The Linux of Things

Saturday, January 26th, 2019 at 03:49pm

As is becoming a habit, January for me means attending linux.conf.au which this time around was held in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The theme this year was “The Linux of Things” and rather than paraphrase the definition I will simply quote part of it:

“Building on the role that Linux plays in our everyday lives, we will address IoT-related opportunities and concerns from the purely technical through environmental, health, privacy, security and more.”

Those who know or follow me should immediately spot that that this is strongly aligned with my recent enthusiasm for home automation. I lost count of how many conversations I had with people about what I had done and what they had done, then there were a number of relevant talks that added more information into the mix. It is a lot to think about…

A few of the bigger takeaways are:

  • Home Assistant is good for automation and displaying recent history, but store long term history elsewhere.
  • Use what you are comfortable with. For others this may mean off the shelf devices, but for me this means I will continue building simple functionality into arduinos.
  • What you actually do is also highly personalised. Just because someone triggers the aircon in their office to turn on when they make their first cup of coffee doesn’t mean that you have to as well.
  • Always learn from what other people have done, and just as importantly share what you have done so others can learn from you.

That last point isn’t really new or home automation related, it is part of the philsophy underpinning open source itself, so not surprising that it came up (a lot) at an open source conference ;)

As is also becoming a habit, I am not going to travel to another country just for one week, in a similar way that I followed up Hobart 2017 with a road trip, I am also following up Christchurch 2019 with a road trip:

I will need to hold off (for now) the planning a road trip from the Gold Coast, because that is where LCA will be in 2020…

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