I have questions! Does it really require all that hardware? I've spent the last week working on a P25 scanner with 2 RTL-SDRs on a Pi and transcription running on a Ryzen AI laptop. The Pi keeps up with recording fine but it is only 4-5Mhz bandwidth instead of the ~11Mhz you're monitoring. For me transcription only lags by a few seconds but if I ran it on my desktop with a 2080ti it wouldn't even be that much.
What STT model are you using? In my tests I've gotten the best WER with whisper v3 large but it's still not that good.
I would expect that the hardware involved is massive overkill.
The Ettus SDRs are very nice and are marked up enormously over the BOM cost. You’re paying for an integrated, supported system, with good engineering, not for the parts. These days, for this particular use, you could probably build your own direct (no downconversion) receiver with a decent filter and, say, a 400MSPS DAC. (This was not a thing at any reasonable price point 15 years ago when I last played with this stuff.) Or you can buy or build a little mixer and choose an appropriate LO frequency and use a much cheaper DAC. Or you can buy a cheaper SDR.
~15 years ago I amused myself for about an hour using a USRP (older Ettus gear) and MATLAB to do more or less this but for regular FM radio, one channel at a time, on a decent laptop of the era. The processing power needed to channelize and demodulate a few channels from I/Q data is very, very low. Even coming up with some kind of optimal demodulation scheme wouldn’t use many cycles. (Although I suspect that there is more space to try to jointly optimize demodulation and transcription with FM than with AM.)
It would be a fun project to try to kludge up an ESP32 of some sort to do this. The tricky bit would be that the WiFi/BT hardware doesn’t go to DC.
It's not always that simple. I have a bunch of devices in my home that have WiFi IoT: bedroom AC, dehumidifier, refrigerator, and washer/dryer. I bought all of them regardless because they work fine without WiFi and I've never connected them. I'd love it if I could connect them to Home Assistant without data leaving my network. Reverse engineering them is on my list of future projects.
In the meantime they continue to function as "dumb" devices just fine.
I'm not sure that this ability to be firewalled is what keeps Homekit down. Inexpensive Matter devices abound that can also be firewalled from the internet, and never connected to it even once[1].
[1]: Yes, I know. There exists Matter-upgradeable widgets that must be connected to the Internet before becoming usable as Matter devices; send those back. I'm also aware that there's Matter devices that require Internet in order to be useful[2], but every instance I've seen of that is just something that was designed by a moron, imbecile, or idiot; send those back, too. Returns cost these companies money.
You want a router that will not let those wifi devices reach the internet or contact any other device on your network except allowed devices.
For any device that needs to connect to the internet, you want to be able to use dns and ip block lists at the very least.
These changes are on my todo list. Tvs especially need to be quarantined. They scan your network to datamine and try to report your conversations to the tv manufacturer.
The next step is root the tvs and clean off as much junk as possible.
What I want to do is replace their firmware with one that never tries to leave my network. But that's getting a bit ahead of myself since I haven't looked into them at all yet.
> I genuinely don't understand why someone would want to work like this. There's obviously no practical use in having a 26-year-old novelty webcam work at 5fps.
So? Why does everything have to be practical? It can be fun to get something working like this, even if you use an LLM to do it.
1. Commercial devices must use offline only protocols, Zigbee or Zwave. If it's WiFi only I will not buy it unless the firmware is open source or easily replaced with an open source, local only alternative.
2. Non-sensor devices must fully function without their IoT features. I must be able to control my thermostat, fridge, stove, etc without any external interface.
Never use a WiFi IoT device that isn't open source. Even if you can control it locally it could be a spy device that's exfiltrating your data. Yes, you could setup VLANs or a separate network but it's not worth it. Vote with your wallet.
I don't know how this fits into your list, but I also require an open, local API, so I am free to chose which dashboard/automation I want to use - my own (Home Assistant or any locally programmed orchestrator) vs. the official App vs. some third-party dashboard/website. This was my main criteria for buying a Marstek Venus E Battery. I was able to automate it fully locally, isolated in a separate VLAN, via ModbusTCP/RS485 and my custom Home Assistant Automation. Works wonderfully, even on Internet disconnects. [1]
I've only tinkered around the edges of home automation, but so far most everything I've looked into is either proprietary and $ or open source and $$$. The sweet spot seems to be proprietary devices that are hackable and/or re-flashable to open source firmware. But there aren't many of those, they come and go constantly.
A large part of my goal for automation is energy efficiency, if I have to dump multiple hundreds of dollars into hubs, switches, plus, lights, and sensors, then I've only added work for myself and saved no money.
Most of my devices are Zigbee. They're inexpensive, easy, and have been pretty reliable. They operate on 2.4Ghz which may have a lot of interference in some places like dense apartment buildings.
There are a lot of vendors. I have a decent amount of SONOFF stuff, Schlage Zigbee deadbolts, Ikea Zigbee blinds, etc. No one makes a good Zigbee thermostat so I have a Honeywell Zwave.
Switchbot Smart plugs are cheap, around five dollars in a four pack. You can flash them over the air without needing to open them up. And they have a ESP32C3. So you can easily flash them with Tasmota or ESP home. And they include energy monitor.
I recommend SONOFF: they support ZHA as first class citizen (they are very active on raising PR to https://github.com/zigpy/zha-device-handlers) and they are cheap (manufactured in china). I don't even have to download their app to do the initial setup, most of their devices just work out of the box with ZHA.
Right? I've never quite understood the question. There's no requirement that a smart TV be connected to the internet.
Something like a Roku is cheap, can handle your streaming services (including Jellyfin), and has no spying hardware. DIY HTPCs are of course the best option for control.
> Sure, HTPC would be the best, but they are quite a bit pricier.
Not necessarily. An Apple TV box is now $300. That's enough to buy a far more capable mini-PC. You can run an ordinary Linux distro on it with a "launcher" like Plasma Bigscreen. Alternatively, if you want to put some more work in, build LineageOS for x86_64 with an ARM translation layer and you get the best of both worlds. I recently did just that and I am delighted with the result.
I have my home server in the living room, connected to the TV. But I also have another TV and I wouldn't want to buy and maintain one more device just for that.
Last I checked there were no mics or cameras built into my Roku, but maybe we're concerned about different things. What are the "all the same things" you're talking about?
I don't connect TVs to networks. I use external streaming devices. Previously this was Roku with all of their tracking domains DNS blocked but I've switched to Android TV (NVIDIA Shield). I used Claude Code to review all the installed software and remove anything that called external services that wouldn't break core functionality. DNS blocklists handle everything that remains.
The above intrigues me, I plan to give it a go when I reach it on the TODO list- ideally that would address issues that can't be fixed with network isolation.
I didn't know about those protocols, and also surely they don't really mention them in the title or product description usually. Also are they the most used average protocol? I don't wanna pay premium price for a reasonable offline feature which was always the default.
However, I tried to purchase from EU manufacturers so that, at least, they're GDPR-liable. Quite a few of them even advertise things like "Offline mode only available" or "NO account setup needed!" ... It was a FKN weight measurement device (one of those you put on the floor and step on). Id rather die a horrible death then give them any access to my WiIF or email account. i jsut want a damn number in Kilos and thats it.
And about people saying "OVERWRITE", "CHANGE", "HACK", or whatever. I mean, I used to do those things when I was younger, learned alot, but I simply don't have the time for that anymore and it shouldn't be required.
That's the whole point: these things should be the default, rather than requiring you to waste two weekends fixing a product you just purchased.
You can buy pre-flashed hardware such as Martin Jerry switches with Tasmota on it (OSS). Which is what i recommend for people trying their best to avoid tinkering.
My parents had this problem when I was growing up. We lived in town A but due to being on the border of town B and in the middle of nowhere we got our mail from town B. Anything addressed to town A wouldn't be delivered. They ended up getting a PO box in town A and post office would put all the undeliverable stuff in it.
With a growing population town A decided to start delivering their mail something like 20-25 years ago. I can see it being a bigger problem now with autofill addresses and such.
They should have used a classifier in the first place. Amazon has the data and resources to build a model or fine tune one. Using an off the shelf LLM doesn't make sense.
I had the same problem. I posted in last month's thread and for a few weeks I got one or more automated emails a day from low quality recruiters and career coaches. Nearly every one follows the same pattern:
1. Email was from Gmail with a long username like "startupjobsrecruiting".
2. Clear template email with the experience I had posted copied nearly word-for-word.
3. Vague details on what they actually offer.
I responded to some when they first came in and the replies came back immediately indicating it's automated. Some also had automated follow up whether I responded to them or not.
I didn't seem to get any actual humans contacting me. Now I mark them all as spam.
I miss my DSMs. I had a couple of 1st gens but always wanted a 2nd gen. When I looked at prices a few years ago I decided I'll never own one unless I have a large exit. I'm only interested in a GSX and prices have gone up way too much.
What STT model are you using? In my tests I've gotten the best WER with whisper v3 large but it's still not that good.
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