Hey, and we are live. What's up everybody? Welcome to Freedom Tech Weekend. My name is
Marks. I'm your host every week. Today we're doing it a day later because I was traveling.
If you watched last week's episode, you saw that I was in a different location. I'm back
home now in my normal studio that I got here. This is my studio office, all the good things.
So glad to have you here.
I did not really give an announcement.
Let me just check the Savio real quick.
Let me see here.
All right, we're good.
I didn't give an announcement because, frankly, I wasn't planning on streaming right now.
But I had an idea because I was doing a project for a friend.
And I said, why not just go live right now?
So that's what I'm doing.
I just decided to go live and start streaming.
So we're going to do that today. We're doing smart home stuff. We are setting up a smart home. This
is somebody who has, they might have devices from Google, they might have Amazon Ring, Ecobee,
you might have Apple devices, a whole bunch of them, right? So there are
different options
you
can use to try and connect these all together because for the most part, these systems don't
want to talk to each other. They're starting to get better. You have things like Matter and Thread
that are trying to make things compatible with all of the different systems out there.
Remember back in the day you had the Samsung or not Samsung, smarter things, smart things, whatever.
You have Z-Wave, you have Zigbee, everybody's tried to do their own thing and really what it
comes down to is we just need we need open standards that allow them all to talk to each
other. So in the mix of all of this there have been some open source projects that have tried
to bring these together and many of you on the stream hello we've got we've got like 90 people
so far this is great um let's see i vaguely remember hearing about this is it linux uh yo um
well actually we are going to be running linux is what we're going to be doing but
there are lots of different systems out there for trying to get all these these different smart
platforms to talk to each other because really in the end what i'm doing today is i have to leave in
about 20 minutes. Actually, no, 15 minutes. I need to leave him 15 minutes to go over to my
friend's house to help him set up his thing. And he doesn't want to have to babysit this. He doesn't
want to SSH and log into a Linux terminal. And then he doesn't want to have to like install
stuff and reboot and do pseudo app, get all that stuff. So I want this to be plug and play as easy
as possible for him. And so I figured if I'm going to be setting this up for him, why not
bring you all along for the ride and show you what the process is like.
There are different options. Maybe I can share my screen briefly. Let's see if this will work.
All right, so I'm going to share one window with you.
Okay.
That's not the one I wanted. Let's try this window over here. Okay, that's better. We'll use Orion as
the browser today on this. I'm not doing my home server thing because a different show for you
today. All right, so we are now sharing the Orion browser and I'm going to show you a few different
projects real quick and then we will get to the actual installation.
So there are, you have a few projects. You have OpenHAB. Normally I would have Maple open on the
screen to help us with this, but I'm going so quickly today that I'm just going to go off on
my own memory. You have OpenHAB, which is a platform for bringing these all together.
Okay and then you also have Homebridge.
These are just two. There are other ones but these are probably two of the most popular ones.
So if you want to look at a couple of them you can look at look all these wonderful logos and
brands that can connect to OpenHAB. And then you have Homebridge which also has lots of wonderful
logos and stuff although they're not right on the home page but you've got you know you have
find your plugin and then you search and it's all based on npm packages
node packages and then you can find all these things so i would recommend starting with these
two but there are others you can look at i'm doing homebridge today that's what we're gonna do um so
what i did is i searched raspbian which is raspberry pi's operating system i think it's
called Raspberry Pi OS or Raspberry OS now. And then I did a Raspbian homebrew, right? Okay.
And then somehow I got to, I don't remember exactly what I searched, but let's just go to
Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi OS. We want to get a download, right? Bro. No. Raspberry Pi search.
Okay, this is where I was. So I downloaded this imager. You might have different opinions of
Raspberry Pi and all that stuff. You know, that's fine if you have those opinions. Some people don't
than some people do. We don't have access to the hardware. We don't know if it's like rooted or
has something installed on it that's not good for us. So it is what it is. Let me show you real
quick. Can I share a second screen? We'll just do this. Okay, share. All right. So here's my
Raspberry Pi. I just have this old one laying around. It's a 3B plus and it's got a case I got
on Amazon a long time ago. And I had this card in here, my little micro SD. So what I'm going to do
is I'm sticking this into this adapter and then putting it into my MacBook Pro on the side here.
All right. And then a little bit, we'll bring it back up there, but let's go back to the web
browser that I was sharing.
To Orion.
Okay.
So here we are.
I downloaded for Mac OS.
I downloaded the Raspberry PI imager.
And then, um, and I installed it.
You can go through and like view the sources and you can download specific
builds, but the Raspberry PI imager actually has an easy click through thing,
um, which is really nice.
It used to be much more difficult.
So if you want to be more manual, you can just go view the sources and pick stuff that you want on your own.
Okay, so now let's go over to the Imgur.
So let me switch screens to that.
Okay, here we are.
All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome. Let me pop in the chat. I'm going like with just one screen today. Let's see if we have any questions. I'm confused. Where's Marty? This show runs on TFTC channels, but it's called Freedom Tech Weekend. And we're working together because Marty's all about freedom tech and truth for the commoner. And this is the same thing. So we do this every Friday or every weekend. And it's one tool or one app that you can try out this weekend when you have free time.
Okay, so this channel has not been hacked, by the way.
This is just, Marty knows that I'm doing this.
Okay, so here we go.
We've got Raspberry Pi.
You can pick what you're using.
I'm using this one.
And then choose your operating system.
So this is where you can like really do lots of cool stuff.
So we're doing smart things today, home devices,
but you can run just regular Raspberry Pi desktop
if you want to set up a computer. But then there's other things where you can do a media player,
or you can set up an emulator for having a gaming system and plug this in because
the Raspberry Pi has an HDMI port on it, right? So you can plug it into TV,
home automation, which is what we're going to use today, a bunch of things. So let's just
jump to that, home automation, and then see all these cool things like 3D printing, Moodle box,
Moodle is a learning management system. I highly recommend the Canvas learning management system.
from my previous life and I'm doing home assistance and home automation
and then here you are you can see other ones Gladys assistant
open hab like I mentioned and we're going to do home bridge now you can pick 32 bit 64 bit it's
recommending based on the device that I picked all right and then you choose the storage that
you want to put it on and I have this card right here next and then in here you can actually set up
stuff, right? So you can set up what you want to have as passwords and other things.
So yes, let's just move forward there.
Everything's going to be white. Yes. So what it's going to do now,
can I just use my fingerprint? No. Okay.
All right, so it's going to write the card and it's going pretty quick.
And then after this is done writing, we'll boot it up and I'll show you the final step really of how to get it configured.
Because what I want
is
I want this to be as plug and play as possible.
I want it to behave kind of like a Wi-Fi router where you plug it in to your power at your home and then you connect it to your network.
And from there, you can just like open up an app on your phone and manage it from there.
That's the goal. And then if it ever gets hung up, they can just go in and unplug it from the power, wait a few seconds and then plug it back in.
I don't want them to have to go in and do anything beyond that.
Whereas I'm more tech savvy, so I don't mind doing a little more management.
So once this is done imaging, I'll pop the card into the Raspberry Pi.
we'll show you what the screen looks like and how you can get it connected to wi-fi really easily.
There are newer pies than this. This is like I said a three and you can do the four or five.
You can get them on Amazon or whatever website you want to buy them from. I always make sure
you're buying from a good dealer though. You don't want to buy one that's been hacked or something.
So buy from a trusted source but when you buy them on Amazon you can get them in a kit where
where it comes with like a case and some other things already
to make it easier to use.
'Cause if you buy just the Raspberry Pi,
you're just gonna get the board all by itself
and just gonna be this naked board sitting there
that is unprotected and no power usually and other things.
Okay, we're almost done.
We're at 91% and I'm glad that we've got a good group here.
We have a few hundred people here joining us
on a random Saturday, unannounced on TFTC channels,
as well as on Zap.stream.
In fact, let me pop over to Zap.Stream
and see if anybody is commenting over there.
Let me pull it up here.
All right, got a few people watching on Zap.Stream.
Hey, Noster folks, but no comments and that's okay.
Okay, so I was just doing a quick verification.
Now that it's done writing,
it's gonna verify that it copied everything over,
that all the bits matched,
because you don't want to have a corrupted file,
corrupted image on your device.
So here we go, we're in the 80% range.
97, 98, 99%, okay finalizing.
So pretty soon I'll be able to pop it out on my computer.
All right, it has been written successfully.
You can now remove it.
All right, so let's switch cameras back over.
Okay.
It's all blurry.
Why are you blurry?
I don't know.
Can I see anything?
Nope.
Yo.
All right.
Well, maybe they'll come back on here in a second,
but I'm gonna pop the card out of my computer.
Such fun.
Oh, all right, I lost it.
One more try real quick, but then we gotta move on
'cause I actually have to get out of here.
New movie recording in QuickTime,
and then we'll select the iPhone as a camera.
Looks like we're not going to get it.
That's too bad.
Okay.
Oh, here we go.
I heard the good noise.
Sweet, we're working.
Let's share that screen while we got it.
You think this would be easier, but it's not.
Okay, so I've got my Raspberry Pi.
I'm going to pop this micro SD card out,
stick it in the bottom.
there's only one way for it to go in if you're pushing really hard and it's not going in you
probably have it in backwards and then let's hook up the hdmi cable that i got
so this ghetto monitor this old school dell that a neighbor gave me many years ago because they
were just going to throw it away but it's so useful still all right and then i'm going to
plug in this this dell monitor is not hdmi compatible but i bought a cable that converts
Okay, so it should be booting up now. There we go. You can see the screen. Maybe I'll stick this
right here. Okay, so it's booting and of course my phone goes offline. There we go. Generating SSH keys.
Rebooting in five seconds. Sweet. So it's going to basically, I'm going to explain what's
going to happen. Once Linux boots here, this is a Debian fork, a fork of Debian. It's going to boot
up and then it's going to drop me into the home bridge login screen. I'm not going to have him
do anything here except the only step I'm going to do when I get over to his house is up on the
screen it's going to show a wi-fi network that I can connect to. So from my phone I can connect to
this wi-fi network that this Pi is broadcasting and from there it will allow me to type in the
password for his wi-fi network at his house. Again because I don't want I don't want to go over there
be like here let's plug this raspberry pi into your tv or something i just want to plug it into
power and use the phone to manage it from there so we're almost done booting once it's done booting
i really gotta get out here okay here we are so we're on homebridge and what you can see here is
it says need setup wi-fi use your mobile device to connect to the homebridge wi-fi setup network
and that's really it or you can plug it into ethernet so there it is all right
so once i do that then i can use the apple home app i can actually go on my browser on my phone
and connect to this uh address here homebridge.local or once i connect to the wi-fi
there's going to be an ip address here that i could connect to but again i'm not going to be
able to see this screen so i'm just going to connect to homebridge wi-fi setup on my mobile
phone and then go in the mobile browser and take it from there. Okay, this has been a quick show
today. 16 minutes. Thank you everybody for joining. Do you need better cord management?
I totally agree. This was a last minute broadcast and so I was quickly grabbing every cord that I
could find to get this to work. Normally my cords are much better managed. You should see my cable
management underneath my desk though. I'm sitting at. It's much cleaner. But thanks for joining
the day hope you all have a great weekend if you want to get your different devices talking to each
other check out openhab check out homebridge you can run homebridge and openhab on an existing
device you don't need to have something like raspberry pi you can run it on a mac on windows
on a linux computer you can run it in a virtual machine i've done them all and it's really nice
so anyways i'm not pointing any text on the screen anymore i'm just talking
but uh thanks for joining us and hope you have a great weekend later