The real reason
we're building this.
The hardware post came first because the hardware is real. But hardware wasn't what started this.
My son graduates in two weeks. A coworker put it plainly: this is the worst job market for new graduates since 2008. A CS degree gets you in the door for an interview, but it doesn't separate you anymore.
The same month Grant was finishing his final semester, the woman who had lived downstairs and helped my mother for over twelve years moved out. My mom can get around her upstairs with a walker. She likes living in her home. But for the first time in over a decade, she's really on her own, and I'm not there.
Those two things -- Grant needing real experience building something, and me needing a better way to keep an eye on my mom -- landed on top of each other at the same time. That's where this project actually started.
I have a Nest camera. It lets me pull up a picture. Sometimes I can piece together how long she's been sitting in her chair from a few recent frames. That's it.
What I actually want to know is a different list entirely.
The commercial options are built for people who want to watch their front porch. We need something built for people who want to know their parent is okay.
The gap between those two things is exactly where we're building. Home Assistant gives us the foundation. The open sensor stack gives us the data. The software we're writing on top is what turns that data into something actually useful for this situation.
If these are my real needs, they're probably someone else's real needs too.
Montana is a big state with spread-out families. Adult children living two hours away, or across the country, trying to balance checking in with not being intrusive. Parents who want to stay in their own homes -- who have every right to -- but whose kids lie awake worrying on bad weather nights.
The existing solutions ask you to choose between expensive professional monitoring systems, consumer gadgets that don't talk to each other, or moving your parent somewhere they don't want to be. We think there's a better option for families willing to invest in getting it set up properly.
We're not ready to take clients for this specific use case yet. The proof of concept is at my mom's house. But if this resonates with your situation, follow along. We'll be transparent about what works, what doesn't, and when we're ready to help someone else do this.
There's a version of this story where a new CS graduate spends six months sending resumes into a black hole. That version is real for a lot of people right now.
There's another version where he spends that same time building something with genuine real-world constraints -- a client with actual needs, hardware that has to work reliably, software that matters because a real person depends on it. That version builds the kind of experience that a resume line doesn't capture but that anyone technical will recognize immediately when they see the work.
That's the version we're choosing. The job market can wait a few months. The work is already started.
What comes next
Post #3 covers the software and protocol decisions: why we chose Home Assistant over the alternatives, and how Zigbee, Z-Wave, WiFi, and Matter/Thread actually compare for a real install. Read it here →
The software layer for the elder care use case is its own track, and we'll document it separately as it develops. There are things we want to build that we're not ready to talk about publicly yet. When we are, you'll read about it here first.
If any part of this sounds like your family's situation -- a parent living alone, the constant low-grade worry, the feeling that the tools available don't quite fit the problem -- we'd genuinely like to hear from you. We're not selling anything yet. We're just trying to understand how many families have this exact problem.