I discovered these little “Orvibo S20” sockets that let you turn sockets on and off using your iphone. Very neat.
You can also do this over the Internet. But I’m not entirely convinced that the third-party proxy is secure enough for my level of internet security paranoia. I mean, I am sure it is fine but I only paid them a one-off fee under £20, so their motivation to run a highly secure proxy is going to eventually wane a little. So I need another solution.
Fire-up a Raspberry PI and have a play with this project on Github. You’ll soon have a webpage on your PI that lets you turn sockets on and off. Now it is in your control, putting it behind a VPN tunnel or SSH session is a possibility.
Now go look at what the more expensive proprietary home automation systems cost and decide if £20 and a few hours of your time makes sense…
