Shelly

It all started last summer

When my family moved to a new place. In our previous home we had a district heating service that included unlimited hot water for a fixed price. That was awesome - not very environmentally friendly and actually not very cheap, but we never ran out of hot water.

In our new home we are independent from the city’s hot water services. This is good because we pay exactly for the energy we use. It means that we have a 300-liter hot water heater that we turn on when we want to make as much hot water as we need. In most households such a hot water boiler has a thermostat set to a specific temperature and the heater keeps all 300 liters of water as hot as it is set. I do not like this, because regardless of how great the insulation on the water tank is, it loses temperature over time. I needed a smarter system.

For xmass I got few Shelly lamps to play with. Shelly lamps are simple IoT devices. Super easy to install, configure and use. The Youtube is full with instructions on what can be done with these smart lamps. Naturally my main motivation was to figure out how to hack these devices and how ready my openSUSE servers are with tools and services (spoiler: they are ready)

Look daddy no cloud

Needless to say that like most smart home automation devices the Shelly lamps can be operated via the Shelly cloud. I may cover that area in the next post. But now I am interested in what can be done without the cloud. After all, one big selling point of the Shelly devices is that they are fully operable and functional even without Internet connection just on a WiFi LAN. It means that if I am concerned about the security of my home infrastructure I have an option not to expose my smart devices.