Iot on Marcello Barnaba

How I replaced the Verisure app with Home Assistant

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Verisure app is garbage. There, I said it.

It’s not that the alarm itself is bad — the SDVECU panel is solid, the sensors are reliable, the installation is professional. But the app. Good lord, the app.

The problem

You open the app to check your alarm status and you’re greeted by an ad for Verisure itself. I pay through the nose for the service and they shove ads inside the app. It’s 2026 and a security company is showing me banner ads when I’m trying to verify that my house is protected.

But the ads are the least of it. The real problems are:

Blind routines. Yes, the app has “routines” — arm at midnight, disarm at 7. But they have no idea where you are. It’s midnight and you’re still in the garden? The alarm arms and the sensors go off. Window open? The panel announces it can’t arm, but if you don’t hear it the alarm stays disarmed. Go on vacation and forget to disable the morning disarm routine? Alarm off with an empty house. And routine changes take 20 minutes to propagate — “or the next day”. In 2026.
Zero presence awareness. The app doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know who’s home. It doesn’t know if the cleaning lady has left. No location-based automation whatsoever.
One camera at a time. Want to see all your cameras? Tap, wait, go back, tap the next one, wait. No overview. No “capture all”.
Biblically slow. Request an image, wait, wait, maybe it arrives. Sometimes you reload the app and try again. In 2026.
No permanent storage. Captured images vanish. There’s no browsable history.
No timestamps on images. You capture a photo and you don’t know when it was taken or which camera took it. You have to remember. For a security system, that’s embarrassing.
Generic notifications. One notification, same for everyone. No actionable notifications, no critical alerts that bypass Do Not Disturb.

What I wanted: my alarm, integrated into my smart home, with intelligent automations, notifications for all residents, and a dashboard that shows everything at a glance. No ads.

wifi-dethrash: Finding and Fixing WiFi Mesh Thrashing on OpenWrt

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It started with WiFi presence detection. I had built a system that tracks which room everyone is in by scraping RSSI from my OpenWrt APs. It worked — but the room assignments kept flickering. Kitchen. Office. Kitchen. Office. Three times in ten seconds. The state machine was fine. The WiFi wasn’t.

My home network runs six OpenWrt APs across three floors, two SSIDs — Mercury on 5 GHz, Saturn on 2.4 GHz — all backed by 802.11r for fast roaming. From the outside, it looks like a proper mesh. From the inside, one phone was bouncing between access points 129 times in 24 hours.

I didn’t know this until I built the tool to see it.

Each row is a WiFi client, the color shows which AP it’s connected to. Healthy clients show long solid bars. Sick ones look like barber poles. See sara-iphone? That rainbow stripe is 129 connects in 24 hours — the phone is walking through an overlap zone between two APs where both have roughly equal (and terrible) signal.

The Problem You Can’t See

WiFi roaming is invisible. Your phone shows full bars, Netflix buffers for a moment, and you blame the internet. But what actually happened is your phone disconnected from one AP, scanned for alternatives, picked another one with a marginally different signal, associated, authenticated, and started streaming again — all in under a second if 802.11r is working, several seconds if it’s not.

Do this 15 times in 2 minutes between two APs that both have garbage signal, and you get what I call thrashing: rapid, pointless AP bouncing that kills throughput and wastes airtime.

WiFi Presence Detection for Home Assistant Using OpenWrt

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had two problems with Home Assistant’s presence detection.

The first: GPS tells you if someone is home, but not where in the house they are. My home has six OpenWrt access points spread across three floors. They already know exactly which phone is connected to which AP at every moment — that’s room-level presence data, sitting right there in the WiFi stack, screaming to be used. Knowing who’s in which room opens up a whole class of automations that GPS can’t touch: lights that follow you, climate control per occupied room, a dashboard that shows the household at a glance.

The second: our housekeeper stays at our place a couple days a week. I don’t want to set up a full HA account for her, install the companion app on her phone, or deal with GPS permissions. But I do need to know if she’s home — because my alarm automation needs to know whether the house is actually empty before arming. Her phone connects to WiFi. That’s all I need.

So I wrote openwrt-ha-presence: a state machine that scrapes RSSI metrics directly from your OpenWrt APs, figures out which room each person is in by signal strength, and publishes per-person home/away state to Home Assistant via MQTT Discovery. No cloud, no beacons, no log parsing, no time-series database. Python, async, ~600 lines of actual logic.

How It Works

OpenWrt APs  →  openwrt-presence  →  MQTT  →  Home Assistant
 (node-exporter-lua)  (state machine)    (discovery)   (device_tracker + sensor)

Every 5 seconds, openwrt-presence hits the /metrics endpoint on each AP and grabs wifi_station_signal_dbm for every associated station. That’s the RSSI — how loud your phone’s signal is at that AP. The engine then processes the snapshot:

5G as Fiber Backup: Never Miss a Meeting Again

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of months ago, my fiber went down. As per Murphy’s first corollary, it happened at the absolute worst moment: right before a crucial meeting with a partner company. I found myself frantically jamming between a distant neighbor’s AP and my phone’s hotspot, but both sucked hard. We’re talking 200ms RTT and 15% packet loss. I was apologizing profusely while my video feed turned into a 1998 slideshow; no one could parse a word I was saying. I ended up cutting the video and staying silent. Missed opportunity. Never. Again.

So I went full paranoid and built a proper 5G backup setup.

The Hardware

GL.iNet X-3000 with a Quectel RM520N-GL modem
Poynting XPOL-24 directional antenna mounted on the wall outside my home office

5G signal here is non-existing, so I had to use heavy artillery. The Poynting is a beast. 11 dBi gain, real 4x4 MIMO, cross-polarized, weather-sealed. Point it at the nearest tower and suddenly your SINR jumps from “meh” to “holy shit.”

But pointing a directional antenna without visual feedback is painful. You’re basically spinning in circles, refreshing a web UI, cursing at the sky.

The Software

I wrote a set of tools to solve this: quectel-5g-tools.

5g-info dumps everything your modem knows in a readable format:

5g-monitor is an ncurses TUI that refreshes in real-time and—here’s the good part—beeps based on your SINR. Higher signal quality = more beeps. Point the antenna, listen for beeps, tighten the bolts. Done.

It’s like a metal detector, but for 5G.