A Raspberry Pi is not enough and a dedicated server too much? This post shows a system balancing power consumption and performance.

As you can read in the earlier postings I am trying to make my home smarter and smarter. The first step was the installation of connected switches in combination with Home Assistant. Now it is the turn to add some logic behind this simple devices. The first idea is to react on the people around. So we need something like a presence detector. At the moment there are multiple possible technologies. Let's have a quick look at all of them.

As you might have noticed I am currently updating the household with some "smart devices". All of the old 433 MHz actuators have been replaced by WiFi actuators from Sonoff. At the moment I am controlling all the actuators via the web-interface of HomeAssistant. This is basically great, but I do not want to be a slave of my smartphone/tablet/PC. Especially not for such a simple task like turning lights on or off. When I browsed itead I found a "smart switch" - the Sonoff Touch. Seconds later it was on my list of ordered items.

Communicating with a huge number of clients requires a simple, fast and reliable solution. Message queues seem to solve this problem in a very efficient way. There is a reason why many people treat MQTT as the "language of the Internet-of-Things".

The last few weeks showed us that the Internet-of-Things can be pretty dangerous, e.g.: Mirai Again: DT Outage a Precursor to Larger DDoS Attack. Especially if the devices are able to communicate with the internet there is a high risk! But I think this is not the only hazard. What happens if someone gets into your network because of an insecure device? This posting will list some actions the possible of such an attack.