Smart Tiny Home

Hey guys! New here and very excited to possibly have found the place I have been looking for. A year and a half ago I purchased an old school bus to turn it into a tiny home. Not a hippy dippy tiny home with weed smoke rolling out the windows, but a sophisticated tiny home fully of tech and home automation.

I have always been an iOS guy, but the limitations put on it by Apple has led me to believe that this system will need to be ran by Android which I have little experience with. We have a Synology NAS which houses all of our media and eventually security camera software. All items being ran are Docker containers and everything is running great. The automation in the bus will likely be controlled by an ISY994 and Insteon switches. One or two outlets will also be Insteon but not all.

Where I need the help is…

I am looking for a super clean and sophisticated looking front end to run all of the commands through on a wall mounted tablet. I would like to have Alexa voice command too but it seems as though without internet Alexa isn’t possible. With that said, I watched this video the other day and it seems like Alexa is possible without internet with something called the RM Pro Plugin…

Anyhow, any help is appreciated. I am not to the point where I need this setup in the bus yet, but I want to have it all designed and ready so that I can plug and play it when it comes time to move into the bus. It’s only 27’ and I am not going to have room for projects like I do now. I don’t want to say that money is no object considering the amount I have in the NAS and HDDs, but I don’t want to get wild with it. However, I’ll spend what I have to since this will be our home for the foreseeable future.

Here is our current HTPC setup using Kodi.

Also, here is our http://sasquatters.com and our http://instagram.com/sasquatters

Thank you! :smiley:

Hmm, the communication between devices might be over the local WiFi network, without a hop to the cloud, but I’m pretty sure Alexa will refuse to do anything without an active internet connection.

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Both SmartThings and Alexa require Internet, so unfortunately those won’t work.

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I would suggest looking into some of the RV forums. There have been quite a few people who have added various kinds of home automation, most typically lighting control, to recreational vehicles that don’t have constant Internet.

The Logitech Harmony hub has been a good basis for this for many people, but there are other options as well. You will typically need Internet in order to set up your initial accounts but after that there are some choices which run totally locally.

As far as newer systems, many people are surprised to find that apple’s HomeKit does not require active Internet for anything other than voice control, and if you want the voice control can be done over cellular. It does use Wi-Fi, but it can all be local Wi-Fi. The rule complexity is not as deep as some of the other systems, but I did just want to mention it as it is a very stable reliable system.

Hubitat does all of the daily processing locally and is one of the newer systems, but it’s also in a very rapid development stage so you’re pretty much signing up for an extended beta at this point. A lot of people really like it but they tend to be people who enjoy tinkering with their systems.

In terms of more complex local systems that have been around longer and may be more stable, both insteon and homeseer are worth a look. Just remember that although both do have voice control options, at the present time all of the decent voice control options do require active Internet as the voice parsing is done in the cloud.

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Thanks for the info. I will narrow my search to those forums.

Hi @mccorkled,

You should check out this thread on completely local HA control.
https://community.smartthings.com/t/hubitat-elevation-hub-home-automation-that-is-local/117107?u=lmosenko

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Thanks. It seems pretty new. I will look into it more!

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