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

291–300 of 375 posts

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#291

Post by jbuzbee »

Tagbert wrote: post #203

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 m…

I also use the Wemo switches at home. And yes, for the most part they are reliable. I really like setting schedules based on sunset and sunrise. The integration with Google sometimes fails as the article notes (I interpret as a timeout), but if you set up scheduling in the Wemo app, it's stored locally so they can run their programmed schedule without going out to the internet. That's a plus. I also control them via SOAP calls from the local lan so if Wemo ever gives up the market, they are still usable.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#292

Post by outworlder »

FireBeyond wrote: post #213
tga wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unacceptab…

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 minim…

Mandatory software updates are not the problem. Having to restart devices to install any updates (plus the fact that it takes 10 minutes) is the problems. It's possible to engineer around that.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#293

Post by outworlder »

InvertedRhodium wrote: post #261
FireBeyond wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 minim…

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.

Zigbee or Zwave devices can have firmware vulnerabilities.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#294

Post by afavour »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #220
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 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...

It’s a hell of a lot easier to just… not do that, though. I also have a Lutron system and it was amazing to be able to wall mount a wireless remote to add an extra power switch rather than rewire the entire room.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#295

Post by outworlder »

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"

> it's a really interesting problem figuring out how to teach people what Alexa can/can't do

Well, for starters, it needs to interpret queries better :) I have Echos across the house, and one Google device I got for free. Google's implementation "understands" way, way more. Amazon's offering is more well supported and they are less likely to pull a Reader, otherwise I'd have switched by now.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#296

Post by outworlder »

Nextgrid wrote: post #276
MisterTea wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

+1 for Mikrotik. They have incredibly inexpensive routers that outperform and have more features than even some enterprise offerings. Even their tiny Hex models have all sorts of goodies.

They do have some learning curve, but the interface is rather intuitive once you get the hang of it, even over SSH.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#297

Post by jonnycomputer »

I don't have any practical experience with smart homes, because I've avoided adding anything "smart" to my home, so maybe I'm far wrong. But I do work in software, and find the whole drag of constantly making sure everything is updated and coordinating properly an exhausting never ending chore. I don't want to flip a light switch and be told that the OS or firmware operating the switch is updating, or is incompatible with the ceiling fan driver, or some nonsense like that. I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but homes are already trouble enough to keep in good condition, and the dozen devices my family uses already needs so much upkeep, that I don't want to have to worry about non-obvious technical problems with, like, lamps and stuff.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#298

Post by paisawalla »

criddell wrote: post #262
quickthrowman wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/TechnicalDocumentLibrary/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.

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.

Yes, Lutron has indoor and outdoor variants: https://www.casetawireless.com/products/smart-plugs

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#299

Post by suyula »

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 agreed with the 'plant timer' mindset up until recently, when I bought some smart lights to hack for a demo at work. Now the idea that someone likes 'actually doing things' where things == 'getting up from the couch to flick a light switch in the other room' seems ridiculous.

If you make smart stuff a purely additive layer over your home rather than replacing existing tech with it, keep it out of the cloud, and have everything responding to predictable rules rather than apps/AI assistants, home automation is really wonderful.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#300

Post by outworlder »

tzs wrote: post #160
Jedd wrote: post #17

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 ->…

> [...] 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…

> 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.

Nothing wrong with 'simple'. Although you are kinda reimplementing the wheel in some of the setup.

If you don't have an use for the whole Prometheus shebang (it's a great piece of software, but might be overkill, and you probably don't need Cortex), you can upload stuff to Graphite. Installation is simple. Sending data is just a netcat away, can't really get simpler than that. Bonus points is that you don't have to maintain (or create) the PHP page. Or maintain a database schema for any new metrics you come up with.

Send what amounts to a string with your metrics to Graphite, and then you can connect Grafana to it and quickly build all sorts of graphs, even alerts.

Now that you have built it, it makes no sense to replace. If you ever find you need different metrics, different graphs, queries, alerting, a dashboard or what have you, take a look at that. It's the simplest solution I've found.

Like their examples show:

    echo "foo.bar 1 `date +%s`" | nc localhost 2003
Essentially, the format is:

Send that to the listening port and you are done.

Post reply on HN