Looking for a Smart Home with Privacy? Meet Raspberry Pi.

The age of the smart home has brought us lots of exciting conveniences. But the number of proprietary devices and competing standards on the market can create a tangle of apps and permissions, and home IoT security can be a headache with potentially nightmarish consequences if you do it wrong.

That’s why tech innovators are continuing to develop new smart home solutions that can provide the benefits of a smart home in a more secure and user-friendly package. The Raspberry Pi® microcomputer is one such tool that’s shown immense promise. What is it that makes these little computers so great for home automation? That’s what we’ll explore below.

What Is the Raspberry Pi?

Raspberry Pi is a series of microcomputers from the UK. These stripped-down computer models are just a single printed circuit board that doesn’t even come in an electrical enclosure, but nonetheless contains all of the key elements of a computer, including a microprocessor, memory and USB and HDMI ports.

The key features of the Raspberry Pi are its inexpensive price point, incredible flexibility and high portability. Because they were originally created as a learning tool to help students learn coding, Raspberry Pi models are typically priced at just $30-$70. This agreeable price, combined with its range of applications, caused the Pi to unexpectedly explode in popularity after its original release in 2012.

Amateur and professional developers alike have now used Raspberry Pi to build thousands of interesting applications and devices. It’s easy to hook up the Pi to most standard mice, monitors and keyboards, which makes it compatible with almost any setup and supremely user-friendly for those just getting their feet wet with programming.

Raspberry Pi for the Modern Smart Home

What can Raspberry Pi do for the modern smart-home owner? If you don’t mind a little technical DIY, it can provide a budget-friendly and more secure smart home solution. That’s because the Raspberry Pi is an ideal candidate for setting up a smart home gateway from which to control all of your devices.

Several open-source software development groups have released open-source smart home hub firmware products that come ready to go. Mozilla, developers of the Firefox web browser, have created perhaps the highest-profile Raspberry Pi-based smart home solution. Their Mozilla Things Gateway is designed to provide a secure web-based interface for smart home devices.

Installing the firmware is as easy as flashing it onto an SD card and installing the card on your Raspberry Pi. Once you’ve got the software up and running, you can do many of the same things that a normal smart home hub can do, including linking devices via protocols such as Zigbee and Z-Wave. (In fact, this is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to create a multiprotocol smart home hub.)

Because these technologies are usually developed by open-source software groups, they typically lack the fine-tuned UI of a proprietary smart home hub. But what they lack in bells and whistles, they make up for in transparency and flexibility.

Why a Raspberry Pi Hub Can Improve Privacy

One of the main privacy problems with commercially available smart home hubs is how they handle the sensitive data of their users. Almost all smart home hubs are constantly sending data to cloud servers owned by their manufacturers, and what they do with that data isn’t always clear. On top of that, smart home hubs are a juicy target for cybercriminals seeking personal data to steal.

By comparison, transparency and simplicity are the hallmarks of the Raspberry Pi smart home hub. Rather than opaque and loophole-ridden privacy standards buried within 10,000 words of lawyer-crafted license agreements, Mozilla’s Things Gateway (for one example) operates under the simple and easy-to-understand Mozilla Public License 2.0. For those who want to get away from the shadowy data-mining practices of companies like Amazon and Google, a Raspberry Pi can hit the spot.

Of course, using a Raspberry Pi-based hub still requires users to follow IoT best practices. It’s as important as ever to use strong passwords and to remember that individual devices may still be vulnerable if they’re not set up correctly. Make sure your Wi-Fi network is secure, two-factor authentication is turned on and that you’re using a VPN whenever you connect to a public network.

Customizing Your Raspberry Pi-Powered Smart Home

A Raspberry Pi-based smart home hub might sound great, but can it really compete on features with the big smart home device manufacturers? First of all, remember that most of the popular smart home brands and technologies will work with a properly configured Raspberry Pi solution. So that Philips Hue lighting system you’ve had your eye on is still very much in play.

Second, see what your smart home hub software has to offer in regards to customization. Mozilla Things Gateway offers cool features such as an if-then rules engine that allows you to create versatile command chains that link multiple home systems together. Its floor plan feature, meanwhile, is an intuitive graphic interface that smart home owners can use to draw a visual layout of their house and arrange their devices in a way that’s a snap to access.

As for open-source Raspberry Pi versions of smart home features, there are plenty of great additions available, such as:

• Smart security cameras (including motion sensors)
• Smart thermostats
• Smart electrical plugs
• Smart lighting systems

Basically, everything you’d expect to find in a contemporary smart home hub is available through an open-source framework if you’re willing to do a little bit of tinkering yourself. For your first upgrade, though, think about grabbing a plastic enclosure to protect your Pi from dirt and dust.

The smart home revolution is in full swing. But if you prefer to have more control over your devices and save some money at the same time, a Raspberry Pi-based solution could be a fruitful choice for your smart home automation.