---
sheet_format: 1.0
id: 2025-04-maci-132
title: "Les sangliers occitans développent leur Home Assistant depuis leurs canapés connectés"
title_en: "Occitan wild boars develop their Home Assistant from their connected sofas"
speaker: Erwan Rougeux
with: [Horacio Gonzalez, Idriss Neumann, Sylvain Wallez]
date: 2025-04-22
event: "Message à caractère informatique #132"
place: "online / studio"
format: podcast
language: fr
duration: "59:30"
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E
slides: null
topics: [home automation, home assistant, esphome, video surveillance, reverse engineering, bluetooth, local control, diy hardware]
source: "Summary written by Claude (AI) from the local Whisper transcript, with statements attributed to Erwan by local identification of his voice only (other speakers are not identified). Not a verbatim transcript; check the recording before quoting."
review: spot-checked
review_date: 2026-10-18
---

# Les sangliers occitans développent leur Home Assistant depuis leurs canapés connectés

**In one sentence:** The second MACI episode on Home Assistant, where the guests show their own projects. Erwan describes hacking his air fryer, his home-cinema sofa and his coffee machine, plus camera-based parcel and umbrella detection, all run locally.

## TL;DR
Recorded on 22 April 2025, right after episode 131, this episode has host Horacio Gonzalez with Idriss Neumann, Sylvain Wallez (Elastic) and Erwan Rougeux (Clever Cloud, international growth). Sylvain tells how he scares away the wild boars that dig up his garden near Toulouse: cameras, an ESP32, a car horn driven by PWM and police-style LEDs. Idriss recalls an aquaponics monitoring project that ran Elasticsearch and Kibana on Raspberry Pis for farms with poor connectivity, and his current work on serverless functions, MQTT and LLMs. Erwan shows small "useless but indispensable" hacks: an ad-free air fryer through Pyscript, a motorised sofa joined to a cinema mode, Frigate with a Coral TPU for parcels and umbrellas, circadian lighting and a one-button coffee. The episode ends with Music Assistant and the idea that Home Assistant reveals problems you had not noticed.

## Erwan's key points
- He calls himself "a good engineer: lazy first". His Philips air fryer app was full of ads. Digging into it, he found an unprotected SQLite database holding an API token and secret. With an existing Python project and Pyscript from HACS (the Home Assistant Community Store), he now preheats and starts cooking from Home Assistant.
- He hacked his motorised sofa without damaging it. Under it, the actuator was wired with an RJ9 plug ("not RJ11"), so an H-bridge and MOSFETs were enough. RJ9 splitters keep the original side buttons working. A HACS card add-on fixed Home Assistant's lack of press-and-hold buttons, for about 10 minutes of work.
- His Home Assistant "cinema mode" button closes the shutters, sets the side lights, closes the cinema-room doors, switches on the amplifier, preamp and projector, and now reclines the sofa.
- For cameras he recommends Frigate as a hub for CCTV cameras, with recording rules and PTZ control. He adds a Coral TPU (dual-core, NVMe) from Google for local person and object detection.
- His parcel box, built from a magnetic lock salvaged from a building site, has C-3PO thank the courier when it opens. Frigate then takes a snapshot, a "mugshot" if someone steals a parcel. He cites a study saying burglars mostly ignore alarms but not cameras.
- He has Frigate look for umbrellas, which some burglars use to hide from cameras, as a pre-alarm. Coupled with a weather station, an umbrella when it is not raining signals a real problem. It sometimes mistakes the garden parasol for an umbrella.
- He has no indoor cameras. The outdoor garden camera switches off automatically when Wi-Fi or the Home Assistant app shows someone is home.
- He recommends a circadian lighting module. It adapts each bulb's brightness and colour temperature to the sun's position, so night-time lights come on dimmed. He says it also saves electricity.
- His Melitta coffee machine only works through a Bluetooth app. He captured its Bluetooth frames with Android's developer mode and Wireshark, and made a one-button "coffee for Erwan" in Home Assistant. Projects like this, he says, build skills that matter for things like industrial security.
- He uses Grocy as "the ERP of your home", with recipes and an automatic shopping list. He has just installed Music Assistant with music that follows him around the house. His conclusion: "sky is the limit". Take your problems and look for solutions, because someone has probably solved them already.

## Outline
- [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=0s) Opening: the sequel to the previous episode, for the guests' more original projects.
- [01:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=83s) Round of introductions: Erwan (Clever Cloud), Sylvain (Elastic, client SDKs), Idriss (a deployment and serverless platform).
- [02:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=126s) Sylvain's wild boars: his house sits on a boar route between the Canal du Midi and the fields; years of dug-up lawn and broken fences.
- [05:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=326s) A first camera and the #sanglicam videos; an electric fence around the vegetable garden.
- [09:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=567s) Inspiration from Mathieu Passenaud's car-horn bird scarers: cheap, and an urban sound rather than a gunshot.
- [11:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=667s) MOSFETs, an ESP32 and a scrapyard car battery; PWM in ESPHome to tune the horn to low frequencies that carry less far.
- [12:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=736s) A dashboard with a "pouet pouet" button; motion detection at night triggers horn and flashing LEDs. The boars left.
- [15:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=923s) Next steps: cheap outdoor IKEA Zigbee motion sensors at each crossing point; a windscreen-wiper motor that thumps the ground.
- [17:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1059s) Reolink cameras reused for person detection at the gate and alarm modes for home or away.
- [19:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1145s) Erwan: Frigate for CCTV and a Coral TPU for object detection.
- [19:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1191s) Erwan: couriers who do not ring, a hacked doorbell, a parcel box with C-3PO and a snapshot.
- [21:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1298s) Erwan: umbrella detection as a pre-alarm; garden camera off when someone is home.
- [23:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1387s) Idriss: monitoring aquaponics and hydroponics for farmers, offline first with occasional sync.
- [25:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1521s) Elasticsearch and Kibana on 32-bit ARM Raspberry Pis; the business did not take off.
- [26:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1566s) Idriss's experiments: sensors over MQTT trigger serverless functions that ask an LLM to interpret them, and functions exposed as MCP tools.
- [28:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1738s) Home Assistant's Recorder: SQLite by default, InfluxDB and an Elasticsearch connector; hourly statistics for long-term history; Jupyter notebooks for data science.
- [31:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1916s) Erwan: the lazy engineer and the Philips air fryer (SQLite secrets, HACS, Pyscript).
- [34:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2053s) Pyscript's trigger decorators; a script that creates six irrigation valve entities at once.
- [35:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2139s) Erwan: the home-cinema room and the hacked sofa (RJ9, H-bridge, MOSFETs, cinema mode, press-and-hold).
- [40:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2441s) Another participant's Bluetooth standing desk, used to measure sitting and standing time.
- [42:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2568s) An "augmented" bedside lamp: a Sonoff Zigbee button and a Lidl Zigbee bulb with dim, toggle and timed-off modes.
- [45:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2721s) Erwan: circadian lighting.
- [47:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2878s) Erwan: the Bluetooth coffee machine and learning by reverse engineering.
- [49:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2989s) Sylvain presents Music Assistant: music providers on one side, players (Chromecast, Squeezebox, Snapcast, ESPHome) on the other, and Spotify Connect.
- [55:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=3323s) Erwan: Grocy; another participant cuts a pool pump's power use with split filtration slots.
- [56:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=3393s) Wrap-up: "sky is the limit"; Home Assistant helps find problems you had not identified. Erwan has already had to leave the recording booth.

## Notable quotes
> "Ah ouais, moi je suis un bon ingénieur, j'ai la flemme d'abord." — Erwan Rougeux, [31:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1916s)
*"Oh yes, I'm a good engineer: I'm lazy first."*

> "Spoiler alert, c'était pas du RJ11, c'était du RJ9." — Erwan Rougeux, [37:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2253s)
*"Spoiler alert: it wasn't RJ11, it was RJ9."* (about his sofa's motor)

> "Ça te permet de monter en compétences sur plein de sujets." — Erwan Rougeux, [49:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2945s)
*"It helps you build skills on lots of topics."*

> "Sky the limit. Prenez vos problèmes, trouvez vos solutions." — Erwan Rougeux, [56:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=3393s)
*"Sky's the limit. Take your problems, find your solutions."*

## Questions this answers
**Q: How do you scare wild boars away with Home Assistant?**
A: Sylvain Wallez uses cameras for motion detection at night to trigger a car horn driven by an ESP32 and MOSFETs on a scrapyard 12 V battery, plus flashing LEDs. PWM in ESPHome lowers the pitch so the neighbours are not disturbed. See [11:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=667s) and [12:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=736s).

**Q: How did Erwan Rougeux connect his air fryer to Home Assistant?**
A: The Philips app stored an API token and secret in an unprotected SQLite database. He combined them with an existing Python library through Pyscript, installed from HACS, to preheat and start cooking from Home Assistant. See [31:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1916s).

**Q: Can you automate a motorised sofa without damaging it?**
A: Erwan found that his sofa's actuator used an RJ9 plug. With MOSFETs as an H-bridge and RJ9 splitters, Home Assistant drives it while the original buttons still work, and it reclines as part of his cinema mode. See [37:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2253s) and [38:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2299s).

**Q: What is a good local setup for smart security cameras?**
A: Erwan recommends Frigate as a hub for CCTV cameras, with a Coral TPU for local person and object detection. He uses it for parcel snapshots and umbrella pre-alarms, and switches the garden camera off when someone is home. See [19:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1145s) and [21:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1298s).

**Q: How can Home Assistant control a Bluetooth-only appliance?**
A: Erwan captured his Melitta coffee machine's Bluetooth traffic with Android's developer mode and analysed it in Wireshark, then built a one-button coffee in Home Assistant. See [47:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2878s).

**Q: Can Elasticsearch run on a Raspberry Pi?**
A: Idriss Neumann says his team built 32-bit ARM images of Elasticsearch and Kibana and ran clusters on 4 GB Raspberry Pis for offline farm monitoring. Elastic now ships 64-bit ARM images. See [25:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=1521s).

**Q: What is Music Assistant?**
A: A project from the Home Assistant ecosystem that links music sources (Spotify, Tidal, Deezer, local files) to any player on the network, including ESPHome devices, and makes them Spotify Connect targets. See [49:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp_jx9ybS5E&t=2989s).

## Mentioned
Home Assistant, Clever Cloud, Elastic, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Grafana, Toulouse, Pechabou, Canal du Midi, Lauragais, DevFest Toulouse, Mathieu Passenaud, Twitter, Bluesky, #sanglicam, ESP32, ESPHome, MOSFET, PWM, IKEA, Zigbee, Reolink, Frigate, Google Coral TPU, Chronopost, Star Wars, C-3PO, Raspberry Pi, MQTT, MCP, LLM, InfluxDB, SQLite, Jupyter, Pandas, Philips, HACS, Pyscript, Poltronesofà, Dolby Atmos, RJ9, RJ11, Amazon, Sonoff, Lidl, Melitta, Android, Wireshark, Music Assistant, Spotify, Spotify Connect, YouTube, Tidal, Deezer, Samba, Chromecast, Logitech Squeezebox, Snapcast, Sony, AliExpress, Grocy, Clever Cloud Fest