I don’t doubt thread is getting better and could be the more future proof of them all but i bought some zigbee motion sensors for less than $10 and haven’t changed the battery in them in nearly two years. When thread devices are that cheap and can run on battery that long i’ll gladly recommend them too. For now, for beginners, i like to recommend zigbee for it’s low cost in both money and power usage.

It is as vast and customizable as it gets. The sky, and your imagination, is the limit. I’ve been at it for years and i’m still tinkering with automations and services. It’s biggest strength, in my eyes, is being able to run everything local and off line. My advice is to start with zigbee so as to not congest your Wi-Fi traffic and add in zwave where the budget allows and range is needed.

When you come down from your high and you’re looking for your next hit check out home assistant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Frame

I have a few Reolink POE cameras(and poe doorbell) with an old mini pc running frigate, all on a battery backup so if the power goes for a bit the cameras and recording don’t. I also have a coral tpu installed in the mini pc.

All of my cameras are blocked at the firewall from leaving the network and they function fully, 100% local. When i plugged in the poe cable the cameras grabbed an ip address and you can interact with them through that.

As others have said there is also a home assistant integration for reolink that let’s you import and control the cameras from within home assistant as well as a frigate integration. I prefer having frigate on it’s own box so when i need to reboot home assistant my cameras are still recording.

Once it’s all set up you can have live video feed for each camera accessible within home assistant, on your dashboard if you like, as well as access to clips and continuous recordings depending on frigate configuration and storage capacity.

I hope someone else knows a better way to do this because it would appear it is somewhat possible but not easy.

Subsonic servers, such as navidrome, offer the ability to “SyncPlayQueue” via api to specific players, but in the case of navidrome that does not included the web player or music assistant for home assistant (the later is an assumption as i was unable to find a setting to enable it).

For those who don’t care about home assistant they just need to find a player on the devices they want to transition music too and from that supports the feature.

For those who use home assistant and want to listen to music across devices you can transfer queue from within the music assistant player to a device added as a player or the app by picking “this device”. That only works if you’ve been playing music from your phone on a smart speaker, the music queue being played via web isn’t visible from the app and vice vera. It might be possible to set a web browser as a player to interact with but i imagine that would be a fragile setup at best.

Based on some older results i’ve found jellyfin isn’t set up to save play location in songs but if you ran the music folder as audio books it will. Not sure what that’ll do in regards to meta data but it’s only half the problem. I’d just as soon give up the time stamp memory if i could get playlist save state.

Credit where credit is do plexamp is the best option for what i want to achieve, I just hate having to authenticate through them and report the activity occurring between internal addresses.

I opened my server via web browser and started playing music and when i opened the app on my phone it didn’t show anything as playing. Either there’s a plugin i need to install, a setting i need to change, or it’s not an option with jellyfin.

So I understand this correctly, you’re using Fossify Calendar as the phone app that accesses your self-hosted calendar?

I prefer micro fiber cloth and rubbing alcohol. There’s an stl where you cut the micro fiber into strips and attach it to thee face of a “scrubber”. Gives you a handle ti hold and a flat surface to put against the print plate.

The issue is either the chromebook or the fully kiosk app, and i’m thinking it’s the app. Post reboot it won’t let me play music from or to the chromebook now.

The home assistant vm has 32 cores, the chromebook i’m not sure. I installed the fully kiosk app using the google play store.

Let’s discuss the chromebook since that’s where i want the issue addresses first. It’s a chromebook with the fully kiosk app running and it displays my home assistant internal address in the web browser. Through the kiosk app it’s a destination for media playback and the sound comes out of the chromebook speakers. The vm is assigned 24gb of ram and it’s using 8 of that and it’s using less than 1% of the 32 cpus i’ve assigned to it. If you’re wondering, the hardware is an old dual cpu server with more resources than i could ever hope to use so i over fed most of the vms i’m running. I doubt it’s a hardware issue on the server side but i’m willing to try anything.

It’s my understanding that yes, that is an option but i’m in the camp that any step i make at this point will be towards being as cloudless and local as possible with services like this. I agree that i’d trust them over the others but i don’t want to have to pick between a poor user experience, a large hardware cost, or trusting SOME company.

I’ve made automation for all of my most commonly said phrases and when using those it works but that limits it to only the things i’ve already thought to key in. Not very ideal but it works well enough.

You misunderstand my statement. The way i see people making this device better is by either having thousands of dollars of gpu hardware and running their own robust local model or sending their data off to something like chat gpt. The first i have no issue with, if only i had the budget for, the second feels worse to me than alexa. I know amazon knows a lot about me, i don’t need to start feeding all my data to an additional cloud entity.

I love everything Nabu Casa is doing and even though i don’t use any of the perks it offers i still pay for their monthly service to continue supporting them.

I don’t want my comment to come off negative towards the product because my experience has less to do with the speaker itself in more to do with my expectations but i’m less than impressed with it at the moment.

I was watching the live stream and bought one the moment they said sales were live, took about a week to get in. Having never used assist within home assistant before i thought at the very least i could say “turn off the kitchen” and the software would know there was a room called kitchen and turn anything off in it. Nope.

I will eventually get around to setting up my own local llm once i get the right hardware but i don’t understand all these people “glad to drop alexa and google” just to feed their data into a public online llm. Feels worse to me in some ways.

Currently it lives in my bedroom and the speaker is a bit to tin/treb to work for our sound machine but a $10 aux speaker did well enough with that. I had to manually plug phrases i want it to do into an automation but once i did that everything worked fine. At the end of the day, though, if i’m using an additional speaker i don’t understand why i should pay $60 for this when i could get the components and diy one for less than $35.

Likely not the solution you’re looking for but a buddy and i link a folder via syncthing and anything added to one side shows up on the other.

Most of that will be budget based and long term goal oriented. Do you want a 4 bay nas with 10tb drives set up in raid 5 or do you think you’d want a two bay system with 5tb drives set up in mirror raid? Do you want to start cheap and get a second hand thinkcenter off ebay or do you want to buy a brand new NUC and put a 2tb M.2 and 16gb of ram in one slot so you can add the other 16gb later? Some nuc can take up to 64gb of ram and have two 2tb drives in them.

To play off what others are saying i think a mini pc and a stand alone nas may be the better route for you. It may seem counter intuitive to break it out into two devices but doing so will allow room for growth. If you buy a creeper bare bones mini pc and put more of your budget towards a nas and storage you could expand the mini pc without messing with your nas. You could keep the pi in the mix for a backup if your main pc is down or offload some services to it to balance performance.