Tour of My Embedded Linux Powered Private Smart Home
Rather than expose your smart home device data and voice commands “to the cloud” (i.e., to large tech titans as well as smart product manufacturers), this talk demonstrates how you can maintain better privacy over it. The "secret" is free and open source, spun out of Mozilla to be community led, and easy to set up and manage. (Spoiler: the central hub runs the WebThings Gateway). Since data are processed and stored locally, there's no need to give up your privacy, and even if your Internet goes down, your smart home still works.
Kathy will take you on a tour of her own smart home, then demonstrate the simplicity of MicroBlocks for building your own “smart devices”, such as motion sensors, temperature sensors, door/window sensors, pushbuttons, lights, and more.
Author(s) Bio
Kathy fills her desk with hardware, especially microcontroller boards that can be programmed using MicroBlocks, a learning tool for physical computing. While at Mozilla, she worked on the WebThings Project, which successfully launched a "gateway" software stack that can run on a Raspberry Pi, and act as a hub for a myriad of smart home and IoT devices. She received her bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, and her master's in EE from Stanford University. When not at a computer, she can usually be found exploring the great outdoors of northern California.
Twitter and/or Mastodon Handle
kgiori
Q&A
1. Have you writiten documentation or reviews about these different systems?
2. Is there any major implication when IPv6 becomes a standard worldwide in terms of security in embedded systems, regarding information transmission over wireless or wired transmisison lines?
3. What is your opinion. Is Tor hidden service is the perfect tool for exposing IoT home server? Besides encrypted channel, only you know services address. And if there is a zero day, automatically hacking atacks simlpy don't know where is you exposed server. Noone should know you have a smart home, right?
4. Are there any IoT devices talking in a proprietary protocol? If yes, how does Web of Things deal with it?
5. What are your opinions on the Home Assistant project?
6. Do you think that, quote "data explosion" happens only when we save all this data, typically in a cloud? Should our devices be more forgetful?
7. What other cloud services we can use other than Google Cloud to potentiate the features and usability of our IoT devices? I won a IoT device but it comes with a Google Cloud service by default and it's a huge amount of code just to have it working. How other systems handles with these types of online services?
8. Is there a way to set up a secondary Pi to take over in case your main one were to fail?
9. Is there any hardware kit already available to get started?
10. Can you show addon for a cat? We use microBlocks to write it? :)