tomi

I smiled when I saw this tweet. There is one fundamental thing about first principles engineering: you always arrive at the same conclusions as other engineers working from the same fundamentals. About a year ago, when I was planting the seed for my home power-management automation, I got a bunch of these. I also wired every single power-hungry appliance for future connection to smart relays. The goal was: A: Dump excess solar into loads like water heaters, ACs, water pumps, etc. B: During bad weather and low battery, automatically shed non-essential loads while keeping the lights on. I also made the deliberate choice to pay the premium for Victron because of its open ecosystem. My plan was to implement the automation using Node-RED. Back then, Victron hadn't implemented this feature natively. Seeing Victron eventually implement the feature, and choose Shelly as its partner, was a nice validation of my original chain of thought. I'm planning a thread and blog post about my take on smart homes and automation, and how I designed my house from the ground up to be smart. From using lights as a house notification system... To smart CCTV with advanced object recognition that can detect faces, license plates, humans, cats and dogs... All using free and open-source software, completely cloud-free. Watch this thread 🧵 – at Furah, Nigeria