About Athenars

Welcome

Athenars is an independent publication launched in April 2023.

What is Athenars?

Athenars is an opinionated system with an open technology stack combining smart home automation and local cloud-like infrastructure. It includes network performance and security, audio-visual integration, smart power monitoring, your own private cloud storage, voice and text chat, smart lighting and data insights through visualisation, statistics and machine learning. The Athenars approach means integrating it all using open source, open protocols and open standards providing reliability, privacy, performance, control and endurance.

System design

The Athenars stack was developed only after significant time was spent on the overall system design.

Following this process, we use and recommend a hyper-converged highly available compute and storage cluster along with modern building automation that all integrates, is based on open technologies, is all local, all data is brought together and kept on premises and everything is controlled by the owner.

We think about and plan our chosen technology full stack before we start building. Time spent planning system architecture is seldom wasted.

Challenging first steps

We've seen far too many people on Reddit or Forums tell stories about how they've taken their first steps towards something like home automation and bought a hub and now they want to expand it and integrate it with something else. But the two systems are incompatible. Or even worse, the ecosystem they bought into that has cloud dependencies has ceased working as the vendor has gone out of business so now their devices have become e-waste.

Starting something that's big

It's very hard taking those first steps without spending an inordinate amount of time to understand the technology landscape. This is a big area. There are lots of different technologies, vendors and approaches.

Hopefully our system design series will be a good start for people dipping their toes in this area, or for the more experienced wanting to take their systems to the next level of integration, performance and local control.

Athenars, the name

The name Athenars comes from the ancient Greek goddess Athena. Athena was associated with wisdom and warfare and was a key protector of Greece, especially Athens, and also of freedom and democracy. And so Athenars is an extension of those sentiments by emphasising the importance and value of open source software, open standards and open protocols.

For the rs part of Athenars, this is due to both the Rust and R programming languages being highly regarded and utilised. Rust is preferred for basically anything besides interactive data analysis. R is primarily used for interactive data analysis and its vast graphical and visualisation libraries.

The very first Athenars developed open source software project, RusQTTbom, was written in Rust.

The Journey

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