The unbearable fussiness of the smart home • Hacker News Board

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#321

Post by Retric » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

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…

Your not getting the weather forecast from your local network, so your put to at least 2 cloud dependencies. A really basic test it how much still works when the internet fails.

Because just that watering setup is the opposite of rock solid. If the electricity is on, and these several devices in your house didn’t fail, and you have internet, and the cloud service works, then you water your lawn unless the weather forecast says otherwise. Meanwhile a simple mechanical watering timer is basically if you have water pressure and the divide didn’t fail then it all just works.

Don’t get me wrong it can be fun to setup, but setting up and maintaining these “smart” systems end up sucking up more time than those home automation projects in theory save. At least compared to a simple mechanical timer.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#322

Post by donavanm » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 2:34 AM UTC

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...

The mismatch is the "only one" vs "using one" switch comment. That would be an insane circuit with time and material costs to match to meet residential code with 18 devices and a handful of switches covering every door, stairs, etc. I did a complete rewire of a large house a few years back and went with Lutron for this exact purpose. Yes, every light has (at least) one physical switch in the primary location. But it's $30 and 15 minutes to add each of the (wireless) secondary switches at every location. It is a huge benefit to time/materials/flexibility/future proofing.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#323

Post by bob29 » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 2:34 AM UTC

krastanov wrote: post #306

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Boats can float in water, but they can sink in it,too.”

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#324

Post by dicknuckle » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 2:41 AM UTC

pimeys wrote: post #237

milkytron wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same, most of the tech people I know have no aversion to these things, plus Chrome, Facebook, stock Android or other Google products. I have an aversion to all of the above. But when it comes to Android, it feels like the options are very limited. Either use iOS and only be able to use the device the way they want you to (for a steep price), or use Android and be tracked like crazy. As for Google products, YouTube…

With Android you can also get much better privacy by trumping most of the Google services, using Firefox with Ublock Origin and a system such as Blokada for system level adblocker. With Android if you know what you are doing, you can stop a lot of it much better compared to iOS. With Apple the defaults are better than Android but many of the options for blocking trackers are not available.

Can confirm, blokada is an excellent adblocker, although it doesn't have as many granular features as ublock.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#325

Post by dicknuckle » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 2:47 AM UTC

recursive wrote: post #269

driverdan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think any software engineer with some industry experience will absolutely NOT install a device in his home that receives automatic updates Have you ever talked to another SE? The majority I know don't even care about privacy and have all kinds of invasive auto update devices in their homes (Alexa, Nest, Ring, etc).

I don't care about privacy that much. But that's also unrelated to the reason I will never have a light switch that's capable of having software updates. The functionality I want from a light switch is simple enough that it should be able to be built into a finished product. More complexity means more failure modes.

Have you checked out Shelly relays? They can run as simply or complicated as you want. No internet required if you just want to trigger it with a schedule or a webhook over the LAN. The basic logic in the webui was enough to let me run my shop air compressor for 1 hour after the trigger button is pressed and with another option enabled, it won't come back on after a power outage.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#326

Post by onecommentman » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #140

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…

You know those "strip of LEDs on a gooseneck" plant lights? Even these, low-end as they are, have similar issues. They have buttons instead of physical switches. If the power goes out, I have to remember what sequence of button-presses gets me a twelve-hour timer. And you can't even set it to "always on" and control with a mechanical timer. Maddening.

Yeah, they should engrave the button sequences into the back of cover of the controller. There are only 4 or so. Or the settings onto the buttons themselves, if each button is associated with one setting. That would be the fix for mine…

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#327

Post by dicknuckle » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 2:59 AM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #194

omni wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of software engineers know how to put devices on their home network without granting them access to the internet. I have some wi-fi bulbs that I do this for, and I can control them over the network internally.

The internet is only half the problem. The few iot devices I have all hang out on a separate vlan.

It's pretty hard for my IoT devices to spy on me with no internet access on a separate VLAN.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#328

Post by beachy » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

There's a lot to be said for taking control and building it yourself.

We live on tank water and I monitor our 3 tanks using influxdb and grafana on an ec2 instance. It's absurd overkill for the job, but man it is reliable since no-one but me ever makes any changes.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#329

Post by joe_the_user » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:26 AM UTC

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…

Thermostats set to the right temperature/mode at night and in the morning depending on the forecast for the day.

I'm trying to understand how that could work. My old style thermostat maintains my apartment at a constant temperature based ... what temperature I set it to. If I wanted fancier, might have more sensory, fans or whatever to keep temperature average between floor and ceiling. But I can't see how outside temperature gives you any significant value compared to knowing changing in the inside temperature you're controlled.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#330

Post by psyclobe » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:34 AM UTC

I have replaced every switch in my house with GE's Enbrighten series generation 2 (z-wave). I run this zwave network through home assistant and it is rock solid. Can't say the same about anything related to the cloud, this includes Alexa, and Google, both of which seem to think the 'device is not responding' randomly. Meanwhile the home assistant portan app on the phone just works every time.

Voice activation is very handy, in fact I rarely use my phsycial switches anymore. Barking commands at alexa is 90% of my use case. Its just simply 'easier' then pushing something, but voice can be very problematic at times.

What I wish for is a more specialized form of voice recognition where I can speak 'cantations' that do macros or actions. This whole 'big data' 'human intelligence' determination stuff just goes south more often than I'd like.