Moar automation

Posted by Matthew Schick on 4/30/2012 0 comments

Got a few more bits added this weekend:

GE 45609 Z-Wave Wireless Lighting Control On/Off Switch
GE 45614 Z-Wave Wireless Lighting Control 3-Way Switch Kit
Trane TZEMT400BB3 Remote Energy Management Thermostat

Used the normal switch for our ceiling fan/lighting fixture in the den, was hoping for something to be able to control the fan and lighting separately but the module for that is almost 3x more expensive than the switch so decided it just wasn’t worth it for now. The three way switch I installed in our downstairs hallway. Installation there was slightly trickier than a normal two way, but a few minutes with a multimeter got me up and running.

The thermostat was the most interesting of the three pieces to install, mostly since the installation manual assumes a level of familiarity with home cooling systems that I didn’t have going in. It’s really meant to be installed by a professional, but a little google research filled in the missing pieces. One note here, the thermostat I replaced was modern enough that the wiring was done correctly and was nicely labeled. If not for that, I would have had to spend significant time tracing wires and potentially running a common 24v wire to provide power.

Once installed, all three devices paired easily with my controller and I was able to get em included in a few more scenes without issue. The more I play with this stuff, the better it seems to get…

Initial Automation Success

Posted by Matthew Schick on 4/23/2012 0 comments

Got my various HA bits in this morning, was able to get the Vera Lite controller set up (dead easy) with my lamp plug and dimmer switch. All paired without issue and was able to set up a few rudimentary scenes to begin playing. The Vera web ui is well laid out, very straight forward and commands executed there are reflected almost instantly.

I’m using the Home Buddy beta app on my android devices (link) which works well. It does both spoken scene commands as well as allowing for control via Tasker (untested, but next on my list).

Home automation experiment begins

Posted by Matthew Schick on 4/20/2012 0 comments

Got a few bits on the way to start this little experiment in HA off:

Mi Casa Verde Vera Lite Home Controller
GE 45606 Z-Wave Technology 2-Way Dimmer Switch
GE 45603 Z-Wave Technology Wireless Lighting Control Fluorescent Light & Appliance Module

For now I’m just looking to control the lamp in my den and overhead lighting in the adjacent kitchen. Nothing too exciting really, just enough to get my feet wet and be able to do a simple scene around watching movies. Hopefully amazon will get the stuff here tomorrow so I’ll have the weekend to play…

Fun with TomatoUSB and OpenBSD

Posted by Matthew Schick on 12/29/2011 2 comments

With family visiting and a steady stream of folks around the house needing Wifi access, I decided it was about time to finally set up a properly segregated guest SSID to both rate limit and protect my internal hosts from potentially insecure guest devices. As usually happens to me with such projects, I went a bit overboard and ended up with something much more complex but way more fun to manage.

TomatoUSB already has support for multiple SSID configurations, tho it’s considered experimental and doesn’t have full gui support. You’ll also need to either build yourself or use a community build to get the full goodness. I chose Toastman’s builds since it also includes full VLAN support and he’s very active in the community. Installing the latest on my RT-N16 was easy enough and a quick ‘nvram wipe’ gave me a nice clean base to work with. Getting the extra SSID was pretty painless, added the extra vlan and bridge then ssh’d into the router, ran the relevant nvram commands and voila! This is prolly where I should have left it, but in doing my digging I came across this post which details using OpenWRT to create a trunk port carrying all vlans to the OpenBSD router.

Why trunk you may ask? Short answer – because it’s fun. Long answer – single connection required to carry all routable traffic to my OpenBSD box where I can restrict, rate shape, etc. to my heart’s content. Setup here was dead easy, the NIC I was using for my internal network supports 802.1Q so all I had to do was some point and click goodness to tag all three vlans (internal, WAN, wireless guest) into port four on the RT-16N:

I also set the WAN port type to ‘Disabled’ in the basic network config page so the RT-16N wouldn’t try and get an external IP.

Once all that was done, I removed all ip configuration from my internal nic on the router and created the various vlan interfaces:

ifconfig vlan3 create
ifconfig vlan3 vlan 3 vlandev xl0
ifconfig vlan3 xxx.xxx.xx.x netmask 255.255.255.0 up

A quick tcpdump showed the right kinds of packets flowing across the new vlan interface, so I created the others (vlan1, vlan2) and then updated the various hostname.* files to reflect the new configs.
hostname.xl0 (interface just needs to be enabled):

up

hostname.vlan1 (static ip):

inet xxx.xxx.xx.x 255.255.255.0 NONE vlan 1 vlandev xl0 description "Interface in trusted VLAN (1)"
inet6 alias xxxx:xxx:x:xxx::1 64

hostname.vlan2 (dynamic, used for ISP):

dhcp NONE vlan 2 vlandev xl0 description "Interface in external VLAN (2)"

hostname.vlan3 (static ip, wireless guest subnet):

inet xxx.xxx.xx.x 255.255.255.0 NONE vlan 3 vlandev xl0 description "Interface in wireless guest VLAN (3)"

Yea, this is prolly way more complex than it should be for a home network, but the ability to do proper segregation of various traffic types is a big win in my opinion. The only downside I’ve encountered so far is with rate limiting as a whole. Since PF’s QOS is tied to individual interfaces, I can’t just pool all vlans together and have it shape that way. There’s prolly some way of doing it using static routes or even some virtual device, but I haven’t found it yet. For now I’m just aggressively limiting the bandwidth available to my guest network, but if anyone knows of a better way I’d be grateful for some pointers.

Geeky weekend projects

Posted by Matthew Schick on 5/9/2011 2 comments

Had some time on my hands this weekend, so decided to get a few small projects worked out.

  • IPv6 – Since TWC doesn’t provide native support, got my tunnel setup on my router and using rtadvd to hand out addresses with wide-dhcpv6 providing various dhcp options. I’m just assigning addresses manually for any host I want in DNS for now, might end up attempting some ddns magic at some point if I care enough.
  • 802.11n – Enabling it has been problematic in the past with the default WRT160N firmware. I’d always end up with dropped packets or random ap reboots once I put it under a sustained heavy load. After attempting all the linksys recommended nudges, I replaced their firmware with TomatoUSB. Still had some dropped packets but after switching wifi from 40MHz to 20MHz I’m getting very smooth 80-90Mbps speeds through most of my house.
  • No Cable! – Dropped Uverse due to their bandwidth capping and moved over to TWC’s DOCSIS for a whopping 30/5Mbps pipe. Decided not to keep cable tv and instead bought a Roku for the streaming stuff I can’t get easily via XBMC or PS3. Nice thing is, since I’m a TWC subscriber, all the base unencrypted channels are still available so we don’t have to put in an antenna for the normal networks and locals. Ended up picking up an HDHomerun box and setting up MythTV along with the XBMC MythBox plugin so we have proper timeshift/PVR as well. Gotta tweak Myth a bit still since playback of higher bitrate stuff is a bit jittery.
  • Media Hub – Had my old media box sitting unused so decided to put that in our living room primarily for syncing media to/from our various portable devices. Bonus – due to the wireless and Myth changes (and a nice 23″ LCD/LED monitor), I was able to install XBMC on that box and have a perfectly suitable casual viewing spot. And yes, that does include full HD over wireless.

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