[HN Gopher] The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
___________________________________________________________________
The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
Author : imartin2k
Score : 233 points
Date : 2021-11-24 11:56 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (staceyoniot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (staceyoniot.com)
| spratzt wrote:
| Everybody I know who installed smart home devices has abandoned
| them; none would recommend them.
|
| The main issues are surprisingly poor reliability and overly
| chatty interfaces.
| dboreham wrote:
| I can remember discussing when household appliances would be
| networked, back in the 1980s. I would never have predicted that
| in 2021 almost every appliance+ would have a networking
| capability, but that said capability would have been added by the
| manufacturer as a way to get the purchaser's email address so
| they could spam them and sell their information.
|
| + I recently bought: an air fryer and a sous vide heater. Both
| support WiFi and apps (the air frier won't even turn on until you
| pair it with the app). Neither provides any meaningful networked
| functionality.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > the air frier won't even turn on until you pair it with the
| app
|
| WTF. take that crap back.
|
| Buying this shit only encourages them to make _more of it_.
| Quit that.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| I have a mechanical timer rebooting my cable modem and wireless
| router every morning.
| VLM wrote:
| Calls it "smart home" describes exclusively "cloud home" along
| with cloud home problems.
|
| Meanwhile I've got homeassistant in a docker container and zwave
| and everything just works.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Protip: Anything labelled "smart" these days is emphatically not.
| jwr wrote:
| I am building my own lighting controls (using Bluetooth Mesh as
| the underlying communications technology), because I don't want
| the madness of IoT.
|
| There is a misconception that building reliable products with a
| full TCP/IP stack and internet-based servers is a good idea. It
| isn't.
|
| We don't have to go back to mechanical devices: there are ways to
| build reliable home automation solutions. Just don't make them
| all internet devices with a bazillion dependencies.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Is there a reason you're not using a standard like Zigbee? It
| has the same use case, non-wifi stable local connectivity to
| control lights or other devices. And it's a standard so you can
| buy components from many vendors.
| fernandies wrote:
| Three weeks ago, three of my devices stopped working -- all for
| different reasons -- and required different steps to fix them.
| This week, one device suddenly start working again, another
| connected after some initial struggles, and a third became so
| intrusive I had to move it to another room. This isn't a device
| or brand problem. It's an industry problem. Smart home products
| look like hardware but are really software, subject to updates
| and changes that will break integrations, contain bugs, and add
| new, unwanted features. But I got help from a software upgrade at
| https://computools.com/consulting/ and all my devices are working
| fine now!
| biophysboy wrote:
| Has anybody else here had "SmartRent" thrust upon their
| apartment? My management recently installed a smart lock on my
| door that I hate. It is an order of magnitude slower than the key
| I used to use, not counting the time it takes for me to pull my
| phone out, unlock it and open the app. And my door is now
| arguably less secure (although I guess lockpicking isn't that
| hard).
|
| Why do apartments do this? Is it marketing? Tax breaks?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Property managers love these things because they never have to
| rekey a lock again, and the tenants can't unilaterally rekey
| them.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I firmly believe that at this moment, Home Assistant is the best
| smart home system out there. No cloud, no vendor lock-in, no
| data, no profiling, no lock-in with licenses and companies
| needing to make deals.
|
| And honestly, that's terrible. Because let's be honest, Home
| Assistant still kind of sucks. Not because of all the hard work
| the developers put into it, but because all of the hacks they
| need to get devices to work with the damn thing. The IKEA smart
| lamp bridge is unreliable, wake on LAN is unreliable, smart
| switches refuse to operate without a cloud connection,
| transmitted data formats are proprietary and unreliable, it all
| just sucks so bad.
|
| There's work being done by FAANG (or would that be MAANG now?) to
| make interoperability between devices better, but knowing these
| companies that probably means the clouds get more integrated with
| each other.
|
| These terrible internet smart devices should pick a protocol like
| MQTT or CoAP or whatever IoT protocol they fancy, and stick it
| proudly on the box. They can have their stupid internet uplink,
| bht they should Just Work if they're only connected locally.
| These things run fully fledged ESP32 chips with more power than
| you could ever need for a plant humidity sensor, just put a basic
| web interface on them that takes a password, a WiFi network and
| an endpoint to talk to. As for alternative protocols, companies
| like Phillips and IKEA should get their shit together already and
| just expose a good, documented API.
|
| Home Automation is a hobby mostly practiced by the technically
| inclined. The more bridges and products that work with your smart
| fridge, the more value your fridge has to consumers.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I don't think the fault is in Home Assistant. Ultimately, if
| the smart home device doesn't cooperate by providing a
| standards-compliant local interface such as MQTT or similar
| there's not much you can do. HA tries to do its best with
| integrations that reverse-engineer proprietary APIs but
| obviously the reliability is variable.
|
| When it comes to devices that do cooperate I've found Home
| Assistant to be extremely reliable. Every update I've applied
| has gone through flawlessly, but the truth is that once
| something is set up you don't really need to update. I've set
| one up for friends with only local devices (WIFI switches and
| relays) and it's been rock-solid for a couple years now. It's
| probably severely outdated now but it works fine and being
| behind a firewall means outside security threats aren't an
| issue.
|
| It's been working perfectly. They don't even know nor care how
| it works behind the scenes, from their perspective light
| switches will toggle their corresponding light, some basic
| automations like turning off lights after 10 minutes in common
| areas such as the hallway and the heating will pause in any
| room that has windows open.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Home Assistant is much better than the big alternatives.
|
| But, yeah, it does suck as a consumer product.
| deepspace wrote:
| It is absolutely the best home control system available, and
| it simultaneously sucks so much that it is nowhere near ready
| for use by non-enthusiasts.
|
| I used to have a meticulously managed 'smart home' with HA,
| but after the system spontaneously self-destructed the fourth
| time, I ran out of motivation to spend ANOTHER weekend
| redoing everything.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| IOT stuff can be great if you follow a couple rules:
|
| 1. Everything must have physical controls. If it has power, it
| must work. For example, if you want to control your lights, don't
| buy light bulbs, buy light switches.
|
| 2. Do not buy Bluetooth or WiFi devices. Use Z-Wave, Zigbee,
| Lutron Caseta, etc. If you must use WiFi, then it needs to be
| open firmware, such as Tasmota or ESPHome.
| Jedd wrote:
| About 10 seconds into reading this I got a 'cute' drop-down box
| that greyed out what I was half-way through reading, and insisted
| that I attend to a 'Get my weekly IoT newsletter' that demanded
| from me an email address, name, and company details.
|
| The unbearable demands of advertising.
|
| EDIT (ADD)
|
| I've installed a couple of ESP32's with humidity / temperature
| gauges, in two of my abodes, that feed into a prometheus ->
| cortex store, so I can then map them on Grafana.
|
| This is considered 'excessive' by the family, but for me it's
| deeply interesting and compelling, and I'll be pushing more of
| them out over the next few months.
|
| But these are _very_ basic devices, with rudimentary access to
| the local network, and no way (or interest) in phoning out to
| anything else beyond my router. This is the ideal scenario for
| these kinds of devices.
| tzs wrote:
| > [...] that feed into a prometheus -> cortex store, so I can
| then map them on Grafana.
|
| I had to Google because I've never heard of any of those. Did I
| find the right ones?
|
| https://prometheus.io/
|
| https://cortexmetrics.io/
|
| https://grafana.com/
|
| Mine is much more primitive. My indoor temperature monitor is
| an ESP8266 that uploads the temperature to a simple PHP page
| that saves it in an sqlite DB. A cron job runs a Perl script
| every few minutes that extract the data for the last hour, 3
| hours, 12 hours, 48 hours, and since the beginning of time and
| uses gnuplot to produce PNG graphs. There's a static page on my
| server that displays those graphs.
|
| My outdoor temperature monitor uses a cheap AcuRite 433 MHz
| indoor/outdoor thermometer I bought. I have an RPi with an RTL-
| SDR attached spying on the communications between the AcuRite
| sensor outside and the AcuRite display inside using rtl_433. A
| script looks at the rtl_433 and finds the AcuRite sensor data
| and puts it in an sqlite DB. I haven't yet gotten around to
| making something to graph it.
|
| The nice thing about that approach is that it was also easy to
| add support for other 433 MHz wireless sensors near me, such as
| the AcuRite fridge/freezer thermometer I have. I can also see a
| few assorted sensors of neighbors (temperature, humidity, soil
| moisture, tire pressure, wind speed, wind direction, rain, and
| a few other random things). If I wanted to it would be easy to
| add them to the DB.
|
| When I made a wireless tipping range gauge recently. I used a
| 433 MHz transmitter module [1] and added a decoder [2] to
| rtl_433 that understands my data stream format. That gets my
| data into the rtl_433 output. No need to futz around with 433
| MHz receiver modules which appear to be a pain in the ass [3].
| An ATTiny85 counts the tips and runs the transmitter. The
| ATTiny85, the transmitter module, a battery holder, an RJ11
| socket because the rain gauge has an RJ11 connector, a board to
| put those things on [4], and a small waterproof case is pretty
| much the complete parts list.
|
| I think I'm going to standardize on this general approach. For
| things that do not have WiFi and only need to report data 433
| MHz modules and custom decoders fro rtl_433 on the RPi. For
| things that do have WiFi, such as any future ESP projects I do,
| they will just use WiFi to talk to the RPi. If anything needs
| to get sent outside of my LAN the RPi will handle it.
|
| The RPi is also currently controlling a space heater in my
| living room, getting connection data from my cable modem
| periodically and recording that in an sqlite DB, and serving a
| simple web page that lets me quickly change inputs and volume
| on my Denon receiver and so I'm already pretty much committed
| to keeping it running all the time.
|
| [1] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10534
|
| [2] Decoders can be specified in a simple text file. Here's the
| one for my rain guage as an example: decoder {
| name = TZS Rain Gauge, modulation = OOK_PWM,
| short = 416, long = 612, reset
| = 1452, gap = 0, tolerance = 0,
| sync = 1484, bits = 96, match
| = {24}0x545a53, get = Tips:@80:{16}, }
|
| That results in this in the rtl_433 output (when set to write
| output in JSON) for my rain guage: {"time" :
| "1637771949", "model" : "TZS Rain Gauge", "count" : 1,
| "num_rows" : 1, "rows" : [{"len" : 96, "data" :
| "545a5304436f756e743a03da", "Tips" : 986}], "codes" :
| ["{96}545a5304436f756e743a03da"]}
|
| [3] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10532
|
| [4] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZYTZ48N/
| mabub24 wrote:
| If you are using uBlock Origin, you can turn on the filter for
| "annoyances" and as far as I can tell it blocks those
| newsletter popups.
| coldpie wrote:
| NoScript is also a godsend for making the Internet usable.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| Those infernal newsletter nags are fucking insufferable. I
| haven't even read the damn article yet and now you're trying to
| get my email address? I generally subscribe with
| "postmaster@nameofsite". I imagine they break accessibility
| helpers too.
|
| As for smart homes, my toe dipping into them so far has been
| largely negative. Biggest mistake I've made is probably mixing
| brands.
|
| If I did it all from scratch I'd:
|
| 1) find a single brand that does everything reliably and stick
| with it. This saves having to have a dozen different apps on my
| phone and somehow tie them all together, not to mention keep
| track of half a dozen different passwords, as the apps tend to
| randomly log me out every so often.
|
| 2) choose a decent brand. I know pretty much everything is made
| in China these days but my experiences with my Yeelink light
| has been much more painful than my experience with Kasa-related
| appliances that seem to just work (most of the time) and don't
| need messing with periodically.
|
| 3) ask tech people I trust on what to buy and how to set it up.
| I don't trust advertising/marketing and many review sites have
| a vested interest in peddling and recommending shit products.
|
| and possibly
|
| 4) wait until it's a more mature market
| whafro wrote:
| Quick story:
|
| On the day we were closing on our 1920s house here in
| Massachusetts, we noticed that the oven wouldn't turn on. Then we
| noticed that it was shut off at the breaker.
|
| We asked the owner why, and he said "oh, the mainboard in the
| oven (a Thermidor) has some issue where it beeps incessantly in
| the middle of the night and wakes us all up - but not a big deal:
| you can just turn it off and on at the breaker and it works just
| fine!" He'd apparently sent the mainboard in multiple times to
| have it serviced, but the problem persisted.
|
| That wasn't a really satisfying answer at the closing table, so
| we pressed to get compensated for the oven we were rather sure
| we'd have to replace.
|
| A few weeks later, as we were pricing out $2000-3000 replacement
| units, I had an idea to look for a smart relay to control the
| oven's dedicated circuit. I managed to find a 40-amp smart switch
| for $90 that I could control with SmartThings.
|
| Now we can use the app or say "Alexa, turn on the oven," the
| switch is activated in the basement, and the oven turns on. At
| midnight, SmartThings turns it off if we haven't already,
| preventing the beeping.
|
| $90 got us where we needed to be, and it's been working great for
| almost five years now.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I assume there was some reason you didn't just remove the
| beeper? Or put a switch inline with it so you could turn it
| off?
| s0rce wrote:
| I did that on a base model APC UPS that would beep when the
| power was interrupted, even briefly. I didn't care to know, I
| just wanted it to work quietly so I de-soldered the beeper,
| problem solved.
| beervirus wrote:
| Oven timers aren't much use if they can't beep. And the
| inline switch is probably more trouble than what they came up
| with.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| Just set an alarm on your phone.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Why are "smart homes" always presented as either all in or all
| out?
|
| We have a handful of Wemo switches that we use to turn on various
| lights, mostly on a sunrise/sunset schedule. They are reasonably
| reliable with no more than about 1 failure to switch in a month.
| My husband sometimes needs to repeat himself if he is using voice
| commands but then, he is a mumbler and I often have to ask him to
| repeat what he says to me. If I needed to switch one without
| voice or app, I can just tap the physical button on the switch.
|
| When we leave town, they continue to switch off/on. I no longer
| have to dig out one of those Daisey-wheel timers and try to
| figure out what is on and what is off.
|
| None of these lights are 'critical' in that, if they don't switch
| now and then, I'm not upset. I don't demand 100% uptime for
| decades at a time. At worst, I might have to unplug and replug in
| the switch to reset it. I don't try to get complicated with them
| and have no particular desire to automate the rest of the house.
|
| I feel like my home is smart enough at this level, not
| particularly fussy, and not a source of stress.
| h2odragon wrote:
| In that same time period, my "plant light" timer, a $15
| mechanical item of a design unmodified since the 1970s, has
| worked flawlessly, requiring attention only when the clocks
| change or my schedule does. It has not informed Google, Amazon,
| or anyone else about its job or anything else in my home. It has
| generated no royalties nor invoked any support or ongoing
| maintenance costs. It has never needed a software upgrade.
|
| "Smart Home" stuff even since the "x10" standards has been a
| solution looking for a problem to solve. A hobby for the
| homeowner who wants to ride the high side of the Laffer curve in
| effort and expense. It could be argued that quiet, flawless
| functioning of these products would be exactly what the customer
| _doesn 't_ want in this product space.
|
| Compare it to model trains: is that hobby focused around having a
| lovely little table set up and watching the trains run? Or is the
| actual focus the torn up mess that's under construction and "we
| can't play with it right now but i can get it assembled to show
| the kids by Tuesday".
| croutonwagon wrote:
| The interesting one was the NWS bulletins as well. I keep a
| weather radio, with battery backup and tuned to my county and
| with just emergent alerts to audibly alarm set on my
| nightstand.
|
| It's worked for...I dunno, a decade maybe. The settings are
| saved on a small SoC peristent memory chip so even if the
| battery dies I don't have to set it back up.
|
| Why mention this. Because a tool like this CANT depend on
| internet connectivity. Usually when it's needed most basic
| power and even internet are either not available or
| intermittent at best. I live in a hurricane prone area that
| also by proxy is sometimes succeptible to weak tornadoes. I
| would NEVER trust that to a "smart device". It's just not
| necessary.
|
| And that's beyond things like smart bulbs kinda baffle me. I
| get it, but I would never have one myself. Similar to things
| like yard services.
|
| I do have some smart things and n my home, like a Honeywell
| thermostat or even some wifi mouse traps that generally save
| uneeddd crawl space trips. But other things like bulbs,
| fridges, even alexas I don't get. But also understand I'm not a
| primary market for that either
| londons_explore wrote:
| Mechanical timers aren't as reliable as you make out.
|
| For example, if you attach loads with high startup or inductive
| currents, like fridges or big motors/fans to them, then they'll
| wear out very fast and typically stop working in a few months.
|
| If they jam for any reason, they'll usually overheat and melt
| all the little plastic gears inside. This happens if you tell
| them to turn on and off every 15 minutes all day...
|
| Both these failure cases sound unlikely, but of perhaps 10
| mechanical timers I have used in my lifetime, I have had 3
| fail. That isn't great really.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| You can buy timers specifically designed to handle high
| current, heaters, motors, etc. True that the typical timer
| you'll find at a department store will be meant for room
| lamps or other light loads.
| gkop wrote:
| Digitizing the timer doesn't improve the reliability of the
| electrical components though.
| coryrc wrote:
| Electronic timers usually use electronic switches, which
| can switch at the zero-crossing, and thus are far more
| robust to startup surges than mechanical relays (though
| without proper heatsinking, cannot handle as much
| continuous current). I once built a product with a relay
| and triac, the latter to handle the startup surges from a
| capacitive load and the former up handle the continuous 12A
| load. People loved it.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| As a counter point, I've lived in places with frequent power
| disruptions and smart timers that use the internet and NTP and
| figure out the time work _so much better_ than the mechanical
| timers.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I hate to be the tiktok pokerface simple solution meme guy,
| but that's a solvable issue by just adding a RTC module, no
| complex internet garbage required.
| mavhc wrote:
| And a battery, and a UI to set the clock, and a thing to
| alter the DST/Time zone
| fragmede wrote:
| And if the country you're in dares change the DST switch-
| over date (aka the US, during the Clinton era), you're
| now in an even _worse_ situation, because you have to
| change it _four_ times a year. Twice because of DST, then
| two more times because your clock is trying to be helpful
| and accommodate DST for you. That or you download the
| firmware, repack it with new tzdata files, and reflash
| the system, which as we all know, all manufacturers
| totally support everywhere, and for free, so doing that
| sounds like an easy technical exercise.
| beardedwizard wrote:
| Ah yes, the trivial to build, ultra simple crystal
| oscillator real time clock. Every hobbyist can just fab
| them right up, or just dig around in the garden to find a
| few.
| sixothree wrote:
| I think he means it's a problem solvable by manufacturers
| that does not involve end user surveillance.
| dralley wrote:
| Or buy them online for $15
|
| https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12708
|
| Following hobbyist-directed instructions that are, also,
| readily available online
|
| https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/embeddedlab786/real-
| tim...
| beardedwizard wrote:
| So, order electronics from the internet for my non smart,
| non internet connected devices. Got it.
| zrobotics wrote:
| Or go to an electronics store, if we need to be snarky
| about it.
| [deleted]
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Or just buy a finished product for the same price as a
| single part: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01G6O28NA
| dralley wrote:
| Exactly. I only mention the hobbyist route because they
| took their comment in that direction.
| [deleted]
| brudgers wrote:
| A realtime clock for a _mechanical_ timer of the type _I
| believe_ the comment alludes based on reference to the 1970
| 's would require stepper motors, solenoids, rigid frames
| and such to turn the dial. Maybe a camera too to determine
| the state of the timer.
|
| ...and hence the fussiness of home automation. Or to put it
| another way, clockworks are inherently so complicated that
| features are literally called "complications." TAANSAFL.
| YMMV.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _would require stepper motors, solenoids, rigid frames
| and such to turn the dial. Maybe a camera too to
| determine the state of the timer._
|
| Huh? Electric analog clocks have small electric motors to
| turn their dials and that's it.
| everdrive wrote:
| I've got the same old-fashioned mechanical timer. I actually
| attached it to one of those "box fan filters" that people talk
| about here from time to time. (So I can filter on a schedule)
| It works perfectly, and I've never had any issues with it. I'm
| thoroughly convinced that if I tried to replace it with a
| "smart" device I'd have no shortage of issues. I like your
| thinking regarding the lack of reliability with these smart
| devices. It's clearly possible to build these sorts of things
| reliably, but for some reason there doesn't seem to be any
| market pressure on companies to do so. If that's the case, then
| consumers must at least partially be to blame.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Whats needed is a much stronger guarantee. For example, "If
| this device _ever_ , even once, shows an error message or
| misbehaves, then we'll give you a full refund, plus $100".
|
| If there was some logo and brand associated with that
| guarantee, consumers would prefer it, just like today some
| only buy organic or freetrade. Then manufacturers would want
| the extra sales generated by that logo/brand, and have a
| massive financial incentive to only apply the logo when the
| product is good enough.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _" If this device ever, even once, shows an error message
| or misbehaves, then we'll give you a full refund, plus
| $100"._
|
| Apple solved this by just never showing error messa...Your
| computer was restarted because of a problem.
| londons_explore wrote:
| To take this further... To mean anything, this guarantee
| needs to apply unconditionally and forever. Even in 50
| years... Even when the manufacturer is bankrupt.
|
| To do that, There could be a "Will Work Guarantee"
| organisation. The organisation will administer refunds to
| all customers with claims, (and combat fraud). Companies
| who want to be members of the scheme must pay into the
| scheme to cover payouts for their own products, plus a
| deposit for future failures of their products if they go
| bankrupt.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Of course this would have to be a Government service,
| maybe just government backed; and would have to set
| barriers to market entry and enforce standards to keep
| obvious trash off the market... "Ministry of Production"
| perhaps?
|
| Can't imagine any downsides.
| ggcdn wrote:
| That's why I like buying things from Costco when I can.
| they have a 100% satisfaction guarantee on most items.
| And I'm willing to bet on the longevity of Costco more
| than any manufacturers of goods.
| tunap wrote:
| Back during the 'Capcitor Plague', when HP lied and
| denied there was a problem, Costco replaced 3 out of
| warranty HP laptops for my clients who bought them there.
| Their customer service, quality meats and they pay their
| employees well, are a few of the reasons why I prefer to
| give them my money.
|
| Related: MSI replaced 15 OoW mainboards without proof of
| purchase, too. They merely asked for serial numbers and
| shipped them out in a timely manner. Can you guess who's
| boards I used exclusively when building towers over the
| last 15 years?
| msla wrote:
| > "If this device ever, even once, shows an error message
| or misbehaves, then we'll give you a full refund, plus
| $100".
|
| Your device stopped working because the server it syncs
| with is gone because the company that owned the server is
| gone.
|
| Who gives you your money now?
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| I think that the point is that if a company puts forward
| such a guarantee they wouldn't release products that
| relied on anything external.
| julianlam wrote:
| There is the UL certification, but I doubt it covers
| software. That's the crux of the issue, isn't, that
| _mechanically_ everything is working fine, but something
| outside of the control of the unit (e.g. spotty wifi,
| internet connectivity issues) cause UX issues. In the end,
| whose fault is it?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Well spotty WiFi and internet connectivity issues
| probably aren't the homeowners fault either...
|
| The fault probably lies with the ISP, the router
| manufacturer, or someone else. Let the gadget
| manufacturers guarantee pay out, and they can try to
| chase the ISP themselves. If the issue doesn't get fixed,
| they can simply say "IoT doorbell (reliability guarantee
| excludes use with Comcast)"
| nradov wrote:
| UL certification is really all about safety, as in a
| software defect won't cause an electrical fire and burn
| your house down. They don't guarantee a good user
| experience.
| op00to wrote:
| I prefer to buy and use stuff with "open"-ish interfaces.
| This is usually more commercial, industrial, or high end,
| but I don't need my request to turn on the light to go to
| some server in AWS.
|
| I like these openish interfaces because when it breaks, I
| can fix it.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup.
|
| I've got both mechanical timers and digital timers. While the
| digital ones have more programming flexibility (e.g., different
| hours on different days), I've also got to relearn the button
| sequences for checking & setting them up every time I use them.
|
| So, what comes out first? The mechanical ones, just set the
| time, put the pins in the on/off times I want, and plug it in.
| I only bother with the digital ones if I need to use more than
| the couple of mechanical ones on hand.
|
| What will I buy next if I need more? Some of these same
| mechanical ones...
|
| Short, simple, and robust tech stacks really are better than
| tall, messy and brittle.
|
| If someone could give me a tall, clean, and reliable stack with
| a clean UI, I'd be all over it, AND happy to pay more. But the
| trend these days is all about programmer convenience and
| "productivity". Great, except when the result is mountains of
| digital crap that results in articles like that one.
| op00to wrote:
| It's absolutely a hobby for me. The hobby isn't in doing, it's
| in doing while obeying the prime directive: lights always
| work... that AND to create something useful that my partner
| actually uses that makes their life better.
|
| Also, I get a kick out of designing the system to withstand the
| usual challenges of staying running in the usual house: power
| outages, kids playing with light switches, etc. Its basically
| got to always work.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > In that same time period, my "plant light" timer, a $15
| mechanical item of a design unmodified since the 1970s, has
| worked flawlessly, requiring attention only when the clocks
| change or my schedule does.
|
| This could just be survivorship bias. If 99% of these plant
| timers broke and were sent to the scrap heap, you would still
| feel like they were 'built better back then' because you're
| only seeing the ones that made it 50 years. Not the ones that
| didn't.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Sure, the standard cheap mechanical timer has DOA's and
| failures because its a cheaply made machanism; but the basic
| electro-mechanical switch on a clock _design_ has been around
| since the 70s.
|
| I find the timers are best replaced after say 5-8yr because
| they're cheap and i dont trust the plastic once it brittles
| up.If you've been running one over say 50% of its rated load
| it might be entertaining to crack it open and see how much
| the conductors have softened.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The key point here is complexity. It's hard to argue
| mechanical timers are more complex than digital ones: in
| the sense of number of key components vs their reliability
| vs their average lifespan.
|
| Good software is simple.
|
| Nothing in the smart home category, as implemented today in
| retail products, is simple.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Totally different comparison. The design of a mechanical
| timer is such that if placed in the appropriate environment
| will last a long time.
|
| Quality may vary between manufacturers, but they are
| fundamentally more reliable. They are simple devices.
|
| Contrast that to my HomeKit switch. It's operation requires
| that a pki based system incorporating WiFi, Bluetooth and
| some cheap SoC work correctly. It's controlled by an Apple
| framework tied to a cloud identity. When it works, it is
| marvelous. I get power metering, switching, timers, etc.
|
| My lights didn't turn on this morning. The only telemetry is
| a red blinking light. I checked my WiFi management app and
| the switch dropped off WiFi around 3 am. Solution:
| unplug/replug. Not good for something that is supposed to
| control security cameras and door locks.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It could also just be the lack of longevity engineering that
| lets people design products that will last a very specific
| time period to save costs. Back then you just had to eyeball
| it and usually it meant leaning on the durable side to be
| safe.
| pkulak wrote:
| I love my smart home stuff. My lights turn on in the morning,
| change color temperature at sunset, and turn off at night.
| Thermostats set to the right temperature/mode at night and in
| the morning depending on the forecast for the day. My garden is
| watered, but not if it's going to rain. When I turn on my TV,
| the lights turn off and the blinds close. Everything shuts down
| and locks when the family leaves, resumes when we come back.
|
| But what's important is that it's all rock solid and 100%
| reliable, because none of it leaves my house. I don't have any
| "cloud" crap. Everything exists on my local network only. Well,
| that's not totally true. I have a Nest thermostat. It's the
| only device that ever gives me trouble, and it took a whole day
| to get automated. Some day I'll replace it.
|
| I'd argue that your plant timer is reliable not because it's
| old and not networked, but because it doesn't have dependencies
| on servers thousands of miles away and isn't reliant on the
| continuing goodwill, solvency and work ethic of the company
| that sold it to you.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >But what's important is that it's all rock solid and 100%
| reliable,
|
| There will come soft rains.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| You describe it as some sort of heaven, and if that's your
| thing then (probably) good for you. It wouldn't be for me, I
| like actually doing things and see these automation as
| overpriced solution looking for problem that generation ago
| mostly didn't exist, while folks lived comparably happier
| lives.
|
| Plus all the time invested into building and maintaining
| these setups can be measured by tons of fun/adventures missed
| in ones live. But that's my perspective, I incline more to
| OP' mindset of needing at most "plant timer".
| pkulak wrote:
| I've really enjoyed every moment of setting it all up. It's
| like Legos, but useful when you're done. I don't really get
| any joy out of walking around to every wall and flipping
| switches. I don't mind it, but I don't enjoy it like you
| do. We just enjoy different things I guess. Nothing wrong
| with that though!
| Filligree wrote:
| What hardware do you use? And how were you able to get hold
| of something that doesn't talk to the cloud? There's nothing
| like that in the shops here.
| giva wrote:
| I use KNX for the "important" lights. KNX is very reliable
| and completely decentralized, so it continues to work evern
| if the server crashes, but it is also very expensive. For
| all the utility lights, I use ZigBee. For irrigation,
| wifi+mqtt. Everything is controlled by openHAB, i need to
| check out HomeAssistant in the near future.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Philips Hue + Apple HomeKit with a dedicated hub (Apple TV
| or HomePod will do fine).
|
| HomeKit stuff can be controlled remotely, but it doesn't
| "talk to the cloud" as much as IFTTT or Samsung SmartThings
| based stuff.
|
| After you hit a wall with the Hue native automations +
| HomeKit, Home Assistant is pretty much the only relevant
| shop in town, maybe enhanced with NodeRED.
| pkulak wrote:
| Most of my stuff is ZWave which is 100% local (big Zooz
| fan, and I hear that Inovelli is just as good). I have a
| bunch of Lutron switches too, and a couple Hue bulbs. Both
| of those will technically phone home, but you can cut off
| their WAN access and they still work just fine. I control
| everything with an old Mac Mini running Home Assistant.
|
| The trick is, before you buy anything, look it up on Home
| Assistant. If its "class" is "local push", you're golden:
|
| https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-
| th...
| stavros wrote:
| I have the same experience as you, but I use Zigbee stuff
| (a bit more future-proof and open, ZWave is proprietary).
| I also love the Sonoff line of devices with Espurna or
| Tasmota. Everything has been rock solid.
| efitz wrote:
| You're lucky or do Zwave in a small way. I spent a lot of
| money converting my last home to zwave and found tons of
| problems with it; incompatibility between the different
| devices from the same manufacturer; inconsistent
| implementation of standards by device type, etc. I am
| having a way better experience with Lutron Caseta
| (different problem is that I ran out of space on a single
| hub at 75 devices).
|
| The other big problem with smart home is that every
| company wants to own the ecosystem. The technical term
| for that is "greedy bastards". It's not cloud; it's cloud
| lock-in that's the problem as I see it. This is the
| source not only of reliability problems but also of
| compatibility and interoperability problems.
|
| When I started on my IoT journey I adopted a hard
| requirement that everything must "fail normal" - I don't
| want a call in the middle of the night for tech support
| while I'm traveling on business, because my family can't
| turn on the lights. Everything in my house fails normal-
| if the cloud or the internet goes away, the house becomes
| a dumb house and you can still turn on/off anything with
| a switch.
| pkulak wrote:
| Agree 100%. If I cut the Ethernet to my router with
| garden sheers, none of my automations run and I'm left
| with a bunch of normal light switches and locks, like any
| other house.
|
| And I have about 20 ZWave devices. They've been super
| reliable, but, it's a small house, so I can't speak for
| what would happen if I quadrupled. My Caseta stuff has
| been just as reliable.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > The other big problem with smart home is that every
| company wants to own the ecosystem
|
| Nah, standards assist everyone. Thus Matter[0] is
| becoming a thing. It will be supported by pretty much
| everyone (Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung SmartThings and
| the Zigbee Alliance).
|
| "Fail normal" is a good thing to keep in mind
| nevertheless.
| enobrev wrote:
| I have a similar experience with ZWave, and definitely
| recommend Inovelli (I'm also a Zooz fan).
|
| I had everything on HA, but at the time they were
| changing _everything_ way too quickly for me. After the
| last time I'd lost my entire Zwave network setup, I
| figured it was a great time to try something now.
|
| So, now it's a single ~1k line javascript file that
| handles all my automation, built atop zwave2mqtt (hoping
| to move to zwavejs soon - maybe over the holiday). It's
| simple, solid, and very easy to maintain.
|
| I could use a UI, and occasionally dream of building one,
| but honestly I generally forget the place is automated.
| It all just sorta works.
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| That is exactly what I want to do for the same reason.
| Any chance you would be willing to share your JS code?
| enobrev wrote:
| I'm not comfortable sharing the whole thing, since it's
| very specific to my house. But I may be able to come up
| with a much lighter version that could be shared.
|
| No idea when I'll find the time, but if you want to email
| me (check my profile), I'll reach out when I find the
| chance to do so.
| garblegarble wrote:
| You can also reflash the firmware on a lot of smart plugs
| if they use ESP32, look up Tasmota.
|
| I use Sonoff plugs, the first thing I do when I get one is
| solder headers on them and reflash their firmware - hey
| presto, no cloud
| rendall wrote:
| check out https://www.home-assistant.io/ Open source. You
| can be as fiddly or stable as you have tolerance for.
| hanklazard wrote:
| I run this too, nothing but positive things to say. I
| update it every once in a while, but I has been rock
| solid for years.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Any tips for those who want a simple stable setup?
| pkulak wrote:
| Lutron Caseta. I personally like ZWave/ZigBee stuff more
| because it's more configurable and open, Lutron cannot be
| broken, even if you try.
| Yajirobe wrote:
| If you are connected to the internet, then your setup is not
| 100% rock solid and reliable.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| You know those "strip of LEDs on a gooseneck" plant lights?
| Even these, low-end as they are, have similar issues. They have
| buttons instead of physical switches. If the power goes out, I
| have to remember what sequence of button-presses gets me a
| twelve-hour timer. And you can't even set it to "always on" and
| control with a mechanical timer. Maddening.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| This is why engineers invented the screwdriver and soldering
| iron :)
|
| It's not hard to just wire shit directly and use an external
| plug to control the light.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Touching on the part about the Alexa: it has become so
| ridiculously over-talkative lately even with "brief mode" enabled
| that I'm apprehensive to even ask it to do anything.
|
| If you are part of the Amazon team: Just Because it _Can_ Talk
| Does Not Mean it Needs To Talk. Especially related to shoving the
| "suggestions" down your throat. You ask to play a song, and the
| "by the way..." covers up the song! I empathize you've built a
| new feature and no one uses it but forcing them to learn via
| interruptions is not the way.
| boringg wrote:
| Oh god I installed Nest fire alarm products throughout my home.
| Such a PAIN. Last 8 months at most before new batteries. Wireless
| updates kick it off the network all the effin time. Wish I could
| get my money back - now I am committed to this garbage product
| for at least 5 more years (if they last).
|
| Worst - incredibly little value generated from nest.
| tillinghast wrote:
| I would be terrified to have a needy, unreliable network of
| "smart" smoke / fire detectors. How is that even remotely
| acceptable?
| boringg wrote:
| They still work when they aren't connected to wifi but they
| send me monthly reports from Nest that they aren't connected
| and my app sends me notification.
|
| Now that I think about it - probably nicer not to have it
| connected to wifi at all.
| sime2009 wrote:
| I try to follow a Battlestar Galactica approach to critical
| infrastructure in my house. There are microcontrollers but they
| are not networked.
|
| I do have some Philips Hue stuff, but it is not on the cloud.
| Some lights use the remote control dimmer thingies, but they are
| attached to walls in convenient places so that the rest of my
| family can't lose them. Also, in places where I'm using a RC
| dimmer on a wall to replace a traditional switch, the old switch
| is easy to access should the communication fail or the dimmer
| runs out of power.
| yholio wrote:
| I think any software engineer with some industry experience will
| absolutely NOT install a device in his home that receives
| automatic updates over the internet and is critical for
| performing some task or using some basic functionality of the
| house; especially one that has a well known, highly stable and
| ergonomic traditional mode of interaction - controlling the
| lights and water, opening the windows and shades etc.
|
| We know from experience that a nebulous interface that can change
| without notice and provides no clear contract is a asking for
| trouble and will break your house "build", so to speak, or worse,
| it will bork at the worst possible moment, when you have
| "clients" over.
|
| In the early years of home electricity, there was a much higher
| chance of getting electrocuted or burning to a crisp, outlets had
| no grounding, insulation and conductors were of a bad quality
| etc. Similarly, the whole field of home automation is in its
| infancy, in a few decades most major mistakes will be made and
| early adopters will work out the kinks out of the technology (and
| find out why it's a bad idea to have an internet connected
| microphone listening in your home at all times).
| driverdan wrote:
| > I think any software engineer with some industry experience
| will absolutely NOT install a device in his home that receives
| automatic updates
|
| Have you ever talked to another SE? The majority I know don't
| even care about privacy and have all kinds of invasive auto
| update devices in their homes (Alexa, Nest, Ring, etc).
| recursive wrote:
| I don't care about privacy that much. But that's also
| unrelated to the reason I will never have a light switch
| that's capable of having software updates.
|
| The functionality I want from a light switch is simple enough
| that it should be able to be built into a finished product.
| More complexity means more failure modes.
| dntrkv wrote:
| Classic HN bubble thinking from OP. I only hear these IoT
| complaints on HN and Twitter. I'm in the same boat as you,
| most devs I know have smart home devices and don't give two
| shits about any privacy issues.
|
| There is a huge disconnect between what you read about online
| and the real world. Even my conspiracy friends that talk
| endlessly about Big Tech and their harvesting of data use all
| the Big Tech things without putting in even the minimal
| amount of effort to protect their data.
| vultour wrote:
| Same, most of the tech people I know have no aversion to
| these things, plus Chrome, Facebook, stock Android or other
| Google products. It makes me sad that the people who should
| be pushing against the death of the free internet don't give
| a shit. At this point I've accepted that Firefox will be
| going away at some point in the not-so-distant future, but
| somebody will have to pry it from my cold dead hands.
| milkytron wrote:
| > Same, most of the tech people I know have no aversion to
| these things, plus Chrome, Facebook, stock Android or other
| Google products.
|
| I have an aversion to all of the above. But when it comes
| to Android, it feels like the options are very limited.
| Either use iOS and only be able to use the device the way
| they want you to (for a steep price), or use Android and be
| tracked like crazy. As for Google products, YouTube is
| lacking competitors, I use YouTube vanced and NewPipe, but
| those aren't available everywhere.
|
| It seems like the options really suck right now if you want
| to participate in the modern world with even some of the
| comforts that are available.
| pimeys wrote:
| With Android you can also get much better privacy by
| trumping most of the Google services, using Firefox with
| Ublock Origin and a system such as Blokada for system
| level adblocker.
|
| With Android if you know what you are doing, you can stop
| a lot of it much better compared to iOS. With Apple the
| defaults are better than Android but many of the options
| for blocking trackers are not available.
| asxd wrote:
| Honestly. I may have just not heard the right sales pitch, but
| at the moment a smart home is a clear case of "if it's not
| broken don't fix it." I'd like my software issues to be minimal
| after 5pm!
|
| Like you allude to, I'm sure there will come a time where the
| effort is appropriately rewarded for a grump like me, and I'm
| grateful there are folks out there working and struggling to
| improve this.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| Blinds which close themselves after sundown is nice. Motion
| controlled lights for the stairs are also nice, especially if
| you don't always have your hands free.
|
| But I'm enjoying messing with Home Assistant anyways, so
| maybe that's not enough to convince you (and that's okay!). I
| did need to two two different zigbee integrations, but now
| it's working and I can buy the ikea stuff and I know it will
| work.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| > I think any software engineer with some industry experience
| will absolutely NOT install a device ...
|
| I'm curious what goes on in one's mind when you write something
| like that. Surely you're aware that people other than yourself
| exist? People with their own thoughts and lives that are
| actually different from yours? Or you genuinely believe that
| there are no people out there who are smarter, more experienced
| and wiser than you that still install smart bulbs or whatever.
| tpush wrote:
| Stating something that's painfully, obviously not the case
| with the confidence of someone who thinks his opinions define
| reality is somewhat of a staple of HN.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Beginning with "I think" is a strong indication that they
| understand alternatives such as "other people think" and
| therefore "other people exist". Someone unaware of such a
| thing would leave that part out, because why specify "I do X"
| if there is nobody else? (Indeed, why write a comment at all
| if one believes nobody else exists?)
| BeetleB wrote:
| > controlling the lights and water, opening the windows and
| shades etc.
|
| Pretty much all smart devices I own work just like their dumb
| counterparts if you need them to: Switches, bulbs, etc. I think
| this fear is overblown.
|
| There's another comment about Hue lights not coming on for 10
| minutes because of a bridge update. This makes no sense to me.
| If you disconnect the actual power to the bulb (via a switch)
| and then restore the power, they'll turn on at full brightness.
| [deleted]
| xvector wrote:
| Cybersecurity engineer here, have worked for FAANG, my entire
| home is automated to the teeth - every single little thing -
| and I'm not concerned about privacy or security because I've
| chosen my products and network firewall rules carefully.
| milkytron wrote:
| > I've chosen my products and network firewall rules
| carefully.
|
| This seems like a lot of effort, and I've tried to do it. But
| even for some products that claim to never phone home, or
| transmit data outside the network, sales people have lied to
| me and then I have to go through the hassle of returning the
| product.
|
| To me, it seems like there is either 0 effort for 0 smart
| home automation, or lots of effort for any smart home
| automation, privacy being equal.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >I'm not concerned about privacy or security because I've
| chosen my products and network firewall rules carefully.
|
| it sounds like you very much are concerned about privacy and
| security
| omni wrote:
| Plenty of software engineers know how to put devices on their
| home network without granting them access to the internet. I
| have some wi-fi bulbs that I do this for, and I can control
| them over the network internally.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The internet is only half the problem. The few iot devices I
| have all hang out on a separate vlan.
| rnkn wrote:
| Why is it that tech people see the villain in sci-fi films and
| think "it would be great to have that in my home"?
| bluGill wrote:
| Because in the movies it actually works 100% of the time
| (unless the hero is exploiting a bug to take down the villain)
| at_a_remove wrote:
| If anything, all of the smart home business I read suggests that
| the products on the market are the triumph of project managers
| and "visioneers" over actual engineers. The designs seem
| especially flaking and almost all of the features product an
| instinctive cringe in me.
| edent wrote:
| A typical "conversation" in my home goes like this:
|
| "Alexa... Turn on the downstairs lights... _sigh_ Alexa, turn on
| all the downstairs lights... _deep sigh_ Alexa, downstairs lights
| one hundred percent. "
|
| Then, if I'm lucky, Alexa will convince the Philips Hue to flick
| on a dozen lights.
|
| When everything works - it is subtle magic. When it doesn't, it's
| obviously a load of poorly debugged JSON parsers with finickity
| wifi connections.
| vidanay wrote:
| You forgot....<swear> I forgot I had to physically turn off the
| lamps last night because Google told me the devices were not
| available when I went to bed.
| todd8 wrote:
| I have an EE degree and a CS degree. I waste an incomprehensible
| portion of my life fussing with the technology that runs in my
| home.
|
| Why is it so hard to configure VLANs for my security cameras
| using the fancy Unifi switches I have? Why isn't there just some
| _documented_ JSON file somewhere that I can edit? (The key word
| in the previous sentence is _documented_ -- I 'm sure there is an
| XML or JSON file somewhere they just don't tell you where it is).
| Why should I have to do configuration of VLANs on my iPhone? And
| why are you hiding the good stuff with a pretty web-based
| interface. I'd like to be able to manage my network even if their
| "cloud" goes down.
|
| Pfsense firewall, no problem. Local ZFS file servers, no problem.
| Getting my upstairs thermostat (required by the the high end
| Lenox AC unit) to work, big problems. Again, why does it require
| me to have a connection to "the cloud" as the AC technicians say.
| Now I need to remember some dumb password to adjust the air
| upstairs on my phone.
|
| Lightning hit a power transformer down the road. Everything in my
| home survived, except the fancy video security night-light motion
| detecting "cloud" connected doorbell. So now I have two wires
| sticking out of the wall by my front door with a big note on the
| door that says "Doorbell broken, please knock". It turns out that
| works pretty well.
|
| Thinking it was maybe time to declare technology bankruptcy and
| start over, my spouse and I looked at a few homes for sale. In
| one, we couldn't hear one another because the "background" music
| was so loud. We wandered around looking for a way to turn it
| down; It emanated from speakers around the house and neither the
| agent nor us could figure out how to silence the infernal music.
| Did I have to shout out the magic word, like "Alexa" or "Hey
| Google" or was there a Sonos remote hidden under a cushion--who
| knows.
|
| I've installed garage door openers myself, but that was before
| cell phones. Now, I can't get the openers coordinated with my
| family's cars. The cars have their own distinct button
| programming protocols quite tricky to manage. Its a bit like
| learning how to be a courtroom stenographer that types on the
| funny corded keyboard. A neighbor with an engineering degree
| claims to have figured out how to program the street's gate
| opener to his car, but my MB and Subaru have thwarted my attempts
| to keep up with him.
|
| I'm on my third sprinkler controller. The first had a big
| rotating switch with ambiguous buttons scattered around and a
| cryptic page of instructions on the inside of its cover:
| virtually impossible to figure out. Where were the man pages when
| I needed them. I replaced it with a "modern" sprinkler
| controller. It was, naturally, "cloud" connected, so the first
| step was to climb around in the 120 degree attic dragging cat6
| and then install a POE wifi access point in the garage. I
| foolishly said to myself, "Now I can look forward to using an
| iPhone app to control my sprinkler." It lasted about a year
| before I noticed a patches of dead grass.
|
| I figured that maybe I just needed professional help with the
| sprinkler controller (and I was busy inside because my spouse was
| complaining about all the wires everywhere--she didn't understand
| that it takes time to repair a doorbell from the future and run
| new cat6). The professional irrigation guy was great, but he said
| I needed a new sprinkler controller. Now, he informed me, I would
| be able to control my sprinklers with my iPhone, cool, I just
| need to figure out which app I'm supposed to use! He needed my
| wifi password of course so he could work on the controller when I
| wasn't home. No problem, I thought. I'll set up a separate VLAN
| for IOT (internet of things) and configure it via my Pfsense
| firewall to be isolated from my home's higher security subnets.
| At this point, I'm back at paragraph two.
| jimpudar wrote:
| Sounds like you would probably like the EdgeSwitch line of
| products better than Unifi. Cheaper, faster, and easier to
| manage if you are trying to do something specific.
| todd8 wrote:
| I was thinking about trying EnGenius or even Cisco next, but
| I'd like to stay within the Unifi universe because of my
| investment in wifi access points and video cameras. I should
| definitely investigate the edgeswitch line! I sort of ignored
| them thinking that they were last generation, but I'm going
| to take a look.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Just keep away from unifi. I asked a similar question and was
| told "Buy Cisco." as you can configure most of their gear via
| ssh. You get what you pay for.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Mikrotik is another good budget option. And of course if you
| have the hardware for it (a old PC with two or more network
| cards) then OpenWRT (or PfSense, though never used it so
| can't vouch for it) will work just as well and last virtually
| forever.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| Haven't seen a legit first world problems comment in awhile
| that wasn't self-aware. Security cameras, what are you living
| in the purge? Sprinklers, get rid of your gross lawn dude?
| Luxury to just shop for a new house, nobody cares.
| mrandish wrote:
| I just built a vacation home from the ground up and specced the
| "smart" features myself and did so very carefully. I've learned
| the hard way because I was already "orphaned" when I bought my
| current primary residence which had a high-end 'state-of-the-art'
| home automation system that was designed into the walls by the
| original owner. Unfortunately, it was cutting-edge tech for 2001.
| The original manufacturer of the system as well as the local
| dealer/installer both changed owners and product lines multiple
| times and were out of business over a decade ago.
|
| Fortunately, the hardware was pretty well-designed industrial
| grade gear consisting of cards mounted to back plane slots inside
| wall-mounted racks in the basement and I like working on 8-bit
| era arcade and pinball machines which shares many similarities.
| The saving grace is that the system is _just_ old enough to
| predate being internet-connected, so the firmware is in EEPROM
| and was designed to stand alone forever if necessary.
|
| In my new place I was determined to avoid the same issues 25
| years down the road so I've selected devices that run open source
| firmware on widely available, multi-source commodity hardware
| using long-lived open protocols. For example, the 62 in-wall
| dimmer switches have ESP8266 boards
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266) and I installed the
| mature Tasmota open-source firmware
| (https://tasmota.github.io/docs/) in them so they don't require
| cloud connection or try to phone home. They function normally as
| light switches with no connection of any kind but can be
| optionally controlled via wifi by a Raspberry Pi 4 running Home
| Assistant open-source software which hosts modular integrations
| with hundreds of different devices, protocols and standards.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think your solution is good but paranoid in the wrong areas.
| You're probably gonna get bit by 25 years from now is the
| dependency on current gen Wi-Fi. The thing you have to own is
| the transport layer and all the devices that directly interface
| with it. Then all you will ever need to replace is the bridge
| to your "control plane" -- apps, HomeAssistant. The golden
| solution (for me) is RF. 100 years from now you will still be
| able to find trancievers and the software to use it. It
| penetrates walls effortlessly and light switches don't need
| high bandwidth. Best part is they're super cheap.
|
| Better living through 1900s tech. You can own the whole stack,
| have it be self-contained, never need to update. No trillion
| dollar corporation is gonna get distracted and say that Wi-Fi
| 420.69x-qwerty is so last year and force you to change anything
| other than the one little segment of your stack.
| mrandish wrote:
| I actually agree with your assessment and did think about the
| issue you mention. I chose this imperfect set of trade-offs
| because I didn't want to DIY in-wall fixtures and, after
| reviewing the current tech and market and which "open"
| standards were being developed, I decided to go with an
| inexpensive shorter-term solution (~4 to 8 years). The dimmer
| switches are only $15 each delivered from Amazon
| (https://smile.amazon.com/Dimmer-Martin-Jerry-Compatible-
| Neut...) and under Tasmota are highly configurable to the
| extent of being able to communicate in a switch-to-switch
| private mesh.
|
| Since I had to commit to hardware six months ago, I knew the
| kind of longer-term hardware I'd really prefer didn't quite
| exist yet - at least not at the multi-vendor, commodity-cost
| level. There are some interesting high-end, proprietary,
| single-source products as well as some cool experimental DIY
| & low-volume kit-type designs, using stuff like touchscreen
| displays and ESP32-type CPUs. I think this kind of flexible
| display/interaction end-point will be the most likely next
| inflection point but it will first need to go through the
| early-adopter Darwinian process sorts and then come down the
| price-curve to reach Shenzen-container, multi-vendor
| commodity pricing.
|
| My choices were to either
|
| A. Spend too much now making an early bet on something
| available today that probably wouldn't be a longer-term
| keeper.
|
| B. Go with a traditional "dumb" dimmer for $6.50 each and
| upgrade in a few years.
|
| C. Pay $15 each today on a shorter-term, standard-sized,
| replaceable "smart" solution that can fall back to a
| dedicated wifi subnet for control or, worst-case, be a stand-
| alone dimmer.
|
| I decided to go with C. While I agree with your point that
| the wireless protocol world will eventually move on, I
| suspect that wifi as a protocol is so ubiquitous, so standard
| and so cheap that some form of backward compatibility may
| survive for decades through bridge devices. A likely
| contender for the next big multi-vendor standard in home
| automation is likely to be the ChIP-based standard being
| pushed by Google, Samsung, Apple and a couple hundred other
| companies. The standard has been finalized and the wireless
| will be based on both wifi and Zigbee (2.4ghz and 900 Mhz) as
| a basic required element, so there's a fair chance my current
| cheap "Shenzen-specials" will be adaptable through firmware
| since the vast majority of in-wall wireless stuff installed
| today is based on wifi or Zigbee. It's okay if they aren't
| because in my mind they are a short-term disposable solution
| anyway.
| est31 wrote:
| I put wi-fi, at least the earlier generations, up there are
| the list of consumer technology that will _always_ be
| supported somehow, simply due to its extreme popularity. I
| can still buy floppy drives even though they became outdated
| decades ago, just as I can buy serial ports. USB-A will be up
| there as well, as will wi-fi and bluetooth, as long as
| governments don 't ban wi-fi/bluetooth devices.
|
| Wi-Fi runs in unregulated spectrum, which means that no
| operator has to pay lots of money to governments in order to
| use the spectrum. Contrast this to 2G and 3G which network
| operators over the world turn off so that they can deploy the
| more efficient 5G, which one day too will likely be
| deprecated in favour of something even better.
|
| Multiple wi-fi networks can coexist. In fact, wi-fi already
| shares its spectrum with bluetooth and probably a whole range
| of other applications. Even if a company from say cupertino
| thinks that Wi-Fi is outdated, the spectrum will remain
| unregulated, and you will likely have some way to bridge from
| whatever technology the cupertino devices use to that
| technology (or well maybe I'm a bit too optimist, that
| cupertino company has figured out tons of ways to lock you in
| lol).
| mrandish wrote:
| > I put wi-fi, at least the earlier generations, up there
| are the list of consumer technology that will always be
| supported somehow
|
| I agree with you about wifi. In fact, as you were posting,
| I was writing my reply (here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29335111) saying much
| the same. I've been observing the evolution of tech
| professionally now for over 40 years and as a serial
| entrepreneur making risky bets on uncertain outcomes with
| the harsh (yet instructive) feedback of putting my own
| money and livelihood on the line each time. There are a few
| tech standards that become so ubiquitous and accepted that
| they reach the longevity and influence of Roman chariot
| wheel widths (which many anthropologists believe influenced
| the gauge of modern railroads). Various forms of early wifi
| (ie 802.11b) and various flavors and bitrates of
| RS-232-type serial signaling are two examples. I still have
| a couple of 802.11b wifi devices running on a sub-net that
| are ~20 years old and I still network with devices over 20
| years old through Cat5 signaling with / RJ45 connectors.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I am remodeling my house and opted to go without any smart
| outlets, lights, or even USB A or C outlets. The premium that is
| charged for these devices are not worth the very limited benefit
| and I imagine they will very quickly reach obsolescence unlike
| the simple outlet and light switch. I had some plug in smart
| outlets and switches which were a necessity at my last apartment
| - there were no lights in some rooms so you needed a way to turn
| things on and off. It worked fine but I realized that speaking to
| your lights has no meaningful advantage and one color is good
| enough.
|
| That said I am interested in doing things with home assistant
| with a raspberry pi - but building it permanently into my home is
| not in the cards. I doubt a future home owner is going to love my
| cobbled together security system, but they also would not love a
| house that comes with a service contract or sends videos of their
| family to the cloud.
| fredley wrote:
| Nobody wanted a smart home. It does not solve any significant
| need in anybody's life except maybe those with reduced mobility
| or other impairments. Anything a smart home does beyond a very
| few things are gimmicks that people quickly tire of. We have been
| conditioned to _think_ we want a smart home through relentless
| advertising, bundling smart home items with other purchases, and
| other tricks. It is madness.
| julianlam wrote:
| I once had a passing interest in smart lights and outlets. I
| thought the idea of controlling all of my lights with my
| smartphone was the neatest idea ever.
|
| I then happened upon an article that reviewed a specific smart
| home hub, and their trouble with the associated smart devices. In
| one case, his smart devices kept disconnecting, necessitating him
| to have to get out the ladder and crawl along a narrow crawlspace
| in order to access said light bulb so a reset could be carried
| out.
|
| Imagine having to do that a couple times a month... Multiplied by
| however many bulbs you have.
|
| I'll take a dumb red and black wire, thanks.
| bluGill wrote:
| With the price of copper going up I'm starting to think
| everything will become smart just because it is cheaper to wire
| houses with thinner wires and smart switches. Hopefully things
| "just work" though.
| prepend wrote:
| I've become annoyed with "smart home" because the reliability is
| so bad. About 20% of the time the light doesn't turn on or off.
|
| I've used Alexa with Feit and Phillips Hue for about 4 years and
| Apple HomePod for about a year.
|
| At least once a day, I get an error message like "Oops, I had a
| problem with that." Apple seems worse about this. It sometimes
| works by calling the other with the same command. It always works
| when using the app on my phone.
|
| I expect 100% reliability. The same as my light switch. The light
| switch works every time.
|
| I also don't like how chatty they are. I can't turn off the voice
| confirmations with Apple. I don't want it to tell me that it
| turned on the lights.
|
| I laugh imagining a Star Trek episode where the computer responds
| as shittily as our current state of smart homes.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| I had reliability issues with Philips due to memory limits of
| their hub. It becomes slow and less reliable above about 50
| devices. That sounds like a lot, but every light switch and
| motion sensor is also a device. So in a medium sized house you
| exceed that limit.
|
| The hardware however is very good. Replacing the hub with
| zigbee2mqtt and a good USB Zigbee transmitter solves the
| issues.
| sharperguy wrote:
| My Nanoleaf works without even connecting it to the wifi. I just
| turn it on and off by unplugging it and plugging it in again. I
| dunno why I would want anything else.
| robotmay wrote:
| I've had a lot of success with z-wave devices in my home, hooked
| into Home Assistant. They seem more resilient than zigbee (and
| much more reliable than any of the bespoke wifi stuff) and are
| largely all interoperable. I've got a bunch of z-wave devices
| like plugs and thermostats, but it comes at a high cost.
|
| For lights I do use zigbee ones just because they're cheaper, but
| my Hue and IKEA mix do have communication issues sometimes (I
| have them both on a Deconz stick attached to my server).
|
| But all of this relies on Home Assistant. I honestly can't
| imagine trying to use smart home devices as a "normal" consumer,
| relying on the software of specific companies. They're all
| largely terrible walled gardens, and I'm constantly surprised by
| how bad they actually are.
| icoder wrote:
| Comparable here, using mostly Zigbee (Hue, IKEA, Xiaomi and
| others) with Deconz RaspBee, which works great, although I do
| see communication issues from time to time. I have Zigbee
| lights and door/temp/motion sensors. I added Shelly modules
| behind my 'normal looking' wall switches on a local MQTT. This
| all comes together in a local NodeRED (on a Pi that also
| contains the RaspBee and runs the Deconz software and MQTT
| server). I use a few plugins heavily for input / output (MQTT,
| Deconz, etc), but I've got quite a few (reusable) function
| nodes as well with my own code.
|
| Like you said, I can't see a 'normal' consumer do something
| comparable, locally without a technical background. It's all
| too fragmented, closed, clouded.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the
| Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My
| smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands
| via alexa! I love the future!_
|
| > _Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I
| own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot
| it if it ever makes an unexpected noise._
|
| -- https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L
| bananabat wrote:
| Bit of a gadget addict and one of my "one of these days"
| aspirations is automating everything in the house. I wish I were
| a electronics/robotics expert so that I could DIY all of that and
| maybe one day, I'll learn enough.
|
| One thing I've noticed though, just from using off-the-shelf
| "smart" stuff, that you can be at a point where you've simply
| swapped the management of physical repetitive to-do's around the
| house (light switches, locks, etc.) with the management of the
| devices that manage the physical repetitive to-dos's.
|
| Does that extra layer of abstraction deliver on promised
| efficiencies? I don't know yet. But I've gotten in the habit of
| standing in the middle of the room, repeating misunderstood voice
| commands when I could've accomplished the same task twice over
| and in less time by just moving my ass.
| jaywalk wrote:
| The only two things in my smart home that require Internet access
| are my Ring doorbell and Nest thermostat. Everything else is
| either using non-WiFi RF (Z-wave or Zigbee) or uses WiFi but is
| fully controllable over the LAN and any optional cloud
| connectivity is disabled. Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi
| automated and ties it all together.
|
| Obviously that is a far cry from "plug it in, download an app, go
| through the setup, and it works" but it _actually works_ and is
| rock solid.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Amazon's eternally parochial Alexa team has just recently
| rendered my Rainbow Echo Dot useless, by updating it to demand a
| kids profile, in a country where Amazon does not support kids
| profiles, and despite it having worked for years prior across
| four continents.
|
| There never was a more apt term coined for all of this than
| "Internet of Shit".
| 123pie123 wrote:
| I love programming ESP32 arduinos - connecting stuff up.
|
| but I will never make my home 'smart' - not with closed or open
| sourced.
|
| My standard way of thinking is - can I help someone in my family
| to fix it or replace it, if it was to go wrong over the phone ...
| whilst I'm out drinking and drunk.
|
| Because given enough time this seems to pop up again and again
| with anything in the house - and I do not go out drinking often
| (before someone asks)
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Some cheap oversized relays that activate with a small delay to
| each other would make turning on lights much more dramatic.
| Also a random function for when you watch horror movies or want
| to get rid of guests.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| What I'd really like to see is proper, cheap(ish) PoE IoT
| devices. I _don 't_ need everything to be wifi, I'd like to just
| run standard cable to everything, all on a secure common network,
| with power over the same cable.
|
| But PoE negotiation (chips) are apparently expensive, and eth
| chips more expensive than an esp.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Actually, maybe here's a (custom) solution:
|
| Run mains wires to an enclosure with one of these:
|
| https://www.olimex.com/Products/AVR/Development/AVR-IO-M16/
|
| And controlled & powered (the mcu, not the relays) via this:
|
| https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-POE-ISO/open...
|
| Hence avoiding a separate esp board/mcu for _every_ switch
| /device, and just using a single relay board for 4 at a time.
|
| Still a bit of a pain to drag mains to one location, might be
| better if this was individual relay boards with equipment wire
| running to each..
| Havoc wrote:
| This is why I stick to the /r/selfhosted flavour of smart homes.
|
| I'm OK with some challenges, but I want to be able to
| troubleshoot it myself and understand what is happening. DIY also
| helps me learn (esp32 etc).
|
| Alexa & friends are mystery boxes of black magic. That doesn't
| tick any of my boxes
| vnxli wrote:
| This is entirely on the author. Sure these vendors make awful
| products and poorly maintain them - but nobody is forcing anyone
| to buy them or integrate them into their house. I have yet to
| hear, or especially see, these devices make anybody's life easier
| than doing the task manually.
|
| I never think about light in my home, I flip the switch if I need
| it - lights seem like such a chore to my friends who have to
| issue commands to a speaker and that's one of the few things this
| tech is supposed to be good at
|
| Good technology gets out of the way and let's the user do or be
| or experience something. This is the opposite
| ghaff wrote:
| In fairness, the main living area light at my brother's place
| are scattered across a bunch of switches in different places. I
| could see being tempted to have all on and all off voice
| commands or other central control.
|
| My house is a lot simpler. I have voice command for one light
| that doesn't have a switch. Used to use wireless X10.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| We are talking about someone who spent a thousand dollars on
| glowing hexagonal tiles that have a shitty wood pattern
| silkscreened on them.
|
| If she'd done a 5 minute google search like I just did, she
| would have seen several reviews describing them as being very
| buggy.
| input_sh wrote:
| > I have yet to hear, or especially see, these devices make
| anybody's life easier than doing the task manually.
|
| Let's fix that, shall we? I have a Philips Hue system and also
| a physical switch[0] that I can move around. In my hallway and
| my kitchen (high traffic rooms) lights turn on via motion
| detection, making it absolutely unnecessary to ever turn touch
| a physical plug (with my wet hands after washing the dishes for
| example). I'm also not blinded by the lights when going to the
| toilet in the middle of the night. I sync them to my TV (and
| two LED strips on its sides) while watching a movie for a more
| immersive experience. And I also gradually dim the lights and
| shut them down in the evenings if tomorrow is a work day,
| giving me a visual cue that I should go to bed. And it works
| via local network, flaky Internet doesn't affect a thing. I've
| never plugged a mic/speaker to it and I still absolutely love
| it.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I've been definitely burned by other types
| of IoT appliances, but smart lights are awesome. More expensive
| investment than non-smart ones for sure and whether that price
| is justified is up to you, but in my 3-4 years of using them I
| have yet to change a single bulb or a battery in a motion
| detector / switch.
|
| https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-dimmer-switch--lates...
| u10242 wrote:
| This setup really sounds great and very involved.
|
| But how do you turn the lights off again? Timeout? Not
| detecting any motion? Also, do you have any pets?
|
| As for dimming the lights, I'm sure it looks impressive and
| also dramatic. But I've been able to go to bed in time for
| more than 40 years just fine. Also, what if you do want to
| stay up later?
|
| Which, I think, is the gist of the first comment: You can do
| all these things, but they don't improve the current status
| and thus mostly serve as recreational activity.
| thinkloop wrote:
| Turning off the lights is a big problem. You need to
| introduce presence detection, which is more than motion -
| people are very still when watching a movie or reading a
| book or working at their desk. That's when you have to
| introduce phone detection or heat detection or other
| sensors that need to be processed and integrated exploding
| the complexity.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| [0] is an electronic switch, not a physical switch. A
| physical switch is hard-wired into the wall and you
| physically _switch_ the circuit open or closed.
| maccard wrote:
| > I never think about light in my home, I flip the switch if I
| need it - lights seem like such a chore to my friends who have
| to issue commands to a speaker and that's one of the few things
| this tech is supposed to be good at
|
| Pre-covid we used to leave the dog at home during the day (I
| now WFH so not an issue), but it gets dark at 3:30 here during
| the winter, meaning the dog is stuck sitting in the dark for 2
| hours. Philips Hue has routines for turning on lamps 30 minutes
| before sunset meaning the dog gets to chill out and stare out
| the window for an hour longer. The bulbs also sync with TVs and
| devices that will adjust the lighting for tasks/bedtime/movie
| time.
|
| We use hue bulbs in our bedside lamps, and they sync (pretty
| much out of the box) to alarms in google calendar so 30 minutes
| before "up" time the lamps come on and fade up to full
| brightness when my alarm goes off. It happens 5 days a week,
| and correctly knows when I'm OOO to not bother waking me. The
| lights can also do holiday modes so no more giving keys to my
| neighbour to ask them to turn on lights for me.
|
| Heating is even more key - ever go away for a week and forget
| to turn down the thermostat? I know I have, and we've just
| wasted a weeks worth of heating the house to comfortable human
| temperature rather than just keeping it from freezing. Modern
| smart heating systems have thermostats in each TRV so you can
| adjust the temperature in one room rather than the entire house
| (where right now I am using one room), and can be controlled on
| timers, and deactivated remotely.
|
| EDIT: I do want to say that the devices (particularly the voice
| interface to them) is not perfect, however I would estimate our
| failure rate at once every couple of days rather than every
| time we try to turn on the lights, and as others have mentioned
| here it needs to have "dumb" fallbacks - I need to be able to
| turn off the lights with a switch, or walk to the thermostat
| and adjust it otherwise it just doesn't work.
| ghaff wrote:
| The flip side with the heat is that I can't help but feel I'm
| introducing another failure mode into my heating system with
| an internet connected smart thermostat which is a whole lot
| more of a problem in a sub freezing area than forgetting to
| turn the thermostat down.
| maccard wrote:
| You're not wrong - you are introducing complexity here, and
| you need to be aware of the failure modes (and the fallback
| paths available to you).
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| > Philips Hue has routines for turning on lamps 30 minutes
| before sunset
|
| FWIW, mechanical timers have been able to do this for
| decades.
|
| 20+ years ago I had a mechanical timer that turned on my
| porch lights at sunset and off at 11pm. You just needed to
| configure your latitude so it knew when sunset was.
| maccard wrote:
| I found a honeywell timer on amazon, which requires being
| hard wired. There is no way my landlord would have let me
| do electrical work in my previous property, and getting an
| electrician out for a "simple" job like that is ~$80 plus
| $75 for the timer. A hue bridge + bulb is ~$75 and I can
| use my existing lamps too.
|
| > You just needed to configure your latitude so it knew
| when sunset was.
|
| Having an electrician hard wire an extra switch for each
| lamp, configuring latitude and individual timers
| (presumably they don't all work off the same trigger so if
| you want to change them from 30m before to an hour before,
| or 15m after you have to update them all), managing DST...
| That doesn't sound massively simple to be be honest.
|
| > mechanical timers have been able to do this for decades.
|
| I don't think people are claiming that smart homes are
| allowing for things that were never physically possible
| before; I'm certainly not, but it is definitely more
| convenient.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I'd love to see one of these work in Finland :)
|
| Our sunset times vary from "sun never comes up" to "sun
| never goes down".
|
| Practically any kind of sunset-based automation is
| completely useless for anything over here except maybe for
| some decorative outdoor lights.
| mikestew wrote:
| _You just needed to configure your latitude so it knew when
| sunset was._
|
| Mechanical timers have never "been able to do this". Sunset
| time changes on a daily basis. In Seattle that can be
| anywhere from 4:15 to 9:30 p. m. That's fine if one finds
| +/- 2.5 hours acceptable. Others have more precise needs.
| JshWright wrote:
| Wouldn't it also need to know the date? Around here sunset
| ranges from 4:30pm to 9pm, depending on the time of year.
| XorNot wrote:
| I've been on a minor hunt lately to see if I can find smart home
| light control which makes sense, or some technologies to put
| together which would.
|
| The basic problem I've had is I've been dealing with adding new
| light switches in my house through old wall chases - this is
| miserable (or impossible). But in 2021, why do I need to pull 3+
| wires to a light switch to get a light to control (and god help
| you if you need a dual 2-way switch - up to 6). Why can't I just
| run live/neutral?
|
| The other problem is the excessive use of wifi: we have powerline
| ethernet, why can't communications be implemented as a low
| bandwidth wired protocol over a wiring system I already have?
|
| My ideal IoT home automation would solve both of these: no wifi,
| use powerline ethernet (with a bridge unit somewhere for the
| automation), and let me go all in on decoupled switches and
| lighting. And then whoever does this, target selling it straight
| to electricians because we'd be talking huge cost-savings and
| simplifications for wiring up new builds, and retrofits could be
| handled the same.
|
| Let me fully separate my control points and let's just commit to
| getting the basic technology right - if my car can be CANbus
| wired, why can't my house?
| wayoutthere wrote:
| If anyone is looking for a hacker-friendly IoT platform, I would
| suggest the Universal Devices ISY994 paired with Insteon dimmers
| and outlets. Sure, the platform and tech is ancient (best admin
| console is a Java applet) but it honestly works great and
| combines power line networking with a couple wireless protocols
| to seamlessly mesh your devices together. You own the device --
| while there is a license for updates, the device will work fine
| without them (and it's a mature product so it's mostly just new
| features).
|
| The functionality can be controlled via scripting, and there are
| optional links to services like Alexa that give you a lot of
| control over what words will trigger scenes or scripts. Most of
| all, it just works -- the device and software aren't super
| complex, it's just a triggering system that programs your non-IP
| devices and adds support for additional triggers and multiple
| scenes.
|
| (I have no connection to this company other than as a pretty
| happy user).
| xutopia wrote:
| I paid an appalling amount of money to set myself up with Philips
| Hue. Their application is so rigid I can't make it do what I
| want. They have automation but they only allow you to turn on
| your lights when you come home and turn them off when you
| leave... I'd like some lights on when I leave thank you but their
| app doesn't allow for that very simple use case!
| blue_cookeh wrote:
| Honestly this most infuriating thing about this entire situation
| is that the devices we have the most issues with are actually the
| ones provided by big name companies (specifically issues with
| Google and TP-Link in our setup).
|
| I try my hardest to stick to Zigbee and Z-Wave devices wherever
| possible which has lead me to purchase devices like Samsung's
| SmartThings plug, or Sonoff Minis etc that I can connect straight
| to a Zigbee/Z-Wave dongle to expose them to HomeAssistant. This
| setup is actually very reliable and the only downtime we've had
| over nearly three years is when I've pulled the HA virtual
| machine down to do updates - I think we're up to about 40 or 50
| zigbee devices in our network now that all work flawlessly and
| locally.
|
| So what about Google and TP-Link? Google Home is becoming chatty
| and has started to regularly mishear commands, or it will say a
| device is unavailable but still perform the action successfully.
| TP-Link pushed a silent update out to the couple of smart plugs
| we had from them that disabled functionality that exposed them to
| Home Assistant - rendering them a complete waste of time and
| money.
|
| It's mind boggling to me that the (m/b/tr)illion dollar companies
| of the world are the ones fucking up my smart home. It annoys me
| enough that I would no longer purchase hardware from any company
| that uses WiFi or relies on the cloud for "smart" home stuff.
| pornel wrote:
| I've bought into the Apple HomeKit ecosystem, paying premium
| for all the devices involved, hoping that Apples costly
| certification process filters out the junk, but no: it's the
| same crap.
|
| Devices are "Updating..." for minutes when I want to switch
| them on. Once a month something gets stuck as "Not responding"
| and I have to delete it, re-add it, and redo from scratch all
| it's configuration and automations.
|
| I've tried Thread that was meant to fix the issues of Wi-Fi
| devices, but the Thread bulbs are the _least_ reliable ones I
| have.
|
| It's all awful, and I'm an idiot sitting in the dark listening
| to Siri making excuses.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| HomeKit is terrible when it comes to handling your device's
| network disconnecting/reconnecting.
|
| When I arrive home it sometimes takes a few tries before
| HomeKit realises that I'm back on the network and starts
| working.
|
| I'm frankly not sure WTF is going on, the bridge is on a
| static IP so it doesn't even have to do the whole
| Bonjour/ZeroConf discovery and can just hit the latest IP it
| saw the bridge at.
|
| Fortunately my main automation is via Home Assistant and
| HomeKit is only used as a UI, so if HomeKit craps out I just
| fire up the Home Assistant web interface or toggle the WiFi a
| couple times.
|
| But if you were looking at HomeKit for a sign of quality I'm
| not sure it's a good idea. The protocol is unnecessarily
| complex - it's good in that it's somewhat documented and
| open-source gateways such as Home Assistant can talk to it as
| a client (so instead of reverse-engineering a proprietary API
| they can just pretend to be a HomeKit client) but using it to
| connect directly to your control devices (phone, Mac, etc) is
| a recipe for disaster.
|
| So if you have HomeKit devices, maybe look into using Home
| Assistant as a gateway. That way HA is talking to all your
| devices (so its network situation never changes and hopefully
| there won't be problems) and then control your devices from
| HA or have it present itself as a HomeKit bridge as well - at
| least your client device will only have to figure out the
| whole network situation with one bridge instead of all of
| your devices separately.
| tzs wrote:
| A few people have mentioned smart bulbs. I have some data that
| might be useful when choosing smart bulbs if dimming ability is
| important to you.
|
| I measured a few in a dark room with the bulb in a desk lamp
| aimed straight down at a lux meter on the desk. The bulb was 41
| cm from the meter.
|
| For each bulb I measured at 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%,
| 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% brightness.
|
| The bulbs I had were a TP-Link white bulb (TPL), a Merkury
| Innovations white bulb (MIW), a Hue white bulb (HW), a Merkury
| Innovations color bulb set to white (MIC), and a Hue color bulb
| which I tested set to cold white (HCW), daylight white (HDW),
| white (HPW), soft white (HSW), and warm white (HWM).
| TPL MIW HW MIC HCW HDW HPW HSW HWW 1%,
| 14, 135, 64, 135, 10, 7, 10, 5, 3 2%, 14,
| 149, 64, 162, 10, 7, 10, 6, 3 3%, 26,
| 162, 65, 170, 11, 8, 11, 6, 4 4%, 43,
| 180, 65, 182, 11, 8, 11, 7, 4 5%, 58,
| 190, 66, 200, 13, 9, 13, 7, 5 10%, 128,
| 246, 77, 255, 20, 15, 20, 12, 8 15%, 196,
| 303, 91, 322, 34, 25, 34, 21, 13 20%, 261,
| 364, 112, 388, 54, 40, 54, 34, 21 25%, 325,
| 428, 143, 451, 74, 67, 74, 46, 29 50%, 630,
| 725, 400, 776, 282, 218, 282, 184, 118 75%, 909,
| 1008, 820, 1099, 650, 483, 650, 410, 263 100%, 1160,
| 1283, 1382, 1408, 1146, 850, 1146, 725, 463
|
| For comparison, I also measured some non-smart bulbs. a Great
| Value 100W equivalent LED measured 2540, a GV 60W equivalent was
| 1255, and a GV 40W equivalent was 881. Two Cree 60W equivalents
| were 1195 and 1085. Finally, some actual incandescent bulbs: 100W
| 2300, 40W 790, 25W 294.
|
| For the smart bulbs the TP-Link and the MI bulbs where the most
| linear. The MI bulbs fit a linear function with R^2 of 0.9997 or
| better, but that function would be 130 at 0 so they aren't very
| good if you want really low light (like a nightlight for when you
| get up to in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom).
|
| The TP-Link is almost as linear (R^2 = 0.9977) and its function
| would be 7 at 0, so it is great for nightlight use.
|
| The Hue bulbs are quite non-linear. The color ones get closer to
| 0 than the TP-Link so make great nightlights. The white one
| doesn't get close to 0 so is disappointing as a low light bulb.
|
| The curve for the Hue lights fits a quadratic polynomial well.
| For example the Hue color set to plain white matches 1168.3 b^2
| -31.431 b + 10.89 (where b is the brightness from 0 to 1) with
| R^2 = 0.9999. Same for that bulb on the other white settings I
| tested. For example set to warm white it matched 464.82 b^2 -
| 3.2729 b + 3.1916 with R^2 = 1.
|
| This raises a question. I believe human perception of brightness
| is not linear. Is it actually better from a perception point of
| view to have a dimming curve that is linear like the TP-Link
| bulb, or a quadratic curve like the Hue bulb?
|
| When considering smart bulbs, check to see what power-on settings
| they have. The Hue bulbs can be set to power on off, power on to
| whatever state they were in when they lost power, or power on to
| any specific color and brightness.
|
| The MI bulbs power on at full brightness. This can be annoying if
| you have one in the room in which you sleep and you get a short
| power loss overnight that normally would not wake you.
|
| If you don't mind that, and not being able to get anywhere near
| as dim is the others, they can be a good deal. They are 3 for
| $15.88 at Walmart for white. A Hue bulb would call $15.88 a down
| payment. (MI color is 2 for $15.88 or 4 for $19.88).
|
| I don't remember what the TP-Link does on power on.
| ubercore wrote:
| I think it's partly about judicious use of products. I had a
| pretty minimal smart home setup -- Google Home, Nest, and Hue. It
| worked 100% of the time, I never had a problem. I get that part
| of the issue being brought up is that it's not 100% for everyone,
| but I see friends having the most issues when they're constantly
| trying new products, and new classes of product. Also, the more
| complicated the behavior, the harder it is to make intuitively
| "smart". Stick to the basics and you can have a pretty good
| experience.
| yalogin wrote:
| Yeah I don't know if I will trust software to do things for me in
| the house. Automation is something I will not use smart systems
| for. I only use them to provide me connectivity so I can control
| them from my phone.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I did my whole house in Lutron's smart switches (close to 50 of
| them), and I think it's good? It's been about 2 years now and I
| really haven't had any issues.
|
| The switches aren't Wi-Fi connected, because Wi-Fi would be an
| awful choice for 50 devices that you only communicate with a few
| times a day. They use their own wireless frequency and
| communicate in a really simple/reliable way to the bridge, which
| is wired to my router and doesn't need an internet connection to
| work.
|
| There's no always-running cloud service, the light switches work
| even when the internet is down (and I can still use the home app
| too in such an event, just no voice control.)
|
| Siri is finicky sometimes, but I'd wager a 97% success rate in
| saying things like "set the scene Evening Downstairs" and "turn
| off all the lights except in the bedroom."
|
| My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to
| switch whole rooms of lights on and off, which makes it so much
| nicer in the basement where I have 18 different lights to turn on
| and I can just hit one switch on my way downstairs and it's fully
| illuminated (no voice command necessary) and I don't have to
| visit 18 light switches to turn them off again.
|
| Home automation tech must be invisible and fall back gracefully,
| and must always be interact-able in a "dumb" way, or else it's
| just playing games IMO.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| >I have 18 different lights to turn on and I can just hit one
| switch on my way downstairs and it's fully illuminated (no
| voice command necessary) and I don't have to visit 18 light
| switches to turn them off again.
|
| In the analog world we'd just wire those 18 lights on a circuit
| controlled by a single switch...
| JshWright wrote:
| Yep, similar story here. I have a couple dozen ZWave switches
| and other devices in my house which have worked great for a few
| years now. I use Home Assistant with a USB ZWave radio. I've
| broken it a couple times while fiddling with it, but it has
| never broken on its own.
|
| I do have a few wifi devices for cases where there is no good
| ZWave option (or the wifi options are just better, like the
| OpenGarage garage door controller).
|
| I really enjoy being able to double tap the "off" position of
| the switch in our bedroom when we turn in for the night and
| have it do all the things (thermostats turned down, doors
| locked, garage doors closed, lights off, etc). Once that script
| finishes it triggers a verification script that double checks
| the status of all other devices and sends a push notification
| to our phones confirming everything was done.
| pydry wrote:
| This is how most home automation brands ought to work but it
| seems that in practice very few do.
|
| Most of them want to proxy all attempts to turn on a light
| switch via AWS. Which is madness.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I installed Homekit compatible Hunter ceiling fans almost a
| year ago and they have worked without issue since. All I had to
| do was scan a QR code to add it to my network. I feel like as
| long as you read reviews, you can stick to the quality stuff
| that works.
| kgin wrote:
| Lutron Caseta is the only 100% reliable smart home system I
| have encountered. It just does not go offline, ever. The cloud
| functionality is completely optional and additional. Your home
| internet AND WiFi can burst into flames and your lights will
| still work.
| freen wrote:
| This.
|
| WiFi is the enemy.
| bobf wrote:
| My experience with Lutron's smart switches and blinds has been
| great. For any new home construction, I would wholeheartedly
| recommend adding a lot more LED lights than any builder would
| normally put in, wiring in smart+motorized blinds, and using
| smart dimmer light switches. The way to avoid fussiness from
| smart home devices is to choose ones that are controllable in
| both the classic ways, like with a switch on the wall and/or
| remote control - and also through an app or by voice with your
| preferred device from Amazon, Apple, or Google.
|
| With Lutron, beyond the things you mentioned, two more of my
| unexpectedly favorite features have been:
|
| 1) being able to add additional wall switches anywhere and
| program them to control any set of lights, without any extra
| electrical wiring (for 3-way or 4-way switches, or controlling
| multiple lighting circuits with one switch)
|
| 2) range-based programming (e.g. automatically turning on
| lights for rooms from the garage to kitchen when you're
| arriving home)
|
| Other devices like smart locks, smart garage doors, water leak
| alarm sensors, and AV equipment have all been useful and
| generally worked well for me. Some of them have been slightly
| fussy, but not as a general rule and certainly not to an
| "unbearable" extent. Overall, they really do make things
| significantly better, at a surprisingly low cost compared to
| the rest of home construction.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| i'm replacing all my caseta and pico with dumb switches. the
| radio bits and the color matching are of utmost quality. the
| ergonomics of these devices however is exceptionally poor, and
| an example of market segmentation. (ra and ra2 provide the
| entire switch as a target).
|
| zwave doesn't come close to the reliability of lutron so dumb
| it shall be
| luckydata wrote:
| Lutron is a shining example of how you do home automation right
| and nobody is taking note.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I was about to say the same thing.
|
| I set up all my non-standard lighting fixtures with Lutron
| Caseta switches, and replaced all the standard bulbs with
| Philips Hue bulbs. They've both been working flawlessly,
| together, with my 3 HomePod Minis for about a year and a half
| now.
|
| It really is a brand thing. Most are bad.
|
| [edit] > My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be
| programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off...
|
| This is my only gripe with the Lutron hardware. The Picos can
| only be used to trigger Lutron devices. They don't integrate
| into HomeKit like the switches do.
|
| This meant I had to go with a bunch of Hue Smart Buttons, which
| do, but have a tendency of falling out of their homes and onto
| the ground.
|
| Was looking at the Hue compatible RunLessWire stuff though. [1]
|
| [1] https://runlesswire.com
| longitudinal93 wrote:
| I just did a whole house with Philips Hue lights and the
| RunLessWire switches. Love the fact that the switches are
| piezo-powered. The downsides to them are the loud click they
| make and that you have to learn how to properly press them
| (with about a 200ms hold) in order to come close to 100%
| reliability.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > you have to learn how to properly press them (with about
| a 200ms hold)
|
| My water filter infuriates me to no end with this. Maybe if
| the switch were polled every 50ms I wouldn't notice it, but
| 200ms is so long for my otherwise patient composure that I
| prefer to drink the water from the tap.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| They're actually not piezo-powered! That's an EnOcean
| switch module, it's generating the energy from a coiled
| wire. Clicking the switch loads up force in a spring
| mechanism and then releases it to move a magnet through the
| coil.
|
| ArsTechnica has a look inside a similar module in the Hue
| Tap.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/gallery-
| dissecting-t...
|
| RunLessWire looks to be selling two variants of them, one
| with the same 2.4 GHz module as above for use with Hue, and
| another version for on/off circuit control, which would be
| 902 MHz EnOcean in the US.
| ev0l wrote:
| I use a couple wall modules that don't plug into anything
| then setup a HomeKit trigger to bridge other systems. You can
| trigger the wall module from a Luton switch and that will
| trigger the HomeKit automation.
|
| The hack is worth it for the reliability of Lutron. The
| Caseta system never fails for me.
| tga wrote:
| Philips Hue lights are sadly not on the same seriousness
| level as the Lutron hardware.
|
| After a time away, I tried to turn on lights with my phone --
| only to be greeted by a message like "There is a mandatory
| update available for your bridge. You can use your system
| again after 10 minutes". I found not being able to turn on
| the lights for 10 minutes because they were installing
| unprompted updates completely unacceptable, so that was my
| last day as a Hue user. I now use a mix of Zigbee bulbs
| controlled with a (stable, offline) zigbee2mqtt gateway.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| One of the challenges is this - on one hand, we have the
| "IoT is notoriously insecure and manufacturers have or
| should have liability" argument, which is valid, and when
| manufacturers do actually release security updates, that
| should be lauded.
|
| And then on the other we have the usability pain like this.
| I'd rather pay a few dollars more for more storage or an
| A/B firmware system so the upgrade can run async and
| minimize interruption.
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| Just don't use wifi. When the only firmware you need to
| update is in the MQTT bridge, the whole problem becomes a
| non-issue.
| timc3 wrote:
| I have two hue bridges ( because I have over 60 lights)
| that have been working for a long time now and I have never
| seen this problem. It's worked flawlessly.
|
| I also have another zigbee dongle with zigbee2mqtt and
| zigbee2mqtt is what gives me problems particularly if the
| power goes out over the house.
| na85 wrote:
| Hahaha, oh my gosh, the future is here and it's awful.
|
| I'm going to stick with my regular old legacy light
| switches and bulbs as long as I possibly can.
| hokumguru wrote:
| Lutron sells a pro bridge for the caseta that exposes the
| Pico over IP. Allows for easy setup with HomeBridge running
| on a raspberry pi.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The thing that I like about the Lutron system is that you can
| try it, with just a single switch or lamp module. Then, if you
| like it, you can buy more.
|
| I previously used a different brand to control my aquarium
| lights and HATED it. When the app randomly made me enter my
| password to turn the lights on, I 1-starred it with a very
| frank, "my old-fashioned light switch doesn't randomly ask me
| to enter my password" in the review.
|
| One complaint that I have about the Lutron system is that they
| don't offer relay-based modules. (The old X10 system did.)
| Aquarium lights run very poorly off of the Lutron modules, so I
| wired up some 120V relays for my aquariums. I also use a Lutron
| module to control an outdoor outlet for holiday lights, and had
| to do the same thing; wire in a high amperage 120V relay into
| the switch.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > One complaint that I have about the Lutron system is that
| they don't offer relay-based modules.
|
| Yes they do, here is the cutsheet: https://www.lutron.com/Tec
| hnicalDocumentLibrary/369-549b_Eng...
|
| This one can switch 5A using a Pico input device.
|
| Just to be clear, _every_ commercial lighting controls line
| has relay modules, it's necessary for occupancy sensing.
| criddell wrote:
| Do you know if they have a simple smart outlet? I want to
| use one with my Christmas tree lights because getting to
| the switch is difficult. I looked on Amazon and didn't see
| anything so I ended up ordering a cheap Refoss device that
| I have very low expectations for.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I came across that a few years ago. I'm not sure why I
| didn't use it. I suspect it's because I wasn't sure if it'd
| work with the hub, or if it was pico-only.
|
| At least as far as controlling the outlet for holiday
| lighting: It is a 15-amp circuit, and I could easily
| anticipate plugging in a power-hungry tool at some time.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| In that case, there's also a 16A version! (16A is 80% of
| 20A) It's only rated for up to 1/2 HP motors. If your
| 120v power tool is over ~10A, you'd want to have the
| power pack trigger a motor-rated line-voltage contactor,
| and that contactor would turn the power on and off.
|
| https://www.lutron.com/ExternalTechnicalDocumentLibrary/A
| L-1...
| gangstead wrote:
| I worked at Lutron my first two years after getting my EE. I
| wasn't on the wireless products but we did do crazy amounts of
| fussing over fall back behaviors and corner cases. We very much
| developed the software with the attitude of hardware: we knew
| what we shipped had to work for years and field updates were
| unacceptable.
|
| I've been gone from Coopersburg for 15 years but I still
| practice the engineering culture I learned there.
|
| Fun fact: I don't know what they do today but when I was there
| it was a long standing tradition that engineers put in some
| time on the customer support phones. That way you get direct
| (and sometimes very unfiltered) feedback from users and their
| expectations on your product and understanding of the
| instructions you wrote. So if you call the 800 number it's not
| going to India and you might get to talk to one of the (lower
| level) engineers that made the product!
| op00to wrote:
| As a customer I can say Lutron engineers totally engaged with
| me over a home assistant bug and helped get it fixed.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Oh hey, Lutron! I interviewed there coming out of college,
| some 10 years ago. I think I drove down from Rochester, iirc.
| Of all the places I interviewed at the time, it's one of the
| only ones where I remember a specific interviewing session
| because it was somewhat unique:
|
| The interview sat across from me and role-played a customer
| calling to complain about a vague issue happening in their
| home. I then had to roleplay asking the customer and various
| internal teams (all played by the interviewer) questions,
| forming hypotheses, running imaginary tests (the interviewer
| would tell me the outcome), and so on. I started from "The
| lights in this room don't work right", then clarified and
| trouble-shot through to the underlying issue, and finally to
| a root cause.
|
| At the time it seemed super weird, but looking back on it
| years later, it was a clear exercise in troubleshooting skill
| - something that remains invaluable in engineering. It's one
| of the only times before or since that I can recall being
| tested on that specifically, even though it comes up all the
| time in my day-to-day job.
|
| From what you describe, this challenges sounds like that was
| emblematic of the culture there. :)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > long standing tradition that engineers put in some time on
| the customer support phones
|
| Before this, the tradition at engineering companies was that
| the "kids fresh out of school" would start in Manufacturing
| or Service so they'd have some experience with the difference
| between design engineering and actually being able to build
| or repair the thing you designed.
|
| It seems that this doesn't happen much anymore.
| karaterobot wrote:
| For a company that sells a product, understanding customers
| is really important, so it makes sense to have new
| employees spend time in customer support. There is no
| faster way to understand what you should be building. The
| only problem I have with it is thinking of exposure to
| customers as a hazing ritual that ends after a certain
| point, after which you never have to deal with them for the
| rest of your career. This should probably be on a rotation!
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Not familiar with Lutron, maybe not so common in Europe?
|
| How do they compare with IKEAs "TRADFRI" offerings?
| volkl48 wrote:
| Not really the same tier of seriousness.
|
| While they've always sold dimmer switches at the store for
| the average homeowner, they're better "known" for commercial
| installations. Think the lighting controls and software to
| manage the lighting for an entire office building, corporate
| campus, museum, etc. The expectation in terms of reliability
| and scalability is a bit different.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > I did my whole house in Lutron's smart switches
|
| Sure, but how do you turn the lights on when the power's out
| and the router is down?
|
| Lrf, V'z wbxvat.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > turn the lights on when the power's out
|
| Well I go start up my backup nuclear reactor in the basement
| of course.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Sure, but how do you turn the lights on when the power 's
| out and the router is down?_
|
| Taking this as joke as one doesn't often turn on lights when
| power's out ...
|
| _But_ I used Caseta in a home with a generator since the
| Lutron light switches and dimmers are physical switches that
| happily work without any smarthome features.
|
| Unplug your hub and they all work except for the ones that
| don't get wired (the ones that are their remote, just stuck
| on a wall).
|
| Pretty much the top selling point of Caseta for me, was
| working like normal switches. Gravy is how much more
| responsive than Hue or similar.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I actually have a natural gas generator that powers the
| majority of the house, and I was happy to see the lights all
| worked fine during an outage when the internet was down along
| with the power. The switches all obviously worked, but the
| Home app worked too so I could continue to set scenes/etc. It
| was quite nice!
| dotancohen wrote:
| Interesting, thank you.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| The Lutron Pico line is really nice, probably because it's a
| commercial grade lighting controls line.
| vailripper wrote:
| Similiar here - we had some older Zigbee / Z-Wave switches that
| were constantly breaking. Switched everything to Lutron, rock
| solid since then. The Pico remotes are incredible - we have
| some mounted in switchplates in places where we wanted 3-way
| switches, but didn't want to tear apart our walls running
| wires. Zero issues.
| skadamat wrote:
| Honestly, smart home tech should embrace local first & end-user-
| programmable-first. I'm waiting for Dynamicland to come to my
| home: https://dynamicland.org/
| dkarl wrote:
| I have a Homepod (short story, I needed a new speaker for the
| kitchen, and I was shopping for security camera at the same time)
| and it has been much more annoying than the simple bluetooth
| speaker that it replaced. The other day I was hearing strange
| sounds from it, rustling and crackling and murmuring, and I
| couldn't transfer the podcast on my phone to the Homepod like I
| normally do. I was convinced that either something was
| electrically malfunctioning, or one of our neighbors had
| inadvertently hacked it and were trying to watch an ASMR video,
| or worse, I was inadvertently listening in on somebody's open
| mic. I restarted the Homepod, started playing the podcast, and
| then my phone momentarily disconnected and the rustling and
| cracking started again!
|
| Eventually I figured out that the Homepod was playing a track
| from some experimental percussion album that I bought years ago
| and haven't listened to since. Killing the Home app on my phone
| stopped it. So the Home app plays music??? Why is this separate
| from the Music app on my phone that is for playing music? Why
| does the Home app not show when I check my phone to see what it's
| playing? Maybe the app that plays music is running on the
| Homepod, but it plays music from my iTunes purchases? In that
| case, why is killing the Home app the only way I can see to
| control it?
|
| I don't @#$%ing know. I don't care. I never asked it to play
| music that way. I don't remember being consulted. I didn't even
| know the functionality existed. I couldn't immediately see how to
| control what was playing, so I still don't know what the
| functionality is, and I don't care. All I know is that in the
| future when this happens I can stop it by killing the Home app on
| my phone.
|
| I can only imagine that the Home app and the Music app are
| developed by Battlin' Business Units who are fighting over
| engagement. The focus on engagement is turning technology into
| the equivalent of those squeegee guys who soap up your car at an
| intersection and hope you mistake it for a sincere attempt to be
| helpful. Except those guys at least care about the yield from
| their engagement, and if you look angry enough they won't ignore
| your attempts to wave them off. On some quarterly report
| somewhere, every shitty experience where a feature gets shoved in
| your face is celebrated as evidence of a successful feature
| launch.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| do you mean homepod or homepod mini?
|
| yes it is infuriating how it has a mind of its own. if you just
| want to use it like a bluetooth then disconnect it from your
| icloud account. it will still work as an airplay target.
|
| what you (and i initially) failed to understand about it is
| that it is a streamer device (limited to apple music). not
| simply a wireless speaker.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| My home is my escape from tech. I use software and computer
| technology all day at work. Yes I have a PC at home but it's an
| isolated system. I don't want this stuff in every facet of my
| life. My light switches are all conventional mechanical ones. My
| thermostat is digital (I didn't choose it) but unprogrammed. It
| is set to hold whatever temperature I select, until I change it.
| My locks are all key-operated. Same with my cars, I buy older
| cars with minimal or no electronics. I will never buy an
| appliance the requires an app to operate it, and will never have
| any devices that listen or talk to me. Alexa, Echo, etc. seem
| utterly pointless and invasive.
| fredophile wrote:
| I think there's a happy medium to be found here. I don't have a
| tonne of smart home devices but I have some that have been very
| useful for me.
|
| The deadbolt on my front door can sense my key fob. This means
| when I come home and my hands are full of groceries I just
| touch the deadbolt and it unlocks instead of having to juggle
| bags while I dig out my keys.
|
| I also have smart light switches in parts of my home. They
| aren't set up to be smart though. I bought them because they
| always return to a central, neutral position. Instead of
| toggling randomly for a three way switch I know that up is
| always on and down is always off.
| dehrmann wrote:
| There's a bigger message beyond IoT: every new bit of technology
| you bring into you life requires some amount of upkeep. The same
| thing is true in your job: new code, new services, etc. all
| require upkeep, so be prepared for that, and use it when deciding
| if you really need something.
| dionidium wrote:
| What some people call "fussiness" I call "doesn't work." When I
| was younger I enjoyed playing with the new tech, so I was willing
| to overlook a lot of problems. But now I look around at the state
| of technology and I'm sort of flabbergasted at what we've let it
| become. Most stuff sold to consumers simply doesn't work for a
| very simple and obvious definition of "doesn't work." Even my Wi-
| Fi "doesn't work" by any normal standard of "works" that was in
| use before, say, 1980.
|
| Everything is sold as a 10% product. A 10% product is a cell
| phone in 1994. It provides transformational, life-changing
| functionality...10% of the time. The other 90% of the time it
| just frustrates you because it doesn't work. It took cell phones
| 25 years to go from a 10% product to a 98% product.
|
| The problem is that most things aren't cell phones. Most things
| sold to consumers should stay in the lab until they are closer to
| 98% than 10%.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Additionally, I think there is a perception problem.
|
| If you have a normal wall thermostat switch you expect that it
| switches heating on when its sensor(s) believe it is too cold,
| and switches heating off when it becomes too hot.
|
| The device is very basic, does one thing (and does it correctly
| 99.99% of times, with the only rare cases when the switch
| actually breaks or wires get loose or contacts get oxidated, or
| batteries - if any - needs to be replaced).
|
| If you replace that with something else (that does "more"
| things) the basic expectation should be for it to work the SAME
| (with the same reliability) for the same basic scope AND add
| some other feature.
|
| Yet most people I know that tried (and still try) to have this
| or that kind of home automation are more tolerant when the
| thingy doesn't work (as expected and as it should) and insist
| on those crappy devices, hoping that an OTA will fix0 the issue
| or buying a new (WHY?) "version 2.0" as that is said to solve
| problems.
|
| Why you (average user) accept that your stupid net connected
| thermostat does whatever it feels like doing, including NOT
| switching heat on and off when needed?
| harshaw wrote:
| I invested in Z-wave light switches that are marked as GE but in
| reality manufactured by Jasco. The problem is that for an earlier
| generation of these devices a power surge / dip could fry the
| electronics, causing me to replace several of these switches over
| the years. This more speaks to the idea of long term reliability
| of electronics for devices that you want to replace very
| infrequently.
|
| On the software end I used Smartthings. Samsung went through a
| big redo a year ago that caused me to redo all of the automation.
| That sucked. I've considered going open source but at this point
| smartthings is stable and the mobile app is not horrible.
|
| Recently someone at either Amazon or smarthings thought it would
| be good to update the terms of service and break the integrations
| between the two services. I had to re-enable the integration by
| logging into and clicking an idiot button saying "I approve" of
| all the blah-blah-blah legalese. This was the worst part of my
| home automation story as clearly this didn't need to break.
|
| I live in the US burbs and have a fairly large house at 3K+
| square feet. There are a bunch of light switches that logically
| are one room. Using automation makes this much easier to control.
| Also kids - they don't turn shit off. I have an automation that
| turns off everything at 11AM on weeknights. Great reminder to go
| to bed but also causes my wife to be unhappy with me when the
| movie turns off unexpectedly, lol.
|
| We have a smart lock on the front door. The kids have a door code
| and you can give contractors / cleaners their own code. That's
| nice. And one of the little f**kers doesn't lock the door on the
| way out I can create a rule that automatically locks the door
| after its been unlocked for 15 minutes.
| hirundo wrote:
| I had a zwave light switch that randomly became a disco strobe
| generator three days after a brown out, no extra charge! It
| started flickering the main kitchen light several times per
| second ... while turned off. I had to shut down the power to
| stop it.
|
| About 1 in 4 of the $40+ switches have failed, but that was the
| most spectacular.
| markbnj wrote:
| Yeah over the last few weeks Alexa has grown annoyingly chatty.
| Pretty much every ask, like "Alexa, what's the outside
| temperature?" is followed by the answer and then "Did you
| know..." which is itself followed by me saying "Alexa stop" in an
| irritated voice.
|
| "Computer, lay in a course to intercept the Romulan cruiser."
| "Intercept course calculated. Did you know, I can automatically
| reorder toilet paper for the bridge head?"
|
| If any one from Amazon is hanging nearby, please pass along how
| annoying a chatty home assistant is.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| If Apple ever does this with HomePods, I'm throwing mine out
| (after smashing them with a mallet to ensure that they won't
| plague anyone else).
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The "did you know..." crap sounds like someone's bonuses are
| tied to Alexa engagement.
|
| And people just triggering their half-dozen routines they made
| 3 years ago isn't enough engagement. Thus: a ham-fisted attempt
| to get people to use it more.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Agreed that "did you know" sucks. Worst possible way to teach
| me to use the device.
|
| That said, it's a really interesting problem figuring out how
| to teach people what Alexa can/can't do. How do you tell your
| users "we built a feature so now you can set subscription
| orders!"
|
| Personally, I don't get why they don't run ads. Like, instead
| of a smiley face delivery person, just say "here's a new thing
| your Alexa can do"
| krrrh wrote:
| > it's a really interesting problem figuring out how to teach
| people what Alexa can/can't do
|
| A monthly email seems more than adequate.
| JshWright wrote:
| I bet the open rate on that email would be far from
| "adequate" (depending on the perspective we're looking at
| it from).
| krrrh wrote:
| Yeah, which is my point. The uptake for new voice
| commands is even lower.
| Applejinx wrote:
| That would cost money, but if you're engaging with your Alexa
| you are guaranteed to be paying attention and are therefore a
| captive audience. If you can be trained to tolerate 'did you
| know' it's time to sell paid advertising in that slot.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Personally, I don't get why they don't run ads.
|
| They will. Thing is if you asked Alexa to turn the lights on
| and it replied with an ad, people would lose their minds.
|
| However, if you slowly erode the experience with these "did
| you know" quips and other time wasters, eventually people
| will accept the extra annoyance. Now you have the ability to
| slip in ads. Why? If you replace the 5-10 seconds useless
| quips with an ad that could save some one money, suddenly you
| invert the negative aspects of ads and the outcome is
| positive. No linger are you subject to needless did you knows
| and instead "useful" ads that tell you nike is on sale.
| bananabat wrote:
| My family teases me about my irritated voice for Alexa. It
| seems this is the tone she listens to.
| lima wrote:
| Google Assistant never does that, thankfully.
|
| (...yet?)
| freen wrote:
| It did...
| HanShotFirst wrote:
| My Google Home has definitely done this on several occasions.
| Seems sporadic though, not enough to truly annoy me yet.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I have a fair amount of automation, an I've had a pretty good
| experience. Yes, a couple things have failed over the years. But
| I have one steadfast rule -- the automation _must_ fall back to
| normal operation. Short of a physical failure in the switch, it
| should always be a switch, even every bit of automation around it
| goes haywire. Then I 'm only annoyed that the conveniences are
| unavailable, but I haven't forgotten how to use a light switch.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Ask yourself what the value is of all this additional complexity
| and additional "features" relative to the end sought. Do you need
| the damn router to be on for the stupid "smart" lightbulb to turn
| on? When you need the lights on to get something done, do you
| really want to be distracted by some undependable piece of shit
| doing is little smart jig? It's like living in some absurdust
| play.
|
| The market demand of a lot of these things is driven by a kind of
| monkey-loves-shiny-things syndrome and herd thinking. Maybe enui
| and idleness because anyone that truly values their short life
| won't waste it on tinkering with a bunch of pointless devices
| that contribute no real value to his life. May his tombstone read
| "He tinkered with his smart devices. Then he died."
|
| Interestingly, a mature software engineer hates complexity. He
| loves to trim the fat from his code base. He hates pissing away
| his life dicking around and maintaining stuff that had no reason
| for being there in the first place. He has better things to do
| with his time than jerking off some code he doesn't need.
|
| Maybe smart devices are a distraction for nihilists. Maybe it's
| like alcohol. Maybe Idiocracy II will feature a populace spending
| half their days trying to turn the lights on.
|
| And nevermind the dystopian contribution these things are to the
| surveillance state.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| I will never understand why computer geeks buy IoT crap and then
| complain about it. It's like buying rotten food and complaining
| about it. What's the point?
|
| I know so many computer knowledgeable folks and a fair number of
| them have 'smart' crap in their homes. These are the same people
| who then tell me that the IoT is garbage and a security risk and
| all that. No one forced them to buy that Alexa. Why do these
| people buy this garbage and then just complain about it?
|
| Why does this author of this article own any of this garbage?
| Just throw it all away.
| rwmj wrote:
| Has to be said I don't understand "smart devices" one bit. I
| simply don't understand how pulling out a phone and launching an
| app is preferable to an ordinary light switch. In fact I would
| say it's in every respect worse. And I don't want something that
| sits in the room listening to everything I say and uploading some
| unknown part of that to an unknown cloud service.
| prepend wrote:
| For me, the voice control is very convenient. Pulling out an
| app is not.
|
| For example, when I come downstairs and say "computer lights
| on" it's easier than flipping two switches and turning on two
| lamps.
| gambiting wrote:
| So as an example - I don't have any voice control in my
| house, would hate to have it, but then all my lightbulbs are
| app controlled - just means I don't have to do the usual
| "tour around the house" in the evening switching every single
| light off, I get in bed, then on my phone click one button
| and everything switches off. It's very convenient.
| sagarm wrote:
| Using an app or voice to control your lights is only rarely
| useful.
|
| Having one switch control all your table lamps, floor lamps,
| and ceiling lights is useful. Being able to add new wall
| switches (really remotes) in new locations for ~$25 also nice
| (excluding the cost of the rest of the system, obviously).
|
| A few years ago, we had no switches or light sources by the
| entry way; we had to stumble our way to a switch in the dark. I
| fixed that with remote controlled outlets at first and later
| upgraded to Hue bulbs and dimmers. In the bedroom, my wife and
| I both have remotes for the lights (though she actually prefers
| voice control, ironically).
|
| We have a few useless wall switches that control outlets
| instead of lights; turning those into in-wall remotes makes it
| so we can control multiple lights and use the outlets for
| devices that need continuous power.
|
| We also have our light bulbs automatically change brightness
| and color temperature based on the time of day. We get
| daylight-bright light during daylight hours and dim warm light
| in the middle of the night. It's really nice.
|
| Another nice smart home feature: checking that the range is
| off. My wife used to stress about this, it's no longer an
| issue. Don't worry, you can only turn the thing OFF remotely,
| not on.
|
| The smart speakers are mostly for music, checking the weather,
| and time. Occasionally for light control.
|
| Smart/energy monitoring outlets we use mostly for tracking down
| energy hogs and reducing our energy bill.
|
| The security and privacy stuff is a risk, but as long as you
| stick to major brands IMO the risk is overblown. Those brands
| are subject to a ton of scrutiny. Fly-by-night alphabet soup
| brands off Amazon or Alibaba are another matter.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I could be less wasteful in nearly everything I do, but sending
| a command around the globe to flip a light switch seems
| extremely wasteful.
|
| Don't know if I would use the adjective "smart" compared to a
| switch.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| If you need to pull out a device to control your smart home,
| you've done it wrong.
|
| 1) Motion sensors
|
| * Our hallway lights turn on via motion and turn off
| automatically.
|
| * My work desk lights turn off and on via a motion sensor.
|
| Both apply the correct color temperature and brightness based
| on ambient light and the time of day, so that I don't get
| blinded buy 1100 lumen lights at 5000K when I go play a few
| rounds of $game at my desk.
|
| Just having the bathroom lights turn on and off automatically
| is magical.
|
| 2) Voice control
|
| We have a few Alexa routines programmed for the house:
|
| * "Movie time": All lights off, TV and AppleTV turn on
|
| * "TV Time": TV off, few lights near the TV turn off
|
| * "Good morning": Lights at a reasonable level, Alexa tells us
| the weather forecast and traffic (well not anymore, we work
| remotely).
|
| ...and a bunch of others.
|
| 3) Wireless switches.
|
| All of the above can be controlled via physical switches
| mounted around the house where practical - not where the wiring
| happens to be.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| It's not the ability to manually control devices from your
| phone that is the interesting part. It's the part where you can
| automate things and create scenes that is.
|
| For example, I have my home office in my basement. I have an
| automation in Home Assistant that when I turn on the Z-Wave
| light switch at the top of the stairs, it turns on my desk lamp
| and recessed lighting, and if it is a weekday during work
| hours, it will send a wake on lan packet to my work computer.
|
| Another example, I have a tilt sensor on my garage door, and a
| contact sensor on the door into the garage, so that when either
| of those are opened, the main garage lighting turns on.
| jaywalk wrote:
| How about a "standard" light switch that is _also_ controllable
| via Z-wave, which doesn 't require Internet access or Wi-Fi or
| anything like that? Which is what most of the switches in my
| house are, and really what a proper smart home should be using.
| rwmj wrote:
| The "Z-wave" function would never be used in my house so it
| would just be adding cost. Considerable cost at that - a
| plain white plastic light switch is PS1.99, and the "Z-wave"
| ones I can see on Amazon are all around PS20-PS40!
| bluGill wrote:
| Are you sure? The normal switches should be the normal way.
| But sometimes I've realized I left a basement light on and
| didn't want to walk downstairs to flip the switch.
|
| There are also odd niches. I have an air compressor in a
| far corner of my shop (for noise reasons) with pipes
| running to where I need air. I want to control that without
| having to walk across the shop. (So far I don't have this
| because finding a switch that control a multi-horsepower
| induction motor is hard - most top out an 1/4 horse)
| jaywalk wrote:
| I have no idea if it'll meet your requirements or not,
| but have you looked at something like this GE direct-wire
| smart switch? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00YTCZZF0
| zrail wrote:
| I have two use cases for this specific switch that I
| haven't acted on yet:
|
| * schedule my non-smart EVSE to charge our car when power
| is cheaper at night
|
| * monitor (but not control) the energy usage of our
| electric hot water heater. It's the second biggest
| electricity user in the house but I have to infer how
| much power it's using based on the other separately
| metered components.
|
| Cost is the thing holding me back. Will it have positive
| ROI in a reasonable time for our PHEV minivan that only
| has a 30KWh battery? Seems somewhat unlikely. Would
| monitoring the power usage of the hot water heater have
| positive ROI ever? Also seems unlikely.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| The standard way to do this would be to use the wireless
| switch as a pilot-duty relay to switch a contactor for
| the compressor.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I was providing a smart home alternative to your example of
| having to use an app to turn something on and off. I don't
| think you're going to find a smart switch, Z-wave or not,
| for PS1.99
| mavhc wrote:
| Connect a switch to a PS1 esp32, now it's smart
| zrail wrote:
| Making that arrangement safe probably costs more than
| PS1.
| mavhc wrote:
| The fact we're sending 240V AC around inside the walls
| for no reason is a whole other question.
|
| But an optocoupler relay is also about PS1, so there's
| that.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| still need to power the esp so you'd maybe need mains AC-
| DC PSU.
| rwmj wrote:
| Sure. I'm not opposed to people spending large amounts of
| money on smart devices, I just don't choose to do it
| myself because in all honesty I don't understand what the
| point is.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Neither do I.
|
| At my first job, I worked for a company that built (among
| other things) X-10 powerline-control interfaces that
| would let your PC do the same thing: switch on
| lights/fans, etc.
|
| As far as I could tell, the only people buying that stuff
| were hobbyists with a lot of disposable income. Part of
| my duties was customer support and I can't recall a
| _single_ instance of anyone doing it for any reason that
| didn 't boil down to "it's cool."
|
| Not making judgements, but I really don't see what the
| big deal is with getting up to turn on a light, and I
| live in a pretty big house.
| [deleted]
| qq4 wrote:
| I agree with you for the most part. I can see the appeal for
| flipping certain switches, like something I tend to turn on/off
| at the same time everyday. Otherwise I try to simply have less
| things to turn on/off!
| Karunamon wrote:
| Nobody's using the app for day-to-day stuff, it's all about
| voice control, and most people don't share the (overblown to
| the point of conspiracy theory, imo) concerns about voice
| assistants.
|
| I've got a whole home full of these, switches and bulbs and
| smart speakers. They do some very useful things for me:
|
| * Turning the lights on before entering a dark room with
| inconvenient switch placement inside
|
| * Ensuring all the lights are off before leaving or going to
| bed
|
| * Turning on my porch light when it gets dark, and off again in
| the early morning
|
| * Simulating liveness when away on vacation
|
| * Turning the lights on when I've got my hands full of grocery
| bags
|
| * Ramping my bedroom lights up slowly in the morning as a
| gentle wake-up
|
| * With some cheap motion sensors, ensuring that lights that are
| often accidentally left on are turned off, saving power and
| money.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| So I really see the value of voice-activated stuff now that I
| have a baby. I have a few Ikea dimmable LEDs which work
| reasonably well aside from the 0.5s-5s delay to actuate them.
| I've even set up Homebridge to get non-Homekit baby devices
| (like the Hatch sound machine) voice activated via Siri.
|
| But the phone home stuff is just insane to me. I bought an
| Insignia garage door opener trigger that works with Homekit
| natively without an app, figuring that would be the simplest
| possible setup (and cheaper than RF-based physical remotes). I
| Wiresharked the traffic it was sending out (in order to block
| it) and it phones home over a *Wireguard VPN tunnel*. I've seen
| some shady phone-home behaviour from cheap Chinese devices but
| never this.
|
| So now it is totally blocked from accessing the internet and it
| does open the garage door, but I am told "there was an error
| communicating" every single time.
|
| I will mention one device I absolutely love: CloudFree Smart
| Plug 2 for energy monitoring. As I mentioned on my Twitter*:
| [CloudFree Smart Plug 2] are the first IoT product I've ever
| used with zero friction whatsoever. First time usage, from
| unboxing to pulling power stats over HTTP API in under 3
| minutes. No other products come close.
|
| * - just copy/pasted my Tweet, no need to hyperlink it
| op00to wrote:
| I have had great success with my home automation.
|
| Home assistant running in a container interfaces my lights
| (Lutron) sensors (zwave) and entertainment (Yamaha / Apple). HA
| also presents a HomeKit hub that the Apple devices connect to for
| Siri, etc. All interfacing is via HomeKit because that's our
| preferred platform, but the HA interface/app work fine and do
| everything as well.
|
| None of this relies on remote services!
| oftenwrong wrote:
| I share the neo-luddist perspective of many of the other
| commenters, but it's also clear that there are basic product
| quality issues at hand. Switching something on and off on a
| schedule is not a hard problem to solve, in theory, so why
| doesn't it work? Is there something about the ecosystem and
| interfaces between devices and hubs that is lacking? Did the
| company just not test their product sufficiently?
| npteljes wrote:
| I feel the ROI is better if instead of QA you spend it on ads
| and PR.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Did the company just not test their product sufficiently?
|
| Almost nobody in the software industry does. Quality is hard.
| Testing to high quality makes testing take 70% of the time
| budget - most places want to ship yesterday. Google and Amazon
| have popularized push to production, which is a stupid idea.
| (Note that Google and Amazon have invested a ton into fast
| automatic rollback which most people miss, even so Google
| regularly breaks features people depend on)
|
| There are things we can do. Automated tests are a good thing,
| you should have an extensive suite. My company has a suite that
| takes 3 hours when running on 40 machines in parallel. That
| just assures things aren't completely broken before the humans
| testers start their 1000 hour test starts [not the real number
| but the right magnitude]. While we are looking to move more of
| that 1000 hour test to automated systems, much of it is about
| proving that our simulation matches the real world and so
| cannot be automated.
|
| We have had good luck with static and dynamic analysis tools.
| They pick up a lot of errors that are hard to find manually,
| and make the code more maintainable.
|
| The above still doesn't meet my quality standards. I'm looking
| for anything that will make things better. (So far I've only
| heard of formal proofs, which I've also heard is hard)
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I cannot be the only jaded nerd to have looked at all the highly
| integrated "smart home" crap on the market and scoffed. I have
| absolutely NO desire to sysadmin my goddamn house. I've been in
| this game a long time, and I know none of that stuff is going to
| be made well, or coded well, or be able to interoperate well, and
| that means HEADACHES.
|
| And people buy them! Like, they buy internet-connected LOCKS for
| their doors! Seriously, why would you do this?
|
| One truth I've gradually learned over the last couple decades is
| that companies that decide to make a "smart" version of an
| ordinarily non-smart object invariably screw it up. They don't
| want to hire good devs, or good product design people, and they
| end up with a hamfisted mess. Even companies that make somewhat-
| smart devices can screw this up when they try and "level up" (the
| example I usually use is Garmin, who have shredded their
| reputation in the cycling community with unreliable software over
| the course of the last 7 or 8 years).
|
| Do I have any "smart" things in my house? Yes, but ONLY A COUPLE,
| and I don't expect them to talk to anything else.
|
| 1. I have Belkin WeMo switches on some lights. I bought them
| because we were going on vacation and wanted to put timers on
| them, and it was one of these (with a nice phone app for
| configuration) or the traditional fiddly million-little-switch
| kind. They work GREAT. The software is now smart enough to peg
| the "on" event to dusk, which is neat (i.e., it means I no longer
| have to reset them twice a year for DST).
|
| Do they talk to Alexa or Siri or whatever? No idea. Never set it
| up. Don't care. Not important.
|
| 2. I have a couple HomePods. One, an original model, is in the
| kitchen. It sounds pretty great for its footprint, and can do
| other things too ("hey siri, how many ounces in a pint?" or "Hey
| siri, give me a 12 minute timer") that come in handy when
| cooking. On the strength of its performance, I bought a smaller
| one for our bedroom/bathroom, and it's fine, too. Do they connect
| to anything else? Not really. That's fine.
|
| (I mean, yes, they connect to Apple to work, but I'm comfortable
| with that. I mean I haven't tried to connect them to anything
| else in the house.)
| JshWright wrote:
| > Like, they buy internet-connected LOCKS for their doors!
| Seriously, why would you do this?
|
| I have no interest in internet connected locks, but I really
| enjoy the convenience of my ZWave locks (which are technically
| "internet" connected via my Home Assistant instance, but that's
| only accessible either via my LAN or via Wireguard).
| ec109685 wrote:
| SmartLocks are actually really convenient. Being able give a
| temporary code to someone instead of a key is really nice and
| our children know how to lock and unlock without needing to
| remember their key.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| It would also be "convenient" to leave your door unlocked,
| but "convenience" must be balanced with security.
|
| No lock company can be expected to harden their online
| systems enough to justify "unlock with an app" level access.
| It's bananas.
|
| The same goes for alarm companies. ADT has been trying to get
| me to "upgrade" to an Internet-connected alarm brain for
| years. Hard pass.
| antod wrote:
| _> I cannot be the only jaded nerd to have looked at all the
| highly integrated "smart home" crap on the market and scoffed.
| I have absolutely NO desire to sysadmin my goddamn house._
|
| You are not the only one. The only saving grace for all this
| stuff is that some company can't "upgrade" my house with it
| behind my back.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 100%. Though I have heard horror stories of landlords
| imposing so-called smart locks on tenants. Ugh.
| cmsj wrote:
| I always find it curious that these systems are very much event
| driven and not state driven. If you set the lights to have an On
| state between those hours, the system could periodically check
| them and assert the right state if it's wrong.
|
| (although that drives you right into the scenario where you want
| to change the state, but some supervising entity keeps overriding
| you)
| doteka wrote:
| The scenario you describe gives me nasty flashbacks of fighting
| with broken Ansible configs. I wouldn't wish that upon anyone
| who's just trying to dim the lights.
| cmsj wrote:
| I am also not an enormous fan of declarative programming, but
| it does have its benefits :)
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I think one of the problems of DIY smart home implementation is
| ... the DIY part.
|
| I think the DIY designs suffer from sedimentation, or buying
| something that works for very specific function, then forgetting
| about it and moving onto the next very specific function.
| Although individually these functions may work, together they
| multiply problems.
|
| I think much of this can be reduced if DIY-er sticks to a fewer
| solution. Just on for communications, I have seen Bluetooth,
| ZigBee, LoRA, Wifi, Ethernet, and modbus in a single home...
| kragen wrote:
| People should not have computers in their homes running software
| that they do not have control over. They should have the full
| legal and practical freedoms to study, copy, modify, and
| redistribute the software they are running, and to delegate those
| abilities to the people of their choice, since not everyone wants
| to be a programmer.
|
| The current situation, where Google, Samsung, and Amazon have
| unaccountable devices running unauditable secret code, which they
| can update whenever they want, with access to the most private
| aspects of many people's lives (including microphones and
| sometimes cameras in their bedrooms), is extremely risky; no
| government and no company can be trusted with that kind of power.
| tgtweak wrote:
| I've come to find that "smart" as in, I can schedule them, is
| quite useless in the long run.
|
| In the last 3 months:
|
| 1) Lennox "Smart" icomfort thermostat... tasked with running the
| entire dual-mode heating and cooling system in the house (ie: all
| the heating and cooling). Hard reset itself and lost it's cloud
| connection. Was still showing in the app (ie: no option to add a
| new one), but the app wouldn't relay any information and the
| thermostat itself was showing "cannot communicate" error when
| trying to make any changes to the temperature settings. Buried
| deep in the installer settings menu was an option to re-pair it,
| where after several obscure errors, it finally re-joined the
| "account" and resumed proper working. The worst part is that this
| thermostat is basically doing the exact same thing as a normal
| thermostat, with no added intelligence (sensing temperature and
| turning relays on/off).
|
| 2) Wemo's randomly disconnecting from the app, despite google
| being able to control them... this is particularly concerning as
| they're clearly connected to _something_.
|
| 3) Wyze camera (v3, latest firmware...) that will run fine for
| months on spotty wifi (I've added an SD card for local loop
| recording) but the if you try to connect to it from within the
| app for live viewing, and it fails to negotiate a connection (due
| to the aforementioned spotty wifi connectivity), it will
| permanently disconnect itself.
|
| 4) Wyze smart irrigation sprinkler controller that is weather
| forecast aware, opting to skip watering if mother nature is
| planning on doing it anyway... will skip a watering due to
| forecasted rain but not check if it actually rained when
| calculating ground humidity levels, therefore skipping the next
| one as well. There is also no way to connect two sprinkler
| controllers (if you have more than 8 zones) in a group so that
| they don't run simultaneously and exhaust water pressure. They
| are considered 2 separate houses.
|
| 5) Meross smart garage door controller will occasionally forget
| whether it is open or closed, and displaying "overtime" warnings
| accordingly and will wait for 1 minute after a close/open command
| before recognizing its true state by process of elimination,
| "I've been closing for a minute, so now I'm closed". Bafflingly -
| it has an integrated magnetic sensor on the door to detect when
| it is actually open and closed - it knows when the door is opened
| by a 3rd party, and alerts accordingly.
|
| 6) Blink cam will trigger its own motion detection when it's
| turning on or off it's blue "recording" light, causing an
| infinite loop of "motion detected".
|
| My dumbest smart house items (LED lights mostly, some bluetooth
| with wifi hub, some built-in wifi) are the chinese ones you see
| all over Amazon, and they tend to "just work" in their dumbness.
| They all use one of 2 apps (Smart Life or Magic Home - amusingly,
| most work on either since they likely all use the same wifi and
| control ESP). They rarely disappear, work without firmware
| updates, and I've yet to catch them sending anything back to the
| mothership (ALL smart devices are on their own wlan & subnet
| without packet forwarding - I would recommend everyone do this).
| You can pair them with Google Home, Alexa or Siri, and then get
| rid of the app itself if you are concerned. Many of them can be
| connected to simply by setting them into pairing mode, connecting
| to their wlan, and hitting an http api or sshing in.
|
| I have high praise for the lutron "caseta" family of smart lights
| and plugs - which use a proprietary radio and a single control
| hub which never disconnects and doesn't pollute the wifi radio
| space. The only downside is that they cost more than the wifi-
| integrated plugs, which is a bit crazy given it's a low power
| zigbee-like radio and control plane.
|
| Hopefully things get better before more critical things become
| "smart".
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Take the thing in your hands, install Home Assistant
| (https://www.home-assistant.io/) and let Open Source rule your
| world.
|
| It works flawlessly, there is just a Himalaya steep learning
| curve and knowing Python helps when doing fancy automations with
| pyscript (there are integrated automations whihc are a pain in
| the bottom, and solutions such as Node Red).
|
| In all honesty, Home Assistant opens a huge amount of
| possibilities but you have to commit to it.
|
| My wife constantly wonders what she will do when I die and the
| whole thing goes south the day after.
| bredren wrote:
| I have been trying to make my home automation work using only
| HomeKit supported devices. I did all the "programming" in the
| official Home app or the Eve app.
|
| It has not been a good experience. Apple has just not developed
| home automation beyond surface level.
|
| In trying to deleverage from expensive homekit licensed
| accessories, I first tried the conbee II / Devon's first, and
| just couldn't get it working.
|
| I'm trying again with home assistant via zigbee2mqtt using a
| Zigbee USB CC2652P.
|
| I welcome programming the devices in Python instead of the
| Apple Home interface.
|
| But the moment you step off the homekit reservation, it's an
| integration project. Not consumer ready at all. I think Apple
| Shortcuts may figure out a way to let normal people enjoy
| multizone, moderately complex, condition-based scenes but it
| may be a few years.
|
| Apple's head of Home Services, left the company last week.
| https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/15/apple-home-services-hea...
| philsnow wrote:
| I'm committed to not replacing any switches/plugs if it doesn't
| Just Work when the home assistant / hub goes away. My poor kids
| shouldn't have to wander around in the dark if my hass
| container craps the bed while I'm out of the house.
|
| > My wife constantly wonders what she will do when I die and
| the whole thing goes south the day after.
|
| Talking about life insurance is morbid, but.. if you have life
| insurance, try to either consider $5k of it set aside or try to
| increase your coverage by $5-10k, as a fund that would pay for
| an electrician to go around ripping out all the smarts from
| your home. As a yearly to-do, keep a one-page document up to
| date with two or three electricians you would consider
| qualified to do the work without ripping off your grieving
| spouse, and keep that in your "to my grieving spouse" binder.
|
| If nothing else, consider the idea that they might have to sell
| the house, you wouldn't want them dealing with real estate
| showings where the light switches don't work.
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