Alternative components for the paranoid

Feature Requests
1

I remember around one year ago, I was looking around for a smart home solution and I decided on Home Assistant mainly because it doesn’t require internet to work.

And one year later, it has grown to 563 components. Unfortunately, some of the components I am using today (even though it is awesome), rely on third party services that live in the Internet.

I understand some of the services can’t be hosted locally such as weather sensors unless you have your own weather satellite or a full fledged weather station. These services require specialize hardware.

However, what I hope to see is more software based components that can be hosted locally. For example, these services already have self-hosted alternatives but not yet made into a component…

  1. Google Calendar Event (possible alternative: Caldav server)
  2. Microsoft Face Identify (possible alternative: OpenCV)
  3. Alexa / Amazon Echo (possible alternative: Jasper. MyCroft still needs Internet to work but it seems can be customized to run locally)
  4. Test-to-speech components (Pico TTS sounds too robotic and blur. I can’t consider it as an alternative)

I know many don’t mind relying on third party services online and share their personal data with these big corporations, but there are some people like me who value their privacy and wish keep everything in their own hands, away from the prying eyes of advertisers, NSA, etc…

Apart from online privacy, locally hosted services also mean you can rest assured nothing will change and I can set it up and forget about it. I don’t have to worry when these companies decided to shutdown the services, make any changes to the policy (such as paid only services) or when I decided to move into a jungle and live without internet.

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2

I actually have a full fledged weather station and I’m still trying to figure out how to get it into HA without utilizing Weather Underground. LOL

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3

Something like this not practical?

4

I’m actually looking into that but stalled at the moment. But thanks!

5

At least Radio Thermostat is a good alternative to Nest and Ecobee. I do not know of any other Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats that do not require Internet connection.

Am I correct that the local component of Insteon (for 2242/2245 Hub) do not require Internet connection?

I think we need to separate the list of components whether the component requires Internet connection or not. How about this:

  • Internet of Things
  • Intranet of Things

?

“Intranet” means it allows devices to interact with other devices within the local network.

Actually, it would make sense to name it “cloud” and “local.”

2 Likes