Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

staceyoniot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 375 posts

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#181

Post by Applejinx »

curiousllama wrote: post #96
markbnj wrote: post #86

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 bridg…

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"

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#182

Post by bananabat »

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#183

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

whafro wrote: post #172

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…

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?

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#184

Post by blue_cookeh »

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#185

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

gangstead wrote: post #88
ninkendo wrote: post #9

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 m…

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 lea…

> 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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#186

Post by cmsj »

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)

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#187

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

bluGill wrote: post #48
rwmj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 £1.99, and the "Z-wave" ones I can see on Amazon are all around £20-£40!

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 swit…

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#188

Post by bananabat »

markbnj wrote: post #86

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 bridg…

My family teases me about my irritated voice for Alexa. It seems this is the tone she listens to.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#189

Post by pornel »

blue_cookeh wrote: post #184

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 t…

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#190

Post by doteka »

cmsj wrote: post #186

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)

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.
Post reply on HN