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The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

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Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#331

Post by pkulak »

joe_the_user wrote: post #329
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…

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 te…

Yeah, I mostly have automation so that I can turn the temperature down at night. I'm a big fan of sleeping in cold air. Even significantly colder air. When it's warm out, the AC kicks on. When it's cold, the heat just turns down.

Apart from that, I could just set my thermostat to heat-cool between 70-74 at all times. But then if it's 40 degrees out and I'm cooking a roast all day, the thermostat right next to my kitchen could kick the air conditioning on, which could actually damage it. So... I automate it; heat when it's cold, AC when it's hot. :shrug:

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#332

Post by pkulak »

Retric wrote: post #321
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…

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 for…

When the internet fails, my garden won't get watered (though, I live in an area where it rains about 160 days a year), and I'll have to adjust my thermostat by turning it with my hand. When my cloud dependency fails, I'll use another of the 400 ways to get weather data. I've already switched weather providers several times. Don't worry about me; I'll make it through. ;)

> sucking up more time than those home automation projects in theory save

I guess? But it's fun. And I'd rather spend 10 hours automating something than 1 hour doing it. I'm not doing this to create free time, I'm doing it in my free time.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#333

Post by eloisius »

suyula wrote: post #299
saiya-jin wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

I would definitely rather get up from the couch and flip a switch than open my smart phone, start an app, fumble through a nag screen telling me about recent updates to said app that auto-upgraded since last time I used it, turn on my lamp, get distracted by emails or some other red badge with a number calling for my attention before finally remembering that I just wanted to flip on the light so I could read my book.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#334

Post by suyula »

eloisius wrote: post #333
suyula wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

I would definitely rather get up from the couch and flip a switch than open my smart phone, start an app, fumble through a nag screen telling me about recent updates to said app that auto-upgraded since last time I used it, turn on my lamp, get distracted by emails or some other red badge with a number calling for my attention before finally remembering that I just wanted to flip on the light so I could read my book.

Sure, but in my home, the light is already on.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#335

Post by fouc »

pkulak wrote: post #331
joe_the_user wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

Yeah, I mostly have automation so that I can turn the temperature down at night. I'm a big fan of sleeping in cold air. Even significantly colder air. When it's warm out, the AC kicks on. When it's cold, the heat just turns down. Apart from that, I could just set my thermostat to heat-cool between 70-74 at all times. But then if it's 40 degrees out and I'm cooking a roast all day, the thermostat right next to my kitc…

A regular digital thermostat has settings for turning down the heat at night, and turning it back up in the morning, etc.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#336

Post by Jedd »

mabub24 wrote: post #71
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 ->…

If you are using uBlock Origin, you can turn on the filter for "annoyances" and as far as I can tell it blocks those newsletter popups.

Oh, that's an excellent recommendation, thank you.

I've never really looked in that menu previously, but, yes, definitely have uBO installed everywhere.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#337

Post by Jedd »

jjbinx007 wrote: post #40
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 ->…

Those infernal newsletter nags are fucking insufferable. I haven't even read the damn article yet and now you're trying to get my email address? I generally subscribe with "postmaster@nameofsite". I imagine they break accessibility helpers too. As for smart homes, my toe dipping into them so far has been largely negative. Biggest mistake I've made is probably mixing brands. If I did it all from scratch I'd: 1) find a…

Yeah, it's a bit of a mess. Jeff Geerling did a good two-part write up where he went through a lot of experimentation with different brands, which I've still got in an open tab somewhere.

The Node-Red / Home Assistant (hassio) stuff I need to really dive into in anger at some point. So far my 'smart' stuff is some google gear + Philips Hue (lighting), and these little ESP microcontrollers.

When looking at what vendor to adopt, I've been checking what has the best support by the hassio community - on the assumption they've been down this path already.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#338

Post by ec109685 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #164
ec109685 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SmartLocks are actually really convenient. Being able give a temporary code to someone instead of a key is really nice and our children know how to lock and unlock without needing to remember their key.

It would also be "convenient" to leave your door unlocked, but "convenience" must be balanced with security. No lock company can be expected to harden their online systems enough to justify "unlock with an app" level access. It's bananas. The same goes for alarm companies. ADT has been trying to get me to "upgrade" to an Internet-connected alarm brain for years. Hard pass.

No lock would keep a determined adversary out.

We have Ring, so you’re right, we are exposing ourselves to Internet foes, but it is Ring / Amazon, so they have lots of reason to keep things secure.

A key isn’t all that great at keeping secure either given you can just borrow it for five minutes and make a copy without ever taking to anyone.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#339

Post by msla »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #265
msla wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If this device ever, even once, shows an error message or misbehaves, then we'll give you a full refund, plus $100". Your device stopped working because the server it syncs with is gone because the company that owned the server is gone. Who gives you your money now?

I think that the point is that if a company puts forward such a guarantee they wouldn't release products that relied on anything external.

More likely, they conclude that if they don't exist, they can't be fined.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#340

Post by Jedd »

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…

Au contraire - your setup is way more sophisticated than mine! : )

I have some 433MHz kit, plus a bundle of various arduinos, but (for me) the complexity of getting them to talk back to base has kept me procrastinating for years.

The ESP8266/ESP32 devices, with WiFi built-in, are effectively the same price as arduinos (here in AU, via ebay) but so much more convenient because of that extra memory + the wifi. I'm going to have some frustration with the 3 vs 5 volt, especially with some of the more esoteric components, but so far it's been a breeze to setup.

As Outworlder observes, my back-end is way more complex than a normal human would need - I'm replicating a stack we use at work, so it's basically taking up a bit of space on my home lab. Cortex is for a serious (enterprisey) amount of long-term storage of time-series metrics. Prometheus is easy enough to set up - it scrapes web end points that contain key / value pairs in plain text, and puts those in its own time series data store. Sqlite will scale just as well, I'm sure.

If you have the bandwidth, I can recommend playing with some of these things, just in case they may make your life easier later. Prometheus (server) will run on a Raspbery Pi easy enough.

https://github.com/G1Tech/youTubeStream/blob/master/promethe...

That's a code fragment to run on an ESP and present a prometheus-compatible end point with a handful of key/value pairs - if you have a spare ESP, run it up, and hit the endpoint to see what I mean. The simplicity is compelling.

If / when I go down the path of custom components plugged into arduinos - and I'd like to one day build something to measure the levels in my rainwater tanks - I think that I'd try to get those data back into an intermediary device (esp or RPi) that could present them in this opentelemetry format, as it would make it easier to swap things around in the future.

Grafana is fantastic, and can produce some gorgeous visualisations from Prometheus (and other) sources. You may even be able to get it doing something with your sqlite DB.

Running up a monitoring agent (Prometheus' node_exporter, or InfluxDB's telegraf - functionally very similar) on your laptop may be a good way to experiment with live data and visualisations with low-effort. (Note that Telegraf will by default try to push into an InfluxDB -- I'm not a huge fan of InfluxDB -- but you can configure it to provide an otel / prometheus-compatible scrapable web endpoint instead.)

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