Meet the VueVille Family

Hi, I am Daniel and I run this blog together with my lovely wife. This DIY Smart Home blog is where we document our family’s journey of building our own DIY smart home.

I am a mechanical engineer by profession and have always loved tinkering with gadgets. So when we bought our first home, I quickly got interested in home security cameras and home automation.

We started with a single security camera in 2014. Over the years, this has grown to a fully integrated, seamless setup that combines DIY home security cameras and DIY smart home automation.

We are not fans of cloud-reliant devices, or paying a monthly fee. So our smart home uses only local-processing, local-storage and has no monthly fees.

New to all this?

If you are new to the whole smart home and smart security camera world, start here:
EasyDIY or ProDIY – Introducing the VueVille Smart Home DIY Framework

What we wanted from our smart home

There are some common sense requirements we have from our smart home:

Local Processing Only: It should work even if the Internet connection goes down or the manufacturer’s servers are unavailable. In other words, it should not be Internet-reliant.
Local Data Storage Only: It should not store our data on the cloud, unless we choose to for backup purposes. In other words, it should not be cloud-reliant.
No monthly fees: It should not cost us a monthly subscription fee or force us to buy a subscription for core functionality.

Finding reliable and trustworthy resources to help decide which brands to go for, which features to look for and what to avoid is far more difficult than it should be.

The Internet is chock-full of commercial blogs and websites that have hidden agendas and don’t really care about your needs and your wallet. If we had followed the so-called ‘smart home experts’ recommendations, we would have ended up with a mountain of stuff that doesn’t really work with each other and a hefty monthly subscriptions bill.

This is why we started writing this blog. We hope you find it useful and do get in touch with us if you have any questions. We are happy to help.

Why insist on local processing and local data storage?

A very popular cloud-reliant smart home platform, Samsung’s SmartThings, went down for a whole day recently and left users unable to turn on lights, lock or unlock doors and …. you know just generally very frustrated since their smart home had turned into a decidedly dumb home. Source
One of the largest cloud-reliant smart lock platforms, Yale Smart Living, recently saw their platform fail for a full day. People were unable to arm or disarm their alarms, and it even left people locked out of or inside their houses! Source
Surely Google and Alexa won’t be this unreliable, right? Nope, they too have suffered service blackouts. Don’t forget about the fact that they are always listening to you for the wake word. Source and source.

I can find many more instances of major cloud-reliant smart home systems failing or getting hacked. It’s simply a very bad idea – to turn on a light in your house, why should you have to send that command to a data center halfway across the world and then wait until the server processes the command and then send a ‘turn on’ command to your bulb. It is just silliness.

There is a place for cloud services, say for providing easy remote access to your smart home. But of course I wouldn’t rely on the cloud for even that. I run my own secure OpenVPN server on my QNAP NAS.

What are the core principles of this blog?

We only recommend products and services we already use or can see ourselves using. If it can’t pass the ‘friends & family’ test, you won’t see us recommending it.
Every smart home product that we recommend must fit in with the VueVille Smart Home DIY Framework. This simply means that it must have some ability to talk to the rest of the house. This really is the biggest issue with smart home stuff today. In most cases, there’s no point in using something I cannot monitor or control through my smart home hub (running HomeSeer HS3 software).

What do our readers think?

Your website is fantastic and full of great information, keep it up!

Awesome site … it helped answer some of the things I had been researching. Wish I had found your site sooner than later as it would have saved me a lot of time.

Great stuff and exactly what I was looking for. Has helped immensely.

Thanks very much for sharing your experience and expertise.

Great site and thanks for sharing your setup.