There’s a way to sidestep all this — not as extreme as putting a USB port in your arm and ‘hooking it up to some nerves’ — but it does involve a similar attitude.
There’s all sorts of ‘smart home’ gear available these days, with the ‘smarts’ in the cloud. ‘’Cloud” just means ‘Somebody else’s computer”. There’s no reason you can’t run the smarts on your own computer. If that sounds like a good idea — or giving someone else’s computer access to your home seems like a bad idea, check out OpenHAB. You don’t need anything more powerful than a Raspberry Pi Zero, which takes no more wattage than most smart thermostats
For instance, if you’re interested in a ‘smart’ thermostat, check out HestiaPI (catchy phrase: “If you don’t have root on your thermostat, somebody else does”). I’m in XKCD’s ‘target audience’, so this seemed like a no-brainer to me. (BTW, if you haven’t read Randal Munro’s How To, and like laughing hysterically about something your family doesn’t ‘get’, go read it)
I bumped into all this while trying to decide between smart thermostats, and seeing complaints about what happens when the Nest/Honywell/Carrier server goes down (thermostat stops being smart, no way to remotely change it).
The attraction to OpenHAB is that you get static/dynamic hybrid product. Changes come along, but they’re optional. Being open source, you can look at exactly what it’s doing — and you can add bits yourself, if you’re so inclined).
Of course, if you don’t care if your video camera has ‘smarts’, wireless cameras have been around for at least a decade. You just need a way to remotely connect to your home. I use a firewall that supports an inbound VPN (OpenVPN on a pfSense box, and as I don’t pay for a static IP, dynamic DNS through namecheap.com). But if you’re adding a dumb wireless camera to your home network, change the username and password, and forbid it access to the outside world. Yes, you have a firewall, but most residential firewalls are not super secure. Take a look at pfSense for a near Cisco level of security, essentially for free (runs on any old PC). Warning: steep-ish learning curve.
Given that Medium is a self-publishing site, I guess I should write this all up as an article. I just have to get past not seeing myself as any kind of ‘author’ :-)
