[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday, 7pm: HomeAssistant/Zigbee2MQTT, SQLite (Nov 2021)

Paul Nijjar paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca
Sat Oct 30 01:13:45 EDT 2021


There used to be a device called the Clapper. You clapped your hands
and then the lights would turn on and off, without you needing to get
off your couch to flip the light switch. It was magical, and although
I never used one I know it was real because it was on TV. 

Apparently, we live in the future now, and you can get your own
Clapper. You can buy helpful smart speakers that sit in your
livingroom and pretend not to record everything you say, but somehow
wake up when you call them when you say their name. You can turn on
your blender via a smartphone, and it helpfully sends data to Silicon
Valley for completely benevolent reasons. The future is amazing. 

John Steel lives in the future, but for some reason he likes to keep
his own data on his own network. No doubt he can clap his hands to turn his
lights off and on, but by some miracle Silicon Valley doesn't know
he is doing it. He has set up some FLOSS home automation software
called HomeAssistant to make his house smarter while preserving
privacy. His fancy smarthome devices speak a protocol called Zigbee,
and he uses a translation layer called Zigbee2MQTT so that those
devices can talk to HomeAssistant instead. In his presentation, John
will give us a tour of his smart home setup and how this all works. 

Say you want to slurp up all the world's data? A database might come
in handy. For prototypes and single-user applications, a tiny public
domain SQL databae called SQLite has eaten the world. If you use
software you are probably using SQLite to store data someplace,
whether you know it or not. Brent Clements has been playing with
SQLite lately, and during his presentation he will tell us what SQLite
is and how you can use it to prototype applications quickly. 

Sadly, we do not have any presentations lined up for December or
beyond.  (Sigh.) Do you have something to talk about? Maybe you are
working on a fun side project? Maybe you are learning some new FLOSSy
tool or platform? You do not need to be an expert in your topic; you
just need to share some of your enthusiasm and knowledge so we can get
excited too. If you have something to present or know somebody who
might be able to offer a presentation, please get in touch. 
It would be such a relief to have a few months of talks lined up.

That's it for me. Our meeting will start at 7pm, and will once again
be held online: 

https://webconference.kwlug.org 

At some point we will probably transition back to in-person meetings,
but we are not there yet, so December will probably be online too. 

- Paul
-- 
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Housing: https://unionsd.coop
Blog: http://pnijjar.freeshell.org




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