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

301–310 of 375 posts

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#301

Post by outworlder »

Spivak wrote: post #225
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…

> The golden solution (for me) is RF

The devices that I'd be interested in using RF with (for instance, power sockets) generally accept commands over RF but don't report status back. This makes some scenarios unreliable as automation doesn't know the status of the switch.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#302

Post by markvdb »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #150

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.

I chose a similar path on our place, but went a bit further:

- cat5e cable to about every sensor or consumer to be automated, star topology

- central Olimex esp32 gateway running esphome

- some i2c multiplexer boards

- old thinkpad running home assistant

That should get us all of:

- physical controls

- cheap

- open hardware

- running free software

- all wired, no wireless

- graceful fallback in case of most failures

- configuration version controlled

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#303

Post by jrumbut »

outworlder wrote: post #290
Yajirobe wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No setup is. How many nines of reliability does your home automation setup need anyway?

Depends what the failure mode is.

To date the only light switch downtime I've had was related to power outages and bulb failures.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#304

Post by BLKNSLVR »

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…

My initial reaction to your first paragraph is "Preparation for your own death".

And I don't know where on the scale from "old man shouts at cloud" to "living consciously and connected to, and aware of, the world around you" this reaction sits. Even whether that scale has both end points being co-existent.

I find that pursuits intended to give myself more time for the things I enjoy eats into the time otherwise spent on things I enjoy - both in the setup and the maintenance (you already said it's reliable though, so maintenance may not be an issue).

To what end? is my question. Living in the perfect temperature works to narrow the temperature range in which you can comfortably operate. TV on, lights off, blinds closed... it just feels like the next step is automatic fecal extraction and progress towards the body types on the space ship in Wall-E.

To what end? To see if I can. And if you can, which in this case you could, it feels as if you're retro justifying the effort. Are you happy no longer having to do these mundane tasks? Living in algorithmic rhythms.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#305

Post by zbrozek »

fishtoaster wrote: post #275
gangstead wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's how I interview for some roles! I don't work for Lutron though.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#306

Post by krastanov »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #304
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…

My initial reaction to your first paragraph is "Preparation for your own death". And I don't know where on the scale from "old man shouts at cloud" to "living consciously and connected to, and aware of, the world around you" this reaction sits. Even whether that scale has both end points being co-existent. I find that pursuits intended to give myself more time for the things I enjoy eats into the time otherwise spent…

Feels like you can make the same argument about the washing machine, vacuum cleaner, and other housekeeping tools that made life easier a hundred years ago. Doing chores is not "living" and automating chores leaves more time for the wondrous and unique.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#307

Post by zbrozek »

pydry wrote: post #20
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…

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.

Folks are lazy and that's expedient. It's good (in the short term, at least) for the people who make the decisions and bad for their customers, who have little agency.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#308

Post by MrStonedOne »

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 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!"

Did you know there is a setting to turn the did you know stuff off?

Did you know that this setting even used to work at one point in time?

Its frustrating that companies can't get it into their head that users may not want to know.

Also they have my email, and could send that kind of shit there so no excuses for updating the system to ignore the "follow up recommendations" setting.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#309

Post by MrStonedOne »

MisterTea wrote: post #216
curiousllama wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> 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…

They meant run ads on tvs about what alexa can do.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#310

Post by jeroenhd »

Nextgrid wrote: post #274
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 reliab…

I don't think the fault is in Home Assistant either, the fault is in the mountain of shitty hardware thag just won't cooperate.

Home Assistant does its best to compensate for the bullshit and they're doing an amazing job. Autodiscovery is a godsent and when it works, it's easily the best way to get any home automation system set up.

But if autodiscovery fails, honestly, the process is unnecessarily painful. You need to enter a lot of information and mess with settings to get things working reliably because the vendor decided to change the API between hardware revision or send invalid JSON at random.

Post reply on HN