Ideas

I have many Raspberry PIs running around the house. Some of them have SD cards while some have SSD drives. For the PIs that have quite a bit of I/O I am using SSD drives. This eliminates the error prone problems with SD cards where you write to them too many times and they start to fail.

As of this writing there are really no good cases that hold both a Raspberry PI and a SSD. I have found a solution that costs  $20 for the case and is very functional. I also found a coupe of other items that make the solution even sweeter. I have all of the parts and I just need to put the video and instructions together. More details are here.

Currently I use Alexa for my voice home automation. Long term I do not want to rely on the cloud for any part of my home automation. In order to accomplish this I need to implement AI voice recognition. The compute power necessary to do the voice recognition is just not there on a normal computer like a Raspberry Pi.  I have purchased a Nvidia Jetson Nano that gives me the GPUs necessary to to the ASR.

I have installed 6 REOLINK POE 5MP cameras around the exterior of my house. I am currently simply using the REOLINK App that comes with the cameras. My plan is to utilize the Nvidia Jetson Nano to do object and facial recognition. This will then communicate with node-red for the rest of the home automation events that are triggered.

All of the lighting in my house is automated. I use Treatlife WiFi dimmers and switches flashed with Tasmota. These switches are relatively inexpensive and because Tasmota is installed I am able to control and monitor them with node-red. 

I am currently building my third home theater. The picture to the left is the theater that I built at my previous house. It was 1000 square feet with 12 foot ceilings. The screen was acoustically transparent and measured 12 foot diagonal. Fortunately I have a good friend Dave Ahl that builds and designs professional recording studios to help me out with the acoustic treatments www.ahlincorporated.com. Now, room acoustic treatments are not all that computer technical. But I have recently been reading about room correction and audio convolution. It is very exciting to be able to recreate the audio exactly how it was intended by eliminating any oddities that are created by the room itself. This process requires special microphones and software to modify the audio signal in real-time. I have learned from previous home theaters that I have built that you cannot scrimp on the acoustic treatments. But, in the past, all we could use was acoustic treatments to get the room to audibly respond as we wished. Not we can add convolution to the picture and in my early trials I am completely amazed!!