IoT Lights

The challenge - the builder of the church wound up doing something that was, umm, not so smart. In our backyard they installed 3 lights. 2 of them are normal, the 3rd is a motion detector. The not smart part is they are all on the same switch. If we shut the switch off, then the motion detector does not work at night. If we leave the switch on, then the non motion detector lights are on 24/7.  I decided to address the problem by looking at IoT lights.

One of my friends recently built a house and he had Insteon installed everywhere.  The hub is $149. The switches are $69 each. Then I counted up my light switches, 70. Now obviously I would not have to change them all out, but I really started thinking about what lights I would want to control, and this solution just did not seem to make sense, from a fiscal standpoint.

Another gent I work with has the Hue system. He swears by them. Openly admits they are not cheap, compared to regular bulbs, but preaches that it changes everything. The starter kit, which is the hub and 3 bulbs is $199. 

Setup was very simple, starting with Amazon frustration free packing FTW! Once the hub is plugged in the lights automatically find it. You then install the app on your phone, and pair with the hub, by pressing a button on the front of the hub. I am guessing it's a security feature. Prevents someone from pairing with your hub and taking over your lights, since you have to have physical access to it. 

Now here is the cool part. Once everything is setup up you can control the lights with IFTTT. I created a recipe to turn the lights on at 5 PM and off at Midnight. Allows us to have all the lights on when we want them. The 2 IoT ones during the evening and the motion detector all night. 

Another ridiculously cool thing is the Echo integration. Now we can simply ask Alexa to turn our lights off and on. 

Enter the slippery slope. The lights were just too cool to not get more. I wound up switching out the builds in many of our rooms. Once you have more than one light in a room you can select a theme. The multi-color LED’s will paint the room in color. I truly lack the words to describe how awesome it is to light a room up with the different themes. 

vCenter Server Appliance 6.0

Got some cycles in on the lab today and decided to work on vCenter Server Appliance. The first thing that you need to take care of is local DNS. In the past I have always run a windows server.  I decided to see about an appliance. Infoblox has one, and so does Men and Mice. Both led to registration, request for downloads. Which I still haven’t received. As I was poking around and I found the VM that was my old DNS server.  I was able to import and update it without too much Yak Shaving. DNS, ✓

Its been a while since I have installed the Appliance. I was a bit surprised to find out that the appliance is still heavily dependent on Windows to install. There is plenty of docs and blogs on how to install the appliance, so I won’t duplicate here. At a high level you mount the ISO to a windows image, install a windows program, and then that program deploys the Linux Appliance. 

The windows dependency comes in because while the end product is an appliance, it is an appliance that can have many configurations. The installation wizard (the aforementioned windows component) leads you through a series of questions.  Do you want to embed the platform controller? Is this a stand alone platform controller? What about SSO? Do you want to use Postgres or Oracle? The install actually builds the Appliance based on your answers. Hence why an ISO versus an OVA.

The windows install (OVA builder) took about 20 minutes to run. Just when I thought things had gone wrong and started to go look for log files, it finished. 

After an EBKBAC error I was able to log in. I must have mistyped my login. For the life of me I could not log in. Then I read the fine print about close the window and try again. Once I did that I was able to log in and have vCenter running. 

Alexa Nest

Sometimes our house gets a bit warm in the middle of the night. It sucks to have to turn on the blaring iPhone screen to adjust the Nest. I thought to myself wouldn’t it be cool (pun intended?) to have Alexa take care of things for me. 

I started out with the goal of having Alexa turn on our HVAC fan. Logged into the Alexa app and it does have Nest integration. Turned it on and spent the next 15 minutes in the I hate Alexa category. You can’t just turn on the fan. Alexa wants to turn on the AC. Okay so maybe not a bad thing, but even giving in, I could never get her to understand my request to make the upstairs cooler and turn on the AC. 

Time for plan B. Jumped over to ifttt.com. Activated the Nest and Alexa channels. Created a trigger channel to turn on the fan. Moving back into the I love Alexa category. With the simple phrase “Alexa trigger  turn on the upstairs fan" the fan will turn on!