Home Automation First Steps

06 May 2019 I dipped my toe in the smart home automation waters after I came across OpenHAB while researching options for the multi-room audio system that I wanted to build. As a strong advocate of privacy, I wanted to avoid cloud based solutions like Alexa, Google Home and others. read more...

Encryption, Backups and Recovery

08 Apr 2019 Encryption is a good thing, especially in my country where the government's desire to know and control every detail of private citizens' lives would make the Chinese and the Russians blush :) But don't lock yourself out of your own data as I thought I had yesterday. read more...

Multi Room Audio - part IV

30 Mar 2019 The remaining work for this project consisted largely of trying to decide where to locate the unit with my rack of RasPis and how to gracefully manage the cables for power, network and speakers. read more...

Multi Room Audio - part III

23 Mar 2019 At this point, I'd got a prototype working and understood how all the key pieces of my system will hang together. The next major phase is to expand the number of players and work out exactly where all the components are going to be located and how they are going to be cabled together. read more...

Multi Room Audio - part II

16 Mar 2019 In part I, I covered the planning (cough..) and design goals for my multi-room audio system. Part II goes into most of the detail of how I ended up building it. read more...