SwizzleStick

Despite what comes from the mouth of the company, it is made from and run by the people behind it. Funding Mullvad funds him, and in turn that funds something intolerable to me. As long as that link is there, I won’t be.

Separating the people from the company is viable when it’s an inconsequential staffer in question. Not so for a co-founder and co-owner.

There aren’t many things left in life where it’s easy to have scruples, but this absolutely a hill that can be died upon without much inconvenience.

One of the Mullvad founders funds a far right political party.

Thought you should know. It might not bother you, but it bothered me enough to move to an alternate provider.

We have a similar setup for lights that aren’t just tied up to motion sensors :)

I’m sure I’ve seen a mollyguard-like printable that covers the rocker of the switch to prevent accidental presses. It had a slot in it so you could still flip the switch with a card or similar thing object.

Hey,

Another user helped me out by sending me a Sureflap.

You can still integrate this into homeassistant - just need to buy in a particular esp unit and contact Peter on the homeassistant forums (see thread) for the firmware.

We’re all set up now:

The OnlyCat flap looks very nice, but the price is insane & the online requirement is a deal-breaker. Even the non-sub option requires activation online afaik, so that’s just no.

Yes, with the caveat that you need to be 100% sure they are cut off from outside when you get the keys. Whatever device is handling your connection needs to have the features to be able to do that, but often ISP provided kit will not.

The most recommended way is to isolate them on their own VLAN. I have few enough not to bother, and just give them static DHCP reservations from a block of addresses that are disallowed outside access. This has worked fine for me for over a year.

If they get any opportunity to phone home though, the local key may change abruptly and you’ll have to go through the process again.

Flashing alternative firmware is always the best solution, but it’s the most technical and sometimes not possible without physically ruining the device. Or it just might not have a supported chip.

Local Tuya fills that gap nicely. Just need the keys. A dev account is free and renewable at no cost. You can also use older versions of the Tuya/Smartlife app that expose the info. Some have had success that way with an Android VM like Bluestacks.

I tend to avoid them but sometimes the price point is worth the extra trouble.

A Tuya dev account will allow for easily obtaining local keys, at which point they are cut off from the internet and given to Local Tuya for control.

Most recent successes are a pair of Calex mood lights from a local supermarket that were marked down enough to impulse buy.

I would not use the official integration for anything.

You’re a gem - messaged.

I’d have taken you up on it, but half my country are morons and dragged us out of EU.

If you still have it, it may still be useful to a dev - especially if it’s been off the net and not updated.

I can’t find anything else today with the same features at least. A shame it’s unfriendly to open standards.

You can at least get the who’s in/out with a pair of cheap cameras (one inside, one out) and the frigate add-on. Set up for cat detection it’s fairly decent:

If you build up enough images of your creatures, you could even train a model to recognise them each specifically.

The one that has the little hub with the light up ears?

Last I heard the local workaround was updated out of the software and that one dev had taken their project on it private, due to the manufacturer actively working to make it difficult.

Insane price to buy new, and have been getting a kicking in the reviews for poor function & support. I was considering, because it would be nice to have in HA, but all the above has put me off it.

Will probably end up with a standard chip reader flap and continue to rely on cameras for IDing who’s in and out. All I’d want remotely is a way to force an unlock, for dealing with any failures to open. Could maybe mod that in.

They never asked me for that (UK here). Was up and running with just the basics in minutes. Are you on a list? 😅

They do have a waiting/payment cycle period on their server offering before they’ll open mail ports. Once you qualify, you still need to raise a ticket to ask. That was a bit annoying as my new ISP is stricter with the ports than prior, meaning I had to wait before my relay workaround could send mail.

Same setup here, Hetzner/Rclone with enc. Script runs daily on the NAS to beam everything up. Very happy.

Make at least one offline copy of what you need to decrypt and keep separate though. An inaccessible encrypted backup is no backup at all.

They are between builds.

B41 stable has been out for ages with multiplayer support. It’s the current version and what you get if you don’t opt in to experiential builds.

On unstable builds, the devs remove multiplayer initially until they think it’s good enough. B42 unstable is in active development and just recently added multiplayer support.

B42 is still a bug-ridden crapshoot though, stick with 41 if you want to play online.

Aye it’s on the list to try & potentially swap out when time allows. Probably over the holidays - no work until the new year after the 23rd, so no excuse really :)

It’s fine, did the job for me at the time. Just wanted the ad and nasty blocking. Keeping it and the filters up to date is easy.

Now have a pfSense box with pfBlocker-NG, which does essentially the same thing. Also runs Snort as an additional layer, and makes penning in IoT stuff possible.

Innr kit has been great here, and recently affordable. The bulbs are little workhorses and have required exactly no extra attention since first connection, even across a house move.

Setup is ZHA/Conbee II. Old now but still all smiles.

Well it’s exactly what I asked for, can’t argue 😂

We settled on Puck for the name. It rhymes with what’s said when weird noises come from its direction…

Why not. I would love to see your detached robotic ass.

I printed special little stilts to raise one of our tables the 10mm extra it needed to be able to go under without getting wedged. It still tries fornicating with the cat tree - a different problem to solve.

Never lost it’s ass though, one to look out for there.