Patrick Easters (He/Him/His)

88 points

Raleigh, NC

Patrick is a principal systems engineer at Red Hat, helping customers and partners use OpenShift for 5G and other edge deployments.

He has a passion for automation, building resilient systems, and helping teams deliver software more efficiently. When he’s not busy automating things, he’s probably building something in his garage, making his house too smart, or stepping on Cheerios dropped by his kids.

Open Enthusiast Author

Authored Content

Overcoming language and distance barriers in open source projects

Track aircraft with a Raspberry Pi

Explore the open skies with a Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive radio, and open source software.

Feed the dog and close the door with an open source home automation system

Home Assistant, a versatile and lightweight open source tool, makes it easy to automate everyday household tasks.

Authored Comments

patrickeasters

29 Mar 2018

Feed the dog and close the door with an open source home automation system

I'd say most of my devices/sensors are Z-Wave. Outside of my Z-Wave switches, I do have some Hue bulbs. For temperature, I do have data from some Z-Wave sensors as well as my Ecobee thermostats and sensors.

My Github repo (linked in the article) has a mostly up-to-date list of my devices in the README.

patrickeasters

26 Mar 2018

Feed the dog and close the door with an open source home automation system

Definitely a great question! If you plan to make your instance available via the internet, make sure you have SSL configured, a strong API password (rotate this occasionally as well), and configure IP bans with a login attempt threshold to help with any brute force attempts. A step above that would be to only use the web frontend when you're on your home network (or VPN) and to not expose it at all.