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The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

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Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#221

Post by Yajirobe »

pkulak wrote: post #200
h2odragon wrote: post #2

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…

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…

If you are connected to the internet, then your setup is not 100% rock solid and reliable.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#222

Post by mrandish »

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#223

Post by jeffbee »

biophysboy wrote: post #212

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?…

Property managers love these things because they never have to rekey a lock again, and the tenants can't unilaterally rekey them.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#224

Post by bredren »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #218

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 possibi…

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...

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#225

Post by Spivak »

mrandish wrote: post #222

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 s…

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#226

Post by hanklazard »

rendall wrote: post #206
Filligree wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

check out https://www.home-assistant.io/ Open source. You can be as fiddly or stable as you have tolerance for.

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#227

Post by efitz »

pkulak wrote: post #205
Filligree wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#228

Post by mikestew »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #70
maccard wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#229

Post by theshrike79 »

Filligree wrote: post #202
pkulak wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#230

Post by theshrike79 »

efitz wrote: post #227
pkulak wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 prob…

> 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.

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