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The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

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Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#271

Post by antod »

ubermonkey wrote: post #139

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 door…

> 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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#272

Post by throwaway9870 »

enobrev wrote: post #267
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…

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 mov…

That is exactly what I want to do for the same reason. Any chance you would be willing to share your JS code?

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#273

Post by pkulak »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #264
rendall wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Any tips for those who want a simple stable setup?

Lutron Caseta. I personally like ZWave/ZigBee stuff more because it's more configurable and open, Lutron cannot be broken, even if you try.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#274

Post by Nextgrid »

jeroenhd wrote: post #157

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 wo…

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#275

Post by fishtoaster »

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…

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. :)

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#276

Post by Nextgrid »

MisterTea wrote: post #234
todd8 wrote: post #151

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 jus…

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.

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#277

Post by pkulak »

saiya-jin wrote: post #245
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…

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 i…

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!

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#278

Post by Nextgrid »

pornel wrote: post #189
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 T…

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.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#279

Post by ubermonkey »

antod wrote: post #271
ubermonkey wrote: post #139

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 door…

> 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.

100%. Though I have heard horror stories of landlords imposing so-called smart locks on tenants. Ugh.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#280

Post by pkulak »

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…

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.

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