna save money, but then you actually don't save money because you buy the thing. So it's kind of like a false economy, but it seems cool. And the same with, like, the the heating stuff, like, smart thermostats. Oh, you know, you've gone away for the weekend, and you forgot to turn your heating down. Well, you can do that from your phone. Oh, that sounds really cool. And then, on top of that, it's just, like, ease of use and the fact that it's integrated into everything.
I I bought a a what's it called? A a digital photo frame the other day on Amazon. I was just like, oh, I want this digital photo frame because my dog had died, and I wanted to have a like, all the photos of him. So he's, like, still in our home. And I was like, okay. He can have his own little frame. I've just bought one. It was on a deal on Amazon. Buy that. And then I said to my missus, oh, can you set that up and put the pictures on? And then, she did it, and it's like a smart thing that's, like, links to your phone, and then they have your photos and all this. And I was like, why is every like, everything's a smart thing or, like, the heating engineer will come around and they fit a smart meter thing, and they just sort of naturally do it and everyone does it now. It's just become the norm. So they're the they're the reasons, I think. It's just normal.
[00:13:07] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I think I think the energy saving ones is is a funny one to me. Like you say, it's kind of some of this shit's quite expensive. So, like, the the the amount that you're gonna save on having some LED light bulbs, is gonna be that's quite a long, a long or a lot window for you. So yeah. A lot a large payback window. Yeah. I think I think the other things for me is, like, automation and convenience, like, having automated lights. Although it's not a deal breaker for life, like, when you've got a busy life, it it does, like, make your life a little bit easier. And I know that might sound weird, like, technophobes, but, like, if you can stack a lot of these different, you know, very small optimizations to your life, it can make a marked improvement in terms of, of like you having more time to yourself so that you don't have to spend it doing trivial shit. And obviously, you know, turning on a light switch doesn't take you long. But like I say, if you start stacking these on top of one another, it's kind of, you know, it can have a a marked improvement to your life. And, maybe I'm just being lazy, but I certainly notice it. No. No.
[00:14:11] Unknown:
You're not you're not being lazy. It's that is definitely true and that there are, like, massive wins that you can have there. Because people could have said that about, like, oh, what do you want a fucking dishwasher for? Like, you know, you can just do that in the sink. Like, it's not that. It's like, fuck off. I'm not doing I'm not doing my own washing. I'm not gonna have a dishwasher every like, they're never gonna not have a dishwasher. And the same goes for all this other stuff. Like, if it saves you time and energy and you can, like, spend more time with your family, definitely go for it. But just don't spy on yourself. So that's that's where you're you know? When you were talking to me about it, I think I think you said something like, oh, I want a a light that turns itself off in the bathroom when people leave or, like, it comes on. It's like a sensor.
And that's, like, that's a perfect dad thing. Like, I go around all day just fucking turning lights off just everywhere. Just like, that needs to be off. Why why is the spare room light on? Why is that no one's even in there all day. Like, why is that on bathroom light off? So things like that. That, again, saves you just having to patrol your your house, like, just trying to save money constantly.
[00:15:21] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Before we we dive into some of the trade offs, fortnine.com is available on name Namecheap for $10. So, guess what I'm doing after the show? But, thank you for to yeah. Thank you to Bon, and thank you to Vibrant for for doing the sleuthing there. Appreciate you guys. Nice. Alright. So we've talked about the pros and why people wanna do this, and, you know, I'm fully on board with that. Like, I I cosigned all of it. Like, what's the trade off? I mean, I guess the obvious one I'll dive in first is, like, massive amounts of data harvesting, usage patterns, camera feeds of your house, your comings and goings go into somebody else's computer, like voice recordings maybe if you're using Alexa.
Like, there's been some horror stories of of, like, you know, it listening when you think it shouldn't be listening, and that being used to train all sorts of different models. Like, I don't know. When you know, when you use it naively, like, smart home tech literally allows the corporations to see, a shit ton of information about your life. It could be when you wake up, when you go to sleep, you know, what you say to voice assistants, what time you turn your lights on, what's how high you set your heating, when you get home from work, what time the postman delivers your, your mail. Like, there's there's untold amounts of data that can be harvested depending on how deep into this ecosystem you get and how kind of, like, how much data you're you're kind of sharing here. So that, like, that that is the kind of be all and end all here is to, you know, why I would urge people not to just go straight down the the convenience route here because, like, you just like we say with Bitcoin, you just have no idea how or when that data could be used against you. Like, it's just it's just all being siphoned off into various different different corporate clouds that are just stored for an indefinite amount of time, and probably gonna get leaked eventually, aren't they? Let's be honest.
[00:17:20] Unknown:
Definitely. And even if they're not leaked, you just know they're gonna be used in some dark way. Like, you only have to just look at history to be like, okay. That's definitely gonna happen. But some of the stuff is so convenient that even people who are aware that it's not ideal might use it. Like, someone mentioned in the chat here. I can't remember who it was now. It's gone. But about robo vacuum things. There's things like that. It's like, fuck. Yeah. They are gonna map my house, but they're also really fucking useful if there's just, like, constantly crumbs everywhere and kids making a mess. Like, yeah, that like, there are times where people you start to make trade offs because it's just so convenient, that that that you can easily slip. Like, maybe you don't put an Alexa in your house because that is mental, but, like, there's other things that people do.
[00:18:15] Unknown:
Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. So so, like, we we're all aligned. We we want the convenience, especially as you you, you know, you get older, you become a parent, you know, your free time dwindles down to zero or effectively zero, and you wanna look to optimize. So you, you know, you want some smart home tech to to kind of make life just that little bit easier. But you, you know, you don't wanna put yourself in the gulag and, you know, Amazon's gulag and, you know, Google's Gulag, etcetera, etcetera. So, thankfully, there is an alternative. And, you know, there are many alternatives to be clear. The one I'm most familiar with is, an open source piece of software called Home Assistant.
So familiar with this, Max? Do you know much about it, or do you want me to dive in and give you the the TLDR?
[00:19:00] Unknown:
Definitely dive in. All I know is you've said that it's open source, that it works with a lot of, brands and and things that are already out there and that you found it to be very good. So that that's all I know. I don't know past that.
[00:19:15] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Good summary. I mean, home assistant, and you'll often see it abbreviated to just h j, for the for the the turbo nerds that are going down the rabbit hole, is, as you say, it's like an open source home automation platform that you can run on your own hardware, and that's the crucial part here. So you can run this thing on a Raspberry Pi, small PC, or, you know, even a server rack. Although, to to be honest, that's probably overkill. The whole point here is, again, you're you're not relying on somebody else's cloud. Home Assistant, it kind of acts as, like, I guess, the brain of your smart home. It connects to all of these different devices of, you know, there's there's hundreds, if not thousands, of different brands that, that are kind of baked in or or compatible with the Home Assistant software.
And, basically, Home Assistant acts as the the kind of one hub to to unify all of those different pieces of software. So Home Assistant doesn't kind of replace the, let's say, the Philips Hue in your scenario, Max, or the, you know, the Amazon Alexa. It replaces the the cloud services that those devices typically depend on. Now that isn't to say that, oh, just, you know, if I've got a Ring doorbell and I'm magically connected to Home Assistant, that obviously isn't gonna stop Ring doorbell phoning home to, to to the Amazon service. So it it is very much a twofold approach to kind of get the the the most out of this kind of solution is running Home Assistant, you know, locally, first and foremost, but then being careful about which hardware you use and how you connect that into your Home Assistant system, and we're gonna get into that later, to get the maximum amount of privacy. You know, just running Home Assistant isn't can isn't kind of the the kind of silver bullet to to kinda fix everything because, ultimately, if you've got some Amazon tech in there, it's still gonna talk to Amazon tech most of the time.
And you'll, the one of the things I I like most about Home Assistant is, you you remember when you used to watch, like, futuristic, TV programs or films back in the day, and they maybe Ironman's a good one where he's got, like, this screen or, like, this hologram thing, and he's just controlling all sorts of shit. Like, Home Assistant gives you that, and it it's fully customizable so that you can have, like, your own home dashboard, and you can feel you can make yourself feel like a football player from MTV Cribs in the nineties where they got, like, iPads in the wall to control TVs and stuff like you can do all of that. Oh, yeah. Obviously, you can have, like, an I an iPad and create your own home dashboard so that you can see all of your your, your cameras. You can turn your lights on. You can manage your automations. You can obviously, it depends what hardware you plug into this, but the sky is literally the limit in in terms of, like, what you can control and how you can control it within your own personalized dashboard.
Again, all completely locally so that you don't have to be reliant on a third party server to, well, number one, keep things working, and number two, you know, look after all of your data.
[00:22:16] Unknown:
Have you Cool. To be honest, have you set yours up to look like Ironman?
[00:22:23] Unknown:
To a certain degree, yes. But the the limit the limitation for me at the moment is, I haven't spent thousands and thousands of pounds to have, like, light bulbs in every room in the house and Yeah. Yeah. You know, a a remote controlled garage door or anything like that. Like, I've got the basics. I've got light switches. I've got, my TV. You know, I can control the TV on it. And what else have I got? That's pretty much it. Like, it's just for me at the moment, it's just basic lighting, and the the CCTV coming through into that dashboard as well. So I can quickly turn things on and off, and I can see what's going on on the various cameras that I've got dotted around the house. Yeah. Which is is enough for me at the moment. Don't get me wrong. I've got my eyes on on many other things, to kind of, you know, pad that out. But like you say, it can become very expensive very quickly if you if you let it.
[00:23:15] Unknown:
Yeah. Those, those Philips Hue light bulbs are like or they were, like, £80 a bulb or something stupid. Can't remember how much they were, but a a fortune.
[00:23:27] Unknown:
Yeah. Completely mental. And I'm sure they're probably more expensive now. But, thankfully, as I said, with with Home Assistant, like, you don't have to go with the big players. There's loads of cheaper alternatives, that work just as well, if not better. And you can, again, connect them all all locally. So I I wanna quickly touch on the Home Assistant architecture. So basically, like I say, Home Assistant is like a server on your local network, and it interact interacts with your devices through three kind of main components. You've got integrations.
So these are like the the connectors for all the different devices and services that you have. So you could you'll have, like, you could have a Philips Hue integration. You could have a a ZigBee, integration. More on that later. Spotify integration, you know, ESP Home. There's there's, like, I think there's, like, at least a couple of thousand different integrations. So all that to say is if there's a smart home or smart home tech item on the market, you can pretty be pretty certain that it's gonna work with Home Assistant. But, obviously, they have all of their their integrations listed on the website. And then you have, like, entities.
So an entity is kind of, like a a a trait of a of one of your devices. So it could be a sensor, like, when a sensor detects a motion or when a light switch is turned on or, you know, when a media player is on or something like that. And then the final thing is automation, which kind of brings all of this together, which is basically just, I guess, like, logic based rules that react to certain triggers. So it could be when I walk into my office and the sensor in my office senses some motion, turn on the light bulb that's in my office, that sort of thing. That make sense?
[00:25:15] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:25:18] Unknown:
So like I say, the the default way is, to kind of get started is very similar to it like a Bitcoin node. You would basically flash an SD card and pop that into a Raspberry Pi and then just connect to it on your local network, to and you basically just go to, like, homeassistant.local or or the relevant IP address, and it would just bring up, like, a a locally served website where you can go through the setup process. There's no command line required. And like I say, in the default way, everything is completely local, which, again, is makes things 10 times more private than, than having to rely on somebody else's kind of cloud service, I guess. Mhmm. Some other ways that you could that you could run this, you can run it, inside a Docker container on an existing computer. Obviously, that's a bit more advanced.
You can run it in a command line, I believe, as well as, like, a Python script. But, again, that's, like, way too more advanced than I would need. Yeah. And then there's also, something called Home Assistant Supervised, which again is is similar to the Raspberry Pi thing, but it also gives you control of the underlying com computer as well, which again is is kind of, a bit more advanced, again. So for most people, just, single board computer or an existing computer that you've already got that's sat there doing nothing, you can flash Home Assistant OS onto it, and it works in a very, very similar way to something like Start nine or to, to Umbrel, where you just have a graphical user interface and you can click a point and set up your dashboard, connect your various devices, etcetera.
[00:26:52] Unknown:
Is it, you can't set this up then on, like, a tablet or a phone? It's gotta be on a on a computer.
[00:27:01] Unknown:
Yes. Because it needs to be kind of always on, a little bit like a no Yeah. Of course. Be like so so the way it would work is you'd have the always on computer, but then you'd have the own home assistant app on your phone or on your iPad or whatever, or just go on your computer, just go through, a web browser to, like, homeassistant.local. Quick question from Bond. He asked, is a Pi three four gigabyte powerful enough? I've got an old one collecting dust. I would say, yeah, probably. Like, it's it's it's a very kind of low lift piece of software. It's not really kind of doing much. It's just kind of managing some connections and being, like, the the interface between, you know, a sensor and a bulb somewhere in else in your setup. So haven't tried it, but I would say with four gigs of RAM or Pi three probably would be enough. Yeah.
Mhmm. Okay. Any questions at this point, Max, just while I figure out where we're up to?
[00:28:00] Unknown:
No. Because I think you're gonna cover it later. Well, I guess I can ask it anyway. The only thing I'm wondering about is where you said you can connect devices to this, but some of them will still call home effectively. Like, some of them will still wanna send data back to, you know, whichever it is, like Ring camera or something like that. Is there a way to turn those things off, or does it depend device to device? Or is there a way to somehow block traffic out somehow? Like
[00:28:37] Unknown:
Yeah. Good. Good. Good. Good question, actually. Before I answer that, just quickly shout out to to Ragamuffin, XTX. Good to meet you the other day, mate. And Nathan Day, you've all sent zaps in. Couple of thousand sats each. Very much. And Ragamuffin. Yeah. Thanks for stopping by, guys. Yeah. So to answer your question, yeah, this is very much dependent on how you connect the devices into Home Assistant. So some devices will only work through, Wi Fi, which is fine. It will work absolutely fine to within your local network. But unless you do some more advanced network blocking maybe at the router level, there's nothing to potentially block, let's say, a Philips Hue bulb from communicating out to the Hue servers if you connect it that way. You absolutely can stop that if you are comfortable with going into your router settings and blocking that.
But again, if you use it in the most naive way possible where the the bulb is connected to your WiFi, which is then, within the same local network as your home assistant server, then you can't have that 100% guarantee that it can't phone home. The other way that you can do it, and this is the way that I do it, is that there's different kind of local networking solutions that you can have so that you can have your devices communicate to your home server 100% locally. The way in which I do it is using something called ZigBee, which is kind of like a low power mesh network, essentially.
So the way it works is I've got my Raspberry Pi sat next to my router, and plugged into one of the USB ports on that Raspberry Pi. I've basically got, like, a little dongle, which looks like a USB dongle, and it's got a little remote a little aerial on the top of it. It doesn't take up much space at all. And then anytime I now buy, well, anything for the house, I make sure it's ZigBee compatible, which thankfully these days is very easy to do. So if I if I look for a bulb, I make sure I buy a bulb that's ZigBee compatible. If I look for a a motion sensor or, you know, a door switch or something like that, loads of different ones available.
Basically, rather than connecting any of those devices to my home Wi Fi, which they all will do, I I instead connect it to the local mesh network that runs powered by that little kind of aerial that's plugged into the home assistant server. So that has two main benefits. The first one is that there's no Wi Fi connection, so it can't phone out of the, my home network because I just Yeah. I don't give it the credentials to be able to do so. So it the only way it can communicate is via this this mesh network within the kind of ZigBee kind of mesh that's within my house.
So the the privacy trade off is wonderful. But the other, great part of this is that it's much faster than Wi Fi as well. Like, in in terms of, like so an example is my office light with a I've got a sensor in my office all running on the ZigBee low power, mesh network. It's instant. As soon as that sensor sees some motion in the room, that bulb is on instantly. I have tested it on Wi Fi, and there's a there's a marked kind of, slowing of that. I don't know why that is. I'm sure there's some networking gurus that will be be like, you are yeah. That's obvious. But, when you do it over this low power mesh, much faster. And then I guess the third benefit as well, because you might be thinking, well, if it's low power mesh, like, you know, if I've got a larger house and my home assistant serves in one end and, you know, what happens if I want something some lights in the garage that are automated? Like, is it gonna Well, you've plugged in another little mesh aerial thing. Right? Well, exactly. Because it works on a mesh network, any you don't necessarily need specific kind of boosters, like, to strengthen the signal.
Any device that you connect as part of this is a booster. So all of my, all of my light bulbs, all of my sensors, etcetera, are all boosters and and can because it's a mesh network, like my the the office bulb in my office, obviously, can communicate through other, items that I've got in the house that also like to get back to the to the home assistant hub. So it's local, it's private, and it's much faster. And the more that you have, the kinda stronger that the mesh network gets essentially. So, like, I've got lights in my garage that are all automated and get not connected to the home network. And, like, you did you'd have thought, well, that's way too far away from my my my router, my home assistant server, which is open the same location.
But, yeah, works seamlessly. So Wow. Okay. Massive massive fan of the ZigBee network. And I I believe e even the Philips Hue, is compatible with this ZigBee this ZigBee stuff just to show how widely it is proliferated already. I'm I'm a big fan actually. A lot of the IKEA home tech stuff like switches, sensors, and bulbs, very, very cheap, especially compared to Philips Hue. And they're all ZigBee compatible as well, and they connect really, really simply to to, you know, into your mesh network. So, I'm I'm a big fan. I've spent you know, most of my kit comes from IKEA because it's very, very reasonably priced, and it's all CP compatible.
[00:34:02] Unknown:
Okay. I miss Ikea. They don't they don't have them in the Shetlands.
[00:34:07] Unknown:
I do, Yeah. I do enjoy a walk around Ikea as as as sad as that sounds. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's sad, but it's it is great. BTC wrestles asking in chat, is home assistant available in FortNine or or available to sideload? Definitely not, available in any of the stores that I've checked out on Start Nine. Whether you can sideload it or not, I don't know. But, obviously, that somebody would need to make a package for it. I'm sure it's probably possible. But I know that Home Assistant is on Umbrel. So, you know, if it's on Umbrel, then somebody should be able to package it for Start nine. Easy enough. Yeah. It would, you know, it would be a a great thing to have, personally. I, I'd love to install it on my Start nine. It would mean I don't have to run it on a on a Raspberry Pi. Although, to be said, I know we trash, Raspberry Pi's quite a lot to, on the ungovernable sphere, especially when we're talking about notes. But this Raspberry Pi for that's running my Home Assistant stuff, absolutely faultless. And I think that's because of how lightweight the software is. Like, it's not actually doing a lot. It's just relaying messages.
Mhmm.
[00:35:10] Unknown:
Would you say there's any benefit to separating them out anyway? Like, is there any concerns with privacy, security, or, anything like that from running that on your Fontaine, along with everything else, would it actually be better to have it separate anyway?
[00:35:32] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I guess it depends what you're using your Startlane for. Like, if it's your your only Bitcoin node and your only Lightning node, you know, maybe separation is good there. But, like, if it's more of your self hosting box where you've got, you know, Nextcloud and stuff on it and it's it's less important or or kind of it would be less detrimental to your life if it went down, then, yeah, sure. Throw it on. But I'm sure everybody's got, like, a spare computer lying around somewhere or a spare Raspberry Pi. Especially if you've been in Bitcoin for a few years, you probably got some a few dead nodes floating around that you can throw this on. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, another good point, actually. I think we we had a question on Nostra about this a while back.
Are there any plug and play options for Home Assistant? And and yes, there is. I believe it's called Home Assistant Green, which you can buy from the Home Assistant website. It's basically I think they use a RockPro or a RockPi single board computer. It just like with an umbrella or start line, if you buy from them, it just comes preinstalled with the Home Assistant software. You give it some power. You give it some Internet, plug into your router, and and a way to go. So it's, like I say, very analogous to to what Bitcoin is, are already used to in terms of, like, node setup. Mhmm.
So got a question from Bon on the Nostra chat. He said to to see the devices and control them from your phone or wherever, do you need to connect to the mesh first then switch back to your Wi Fi when you're done? No. So the way that would work, Bonnie, is that the devices, like bulb switches, etcetera, they're using the mesh network. Obviously, the home assistant server, let's say it's a Raspberry Pi, is physically connected to your to your router, via an Ethernet cable, so it's on your local network. And then when you have, you know, your iPad, your tablet, your computer, or your phone on the local network, then the Home Assistant app will just connect to it, locally. Like, say, you just give it the, the IP address when you set it up.
And then, basically, there's you know, you have the Home Assistant app that, depending on how you set up, obviously, you can then manage all of your devices and control them from your phone locally. This is probably a good time maybe to talk about some remote access, at this point because, while, you know, most of the time that you're gonna wanna control stuff, outside of automation to which remind me to come back to that, Max. Yeah. Most of the time, you're gonna be wanting to do it at home, so local is fine. But there will be times, like you said, Max, where you're like, you know, I've come away on holiday and, you know, I've left the lights on, and I don't have an automation that automatically turns them off when they'd sense no movement or something like that. Then, yeah, I guess the the usual, remote access rules apply. Same again, it's very similar to a Bitcoin node. So, if you have, a router that's already got some, like, a WireGuard client on there or you've got, a mobile client or zero tier or anything like or Tailscale, then that you can just connect in through through those different methods, so that you're you're kind of tunneling back to your local network.
I don't believe there's any Tor support so that it kind of just works out of the box. Or if you don't have a a a more fancy router, then directly within the Home Assistant kind of integrations or app store, there is a, I believe a Tailscale and a zero tier option so that you can just install that app and run through the configuration process so that you, again, have that option to tunnel back into your home network so that when you're away on your phone, you would turn on the, the Tailscale VPN, which you preconfigured to kind of talk back to your node at home. And then it just tunnels straight into, into the the home assistant server. So you can either do it at a router level, or you can do it on the on the server itself. And, again, very self explanatory.
And because it runs over, like, Tailscale or WireGuard, it's very speedy. You don't have any of the latency of Tor as well.
[00:39:34] Unknown:
Go on. Yeah. Well, I was just gonna say, you definitely need that for especially if you're gonna have, like, CCTV or things like that. There's not really any point having CCTV that you can't look at while you're away from home. Yeah. Because when you're at home, you can see with your eyes anyway, can't you? So, obviously, it would still be recording and doing all that stuff in the background, but sometimes, you would wanna just be able to check something. Like, oh, why is why is, why is this sensor gone off? Is there someone in my property? Or, like, whatever you need to know?
[00:40:08] Unknown:
Yeah. Definitely. To be honest, with my setup and the, like, different automations that I've got, the amount of time other than, like, you say, checking CCTV, The amount of times that I need to kind of tunnel back in to control something is very, very limited. And and you can kind of, I guess, limit the the requirement to do that by having automations. And, basically, automations are, like, the the best part of it for me because it basically the the beauty of Home Assistant because it can speak all of these thousands of different languages that, different bulbs or sensors, speak and be like the translator between them all, you can tie any of them together to to produce certain outputs.
So it could be very simply, when it's sunrise in my area, turn on this light. Like, that's an obvious and a very, very simple one so that, you know, you know that you go, you know, you get out of bed and you go make a coffee at 7AM. At 06:59, let's say that's when sunrise is or, you know, you could predefine the time. You know that it's not gonna be dark when you get downstairs. Nice and easy, very simple. Mhmm. But then you could take it, like, it can be weird and wonderful as you want. So it could be when the camera on the front of my house, senses, a person, then, what I want you to do if it's past 11PM at night, I want you to turn on the kitchen light so that the the the robber thinks that there's somebody home. And I also want to send a I want you to send a a notification to my phone that bypasses the do not disturb.
It rings my phone and you know what I mean? Like, that's just one example of how you can tie all of this stuff together, Again, completely locally so you can have drastic improvements to your life and to improve your security. And, yeah, like like I say, the sky is literally the limit. Your imagination is probably the limit as to what you can do with all of this stuff. You can have other stuff like I'm trying to think what what else have I I'll have a think because you've got a question as to what else I've got set up.
[00:42:15] Unknown:
Well, I was just thinking, how easy is it to set that up? Go through that example. CCTV senses something in your front garden that it's a person there. It turns on security lights. It turns on a bedroom light, whatever. It it turns on the TV or like, how simple is it if that's your idea of what you wanna do to actually set that up in this app?
[00:42:43] Unknown:
Yeah. So once you've got an understanding of, like you basically just look into the settings of a device. Each device, depending on what it is, will have loads of different entities. So if it's a very simple non color based light bulb that is basically, it has an on and an off, it'll be like the device the bulb is on, the bulb is off. If it was like a Philips Hue bulb, it could be, you know, the bulb is on and red. The bulb is on and blue, blah blah blah, all that sort of stuff. Or, you know, if you get more complicated, it could be a thermostat that is like you know, if the the ambient temperature is below x or a security camera that, has you know, you can set zones on your security camera if it's fit a fixed one to be like, if anything enters this circle, then do this.
Once you have an understanding of, okay, I need to identify what happens with that device to then produce this output or what trigger do I want there to be to, do something to a device. It's like, if this, then that. It's like, I guess, a very similar kind of programming language, but I I say that through tug it cheap because it's not done in code. It's just to say, if something if x happens, then do y. And you can stack all of these on top of one another, so it doesn't have to be just one thing. Like in my example before, it was like, you know, turn the light on, send me a text, blah blah, all that sort of stuff. So to do something more complex, like, you know, if my security camera senses a person in this zone, then do three different, outputs.
Once you've got that understanding, like, I could spin that up in sixty seconds. But you you've gotta get over that first hurdle of understanding what you want and then how to produce that within the dashboard. But once you've done it once, like, it's so simple because you're like, oh, well, I want one of the outputs to be, you know, something that happens on my phone. So I'm gonna click on my phone as the device, and then it it brings you up all the entities. And it's like, okay. Yeah. Send a notification to this person or something like that. That makes sense? Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:44:44] Unknown:
Very cool.
[00:44:45] Unknown:
You can, what else have you you can have, like, geographical based ones. So if you if you are comfortable with it having your phone location, you could be like, okay. Well, when my phone enters this geographical circle, let's say five miles from my house, then set the thermostat to, 65 degrees. And turn on the lights if it's after sunrise. Like, you can have conditional stuff as well where it only does some of the outputs based on other other criteria, like what time of day it is or what the ambient temperature is or whether it's past sunrise or sunset, etcetera. Like, it is mind blowing the amount of shit that you can you can kind of conceive here and how many things you can automate. It's, yeah, it's completely wild.
[00:45:30] Unknown:
Very cool. Very cool. So if it's as simple as this, or relatively simple as this, and it's compatible with so many different devices and stuff like that. Is there any drawback in terms of the price of this what do you call it? Not zebedee. Zebedee. What was it called? Zigbee? Like, is that expensive? Is is the I mean, the software you said is open source. Like, what cost if you already got the stuff anyway, the bulbs and the things and the whatever, the switch between giving all your data and giving much less or none of your data and having more control, what are we talking in the cost for all all the bits?
[00:46:16] Unknown:
So the the ZigBee, like, dongle, I think, is, like, £40. May might even be less than that. Then, obviously, you need a computer, which again, most people have got one lying around. But if not, you know, a cheap Raspberry Pi doesn't need to be anything super powerful. And, yeah, then then it's just a case of being selective about the the the the tech that you buy to make sure that it's compatible with ZigBee or or one of the you know, ZigBee is not the only local mesh. There are alternatives like, Zedwave. I think there's one called Thread.
You've got e s ESPHome as well. So ZigBee is not the only one. It's just the one that I have the best, experience with in terms of, like, latency, ease of setup. Like, it it really is like a wonderful, piece of care con considering how kind of simplistic it is as well. What else have we got? Oh, the one final thing as well because the one of the the most powerful things for me other than, like, the automations is that, you know, is it any easier to pull your phone out of your pocket, open an app, and then tap a button to turn a light bulb off versus getting up and just hitting the light switch. Like, it's probably gonna be faster than your light switch. Yeah. Exactly.
So other than automations, which kind of, again, obviously, automate all of that shit for you, another powerful thing for me is is voice control because it's much easier to say, you know, trigger word, let's say Alexa or or similar. Turn off this light. Like, that's that's the easiest way to do it if you need it done instantly rather than waiting for for an alternative. Okay. You can connect all of the the usual surveillance, voice assistance to this. You can connect the the Apple HomePod, the Google sorry, Amazon Alexa. I'm sure Google have got their alternative.
Obviously, there's a big privacy trade off of doing that. You can also connect these to Siri on your phone or to Google Assistant on on your Android phone. Again, trade offs of of doing that. But there is also a home assistant voice, which is kinda like a little, cheap Amazon Alexa, I guess. Although the speaker is is nowhere near as good as it at as it. Excuse me. But you can, again, plug this into your your home assistant server, connect it via the local area network only, and then configure your own voice command so that you can, again, have a an alternative where it's like I think you can give it your own, trigger word or there's predefined ones. I think I think one of them is Jarvis. So you can be like, hey, Jarvis. Set the heating to 65 degrees or something like that. And, again Okay. It it it it again, you can lock it down so that it doesn't communicate to to any cloud.
And you can kind of have that sort of similar experience. I'll be brutally honest. It's nowhere near as responsive as something like Siri or, or as Google Assistant or with, Amazon Alexa. Like, it's just not as good. But with that said, it is a kind of a newer product that it is running locally. So you're you're relying on the computing power of of the Raspberry Pi or wherever you're running the, the Home Assistant server on, essentially. Okay.
[00:49:33] Unknown:
Any advice or, good devices that you can recommend, like, as a starting point for people?
[00:49:40] Unknown:
Yeah. Honestly, I would say, let's assume that you've got the server set up. I would say get yourself a ZigBee dongle. I'm pretty sure they're, like, thirty, forty quid, and then just get some ZigBee, light bulbs as a starter. IKEA is more than the full. Like I say, they're they're really not expensive at all. Just get a couple of them. You know, pick one room that you wanna automate, and plug it, go through the Zigbee setup. If anybody's interested and wants any guides, you know you know where to find me. I can send those through. And, you know, get yourself a couple of cheap bowls from my IKEA, and then play around with some automation. Like, you can get all of that done for, like, £50 if you've already got the server set up. Like, it's it's not a huge amount of, of outlay to to kind of automate the lights in a singular room.
Play around with the automations, you know, get them to come on at sunrise, turn off at sunset. Sorry. All the way around. You know what I mean? Yeah. And just play around. Yeah. You don't have to go balls deep straight away.
[00:50:39] Unknown:
Okay. Just a tip. It's, yeah, I feel like this is one that because we're coming up almost a time. This is one that we could probably revisit, especially when people start tinkering and have more questions and stuff. It's it's kind of like a a pretty broad subject that that you can really I think it can really improve a lot of lives. And, actually, there will be people listening to this who will like, they won't say that they do, but they'll either have Alexis in their homes or Oh. They'll have CCTV that's in the cloud. And they'll have they'll have things because life's just fucking hard, and it's just like you can't always just have everything perfect. It's like there there will be, flaws. And I think something like this really is a is a realistic way to start taking back control of your own home, which is a crazy thing. Like, to have a situation where it's rare not to have something listening in every room and Yeah. You know, all your data being given. It's, the the creepiest one for me is CCTV.
It's one that I'm really, looking into having a decent system. And I'm like, in in previous offices I've had and stuff, I've had Nest because we had people stealing, and I was like, right. Fuck this. I'm putting Nest everywhere, and I could monitor it. But I wouldn't want that in my own home. That's just weird. So something like that, like a decent CCTV system. Like, even the even CCTV is what? A closed circuit
[00:52:14] Unknown:
telephony, isn't it? Yeah. The name is GlassDite.
[00:52:17] Unknown:
Yeah. It's like, oh, I've got CCTV in my house. Like, have you, or have you actually got open version? Because you're giving spy camera. Yeah. You're giving all your data to Nest or whoever the the thing is. So, it's creepiest. Like, it's especially creepy knowing that a lot of the sick fucks who control tech also are sick in other ways, and you've got your family in your house. And it's like, nah. I'm not I'm not not doing that shit. That's a that's a big, big problem. So I'm excited for this. I'm gonna have to have a play around, and we'll have to revisit it. Yeah. Like I say, we we've barely scratched the surface. Like,
[00:52:56] Unknown:
you can do things like you know, I mentioned that that local voice assistant. Like, if you have a powerful computer that's running a a a an a local LLM, you can hook it up to that, have conversations with it. Or if you you can, like honestly, like, the sky is literally the limit. CCTV stuff, if you're looking for recommendations, I use some of the the Reolink kit. The integrations with Home Assistant are wonderful. Again, it's all locally. You can do a cloud backup option if you want to, but, obviously, that kind of defeats the object of, you know, the privacy calls here. Very stable, very secure, and, you know, again, it all records locally onto a hard drive that I've got. And, it just overwrites when the hard drive gets full so that I don't have to you know, because there's, like, literally no maintenance got you know, it all feeds into the dashboard, so I can feel like like an Ironman.
We've got we've got five minutes left. I wanna rattle through some of the presubmitted questions if possible. As always, if you've got any in the live chat, please feel free to drop them into into the chat. We'll get some if we've got time. Quick one from Nosta Gang. We've already answered this, but it's a quick answer. Could somebody like Start Nine tap into this market? Yes. Absolutely. It's already on Umbrel, so hopefully Start Nine, can pick up the mantle and and do the same thing because it's very well suited. Question from Goydian on Nosta. How to prevent IoT Internet of Things.
Yes. Thank you. Well, I don't know why I drew a blank on that. Devices. How to prevent them from phoning home while managing them over the home assistant that is connected I think we've already covered that one. So so maybe just go back and, you know, listen to the the start of the show. You can. Yes. It's absolutely possible. What else we got? Mark on Nosta said, I need smart light bulbs that don't start tweaking out after a few months. Any suggestions? Yeah. IKEA bulbs over Zigbee connection. You do need the dongle. IKEA. Yeah. For for most of this stuff, you need some if you're going into the the Philips ecosystem, like, you need a Philips hub anyway. So just look at the kind of the Zigbee, dongle as as like the hub, but it's a universal hub for all of your ZigBee devices. So well worth the investment.
Next up, we have a question from c s burner on Nosta. What What are the differences between the main FOSS home automation systems, for which application, which one is best? I've only got personal experience with Home Assistant. It's the only one I've run. It's been great so far. I know there's other stuff like I think there's one called Matter. There's another one, somebody shared with me on Nostical something, Hub, but I can't speak, about them because I've never run them or tested them. But, Home Assistant in in my research seems like the most widely adopted, and it has the most, integrations and seems to make the best trade off in terms of usability again. But, again, I've that's the only one I've run thus far. Mhmm.
Mario two. I think that's that's a typo from me. I think it's Maria 2,000, so apologies, Maria. Any plug and play options for us non techies? Yes. Either Umbrel Home, sorry, Umbrel Home. Umbrel.com. It comes you know, if you buy a pre installed one, Home Assistant app is on there. Or you can go straight to the Home Assistant website, and they do a a very similar box that runs on a single board computer that comes preinstalled with the software. How much how much is that, Jun, off the top of your head? Oh, I knew you were gonna ask me that. Let me find it very quickly.
[00:56:16] Unknown:
Just one sec. Because it's I think it's, like, £120. Because sometimes with these things, like, you you do give a bit of support to the people who are building this stuff. It's open source. It's you know, there there are people who have spent presumably a lot of time making this, and I'm not averse to, like, buying hardware from these companies.
[00:56:35] Unknown:
Yeah. £112. So, like, a $130 if you're in The US. That's not bad. No. And I'd say it's just a little a little square box that you plug in some power. It's tiny. You won't even see it. It'll be just sitting next to your router. Basically, just a rack similar to Raspberry Pi. What is it? Did they specify what it is? A rock yeah. Rockchip. Oh. Yeah. It's not a rock pro, but it's a quad core ARM cortex CPU, with four gigabytes of, memory. So yes to, Bon, when you asked before, four gigabytes looks like it is enough.
[00:57:11] Unknown:
Okay.
[00:57:12] Unknown:
What else have we got? I've just lost my mouse. There it is. We have, this is the last one. Actually, good timing. Which security measures can help prevent hacking attempts on smart home systems by mini PC like devices and physical hacking gadgets, and that's from MortgageHodl on Nosta. I would guess I mean, for physical hacking gadgets, like, just, I guess, be careful who you let anywhere near any of your home servers. Put it in a server box. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just be careful who you who you let into the house. Obviously, if you got work people in, you know, getting a new bathroom or something, then, you know, be wary of that. Maybe unplug stuff for the day.
And then in terms of, like, remote stuff, I guess you could fix it by just keeping everything local. Like I said, that's how we started talking about this was it's all all it's all local. I don't think personally that you're adding too much risk by having the the, you know, the Tailscale app installed so that you can do some remote, connections because, like I say, Tailscale is all is is basically just public key encryption at the end of the day. So, you know, unless you're somebody hacks your actual Tailscale account to get into your home network, then the the risk is is minimal, in my opinion. I I don't really see that as as much of a of a massive issue.
Alright? Wow. Look at that time. Yeah. Do you like that? We've, we're getting good at this, aren't we? Yeah. That was a fun one. I think you're absolutely right. I think if we get enough, support from, the listeners and the the viewers on covering stuff like this again, then, yeah, there's definitely more we can talk about. We can go more into detail on, you know, some of the different communication methods, the different automations, and some of the different, hardware that you can connect to this. Maybe I can come up with, like, a, know, a predefined list of stuff that we can talk about. But, yeah, we'll definitely go much, much deeper on that one. So if you if you like this kind of topic, let us know, and we we can definitely bring it back up in, in the future. But, thank you to everybody in the all of the various live chats.
Appreciate all the taps on NOS that we've got. Probably, like, five or 6,000 stats there. So thank you very much for your support and for and for being part of the show. Like I say, we we really appreciate everybody that that gets involved and ask questions because it is a huge driver for the show and to where we take it. So thank you all very much. I believe normal service will be resumed, next week, and we will be back as a trio. If not, then we'll have the same, just the two of us song queued up again.
And, oh, also don't don't disappear too quickly because, we've got a new outro video, and I I want everybody to let us know what they think of it. Max, you were gonna say before I, take us out?
[01:00:05] Unknown:
I've forgotten now. It doesn't
[01:00:07] Unknown:
matter. Okay. Alright. Thanks, everyone.
[01:00:13] Unknown:
Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London. Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet, Foundation, and my NIM box for keeping the ungovernable misfits going. Make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com to see mister Crown's incredible skills and artwork. Listen to the other shows in the feed to hear Kareem's world class editing skills.
Thanks to Expatriotic for keeping us up to date with Boost's XMR chats and sending in topics. John, great name and great guy, never change and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news or continuing to grow the mesh to Dell. Finally, a big thanks to the unsung hero, our Canadian overlord, Shorten, for trying to keep the ungovernable in check and for the endless work he puts in behind the scenes. We love you all. Stay ungovernable.
This is a very sensitive subject.
[00:00:20] Unknown:
Just the turbos, mate. People are gonna be so confused. Allow me to explain. Before that, hello, and welcome to Freedom Tech Friday. For those of you that are new here, allow me to quickly explain what this is all about and why the hell we are here. FreedomTech Friday is a weekly live and interactive show hosted on the ungovernable misfits, ex, Nostra, and YouTube feeds. We go live for one hour every Friday at 9AM eastern or 2PM UK time, but you can also catch up later on the Ungovernable podcast feed. On Freedom Tech Friday, we like to cover the latest latest news and trends for anything relating to Freedom Technologies.
That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between. Essentially, if there's a news item, tool, or topic that that can help you take back some control in today's digital Panopticon, we want to talk about it. My name's Q and A. I'm head of customer experience at Foundation where we build Bitcoin focused sovereignty tools. And usually, I'm joined by two of my good friends, Max, the CTO, chief technical officer at the Ungovernable Misfits Empire, and, usually, although he's not here today with us, Seth, who is VP at kWallet. As I mentioned, the show is live and interactive, and we rely on you guys to steer us towards the topics that you want us to cover or to send us your Freedom Tech related questions.
There are many ways in which you can get involved, all of which really help spread awareness for the show. That includes commenting or asking your questions in the live chat. Hello. I can see that a few people hopped in already. Welcome, gentlemen or ladies. You can submit your topics or questions ahead of time before the show on X or Nosta. You can boost us on Fountain or any of the other podcasting two point zero apps. And finally, you can send questions or tips, via xofourchat.com. And you can also share the show on x or Nosta. Aside from last week's bubbling and awesome Nosta live chat, you guys know who you are. We have no baller boost support on Fountain this week for well, sorry, for last week's show. But top support come from Rev Huddl, who sent 721 stats and said, there's so much information packed into these discussions that I find myself wanting an article to reference based on each recording.
I suppose now with AI, I can make one for myself. Yeah. I'm sure you probably could. Or you could also check the, the transcript, which I believe is, available in in Fountain as well. And all I'd like oh, go ahead. To interrupt there. Rev Huddl, if you're listening.
[00:02:50] Unknown:
If you do make that and you put it through AI and say, can you make this into a article and, like, break down the topics as, like, a follow through, like, someone can do a step by step on the things we're talking about, share it with me, and then we can get it on Ungovernable Misfits, with all the other articles and stuff. It'd be quite nice to have, like, each Freedom Tech Friday as a show, but then it's also we also have it on record that people can go back and, go through.
[00:03:20] Unknown:
That's a good idea. Maybe a little bounty out there for, for some people to, to get involved and support the show. That'd be a great way to do it. Anyway, without further ado, you've already hopped in. Well, allow allow me to reintroduce. Max, how's it going? Are you well?
[00:03:35] Unknown:
Very well, mate. Very well. A little bit disappointed. Our good friend has, ditched us again. But Yeah. Do we know do we know where he's off gallivanting? No. It's the life of a rock and roller, mate. Don't ask. Don't tell.
[00:03:49] Unknown:
He he is a bit of a bigwig these days. Yeah. The life of a VP.
[00:03:55] Unknown:
I know. I know. But, yeah, good, mate. I'm excited about this topic because I've sort of nudged you a few times over the last, maybe, I don't know, eighteen months or something since you first talked to me about this. And, I think it's something that, well, I wanna do myself, but I actually think it's really overlooked by a lot of the more privacy minded people in this space. And I think that it's, I don't know, like, it's a it's an opportunity for someone not just to say, I'm gonna be a complete Luddite and just not have any tech, but to have that middle ground where you can still have some, creature comforts and money saving points and, just, like, use technology without being completely owned. So I'm excited.
[00:04:49] Unknown:
Yeah. It's, it's definitely, a rabbit hole. So if you're in the market for another rabbit hole, stay tuned because, things are about to get good. It's it's a rabbit hole that I've been going down myself, fairly recently, actually. I think we spoke about it once on on the Bitcoin brief. And, it's it's very much a subject matter that I'm absolutely not an expert in, but, I'm kind of, you know, heading down that road and and wanted to talk about it and see what, what the other ungovernables in the in the livestream chat are, are thinking about it and whether they're running something similar. Before we do dive in, just wanted to say hello to everybody. In the live chat, we've got Bon, Clem Fandango, Vibrant, Cyla Thorne brought B2C wrestle.
Dad's here. Hi, John. Clem Fandango. And we've already had, five zaps come through, Max. Nostergang with 10 zaps. Delta Mike Thank you very much. Delta Mike with 420 sats. Vishon with 500 sats, Bob with 2,345 sats, all up, and, Rev Huddl. Yeah. We've just been talking about you. I don't know whether you meant you heard it, but, he said, good morning. Chicago bit devs last night was excellent. Jealous about that. That sounds good. I like it. Anyway, onto today's topic. Today, I wanna dive into, as I said, a rabbit hole that I've been tumbling down this year, and that is, connected home or smart home tech.
It's something that's kind of blown up generally in popularity in in recent years. You know, you've you've only got a walk for thirty seconds outside in my local area, and you'll see multiple Ring doorbells, Internet connected doorbells. And I'm willing to bet that every single person, in today's live chat has got at least one relative that's definitely got an Alexa nestled somewhere in their home.
[00:06:42] Unknown:
Smart home Yeah.
[00:06:43] Unknown:
Yeah. Smart home tech is is it's literally everywhere, isn't it? You've got lights, plugs, cameras, thermostats, speakers, fridges, ovens, door locks. But the sad thing is that a lot of these devices, if you kind of use them in a, I guess, you know, the most simple way or a naive way, they they can quickly become a bit of a privacy nightmare because the these kind of devices, particularly some of the popular ones, they always like to to phone home to big brother because, as we know, data is kinda like the new oil these days, and it's it's very much, valuable to to, you know, the usual corporations.
So today, we're gonna explore why that's a problem, although that's fairly evident, and what the basic building blocks of a private smart home could look like, and how you could get started without being, a turbo nerd or programmer, a massive budget. We're gonna have a bit of a well, the main focus, in terms of the practical advice is gonna be on a a piece of software, open source, piece of software called Home Assistant. And then we're gonna dive into the different devices that can communicate locally, the, the trade offs of taking this path because it, you know, it certainly isn't the easiest way to achieve having a smart home. And as I said, you know, the caveat at the top of the show, this is definitely not a master class. It's kind of, a rabbit hole that I've gone down. It's kind of a like a field report, of somebody who's kind of exploring what's possible whilst trying to remain as, evasive to the usual suspects of, you know, Apple, Amazon, etcetera, as possible.
So, Matt, before we dive in, I'm curious if you've ever dove into or had any kind of smart home or connected tech within your, various different abodes.
[00:08:35] Unknown:
Yeah. I have. And it's the reason that I wanted to learn more about this. Where before I had kids and a missus, I had disposable income, and, I used to buy dumb shit. And one of the things I used to really love was those, like, Phillips Hue lights. Mhmm. And I, like, replaced my entire house with Phillips Hue lights and had them, like, dimming. I know it was like a lot of I should have bought Bitcoin, but, you know, I bought those days. And, as I'd wake up, the lights would come up with me, and they'd dim down. I got the different colors and stuff, and I absolutely fucking loved it. And then I actually sold all of them for Bitcoin. I actually, like, sold all my light bulbs and, like, all the kit. And I've always wanted to have those again, but I didn't wanna what I didn't want people to know when am I home, when am I leaving, like, what like, my patterns. So I was like, I'm not gonna have that. And then I also now want security cameras outside and inside my home.
So I want those, but then it's like you can get this Nest stuff or whatever, and then that's all in the cloud. I'm like, well, I definitely don't want to, like, literally big brother myself, but I want to have the security, for the safety of my family. So there's a lot of things that I want that would be useful, and there's always that, like, fuck. Then I'm just spying on myself. Like, I'm I'm literally, like, putting a spy in my own home that's, like, really stupid. So loads of stuff I want, don't currently have. Maybe you can tell me that I can have it, and there's a clever workaround.
[00:10:17] Unknown:
Yeah. There there certainly is. As with all things, there are trade offs, and we're we're gonna dive into those shortly. But I guess before, before we kinda dive into the nitty gritty of, like, Home Assistant, what it is, and how you can use it, I guess it's worth outlining somebody who to somebody who's kind of never, kind of dove into this or doesn't understand the the kind of attraction here. Like,
[00:10:40] Unknown:
why do you think people look to to smart home tech? Like, it it it's only a fairly recent phenomenon. Like, what people why are people diving into this, do do you think? I think a couple of reasons. One, just before I I jump into it. Yeah, Barn Miner has made, a lot of changes to our vernacular, and Fart nine probably is one of the greatest he's come up with. So thank you, Barn. That has Yeah. As well. Before you do that, has anybody bought fart9.com?
[00:11:08] Unknown:
No. But they should. To. Yeah. Yeah. Well, why your why your go on.
[00:11:13] Unknown:
I was just gonna say, there might be, like, a fork further down the the road, and it's like a a Fart nine option. You see if you can buy it, and then Yeah. I just it it fails on DNS resolution, so that doesn't mean somebody hasn't bought. I don't know. It just says this site can't be reached. Fartnine.
[00:11:31] Unknown:
Oh. Fart9.com. No idea. But, anyway, yeah, why do people go anywhere? Tech rather?
[00:11:38] Unknown:
I think a few reasons. One is energy saving, reasons. Like, you know, are your lights turn off when you leave and all that kind of stuff. And, oh, you're gonna save money, but then you actually don't save money because you buy the thing. So it's kind of like a false economy, but it seems cool. And the same with, like, the the heating stuff, like, smart thermostats. Oh, you know, you've gone away for the weekend, and you forgot to turn your heating down. Well, you can do that from your phone. Oh, that sounds really cool. And then, on top of that, it's just, like, ease of use and the fact that it's integrated into everything.
I I bought a a what's it called? A a digital photo frame the other day on Amazon. I was just like, oh, I want this digital photo frame because my dog had died, and I wanted to have a like, all the photos of him. So he's, like, still in our home. And I was like, okay. He can have his own little frame. I've just bought one. It was on a deal on Amazon. Buy that. And then I said to my missus, oh, can you set that up and put the pictures on? And then, she did it, and it's like a smart thing that's, like, links to your phone, and then they have your photos and all this. And I was like, why is every like, everything's a smart thing or, like, the heating engineer will come around and they fit a smart meter thing, and they just sort of naturally do it and everyone does it now. It's just become the norm. So they're the they're the reasons, I think. It's just normal.
[00:13:07] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I think I think the energy saving ones is is a funny one to me. Like you say, it's kind of some of this shit's quite expensive. So, like, the the the amount that you're gonna save on having some LED light bulbs, is gonna be that's quite a long, a long or a lot window for you. So yeah. A lot a large payback window. Yeah. I think I think the other things for me is, like, automation and convenience, like, having automated lights. Although it's not a deal breaker for life, like, when you've got a busy life, it it does, like, make your life a little bit easier. And I know that might sound weird, like, technophobes, but, like, if you can stack a lot of these different, you know, very small optimizations to your life, it can make a marked improvement in terms of, of like you having more time to yourself so that you don't have to spend it doing trivial shit. And obviously, you know, turning on a light switch doesn't take you long. But like I say, if you start stacking these on top of one another, it's kind of, you know, it can have a a marked improvement to your life. And, maybe I'm just being lazy, but I certainly notice it. No. No.
[00:14:11] Unknown:
You're not you're not being lazy. It's that is definitely true and that there are, like, massive wins that you can have there. Because people could have said that about, like, oh, what do you want a fucking dishwasher for? Like, you know, you can just do that in the sink. Like, it's not that. It's like, fuck off. I'm not doing I'm not doing my own washing. I'm not gonna have a dishwasher every like, they're never gonna not have a dishwasher. And the same goes for all this other stuff. Like, if it saves you time and energy and you can, like, spend more time with your family, definitely go for it. But just don't spy on yourself. So that's that's where you're you know? When you were talking to me about it, I think I think you said something like, oh, I want a a light that turns itself off in the bathroom when people leave or, like, it comes on. It's like a sensor.
And that's, like, that's a perfect dad thing. Like, I go around all day just fucking turning lights off just everywhere. Just like, that needs to be off. Why why is the spare room light on? Why is that no one's even in there all day. Like, why is that on bathroom light off? So things like that. That, again, saves you just having to patrol your your house, like, just trying to save money constantly.
[00:15:21] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Before we we dive into some of the trade offs, fortnine.com is available on name Namecheap for $10. So, guess what I'm doing after the show? But, thank you for to yeah. Thank you to Bon, and thank you to Vibrant for for doing the sleuthing there. Appreciate you guys. Nice. Alright. So we've talked about the pros and why people wanna do this, and, you know, I'm fully on board with that. Like, I I cosigned all of it. Like, what's the trade off? I mean, I guess the obvious one I'll dive in first is, like, massive amounts of data harvesting, usage patterns, camera feeds of your house, your comings and goings go into somebody else's computer, like voice recordings maybe if you're using Alexa.
Like, there's been some horror stories of of, like, you know, it listening when you think it shouldn't be listening, and that being used to train all sorts of different models. Like, I don't know. When you know, when you use it naively, like, smart home tech literally allows the corporations to see, a shit ton of information about your life. It could be when you wake up, when you go to sleep, you know, what you say to voice assistants, what time you turn your lights on, what's how high you set your heating, when you get home from work, what time the postman delivers your, your mail. Like, there's there's untold amounts of data that can be harvested depending on how deep into this ecosystem you get and how kind of, like, how much data you're you're kind of sharing here. So that, like, that that is the kind of be all and end all here is to, you know, why I would urge people not to just go straight down the the convenience route here because, like, you just like we say with Bitcoin, you just have no idea how or when that data could be used against you. Like, it's just it's just all being siphoned off into various different different corporate clouds that are just stored for an indefinite amount of time, and probably gonna get leaked eventually, aren't they? Let's be honest.
[00:17:20] Unknown:
Definitely. And even if they're not leaked, you just know they're gonna be used in some dark way. Like, you only have to just look at history to be like, okay. That's definitely gonna happen. But some of the stuff is so convenient that even people who are aware that it's not ideal might use it. Like, someone mentioned in the chat here. I can't remember who it was now. It's gone. But about robo vacuum things. There's things like that. It's like, fuck. Yeah. They are gonna map my house, but they're also really fucking useful if there's just, like, constantly crumbs everywhere and kids making a mess. Like, yeah, that like, there are times where people you start to make trade offs because it's just so convenient, that that that you can easily slip. Like, maybe you don't put an Alexa in your house because that is mental, but, like, there's other things that people do.
[00:18:15] Unknown:
Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. So so, like, we we're all aligned. We we want the convenience, especially as you you, you know, you get older, you become a parent, you know, your free time dwindles down to zero or effectively zero, and you wanna look to optimize. So you, you know, you want some smart home tech to to kind of make life just that little bit easier. But you, you know, you don't wanna put yourself in the gulag and, you know, Amazon's gulag and, you know, Google's Gulag, etcetera, etcetera. So, thankfully, there is an alternative. And, you know, there are many alternatives to be clear. The one I'm most familiar with is, an open source piece of software called Home Assistant.
So familiar with this, Max? Do you know much about it, or do you want me to dive in and give you the the TLDR?
[00:19:00] Unknown:
Definitely dive in. All I know is you've said that it's open source, that it works with a lot of, brands and and things that are already out there and that you found it to be very good. So that that's all I know. I don't know past that.
[00:19:15] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Good summary. I mean, home assistant, and you'll often see it abbreviated to just h j, for the for the the turbo nerds that are going down the rabbit hole, is, as you say, it's like an open source home automation platform that you can run on your own hardware, and that's the crucial part here. So you can run this thing on a Raspberry Pi, small PC, or, you know, even a server rack. Although, to to be honest, that's probably overkill. The whole point here is, again, you're you're not relying on somebody else's cloud. Home Assistant, it kind of acts as, like, I guess, the brain of your smart home. It connects to all of these different devices of, you know, there's there's hundreds, if not thousands, of different brands that, that are kind of baked in or or compatible with the Home Assistant software.
And, basically, Home Assistant acts as the the kind of one hub to to unify all of those different pieces of software. So Home Assistant doesn't kind of replace the, let's say, the Philips Hue in your scenario, Max, or the, you know, the Amazon Alexa. It replaces the the cloud services that those devices typically depend on. Now that isn't to say that, oh, just, you know, if I've got a Ring doorbell and I'm magically connected to Home Assistant, that obviously isn't gonna stop Ring doorbell phoning home to, to to the Amazon service. So it it is very much a twofold approach to kind of get the the the most out of this kind of solution is running Home Assistant, you know, locally, first and foremost, but then being careful about which hardware you use and how you connect that into your Home Assistant system, and we're gonna get into that later, to get the maximum amount of privacy. You know, just running Home Assistant isn't can isn't kind of the the kind of silver bullet to to kinda fix everything because, ultimately, if you've got some Amazon tech in there, it's still gonna talk to Amazon tech most of the time.
And you'll, the one of the things I I like most about Home Assistant is, you you remember when you used to watch, like, futuristic, TV programs or films back in the day, and they maybe Ironman's a good one where he's got, like, this screen or, like, this hologram thing, and he's just controlling all sorts of shit. Like, Home Assistant gives you that, and it it's fully customizable so that you can have, like, your own home dashboard, and you can feel you can make yourself feel like a football player from MTV Cribs in the nineties where they got, like, iPads in the wall to control TVs and stuff like you can do all of that. Oh, yeah. Obviously, you can have, like, an I an iPad and create your own home dashboard so that you can see all of your your, your cameras. You can turn your lights on. You can manage your automations. You can obviously, it depends what hardware you plug into this, but the sky is literally the limit in in terms of, like, what you can control and how you can control it within your own personalized dashboard.
Again, all completely locally so that you don't have to be reliant on a third party server to, well, number one, keep things working, and number two, you know, look after all of your data.
[00:22:16] Unknown:
Have you Cool. To be honest, have you set yours up to look like Ironman?
[00:22:23] Unknown:
To a certain degree, yes. But the the limit the limitation for me at the moment is, I haven't spent thousands and thousands of pounds to have, like, light bulbs in every room in the house and Yeah. Yeah. You know, a a remote controlled garage door or anything like that. Like, I've got the basics. I've got light switches. I've got, my TV. You know, I can control the TV on it. And what else have I got? That's pretty much it. Like, it's just for me at the moment, it's just basic lighting, and the the CCTV coming through into that dashboard as well. So I can quickly turn things on and off, and I can see what's going on on the various cameras that I've got dotted around the house. Yeah. Which is is enough for me at the moment. Don't get me wrong. I've got my eyes on on many other things, to kind of, you know, pad that out. But like you say, it can become very expensive very quickly if you if you let it.
[00:23:15] Unknown:
Yeah. Those, those Philips Hue light bulbs are like or they were, like, £80 a bulb or something stupid. Can't remember how much they were, but a a fortune.
[00:23:27] Unknown:
Yeah. Completely mental. And I'm sure they're probably more expensive now. But, thankfully, as I said, with with Home Assistant, like, you don't have to go with the big players. There's loads of cheaper alternatives, that work just as well, if not better. And you can, again, connect them all all locally. So I I wanna quickly touch on the Home Assistant architecture. So basically, like I say, Home Assistant is like a server on your local network, and it interact interacts with your devices through three kind of main components. You've got integrations.
So these are like the the connectors for all the different devices and services that you have. So you could you'll have, like, you could have a Philips Hue integration. You could have a a ZigBee, integration. More on that later. Spotify integration, you know, ESP Home. There's there's, like, I think there's, like, at least a couple of thousand different integrations. So all that to say is if there's a smart home or smart home tech item on the market, you can pretty be pretty certain that it's gonna work with Home Assistant. But, obviously, they have all of their their integrations listed on the website. And then you have, like, entities.
So an entity is kind of, like a a a trait of a of one of your devices. So it could be a sensor, like, when a sensor detects a motion or when a light switch is turned on or, you know, when a media player is on or something like that. And then the final thing is automation, which kind of brings all of this together, which is basically just, I guess, like, logic based rules that react to certain triggers. So it could be when I walk into my office and the sensor in my office senses some motion, turn on the light bulb that's in my office, that sort of thing. That make sense?
[00:25:15] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:25:18] Unknown:
So like I say, the the default way is, to kind of get started is very similar to it like a Bitcoin node. You would basically flash an SD card and pop that into a Raspberry Pi and then just connect to it on your local network, to and you basically just go to, like, homeassistant.local or or the relevant IP address, and it would just bring up, like, a a locally served website where you can go through the setup process. There's no command line required. And like I say, in the default way, everything is completely local, which, again, is makes things 10 times more private than, than having to rely on somebody else's kind of cloud service, I guess. Mhmm. Some other ways that you could that you could run this, you can run it, inside a Docker container on an existing computer. Obviously, that's a bit more advanced.
You can run it in a command line, I believe, as well as, like, a Python script. But, again, that's, like, way too more advanced than I would need. Yeah. And then there's also, something called Home Assistant Supervised, which again is is similar to the Raspberry Pi thing, but it also gives you control of the underlying com computer as well, which again is is kind of, a bit more advanced, again. So for most people, just, single board computer or an existing computer that you've already got that's sat there doing nothing, you can flash Home Assistant OS onto it, and it works in a very, very similar way to something like Start nine or to, to Umbrel, where you just have a graphical user interface and you can click a point and set up your dashboard, connect your various devices, etcetera.
[00:26:52] Unknown:
Is it, you can't set this up then on, like, a tablet or a phone? It's gotta be on a on a computer.
[00:27:01] Unknown:
Yes. Because it needs to be kind of always on, a little bit like a no Yeah. Of course. Be like so so the way it would work is you'd have the always on computer, but then you'd have the own home assistant app on your phone or on your iPad or whatever, or just go on your computer, just go through, a web browser to, like, homeassistant.local. Quick question from Bond. He asked, is a Pi three four gigabyte powerful enough? I've got an old one collecting dust. I would say, yeah, probably. Like, it's it's it's a very kind of low lift piece of software. It's not really kind of doing much. It's just kind of managing some connections and being, like, the the interface between, you know, a sensor and a bulb somewhere in else in your setup. So haven't tried it, but I would say with four gigs of RAM or Pi three probably would be enough. Yeah.
Mhmm. Okay. Any questions at this point, Max, just while I figure out where we're up to?
[00:28:00] Unknown:
No. Because I think you're gonna cover it later. Well, I guess I can ask it anyway. The only thing I'm wondering about is where you said you can connect devices to this, but some of them will still call home effectively. Like, some of them will still wanna send data back to, you know, whichever it is, like Ring camera or something like that. Is there a way to turn those things off, or does it depend device to device? Or is there a way to somehow block traffic out somehow? Like
[00:28:37] Unknown:
Yeah. Good. Good. Good. Good question, actually. Before I answer that, just quickly shout out to to Ragamuffin, XTX. Good to meet you the other day, mate. And Nathan Day, you've all sent zaps in. Couple of thousand sats each. Very much. And Ragamuffin. Yeah. Thanks for stopping by, guys. Yeah. So to answer your question, yeah, this is very much dependent on how you connect the devices into Home Assistant. So some devices will only work through, Wi Fi, which is fine. It will work absolutely fine to within your local network. But unless you do some more advanced network blocking maybe at the router level, there's nothing to potentially block, let's say, a Philips Hue bulb from communicating out to the Hue servers if you connect it that way. You absolutely can stop that if you are comfortable with going into your router settings and blocking that.
But again, if you use it in the most naive way possible where the the bulb is connected to your WiFi, which is then, within the same local network as your home assistant server, then you can't have that 100% guarantee that it can't phone home. The other way that you can do it, and this is the way that I do it, is that there's different kind of local networking solutions that you can have so that you can have your devices communicate to your home server 100% locally. The way in which I do it is using something called ZigBee, which is kind of like a low power mesh network, essentially.
So the way it works is I've got my Raspberry Pi sat next to my router, and plugged into one of the USB ports on that Raspberry Pi. I've basically got, like, a little dongle, which looks like a USB dongle, and it's got a little remote a little aerial on the top of it. It doesn't take up much space at all. And then anytime I now buy, well, anything for the house, I make sure it's ZigBee compatible, which thankfully these days is very easy to do. So if I if I look for a bulb, I make sure I buy a bulb that's ZigBee compatible. If I look for a a motion sensor or, you know, a door switch or something like that, loads of different ones available.
Basically, rather than connecting any of those devices to my home Wi Fi, which they all will do, I I instead connect it to the local mesh network that runs powered by that little kind of aerial that's plugged into the home assistant server. So that has two main benefits. The first one is that there's no Wi Fi connection, so it can't phone out of the, my home network because I just Yeah. I don't give it the credentials to be able to do so. So it the only way it can communicate is via this this mesh network within the kind of ZigBee kind of mesh that's within my house.
So the the privacy trade off is wonderful. But the other, great part of this is that it's much faster than Wi Fi as well. Like, in in terms of, like so an example is my office light with a I've got a sensor in my office all running on the ZigBee low power, mesh network. It's instant. As soon as that sensor sees some motion in the room, that bulb is on instantly. I have tested it on Wi Fi, and there's a there's a marked kind of, slowing of that. I don't know why that is. I'm sure there's some networking gurus that will be be like, you are yeah. That's obvious. But, when you do it over this low power mesh, much faster. And then I guess the third benefit as well, because you might be thinking, well, if it's low power mesh, like, you know, if I've got a larger house and my home assistant serves in one end and, you know, what happens if I want something some lights in the garage that are automated? Like, is it gonna Well, you've plugged in another little mesh aerial thing. Right? Well, exactly. Because it works on a mesh network, any you don't necessarily need specific kind of boosters, like, to strengthen the signal.
Any device that you connect as part of this is a booster. So all of my, all of my light bulbs, all of my sensors, etcetera, are all boosters and and can because it's a mesh network, like my the the office bulb in my office, obviously, can communicate through other, items that I've got in the house that also like to get back to the to the home assistant hub. So it's local, it's private, and it's much faster. And the more that you have, the kinda stronger that the mesh network gets essentially. So, like, I've got lights in my garage that are all automated and get not connected to the home network. And, like, you did you'd have thought, well, that's way too far away from my my my router, my home assistant server, which is open the same location.
But, yeah, works seamlessly. So Wow. Okay. Massive massive fan of the ZigBee network. And I I believe e even the Philips Hue, is compatible with this ZigBee this ZigBee stuff just to show how widely it is proliferated already. I'm I'm a big fan actually. A lot of the IKEA home tech stuff like switches, sensors, and bulbs, very, very cheap, especially compared to Philips Hue. And they're all ZigBee compatible as well, and they connect really, really simply to to, you know, into your mesh network. So, I'm I'm a big fan. I've spent you know, most of my kit comes from IKEA because it's very, very reasonably priced, and it's all CP compatible.
[00:34:02] Unknown:
Okay. I miss Ikea. They don't they don't have them in the Shetlands.
[00:34:07] Unknown:
I do, Yeah. I do enjoy a walk around Ikea as as as sad as that sounds. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's sad, but it's it is great. BTC wrestles asking in chat, is home assistant available in FortNine or or available to sideload? Definitely not, available in any of the stores that I've checked out on Start Nine. Whether you can sideload it or not, I don't know. But, obviously, that somebody would need to make a package for it. I'm sure it's probably possible. But I know that Home Assistant is on Umbrel. So, you know, if it's on Umbrel, then somebody should be able to package it for Start nine. Easy enough. Yeah. It would, you know, it would be a a great thing to have, personally. I, I'd love to install it on my Start nine. It would mean I don't have to run it on a on a Raspberry Pi. Although, to be said, I know we trash, Raspberry Pi's quite a lot to, on the ungovernable sphere, especially when we're talking about notes. But this Raspberry Pi for that's running my Home Assistant stuff, absolutely faultless. And I think that's because of how lightweight the software is. Like, it's not actually doing a lot. It's just relaying messages.
Mhmm.
[00:35:10] Unknown:
Would you say there's any benefit to separating them out anyway? Like, is there any concerns with privacy, security, or, anything like that from running that on your Fontaine, along with everything else, would it actually be better to have it separate anyway?
[00:35:32] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I guess it depends what you're using your Startlane for. Like, if it's your your only Bitcoin node and your only Lightning node, you know, maybe separation is good there. But, like, if it's more of your self hosting box where you've got, you know, Nextcloud and stuff on it and it's it's less important or or kind of it would be less detrimental to your life if it went down, then, yeah, sure. Throw it on. But I'm sure everybody's got, like, a spare computer lying around somewhere or a spare Raspberry Pi. Especially if you've been in Bitcoin for a few years, you probably got some a few dead nodes floating around that you can throw this on. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, another good point, actually. I think we we had a question on Nostra about this a while back.
Are there any plug and play options for Home Assistant? And and yes, there is. I believe it's called Home Assistant Green, which you can buy from the Home Assistant website. It's basically I think they use a RockPro or a RockPi single board computer. It just like with an umbrella or start line, if you buy from them, it just comes preinstalled with the Home Assistant software. You give it some power. You give it some Internet, plug into your router, and and a way to go. So it's, like I say, very analogous to to what Bitcoin is, are already used to in terms of, like, node setup. Mhmm.
So got a question from Bon on the Nostra chat. He said to to see the devices and control them from your phone or wherever, do you need to connect to the mesh first then switch back to your Wi Fi when you're done? No. So the way that would work, Bonnie, is that the devices, like bulb switches, etcetera, they're using the mesh network. Obviously, the home assistant server, let's say it's a Raspberry Pi, is physically connected to your to your router, via an Ethernet cable, so it's on your local network. And then when you have, you know, your iPad, your tablet, your computer, or your phone on the local network, then the Home Assistant app will just connect to it, locally. Like, say, you just give it the, the IP address when you set it up.
And then, basically, there's you know, you have the Home Assistant app that, depending on how you set up, obviously, you can then manage all of your devices and control them from your phone locally. This is probably a good time maybe to talk about some remote access, at this point because, while, you know, most of the time that you're gonna wanna control stuff, outside of automation to which remind me to come back to that, Max. Yeah. Most of the time, you're gonna be wanting to do it at home, so local is fine. But there will be times, like you said, Max, where you're like, you know, I've come away on holiday and, you know, I've left the lights on, and I don't have an automation that automatically turns them off when they'd sense no movement or something like that. Then, yeah, I guess the the usual, remote access rules apply. Same again, it's very similar to a Bitcoin node. So, if you have, a router that's already got some, like, a WireGuard client on there or you've got, a mobile client or zero tier or anything like or Tailscale, then that you can just connect in through through those different methods, so that you're you're kind of tunneling back to your local network.
I don't believe there's any Tor support so that it kind of just works out of the box. Or if you don't have a a a more fancy router, then directly within the Home Assistant kind of integrations or app store, there is a, I believe a Tailscale and a zero tier option so that you can just install that app and run through the configuration process so that you, again, have that option to tunnel back into your home network so that when you're away on your phone, you would turn on the, the Tailscale VPN, which you preconfigured to kind of talk back to your node at home. And then it just tunnels straight into, into the the home assistant server. So you can either do it at a router level, or you can do it on the on the server itself. And, again, very self explanatory.
And because it runs over, like, Tailscale or WireGuard, it's very speedy. You don't have any of the latency of Tor as well.
[00:39:34] Unknown:
Go on. Yeah. Well, I was just gonna say, you definitely need that for especially if you're gonna have, like, CCTV or things like that. There's not really any point having CCTV that you can't look at while you're away from home. Yeah. Because when you're at home, you can see with your eyes anyway, can't you? So, obviously, it would still be recording and doing all that stuff in the background, but sometimes, you would wanna just be able to check something. Like, oh, why is why is, why is this sensor gone off? Is there someone in my property? Or, like, whatever you need to know?
[00:40:08] Unknown:
Yeah. Definitely. To be honest, with my setup and the, like, different automations that I've got, the amount of time other than, like, you say, checking CCTV, The amount of times that I need to kind of tunnel back in to control something is very, very limited. And and you can kind of, I guess, limit the the requirement to do that by having automations. And, basically, automations are, like, the the best part of it for me because it basically the the beauty of Home Assistant because it can speak all of these thousands of different languages that, different bulbs or sensors, speak and be like the translator between them all, you can tie any of them together to to produce certain outputs.
So it could be very simply, when it's sunrise in my area, turn on this light. Like, that's an obvious and a very, very simple one so that, you know, you know that you go, you know, you get out of bed and you go make a coffee at 7AM. At 06:59, let's say that's when sunrise is or, you know, you could predefine the time. You know that it's not gonna be dark when you get downstairs. Nice and easy, very simple. Mhmm. But then you could take it, like, it can be weird and wonderful as you want. So it could be when the camera on the front of my house, senses, a person, then, what I want you to do if it's past 11PM at night, I want you to turn on the kitchen light so that the the the robber thinks that there's somebody home. And I also want to send a I want you to send a a notification to my phone that bypasses the do not disturb.
It rings my phone and you know what I mean? Like, that's just one example of how you can tie all of this stuff together, Again, completely locally so you can have drastic improvements to your life and to improve your security. And, yeah, like like I say, the sky is literally the limit. Your imagination is probably the limit as to what you can do with all of this stuff. You can have other stuff like I'm trying to think what what else have I I'll have a think because you've got a question as to what else I've got set up.
[00:42:15] Unknown:
Well, I was just thinking, how easy is it to set that up? Go through that example. CCTV senses something in your front garden that it's a person there. It turns on security lights. It turns on a bedroom light, whatever. It it turns on the TV or like, how simple is it if that's your idea of what you wanna do to actually set that up in this app?
[00:42:43] Unknown:
Yeah. So once you've got an understanding of, like you basically just look into the settings of a device. Each device, depending on what it is, will have loads of different entities. So if it's a very simple non color based light bulb that is basically, it has an on and an off, it'll be like the device the bulb is on, the bulb is off. If it was like a Philips Hue bulb, it could be, you know, the bulb is on and red. The bulb is on and blue, blah blah blah, all that sort of stuff. Or, you know, if you get more complicated, it could be a thermostat that is like you know, if the the ambient temperature is below x or a security camera that, has you know, you can set zones on your security camera if it's fit a fixed one to be like, if anything enters this circle, then do this.
Once you have an understanding of, okay, I need to identify what happens with that device to then produce this output or what trigger do I want there to be to, do something to a device. It's like, if this, then that. It's like, I guess, a very similar kind of programming language, but I I say that through tug it cheap because it's not done in code. It's just to say, if something if x happens, then do y. And you can stack all of these on top of one another, so it doesn't have to be just one thing. Like in my example before, it was like, you know, turn the light on, send me a text, blah blah, all that sort of stuff. So to do something more complex, like, you know, if my security camera senses a person in this zone, then do three different, outputs.
Once you've got that understanding, like, I could spin that up in sixty seconds. But you you've gotta get over that first hurdle of understanding what you want and then how to produce that within the dashboard. But once you've done it once, like, it's so simple because you're like, oh, well, I want one of the outputs to be, you know, something that happens on my phone. So I'm gonna click on my phone as the device, and then it it brings you up all the entities. And it's like, okay. Yeah. Send a notification to this person or something like that. That makes sense? Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:44:44] Unknown:
Very cool.
[00:44:45] Unknown:
You can, what else have you you can have, like, geographical based ones. So if you if you are comfortable with it having your phone location, you could be like, okay. Well, when my phone enters this geographical circle, let's say five miles from my house, then set the thermostat to, 65 degrees. And turn on the lights if it's after sunrise. Like, you can have conditional stuff as well where it only does some of the outputs based on other other criteria, like what time of day it is or what the ambient temperature is or whether it's past sunrise or sunset, etcetera. Like, it is mind blowing the amount of shit that you can you can kind of conceive here and how many things you can automate. It's, yeah, it's completely wild.
[00:45:30] Unknown:
Very cool. Very cool. So if it's as simple as this, or relatively simple as this, and it's compatible with so many different devices and stuff like that. Is there any drawback in terms of the price of this what do you call it? Not zebedee. Zebedee. What was it called? Zigbee? Like, is that expensive? Is is the I mean, the software you said is open source. Like, what cost if you already got the stuff anyway, the bulbs and the things and the whatever, the switch between giving all your data and giving much less or none of your data and having more control, what are we talking in the cost for all all the bits?
[00:46:16] Unknown:
So the the ZigBee, like, dongle, I think, is, like, £40. May might even be less than that. Then, obviously, you need a computer, which again, most people have got one lying around. But if not, you know, a cheap Raspberry Pi doesn't need to be anything super powerful. And, yeah, then then it's just a case of being selective about the the the the tech that you buy to make sure that it's compatible with ZigBee or or one of the you know, ZigBee is not the only local mesh. There are alternatives like, Zedwave. I think there's one called Thread.
You've got e s ESPHome as well. So ZigBee is not the only one. It's just the one that I have the best, experience with in terms of, like, latency, ease of setup. Like, it it really is like a wonderful, piece of care con considering how kind of simplistic it is as well. What else have we got? Oh, the one final thing as well because the one of the the most powerful things for me other than, like, the automations is that, you know, is it any easier to pull your phone out of your pocket, open an app, and then tap a button to turn a light bulb off versus getting up and just hitting the light switch. Like, it's probably gonna be faster than your light switch. Yeah. Exactly.
So other than automations, which kind of, again, obviously, automate all of that shit for you, another powerful thing for me is is voice control because it's much easier to say, you know, trigger word, let's say Alexa or or similar. Turn off this light. Like, that's that's the easiest way to do it if you need it done instantly rather than waiting for for an alternative. Okay. You can connect all of the the usual surveillance, voice assistance to this. You can connect the the Apple HomePod, the Google sorry, Amazon Alexa. I'm sure Google have got their alternative.
Obviously, there's a big privacy trade off of doing that. You can also connect these to Siri on your phone or to Google Assistant on on your Android phone. Again, trade offs of of doing that. But there is also a home assistant voice, which is kinda like a little, cheap Amazon Alexa, I guess. Although the speaker is is nowhere near as good as it at as it. Excuse me. But you can, again, plug this into your your home assistant server, connect it via the local area network only, and then configure your own voice command so that you can, again, have a an alternative where it's like I think you can give it your own, trigger word or there's predefined ones. I think I think one of them is Jarvis. So you can be like, hey, Jarvis. Set the heating to 65 degrees or something like that. And, again Okay. It it it it again, you can lock it down so that it doesn't communicate to to any cloud.
And you can kind of have that sort of similar experience. I'll be brutally honest. It's nowhere near as responsive as something like Siri or, or as Google Assistant or with, Amazon Alexa. Like, it's just not as good. But with that said, it is a kind of a newer product that it is running locally. So you're you're relying on the computing power of of the Raspberry Pi or wherever you're running the, the Home Assistant server on, essentially. Okay.
[00:49:33] Unknown:
Any advice or, good devices that you can recommend, like, as a starting point for people?
[00:49:40] Unknown:
Yeah. Honestly, I would say, let's assume that you've got the server set up. I would say get yourself a ZigBee dongle. I'm pretty sure they're, like, thirty, forty quid, and then just get some ZigBee, light bulbs as a starter. IKEA is more than the full. Like I say, they're they're really not expensive at all. Just get a couple of them. You know, pick one room that you wanna automate, and plug it, go through the Zigbee setup. If anybody's interested and wants any guides, you know you know where to find me. I can send those through. And, you know, get yourself a couple of cheap bowls from my IKEA, and then play around with some automation. Like, you can get all of that done for, like, £50 if you've already got the server set up. Like, it's it's not a huge amount of, of outlay to to kind of automate the lights in a singular room.
Play around with the automations, you know, get them to come on at sunrise, turn off at sunset. Sorry. All the way around. You know what I mean? Yeah. And just play around. Yeah. You don't have to go balls deep straight away.
[00:50:39] Unknown:
Okay. Just a tip. It's, yeah, I feel like this is one that because we're coming up almost a time. This is one that we could probably revisit, especially when people start tinkering and have more questions and stuff. It's it's kind of like a a pretty broad subject that that you can really I think it can really improve a lot of lives. And, actually, there will be people listening to this who will like, they won't say that they do, but they'll either have Alexis in their homes or Oh. They'll have CCTV that's in the cloud. And they'll have they'll have things because life's just fucking hard, and it's just like you can't always just have everything perfect. It's like there there will be, flaws. And I think something like this really is a is a realistic way to start taking back control of your own home, which is a crazy thing. Like, to have a situation where it's rare not to have something listening in every room and Yeah. You know, all your data being given. It's, the the creepiest one for me is CCTV.
It's one that I'm really, looking into having a decent system. And I'm like, in in previous offices I've had and stuff, I've had Nest because we had people stealing, and I was like, right. Fuck this. I'm putting Nest everywhere, and I could monitor it. But I wouldn't want that in my own home. That's just weird. So something like that, like a decent CCTV system. Like, even the even CCTV is what? A closed circuit
[00:52:14] Unknown:
telephony, isn't it? Yeah. The name is GlassDite.
[00:52:17] Unknown:
Yeah. It's like, oh, I've got CCTV in my house. Like, have you, or have you actually got open version? Because you're giving spy camera. Yeah. You're giving all your data to Nest or whoever the the thing is. So, it's creepiest. Like, it's especially creepy knowing that a lot of the sick fucks who control tech also are sick in other ways, and you've got your family in your house. And it's like, nah. I'm not I'm not not doing that shit. That's a that's a big, big problem. So I'm excited for this. I'm gonna have to have a play around, and we'll have to revisit it. Yeah. Like I say, we we've barely scratched the surface. Like,
[00:52:56] Unknown:
you can do things like you know, I mentioned that that local voice assistant. Like, if you have a powerful computer that's running a a a an a local LLM, you can hook it up to that, have conversations with it. Or if you you can, like honestly, like, the sky is literally the limit. CCTV stuff, if you're looking for recommendations, I use some of the the Reolink kit. The integrations with Home Assistant are wonderful. Again, it's all locally. You can do a cloud backup option if you want to, but, obviously, that kind of defeats the object of, you know, the privacy calls here. Very stable, very secure, and, you know, again, it all records locally onto a hard drive that I've got. And, it just overwrites when the hard drive gets full so that I don't have to you know, because there's, like, literally no maintenance got you know, it all feeds into the dashboard, so I can feel like like an Ironman.
We've got we've got five minutes left. I wanna rattle through some of the presubmitted questions if possible. As always, if you've got any in the live chat, please feel free to drop them into into the chat. We'll get some if we've got time. Quick one from Nosta Gang. We've already answered this, but it's a quick answer. Could somebody like Start Nine tap into this market? Yes. Absolutely. It's already on Umbrel, so hopefully Start Nine, can pick up the mantle and and do the same thing because it's very well suited. Question from Goydian on Nosta. How to prevent IoT Internet of Things.
Yes. Thank you. Well, I don't know why I drew a blank on that. Devices. How to prevent them from phoning home while managing them over the home assistant that is connected I think we've already covered that one. So so maybe just go back and, you know, listen to the the start of the show. You can. Yes. It's absolutely possible. What else we got? Mark on Nosta said, I need smart light bulbs that don't start tweaking out after a few months. Any suggestions? Yeah. IKEA bulbs over Zigbee connection. You do need the dongle. IKEA. Yeah. For for most of this stuff, you need some if you're going into the the Philips ecosystem, like, you need a Philips hub anyway. So just look at the kind of the Zigbee, dongle as as like the hub, but it's a universal hub for all of your ZigBee devices. So well worth the investment.
Next up, we have a question from c s burner on Nosta. What What are the differences between the main FOSS home automation systems, for which application, which one is best? I've only got personal experience with Home Assistant. It's the only one I've run. It's been great so far. I know there's other stuff like I think there's one called Matter. There's another one, somebody shared with me on Nostical something, Hub, but I can't speak, about them because I've never run them or tested them. But, Home Assistant in in my research seems like the most widely adopted, and it has the most, integrations and seems to make the best trade off in terms of usability again. But, again, I've that's the only one I've run thus far. Mhmm.
Mario two. I think that's that's a typo from me. I think it's Maria 2,000, so apologies, Maria. Any plug and play options for us non techies? Yes. Either Umbrel Home, sorry, Umbrel Home. Umbrel.com. It comes you know, if you buy a pre installed one, Home Assistant app is on there. Or you can go straight to the Home Assistant website, and they do a a very similar box that runs on a single board computer that comes preinstalled with the software. How much how much is that, Jun, off the top of your head? Oh, I knew you were gonna ask me that. Let me find it very quickly.
[00:56:16] Unknown:
Just one sec. Because it's I think it's, like, £120. Because sometimes with these things, like, you you do give a bit of support to the people who are building this stuff. It's open source. It's you know, there there are people who have spent presumably a lot of time making this, and I'm not averse to, like, buying hardware from these companies.
[00:56:35] Unknown:
Yeah. £112. So, like, a $130 if you're in The US. That's not bad. No. And I'd say it's just a little a little square box that you plug in some power. It's tiny. You won't even see it. It'll be just sitting next to your router. Basically, just a rack similar to Raspberry Pi. What is it? Did they specify what it is? A rock yeah. Rockchip. Oh. Yeah. It's not a rock pro, but it's a quad core ARM cortex CPU, with four gigabytes of, memory. So yes to, Bon, when you asked before, four gigabytes looks like it is enough.
[00:57:11] Unknown:
Okay.
[00:57:12] Unknown:
What else have we got? I've just lost my mouse. There it is. We have, this is the last one. Actually, good timing. Which security measures can help prevent hacking attempts on smart home systems by mini PC like devices and physical hacking gadgets, and that's from MortgageHodl on Nosta. I would guess I mean, for physical hacking gadgets, like, just, I guess, be careful who you let anywhere near any of your home servers. Put it in a server box. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just be careful who you who you let into the house. Obviously, if you got work people in, you know, getting a new bathroom or something, then, you know, be wary of that. Maybe unplug stuff for the day.
And then in terms of, like, remote stuff, I guess you could fix it by just keeping everything local. Like I said, that's how we started talking about this was it's all all it's all local. I don't think personally that you're adding too much risk by having the the, you know, the Tailscale app installed so that you can do some remote, connections because, like I say, Tailscale is all is is basically just public key encryption at the end of the day. So, you know, unless you're somebody hacks your actual Tailscale account to get into your home network, then the the risk is is minimal, in my opinion. I I don't really see that as as much of a of a massive issue.
Alright? Wow. Look at that time. Yeah. Do you like that? We've, we're getting good at this, aren't we? Yeah. That was a fun one. I think you're absolutely right. I think if we get enough, support from, the listeners and the the viewers on covering stuff like this again, then, yeah, there's definitely more we can talk about. We can go more into detail on, you know, some of the different communication methods, the different automations, and some of the different, hardware that you can connect to this. Maybe I can come up with, like, a, know, a predefined list of stuff that we can talk about. But, yeah, we'll definitely go much, much deeper on that one. So if you if you like this kind of topic, let us know, and we we can definitely bring it back up in, in the future. But, thank you to everybody in the all of the various live chats.
Appreciate all the taps on NOS that we've got. Probably, like, five or 6,000 stats there. So thank you very much for your support and for and for being part of the show. Like I say, we we really appreciate everybody that that gets involved and ask questions because it is a huge driver for the show and to where we take it. So thank you all very much. I believe normal service will be resumed, next week, and we will be back as a trio. If not, then we'll have the same, just the two of us song queued up again.
And, oh, also don't don't disappear too quickly because, we've got a new outro video, and I I want everybody to let us know what they think of it. Max, you were gonna say before I, take us out?
[01:00:05] Unknown:
I've forgotten now. It doesn't
[01:00:07] Unknown:
matter. Okay. Alright. Thanks, everyone.
[01:00:13] Unknown:
Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London. Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet, Foundation, and my NIM box for keeping the ungovernable misfits going. Make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com to see mister Crown's incredible skills and artwork. Listen to the other shows in the feed to hear Kareem's world class editing skills.
Thanks to Expatriotic for keeping us up to date with Boost's XMR chats and sending in topics. John, great name and great guy, never change and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news or continuing to grow the mesh to Dell. Finally, a big thanks to the unsung hero, our Canadian overlord, Shorten, for trying to keep the ungovernable in check and for the endless work he puts in behind the scenes. We love you all. Stay ungovernable.
Intro to Freedom Tech Friday and show format
Max joins: setting the stage and todays rabbit hole
Smart home tech boom and the privacy dilemma
Goals: convenience without corporate surveillance
Enter Home Assistant: open source home automation
Architecture basics: integrations, entities, automations
Running it at home: Pi, Docker, supervised and access
Stopping devices phoning home: Zigbee and local mesh
Remote access options: WireGuard, Tailscale, ZeroTier
Automation examples that actually help
Voice control: assistants, trade-offs, and HA Voice
Starter kit and budget picks: Zigbee dongle + IKEA
CCTV done right: Reolink, local recording, dashboards
Q&A rapid fire: nodes, alternatives, plug-and-play
Security tips: local-first and physical considerations
Closing remarks and credits
