Honestly, the first rebirth as a run-of-the-mill article aggregator was better. A lot of it I’d have already seen elsewhere, but occasionally it’d have something interesting that I missed.
Whatever they do, they’ll still be riding the name of a very dead horse.
Hey,
Another user helped me out by sending me a Sureflap.
You can still integrate this into homeassistant - just need to buy in a particular esp unit and contact Peter on the homeassistant forums (see thread) for the firmware.
We’re all set up now:
The OnlyCat flap looks very nice, but the price is insane & the online requirement is a deal-breaker. Even the non-sub option requires activation online afaik, so that’s just no.
Yes, with the caveat that you need to be 100% sure they are cut off from outside when you get the keys. Whatever device is handling your connection needs to have the features to be able to do that, but often ISP provided kit will not.
The most recommended way is to isolate them on their own VLAN. I have few enough not to bother, and just give them static DHCP reservations from a block of addresses that are disallowed outside access. This has worked fine for me for over a year.
If they get any opportunity to phone home though, the local key may change abruptly and you’ll have to go through the process again.
Flashing alternative firmware is always the best solution, but it’s the most technical and sometimes not possible without physically ruining the device. Or it just might not have a supported chip.
Local Tuya fills that gap nicely. Just need the keys. A dev account is free and renewable at no cost. You can also use older versions of the Tuya/Smartlife app that expose the info. Some have had success that way with an Android VM like Bluestacks.
I tend to avoid them but sometimes the price point is worth the extra trouble.
A Tuya dev account will allow for easily obtaining local keys, at which point they are cut off from the internet and given to Local Tuya for control.
Most recent successes are a pair of Calex mood lights from a local supermarket that were marked down enough to impulse buy.
I would not use the official integration for anything.
If I’m paying for 200M, I’m damn well gonna use it :)
I can actually run a few services now on the 200/200 that would be intolerable on the old 30/10. Like streaming and grabbing chunky files away from home in reasonable time. Was a big jump for us.
Got one of these keeping a connection good right now.
200M fibre drop and networking cab are at opposite ends of the house. When the drop was put in, I only had cat5 available to join the two. Distance makes only 100M link possible with the crappy cable to hand.
Through the magic of being cheap and having one of these bad boys spare - two crappy cables with this in-between gets the full beans out of the connection.
It’s been 3 months. It’s shoved in a corner that the cats (fluffy version) love to sit in. I have cat6 to hand now. I don’t need this anymore. I can fix it properly.
But it works and I just cba to do a new direct run.
Love this part of my work. Benefits of small business that’s 90% B2B I suppose.
The phone tree is one level deep by design. You dial, listen to options and then pick one. There’s no bullshit ‘use the website’ or ‘have you considered our other shit?’ The hold music doesn’t suck and it’s only interrupted by an actual person that can help you.
No script when you are put through. Just me, the user, and whatever I can cobble together and cajole into a solution.
And there’s no fucking AI.
You’re a gem - messaged.
I’d have taken you up on it, but half my country are morons and dragged us out of EU.
If you still have it, it may still be useful to a dev - especially if it’s been off the net and not updated.
I can’t find anything else today with the same features at least. A shame it’s unfriendly to open standards.
You can at least get the who’s in/out with a pair of cheap cameras (one inside, one out) and the frigate add-on. Set up for cat detection it’s fairly decent:
If you build up enough images of your creatures, you could even train a model to recognise them each specifically.
The one that has the little hub with the light up ears?
Last I heard the local workaround was updated out of the software and that one dev had taken their project on it private, due to the manufacturer actively working to make it difficult.
Insane price to buy new, and have been getting a kicking in the reviews for poor function & support. I was considering, because it would be nice to have in HA, but all the above has put me off it.
Will probably end up with a standard chip reader flap and continue to rely on cameras for IDing who’s in and out. All I’d want remotely is a way to force an unlock, for dealing with any failures to open. Could maybe mod that in.
They never asked me for that (UK here). Was up and running with just the basics in minutes. Are you on a list? 😅
They do have a waiting/payment cycle period on their server offering before they’ll open mail ports. Once you qualify, you still need to raise a ticket to ask. That was a bit annoying as my new ISP is stricter with the ports than prior, meaning I had to wait before my relay workaround could send mail.
Same setup here, Hetzner/Rclone with enc. Script runs daily on the NAS to beam everything up. Very happy.
Make at least one offline copy of what you need to decrypt and keep separate though. An inaccessible encrypted backup is no backup at all.
The foot in question
Persistence, mostly.
Learning the word ‘in’ and what pointing at the other room/snapping fingers means was the first step. Took a while, but enough picking up/putting down, blocking and gentle scooting got the point home.
After that, get them ‘in’ and start making food on the counter, not direct to bowls on the floor. When a cat crosses the boundary, stop serving up and put them back in either by command or physically. Be belligerent about it if you need to be. Resume/repeat until everyone’s dishes are ready.
When ready, I call the first one in by name and put bowls down. The rest quickly follow.
You may find that the cat with the most bossiness/brains/food drive helps keep the others back on pain of biffing, cause they know intrusion means food delay.
We have a gang of 3 with occasional visitors. They have been taught to wait in the living room while breakfast is prepared, because being mobbed at 5am is a trip hazard.
Still, the orange insists on at least some form of rebellion, and will wait patiently with one foot distinctly over the line between rooms.
They are between builds.
B41 stable has been out for ages with multiplayer support. It’s the current version and what you get if you don’t opt in to experiential builds.
On unstable builds, the devs remove multiplayer initially until they think it’s good enough. B42 unstable is in active development and just recently added multiplayer support.
B42 is still a bug-ridden crapshoot though, stick with 41 if you want to play online.
Aye it’s on the list to try & potentially swap out when time allows. Probably over the holidays - no work until the new year after the 23rd, so no excuse really :)
Basically this, yes haha