My Journey with ‘Mia M’
Alright, so I finally decided to get my hands dirty with this whole ‘Mia M’ setup I’d been thinking about. It’s basically my attempt to make all the smart home junk I’ve collected over the years actually talk to each other properly. Sounds simple, right? Yeah, famous last words.
First off, I had to actually list out everything I owned. Lights, plugs, speakers, that weird smart curtain rod I bought on a whim. It was more than I thought. Honestly, looking at the pile of stuff, I felt a bit stupid. Like, why did I even buy half of this?
Then came the hard part. Trying to find something, anything, that could act as the main brain. I spent hours, days maybe, just reading forums and watching videos. Everyone’s got their own favorite system, and they all swear it’s the best. It’s confusing as heck. Reminds me of when I first started trying to learn guitar from online tabs – everyone played it differently, drove me nuts.
I picked one platform, seemed popular enough. Let’s just call it ‘The Hub’. Getting it set up wasn’t too bad. Plugged it in, connected to wifi. Easy peasy. But then, adding the devices… oh boy.
- Some paired instantly. Click, boom, done. Felt like a genius.
- Others needed special codes, apps, dances under the full moon, I swear.
- A couple just flat out refused. Stone dead. Wouldn’t connect no matter what I tried.
It was frustrating. Really frustrating. I’d spend an evening trying to get one stupid smart plug online. Felt like I was wrestling with ghosts. You push a button, wait, nothing happens. Try again. Still nothing. You start questioning everything – is the wifi bad? Is the plug broken? Am I just an idiot?
This whole thing actually reminds me of a job I had years ago. We were trying to merge two ancient databases. Nobody really knew how the old one worked anymore. It was just this black box that mostly did its job. Trying to connect the new system felt just like this – poking it, hoping something good would happen, mostly getting errors back. We spent months on that project, lots of late nights fueled by bad coffee. In the end, we kinda just built a bridge around the old system instead of truly merging them. Felt like a cop-out, but hey, it worked. Mostly.
Back to the ‘Mia M’ project. After a lot of hair-pulling, I managed to get maybe 70% of the devices talking to ‘The Hub’. It’s not perfect. Some lights still randomly turn on. Sometimes the speaker ignores me. But it’s something. I can actually turn off most downstairs lights with one command now, which feels like a win.
So, where am I now? It’s still a work in progress. There’s this one motion sensor that drains batteries like crazy, gotta figure that out. And I haven’t even touched trying to make complex routines yet. Like, ‘if this happens, then do that AND that’. That feels like opening another can of worms.
Honestly, it’s messy. Really messy. But it’s my mess. And slowly, piece by piece, I’m trying to make sense of it. It’s kinda satisfying when something finally clicks into place, even if it took way too long to get there.
