Automating Your Home with K3s and Home Assistant

The presentation discusses the benefits of using K3s and Home Assistant to automate a home and the advantages of running it on Kubernetes.

• Home labs are a safe way to experiment with new technologies and improve one's craft.
• Kubernetes provides great features for resiliency and redundancy.
• Home Assistant is a popular open-source home automation platform that ties together various products and services that normally don't integrate well together.
• Kubernetes is a great way to learn and manage Home Assistant.
• Z-wave and Zigbee are low-powered mesh radio type protocols that are self-hosted and used to run radio controllers within a home.
• Automations tie all the different components together.
• Hardware such as Raspberry Pi and used servers can be used to build a home lab.

The speaker demonstrated how the different components running in Kubernetes work together by showing a specific person object detection feature of one of the workloads called Frigate. It offloads a small video stream to a Coral TPU USB device to apply a machine learning model for object detection. When the speaker's daughter walked by, Frigate detected her as a person and fired an event that triggered certain automations.

Hey Google, turn off all the lights. Hey Siri, set the thermostat to low. Alexa, restart the nginx deployment. You may have dreamt (or had nightmares) about automating your home and connecting all things smart together. You probably haven't longed for doing all of that on top of Kubernetes. In this session you'll learn why you should and the benefits of having a homelab running Kubernetes. With everyone spending more time at home there has never been a better time to grab an old PC or a few Raspberry Pi's and install K8s. Eddie and Jeff will share their journeys of deploying Home Assistant, open source home automation software, on top of K3s, a lightweight K8s distribution. They'll cover unique solutions like building Device Plugins and using Node Feature Discovery to use external USB antennas for wireless smart home protocols. Ending with tying all of it together with Helm and using Flux for CICD. If you're looking for a personal project to learn Kubernetes this session is for you.