The concept of a smart house with a computer that is everywhere is a concept that is today possible with things like alexa and all sorts of technologies. But when the internet is down much of this breaks down to a more simplier format. What if it were possible to combine the cluster performance of the cloud with a set of smart home controllers. That is with the always on of many of the smart plugs and bulbs can we boost each's CPU power and combine that power into a cluster? The concept being take a quad core arm, but now every bulb, outlet, switch, appliance, and smart camera contains one. First would the combined house power be useful? or efficient? Efficent would be a draw of about 2 Watts per device, which be up from the near 0 most of the zigbee and zwave device produce now when they are in low power mode. Does that mean that let's assume you have 40 of these (40 from how many devices I had when I last constructed a smart home, but really we'd likely be higher on completion) So, what about the useful? That would be 160 CPUs to create a cluster with drawing rougtly 80 Watts. Could this cluster be used for deep learning or camera analysis, like determining who enter into the video? or local voice recognition? There would also be roughtly 32 MB / device or 1.2 GB of distrubuted solid state drive, or 4 G if 128 MB drives are used.
How could we manage something like this? First connecting them all through WiFi, well we could always use B.A.T.M.A.N. to create a mesh network of all of the devices. Which this now makes this network even more useful as mesh WiFi setup. Could cloud prodcuts be deployed across these? Could Kubernetes be used to maintain an always up and running smart home system? Could Hadoop be use to scale some of the audio/video processing? How well would this whole thing work.
Well let's start with something I have plenty of at the moment a Rasberry PI (3B+) and see if it's even possible to build such a thing.
First can we build smart home devices with a pi? Yes, although a full PI 3B+ might be a little large for an outlet box, but a PI Zero W might work a little better for fitting behind an outlet. Although as we are building new, we can make the space for the pi as needed for every outlet and switch. To control an outlet is a simple relay control or two for top and botom. For a switch, non dimmable this is the same, just a relay. What about a dimmable light? It would be possible to build a pi with neo-pixels and be able to create a color changing capabilities, so possible, but would it really be a dimmable? Could also use the PWM out of the PI to dim a light with, although results there might very from bulbs to bulb, but still possible. What about security cameras? Add a pi-camera module and use motion eye, maybe add some pan tilt servos, so agian possible with some work. We can even expand this into water safety with flood sensors and eletronic water valves. Could even setup a smart irrigation into this as well with water valves? What about door locks, I think this where we go with something already availble, it would be hard to be a lock as good as an existanting smart lock builder, within the space. However custom spaces would be possible like a garage door opener or gate opener. These lead to a yes it would be possible to build out a almost entirely quad arm (PI) base smart home as a cloud solution. What about sensors like motion and contact sensors? These might also be difficult to make in a tiny footprint, so again revert back to zigbee/zwave solution to these as well?
So currently solution: Lot of PI's with relays, speakers, microhpones, and camera to build out all of the current smart home devices. Sprinkle in a zwave/zigbee controller USB dongle and we should be able to build out the entirety of a smart home. Use B.A.T.M.A.N. as a mesh netwotk to cover any existing house floor plan.
What about cost? a PI 3b+ would be 50-100 depending on what it would need to do. So some smart devices are ~20 for an outlet or bulb, so sightly more expensive, but somewhat reasonable.
How to manage the smart home? Not sure, but thing Home Assistant or similar project could be expanded as many use MQTT as an extention to new types of devices.
So now why would we want this setup if it costs more in power and setup cost? Well, Mesh Wifi, but that's getting cheaper. Cloud processing, reality is that a modern i7/i9 computer would likely beat this cluster out in terms of raw performance.
For me referencing this to Thought 51, we could certainlly turn a node or two in an artifactory, deploy some Jenkin's for compiling out larger projects, and use the cluster for HaDoop data analytics. Further with the expanded mesh, could we put pi-base rovers in the system and use the rover sensors and house sensors together and create a smarter smart home with a network that we could train tensor flow cnn's that couild be deployed to the rover?
Has this been done? I have not quite seen it, yet, but I cannot help to think that it is coming and this is not another useless thought.
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