IMPORTANT NEWS

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Nothing important to report as of Sat Jan 13 2018...

Introduction

HomeBotty (play on homebody, get it?) is a collection of various home automation bits and bobs meant to make life at home integrated, automated, and simply better. The hope is that with a non-trivial amount of effort, this repository will become a central place from which software (or software configuration) can be coordinated, distributed, and built upon for personal (and possibly public) consumption.

The TL;DR goals of this project is to deliver a POC that can do some simple home automation tasks. Some examples of these tasks are, toggling lights or outlets, monitor fuel consumption, locking or unlocking doors... you get the idea. Accompanying these simple goals are a few tertiary objectives which provide value to those who may not be as interested in the development of such systems and are more inclined to relate to their ease of use or appearance. Those goals include an inviting web based GUI, mobile integration and communication, and most importantly a bot.

The (slack)Bot in homeBotty will grow organically over time and eventually become the most shared (and modular) part of this repository. My hope is that by integrating with a mechanism which people are familiar interacting with, they will become more likely to use the tools behind the interface. This lowers the entry barrier to home automation and opens up other development opportunities like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analysis.

Problem Statement

Computing is becoming cheaper. Devices are becoming cheaper. The declining cost of home automation and the improved quality of life through connected devices should not be a dependent upon a user relinquishing their personal information. If the hardware is not the source by which a company profits, then what is it? If the most valuable stream of revenue is vast amounts of data, how can the consumer to which that data fundamentally belongs be protected? Atop that protection which should be a non issue, if a user is open to sharing this information should not they be able to participate in the revenue which it generates?

• Cost The cost of buying devices is cheap but comes at an alternative price of relinquishing personal data.

• Privacy Terms and conditions are likely not thoroughly read and include information which consumers may generally not be agreeable to.

• Security Is transmission of data encrypted? Is storage encrypted? What are some of the technical details of maintaining the anonymity and security of user data.

• Ownership Every company is profiting off of user data in some way or another. More than likely this is through selling anonymous usage to firms and/or more personalized localized usage to develop directed marketing. Can this be avoided? Can this gold mine be profit shared? Should it be?

• Personalization How do these system learn about the user? Does the experience become more personalized over time? Do people want Hal in their house? Does this matter?

Architecture

The main goals in the design of this system are to isolate the nodes, represented by the small web servers, to having a single ingress and a single egress. Communication to the connected devices will sit behind firewall rules, router rules, a reverse proxy, and the business logic in the device router. Their only communication out will be in the form of logging to a centralized syslog server which must also traverse the same entrance hurdles in pushing the metrics to storage.

Getting Started

Should include a TL;DR here but have a directory in this repository which is more explicitly meant for such things

General Notes

This section is meant for collecting general notes which are quickly accessible and most undoubtedly helpful. Links, rants, commands, help, etc.