---
sheet_format: 1.0
id: 2025-11-devfest-toulouse-domotique-debridee
title: "La domotique débridée, du sac poubelle au sanglier"
title_en: "Unleashed home automation, from the bin bag to the wild boar"
speaker: Erwan Rougeux
with: [Sylvain Wallez, Mathieu (surname unclear in the captions), Logan (surname not given)]
date: 2025-11-13
event: "DevFest Toulouse"
place: "Diagora, Labège, Toulouse, France"
format: keynote
language: fr
duration: "48:45"
video: https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA
slides: https://slides.wanoo.me/2025-11-devfest-toulouse-domotique-debridee/
topics: [home automation, home assistant, self-hosting, privacy, metadata, esphome, zigbee, local ai]
source: "Summary written by Claude (AI) from the auto-generated YouTube captions. Not a verbatim transcript; check the recording before quoting."
review: spot-checked
review_date: 2026-10-17
---

# La domotique débridée, du sac poubelle au sanglier

**In one sentence:** A four-person closing keynote of Home Assistant hacks. Erwan Rougeux's part covers a motorised sofa, automatic tracking of household consumables, and the point that the metadata your home produces should stay inside it.

## TL;DR
The talk was built by Sylvain Wallez, who opens and closes it, with Erwan Rougeux and two other Home Assistant users, Mathieu and Logan. Each presenter shows real automations, from mild ("augmented") to absurd. Sylvain first explains why Home Assistant matters: it is open source, local-first and has a huge ecosystem. Erwan shows a sofa that unfolds itself for "cinema mode". He also counts detergent pods, bin bags and toilet rolls automatically with Grocy. Then he draws the serious lesson: even anonymised data on toilet-paper use can describe a household's life, so that data should stay on self-hosted systems. Sylvain ends with his fight against wild boars, using cheap sensors, a car horn and an open-source vision model.

## Erwan's key points
(Erwan's segment runs from about 25:39 to 38:04. Other segments belong to the co-speakers and are not listed here.)
- He bought an electric sofa. The vendor offered an IoT add-on at about €350 per seat, so roughly €700 for a two-seater. He found that the side buttons connect through an RJ9 line (not RJ11), which carries power and acts as a simple two-wire contact.
- He used an RJ9 splitter so the original side buttons keep working. He insists this matters for the "WAF" (wife acceptance factor). He then wired an old ESP module and relay into the line, powered by the sofa's own supply.
- He describes a "cinema mode": the shutters close, the lights dim, the projector turns on, trailers start and the sofa unfolds. A phone call or the doorbell pauses the film and brings the sofa back up.
- He points out that the Home Assistant app had no long-press button, at least when he wrote his script. His workaround is a script on the ESP that is re-triggered every 50 ms, so holding a button in the app behaves like holding the physical button.
- He presents Grocy as an "ERP for your kitchen". Smart plugs measure power draw, and Home Assistant blueprints detect real washing-machine and dishwasher cycles. Detergent pods are then subtracted automatically, and Grocy builds the shopping list. He also says he goes further by parsing shopping receipts to restock automatically.
- He made his battery-powered automatic bin count the bags taken out. A microcontroller wakes on an interrupt and sends one MQTT message, with no noticeable drain on the batteries.
- He uses Home Assistant's voice assistant and an MCP server for Grocy to log toilet rolls by voice. Comparing the two toilets in the house showed almost twice as much use upstairs as downstairs.
- His serious point is about metadata: this "anonymised" consumption data alone can reveal visitors, changes in diet and daily rhythms. That is why he wants self-hosted, lightweight tools (Home Assistant and Grocy on a Raspberry Pi or an old machine) that keep the data at home. He cites Amazon's old one-click toilet-paper reorder button as a warning.

## Outline
- [0:05](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=5s) Sylvain Wallez, a DevFest Toulouse organiser, opens the closing keynote. He says he invited Erwan, "un malade mental de la domotique", plus Mathieu and Logan.
- [1:41](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=101s) What Home Assistant is: an open-source "Swiss army knife" that runs on a Raspberry Pi and is one of GitHub's most active projects. Its rule is that a home must work without the cloud. Examples: connected beds during a DynamoDB outage, and a defunct cat-feeder startup.
- [3:13](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=193s) The ecosystem: Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, MQTT, around 1,400 official integrations and Python scripting. A non-profit foundation runs it, alongside ESPHome and Music Assistant.
- [5:11](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=311s) Sylvain's bathroom fan: €4 Bluetooth sensors in every room. The fan starts when bathroom humidity is 7% above the house average and stops below 5%.
- [7:10](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=430s) Measuring teaches you how your house lives. In-wall modules double existing switches.
- [9:08](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=548s) An €11 Zigbee button and a Lidl Zigbee bulb give the bedside lamp a night-light mode, and a long press gives 10 seconds of light to leave the room.
- [11:11](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=671s) A co-speaker (unidentified in the captions) presents circadian lighting that follows the sun's cycle.
- [12:20](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=740s) Logan's chicken coop: an ESPHome-driven door, plus an old PTZ camera with Frigate. It sends a snapshot at closing time so the family can check that every hen is inside.
- [16:14](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=974s) Mathieu's robot vacuum runs when his phone leaves a zone. Working his fields by tractor made it leave its base 82 times, so he now sends it to the room cleaned longest ago.
- [18:31](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=1111s) Mathieu runs his water heater against EDF Tempo pricing. He uses a pulse water meter on an ESP32 and the RTE Tempo API, and mentions solar panels as a next step.
- [21:34](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=1294s) Logan's talking letterbox: reed sensors count letters and parcels, and an RFID intercom plays text-to-speech reminders, including which bin to put out.
- [24:29](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=1469s) Logan's Halloween setup with the intercom, lights and sound.
- [25:39](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=1539s) Erwan's sofa: the RJ9 discovery, the splitter, the ESP relay and cinema mode.
- [28:49](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=1729s) Erwan's workaround for the missing long-press button in the Home Assistant app.
- [29:36](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=1776s) Erwan on Grocy: power-sensing plugs and blueprints detect appliance cycles and update stock and the shopping list.
- [32:41](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=1961s) Erwan's connected bin: interrupt-driven MQTT messages count bin bags.
- [35:00](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=2100s) Erwan's toilet-paper study by voice, and his main point about metadata and self-hosting.
- [38:04](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=2284s) Sylvain's wild boars: broken fences, a destroyed lawn. Mathieu, who scares wood pigeons off crops with horns, supplies a horn.
- [42:41](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=2561s) The deterrent: a scrapyard car battery, a horn chopped to lower its volume, police-style lights and a tuning dashboard, then the first test on a real boar.
- [45:10](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=2710s) The rollout: IKEA Zigbee motion sensors and a PTZ camera, with snapshots sent to the self-hostable Moondream VLM, which draws boxes around boars only.
- [47:08](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=2828s) Next step: a second-hand robot mower with a beacon (blade off) to chase the boars. Closing: "qu'allez-vous inventer ?"

## Notable quotes
> "Le WAF est très important chez nous en domotique, tu ne peux rien faire si tu as pas le WAF approved." — Erwan Rougeux, [27:14](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=1634s)
*"WAF really matters in home automation at our place: you can't do anything without WAF approval."*

> "Juste sur l'utilisation de mon papier toilette, on est capable de déterminer ma vie." — Erwan Rougeux, [36:34](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=2194s)
*"Just from my toilet-paper use, you can work out my life."*

> "Ces données-là, elles restent chez nous." — Erwan Rougeux, [36:56](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=2216s)
*"That data stays at home."*

> "Il ne faut pas que votre maison soit connectée au cloud pour pouvoir fonctionner." — Sylvain Wallez, [2:29](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=149s)
*"Your house must not need the cloud in order to work."*

## Questions this answers
**Q: What does Erwan Rougeux think about the privacy of home automation data?**
A: He argues that even trivial, anonymised data such as toilet-paper use can reveal visitors, diet changes and a household's rhythm. That is why he keeps Home Assistant and Grocy self-hosted on small machines at home ([36:34](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=2194s)).

**Q: How did Erwan Rougeux connect his electric sofa to Home Assistant?**
A: The side buttons use an RJ9 line that carries power and a simple contact. He added an RJ9 splitter so the buttons still work, then wired in an old ESP module with a relay, powered by the sofa itself. A "cinema mode" now unfolds the sofa together with the shutters, lights and projector ([25:39](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=1539s)).

**Q: How can Home Assistant track detergent pods and generate a shopping list?**
A: Erwan puts power-measuring smart plugs on non-connected appliances and uses Home Assistant blueprints to detect real cycles. Each cycle subtracts a pod in Grocy, which then builds the shopping list ([29:36](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=1776s)).

**Q: How can a battery-powered device send events to Home Assistant without draining its batteries?**
A: In Erwan's bin, a microcontroller sleeps, wakes on an interrupt when a bag is removed, and sends a single MQTT message. He saw no noticeable battery drain ([33:49](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=2029s)).

**Q: Why use Home Assistant instead of a proprietary smart-home platform?**
A: Sylvain Wallez explains that it is open source, run by a non-profit foundation, has around 1,400 integrations and is designed to work without the cloud. He contrasts it with connected beds and cat feeders that failed when their cloud backend went down ([1:41](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=101s)).

**Q: How do you keep wild boars out of a garden with home automation?**
A: Sylvain combines Zigbee motion sensors, a PTZ camera and the open-source Moondream vision model to confirm that boars are present. He then fires a volume-tuned car horn and flashing lights, powered by a scrapyard battery ([45:10](https://youtu.be/nxVhlSdwFwA?t=2710s)).

## Mentioned
Home Assistant, Open Home Foundation, ESPHome, Music Assistant, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, MQTT, Raspberry Pi, ESP32, DynamoDB, Philips Hue, IKEA, Lidl, Frigate, Roborock, EDF Tempo, RTE, Grocy, MCP, Amazon (Dash button), Moondream, Clever Cloud, Riviera DEV, Péchabou, Sylvain Wallez