WEBVTT

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back in 2019 i took my 1980s garage door

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opener which used to work like this and made it smart meaning that i could

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control it with my phone unfortunately while it worked perfectly at the time

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the two years that followed have been less than stellar to say the least see

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look here's the board we were using it's not in there anymore is it

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fortunately today i think we finally have the

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ultimate solution and since this video is sponsored by pulseway that should

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give you some idea as to what the solution is

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for those of you who are a little slow it's a server

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it's always a server isn't it Jake

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when i bought this house it still had the original garage door openers from

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the 1980s so when i wanted to add some kind of smart remote control

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functionality to it the most obvious solution was to just replace them so i

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went on amazon and bought a smart chamberlain garage door opener with the

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intention of installing it myself only to read through the documentation and

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realize that it was a one dollar a month subscription fee for if this and that

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integration so i could use my google assistant a dollar a month i was

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outraged i'm not paying a subscription fee so instead i spent a whole year

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subscription worth of money on this cheap chinese relay thing that connects

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to your wi-fi and will actually press the button just by bridging the contacts

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for you and as i said before it worked perfectly i'd give my voice command it

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would go through my if this than that recipe and then click click it would

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activate the door the only non-ideal thing was that this has no way of

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knowing if the garage door is open or closed but that was easy enough to

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install with a little roost device or with a garage security camera only it's

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traumatic to think about that time now because that's when the first major

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thing went wrong i had the audacity to replace my wireless access point i went

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from my ruckus one to my Ubiquiti one which should have been fine except that

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my relay wouldn't connect to the new access point even after i changed the

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ssid and the password to exactly the same one

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no problem i thought i've seen that before all i gotta do is a factory

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resell my god there is no way to factory reset this

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thing you actually just have to throw it away if you don't remember to change the

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credentials on it before you change your wi-fi so that's okay i went and bought a

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more expensive and feature-rich four-channel sawn off one and it was

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back to working perfectly until

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it will open the vault garage door

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one day it randomly stopped working

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after some quick googling it turns out that e we link stopped allowing if this

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than that integration free of charge which after i threw a temper tantrum on

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twitter i found out was because if this and that changed their billing policies

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making it so that e we link had to pay far more per user

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i had a call with if this and that ceo where it was off the record

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unfortunately so i can't really share all the details but ultimately they

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walked me through how if this and that is to survive they basically have to

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make some kind of change and they feel like allowing individual users for free

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to create up to three recipes of their own and then use an unlimited number of

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other already existing recipes seems like a reasonable middle ground

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unfortunately for me that means that something as simple as

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open odyssey garage door closed odyssey garage door open bolt garage door and

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close volt garage door exceeds the freaking limit no bother said i i will

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just change all of the voice commands to activate odyssey garage door and

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activate volt garage door since quite frankly the relay stupid doodad whether

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it's this one or the sonoff has no idea if it's open or closed anyway it was

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just kind of like a user friendliness thing then it really hit the fan my

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ancient garage door opener that i had spent all this freaking time smartifying

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outright died so when i called a local garage

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door installer company because frankly i didn't feel like installing it myself

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they basically said look there's only like one unit that we install and

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everything so either you take it or you don't and i kind of went yeah okay sure

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i come home from work and sure enough there it is a brand new lift master and

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those of you who know anything about the industry will probably know that like

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eyeglass frames the garage door opener industry is basically a monopoly and

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liftmaster is owned by you guessed it chamberlain the company that i was

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trying to freaking avoid because of their subscription fee in the first

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place no problem said i i'll just take

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the same leads off of my relay and plonk them onto the back of the wall unit just

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like before no subscription fee for me is what i thought but the installer

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explains to me this was very helpful that these smart garage door openers no

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longer actually work the way the old ones did where they just pretty much

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closed a circuit these ones are only powered by the wires in your wall and

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instead they actually transmit wirelessly to the garage door opener

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units just like the fob that you have in your car

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so you can't use a relay in the way that you used to where you just kind of well

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bridge the contacts at the back

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not to be defeated i quickly grabbed one

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of the pcbs out of a wall unit and

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soldered some leads of my own to the activation switch so that

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effectively my relay going off was just

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pushing the same switch that i would normally push with my finger

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genius too bad the system worked too well

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i sent this video over to maddie from electroboom showing that while my google

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voice assistant commands to open and close the door did in fact work with my

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soldered leads here unfortunately the garage door would also just randomly

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activate itself he explained it to me and it's something

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to do with analog circuitry and having a very high level of sensitivity to

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electromagnetic interference essentially what it means is that these

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wires coming off of the switch were acting as antennas and triggering it

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sometimes repeatedly in the middle of the night i mean that's a bit of a

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security problem don't you think with guidance from eddie i salvaged some

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capacitors and resistors from a random donor board that i had kicking around

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and attempted to put some kind of filtering on this circuit in order to

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prevent it from happening but after spending an entire afternoon on it i

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thought you know what enough's enough my wife will not get off

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my case about how the garage doors don't freaking work properly

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i'm just going to use chamberlain's own myq software how bad can it be

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terrible it turns out so here's my current setup then with the

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chamberlain myq app you can from anywhere in the world see the status of

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your garage doors how long they've been in that state so here you can see the

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volt's been open for four minutes and you can activate them either way

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what's so bad about that that sounds pretty great well a couple of things for

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starters it constantly logs both me and

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my wife out seemingly whenever our ip

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address changes like oh i don't know say for example when we're just coming into

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wi-fi at home or just leaving the range of our wi-fi and switching over to

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cellular data that seems like a pretty small problem and lioness you might say

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i mean why are you pulling out your phone anyway this whole journey freaking

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started because you wanted to open and close your garage door with a voice

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command why not just use my q's integration with

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if this than that which by the way they don't charge a dollar a month for

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anymore they now provide it for free well i'll tell you why because it only

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allows you to close the door when i get

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home at the end of the day i cannot say okay people open the garage door

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it doesn't allow it through if this and that so i'm stuck with one of the

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following a a relay that randomly opens my garage

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doors and does randomly close them as well so that's good that's a good

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feature b an app that constantly logs me out so

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i have to log into it in my driveway in order to go home to my house or see a

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voice assistant that only closes the doors but does not open them oh right

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also there is d i could just use the stupid fob thing that goes on your visor

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like a normal human being but

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it's a huge security problem to keep those things in your car and quite

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frankly i cannot be arsed to like carry

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it around with me all the time so i know i'll end up leaving it in my car which

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is how people break into your house so what this whole experience has highlighted

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for me is a couple of the big problems with smart home stuff in general

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one is unexpected service interruptions or policy changes that can brick already

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perfectly functioning setups and number two is poor or incomplete

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interoperability between different brands and platforms

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now there's only so much we can do about the first one terms of service can

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change but at least for the second thing there actually is a solution and it's

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called home assistant conveniently i

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already have a home server that's perfectly capable of running docker

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containers or virtual machines already running on raid so we're going to show

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you guys the steps that we went through to get home assistant up and running now

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what we're doing with it today is pretty basic taking a myq device and having it

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work with google assistant but there is so much that you can do with this that

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we are barely even scratching the surface it's super cool

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in a nutshell home assistant is an open source home automation platform it's

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kind of like if this than that except that you can host it yourself and it's a

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lot more versatile basically if you can dream it or well at least

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program it it's doable with home assistant our first home assistant

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inspired solution was based around using my existing sonoff inching relay opener

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and then a cheap zigbee hub and a door sensor the idea was that after issuing

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our chosen voice command through google assistant home assistant would run a

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little script in the background to check the door status and then decide whether

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or not to trigger the garage that would be to prevent me from accidentally

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opening a garage door that was already open which would actually close it and

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vice versa now this is a great configuration

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because it relies on fewer cloud services but for me the whole zigbee

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thing is a rabbit hole that i'm not ready to go down

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yet partly because i don't have to it turns out that the fancy new garage

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door openers that i splurged on have a direct integration thanks to home

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assistant with support for opening the door

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which really makes those other limitations seem pretty frustrating and

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arbitrary doesn't it it'll just take some setting up first

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off because of the way google assistant works a few things need to be in place

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for it to be able to access your self-hosted home assistant instance

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first you'll need a domain name that you can use so google knows where to look

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second you'll need an ssl certificate set up for that domain for security and

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third you'll need remote access to that instance by way of port forwarding

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luckily for us there are a few ways that we can make this a lot easier than it

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sounds but for those of you who don't want to dabble in all this techno

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wizardry there is a workaround that avoids all of it as well as helping with

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the security concerns of having your home assistant instance being public

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facing it's called home assistant cloud it's a partnered service run by the

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founder of home assistant where they host it in the cloud for you and then

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you can actually just tie it into google assistant directly without any annoying

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manual configuration however that means that you are again relying on a cloud

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service to host it as well as paying a bloody subscription which was what i was

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trying to avoid so here comes the more

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diy fun way to do it featuring my unraid

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nas let's check that out real quick this is my combination home nas and server so

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it's got about 60 terabytes of storage which is more than i need at least for

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my personal projects 14 core processor 64 gigs of RAM and

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naturally it's running pulse wave for monitoring so i can keep tabs on it have

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remote access and of course get notifications if anything goes wrong to

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help you guys follow along a full text tutorial on the Linus tech tips forum

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will be linked in the video description because it is simply too much to fit

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into a video first up snag a domain from your favorite registrar for the purposes

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of this video we'll be using autopilot to nowhere.com if you have a static ip

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just set it in your dns provider but if your ip is dynamic that means changing

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you'll need to set up dynamic dns or a program that updates your dns record

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when your ip changes since our domain is managed through cloudflare the unread

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community app cloudflare ddns works perfectly for this then to proxy our

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local home assistant instance into a public-facing domain and to handle the

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free automatically renewing ssl certificate we will use another

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community app called nginx proxy manager before we can set up the ssl certificate

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in it though we'll need to set up our port forwarding rules so that we can actually verify that we own the domain

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this is going to vary based on your router so use your google foo if you

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aren't familiar but in the Ubiquiti control panel anyway it's super easy

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note by the way you'll want to make sure that your unraid nas or other machine

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that's running all this gear actually has a static local ip otherwise those

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poor forwarding rules that you set up could just break unexpectedly back in

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the proxy manager set up your ssl certificate as well as the host proxy

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with your domain and bam we install home assistant and we can

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access it remotely the sky is now officially the limit

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but like really with home assistant you could make it uh

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turn off all your lights when all paired devices leave a geofenced location like

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your house or you could have it turn on your sprinklers for you at a certain

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time unless your moisture sensor in your yard has detected rain or if you don't

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feel like one of those you can also just integrate it with the local weather report or you could make a sawn off

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button work with a yi light bulb the possibilities are endless in our

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case we're just simply going to link my garage door openers myq program to home

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assistant and then set up google assistant integration this is a pretty

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long process for self-hosted peeps so follow the instructions linked in the

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description for that but once it's set up we can add it directly to our google

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home app and boom two garages

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yes so it's all working in theory

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what about in practice okay nerd open both garages

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it finally works

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oh man i know right so

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big thank you to you for watching thank you to Jake for fixing my garage again

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and of course thank you to pulseway for

00:15:38.079 --> 00:15:45.839
sponsoring this video pulse way if you guys aren't familiar is the solution to

00:15:43.360 --> 00:15:50.639
monitoring your systems and your servers they've got support for Windows mac and

00:15:48.880 --> 00:15:55.440
Linux and they allow you to see all kinds of important steps on your systems

00:15:53.040 --> 00:16:00.880
like what the CPU usage is RAM usages storage basic stuff like that but also

00:15:58.000 --> 00:16:05.440
apply custom scripts roll updates and remotely access your machines and all of

00:16:02.959 --> 00:16:11.519
that stuff can be done from the comfort of your lawn chair through their mobile

00:16:08.240 --> 00:16:13.440
apps available for iOS and Android so

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naturally i use pulseway for all kinds of things to let me know if my server is

00:16:15.920 --> 00:16:22.639
down or unresponsive or if my storage is reaching a critical level but you can

00:16:20.079 --> 00:16:26.959
use it for basically anything so learn more at the link down below and check

00:16:24.800 --> 00:16:30.880
out pulseway for yourself even personal users can actually get a lot of benefit

00:16:28.800 --> 00:16:34.160
so guys do go check it out if you guys enjoyed this video and you

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want the full history of how this got started maybe check out the original

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where we smartified my og 1985 garage

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door openers it's like a disk it's so slow i hate

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that but because we're using the myq integration there's no getting around it

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when i was just using the relay i didn't have to wait for that

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yeah so if i could still use the relay honestly i would

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but this is fine