thejevans

joined 2 years ago
[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

not quite.

If you buy their device, the cost to use their service is built-in to the cost of the device, so you get access to their service and all of the 3rd-party plugins at no extra charge.

If you would like to write your own plugins for their service, or access their service on one of their devices, but with custom firmware, you need to pay $20 one time for an API key to get access that is more flexible than the limited way the stock firmware communicates with their service.

From looking at the source code of the firmware, it seems like you can extract the "API key" that gets generated by your device with the stock firmware and would technically be able to hardcode that in custom firmware, but I don't know if that gives the same level of access as the official API key that you pay for or if it against any TOS or anything.

If you are hosting a server yourself or are accessing a different server, you can very easily flash custom firmware that changes the target server, and there is no charge for that from TRMNL. The $20 is to pay for extra API calls to their servers over the lifetime of the device than what they accounted for in the purchase price.

In their documentation, they also briefly mention a recurring charge for API access if you want to use a DIY device with their hosted service, but I didn't see any mention of that anywhere else as the documentation for DIY devices is yet to be fleshed out.

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago

Yes to both. The server code is open source under and MIT license as of last night.

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yay for DBML! I'm so excited to stop using dbdiagram haha

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

This is very similar to what Home Assistant offers as a paid service. I don't see this complaint thrown at them, though. Also, any system that uses authentication has "a built in way to lock it down".

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

I agree that the guide is VERY unclear. The documentation here is a bit better, but still bad and mentions a monthly cost for DIY devices instead of a one-time dev-level API key cost.

The gist is that if you want to use their servers and you bought their device, they have an API key built in to the device for their non-dev-level API access, and it's not supported (maybe also against API TOS, but I'm not sure) to extract the API key and use it when you flash custom firmware. Getting the dev-level API key doesn't have this issue, though, because they give that to you when you pay for it.

When modifying the firmware to use on your own server, you don't have to pay them anything because you won't be using their API.

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago

Everything @CondorWonder@lemmy.ca said and because backups to Home Assistant OS also include addons, which is just very convenient.

My Proxmox setup has 3 VMs:

  1. Home Assistant OS with all the add-ons (containers) specific to Home Assistant
  2. TrueNAS with an HBA card using PCIe passthrough
  3. VM for all other services

Also, if you ever plan to switch from a virtualized environment to bare metal servers, this layout makes switching over dead easy.

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

I would recommend running Home Assistant OS in a VM instead of using the docker container.

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 weeks ago

I have a cheap homekit thermostat that I use with home assistant. Being able to turn it off for movies or during peak energy hours is nice. What was most helpful, however, was putting temperature and humidity sensors in every room, so that I could move around heat generating stuff to balance the temps throughout my apartment. I moved my server and gaming pc tower out of my home office. The temperature spread went from 8 deg F to 2 deg F.

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 56 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I use the FUTO keyboard. The "AI" features that it includes are local-only predictive text and voice-to-text (both are very good, in my experience). It's not open source, and neither is GrayJay (another FUTO project), which is a yellow flag, at minimum.

At the same time, they do fund open source projects, most notably Immich, which is a fantastic Google Photos alternative. I'm personally okay with using their stuff, and tentatively happy with them as an organization, but I'm keeping a watchful eye on their behavior.

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It sounds like you want more of a read-it-later tool like wallabag that saves the link and parses + saves the page content. Wallabag in particular is open source, self-hostable, has browser plugins and phone apps, and allows for full-text search.

You could maybe use an AI tool for this, but it would be a massive waste of resources (even with deepseek) and would only approximate a search engine.

view more: ‹ prev next ›