Author: brucealdridge
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Pulling location data from owntracks
Problem: I want to easily pull locations or places I’ve been and write about them.
I used to have all my location data in Google Maps, I think they call it “Location History” or at least one of the previous iterations, it was. Originally it was Google Latitude. As part of attempting to de-googlify my life, I’ve moved my location data into Owntracks. It’s a self-hosted solution for storing location data and supports various apps.
Not surprisingly, being opensource owntracks has a pretty good API setup. But there wasn’t anything that could do anything with that data easily. Long story short, I built a WordPress plugin to handle it for me. I called it GeoPath.
Just enter a date if you want a single POI (point of interest) or if you want a path, enter a date range.
Examples:
Want a fancy map of the time you walked up a hill?
Just enter the date, it will pull the location and the weather
Queenstown Hill, New Zealand
3.5°C
Cloudy
What if you want to show the route you took?
Christchurch, New Zealand
12.1°C
Mainly Sunny
Anything else?
I don’t think this is super helpful for anyone but me, but posting it just incase it is.
There are a few bugs:
- Sometimes the temperature gets lost, just disappears
- When editing the block, the POI Marker gets rendered off the page
- The reverse location lookup comes back with terrible names so they have to be manually edited.
Overall it works quite well though.
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Into the clouds
Summit Road, Christchurch
12.1°C
Mainly Sunny
A few weeks ago I rode up along the port hills. The cloud was just covering the tops of the hills giving little glimpses of the sky and the landscape below.
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Automated lights are a waste of time
I’ve tried many different versions of automated lights. I’ve tried RF-controllable lights, Wifi lights, Wifi switches, and relays. All of them have failed in some way or another. I think Zigbee lights could be better, Philips Hue is a bit out of my price range and others don’t seem to support 240V. I think they’re likely to fall into some of the same traps as the Wifi lights.
Shelly
The latest iteration of my trials have been Shelly devices. They get installed in the wall as a bridge between the physical switch and one that appears in Home Assistant and Apple Homekit. They have worked great for the past year. But I’ve had two devices fail in the past week.
I brought a selection of Shelly 1, 1PM, 2.5, and Dimmer2’s for various different use cases. Both the 1PM’s just refused to connect to my home so they’re sitting somewhere unused. I thought I could wire them in myself but quickly realised I was out of my depth and called an electrician. Much to my relief, it was not a walk in the park for him. He spent a long time trying to understand the documenation.
Last week we had a relay in a Shelly 2.5 fail. It’s stuck in the On state, but doesn’t know. Flicking the switch on the wall and the virtual switch both show a change of state, however the light is always on. Luckily this one is in the garage and is on its own circuit so I can just flick the breaker on and off.
Last night a Dimmer2 failed. Turning on and off lights in nearby circuits changes the state of this device.
Wifi Lights
I have some Tuya lights and they work some of the time. They must have an inbuilt battery that only lasts a few days. If the lights are off for too long, they reset. Next time you turn them on you get flashing lights,
wifi switch
This one has actually been pretty reliable, but it’s Tuya, and can occasionally forget what it is paired to. Luckily it still works as an actual light switch if the connection drops. However, based on my recent experience with the shelly, the relay could fail at some point meaning a painful process to replace.
dumb lights
While the smart lights are good sometimes, they’re never much more than a gimmick. Its helpful to be able to automatically turn off lights when left on, but outside of that I cannot think of a good reason for them. I’m going to slowly remove all of the smart lights, some right now. Others I can wait until they fail. I might need a electrician though as some of the wiring is a bit beyond me.
