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Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

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431–440 of 655 posts

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#431
post #128

Something that I don’t see people talking about here is that MyQ is the core/required integration component for Amazon Key in-garage delivery, a service used by millions of people to have their packages delivered to their garages instead of having them stolen off their porch. That’s why it needs Internet access. All the talk about how Chamberlain will go bankrupt because a comparatively small number of tech people st…

That was my thought as well.

I only have MyQ for Amazon Key. Fortunately Amazon also supports the Aladdin Connect - which works with all garage doors. And is fully supported in Home Assistant.

I have one on order and will be swapping out, bye bye Chamberlain.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect new homes are a only small portion of garage door opener sales.

What would beat it? Who is buying garage door openers?

IME, door openers only last 15-20 years, at least in the northern US.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect new homes are a only small portion of garage door opener sales.

What would beat it? Who is buying garage door openers?

Garage doors openers have a life of 10-20 years. There are many many millions of existing homes that need new openers every year.

Also, openers are also a common up-sale when other components are serviced or replaced. For example, if you get a garage door replaced, the installer will often recommend a new opener at the same time.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#434
post #205
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's unclear if the CTO just doesn't understand that "DDoS" generally implies malice, or if they're intentionally using that language to blame users for using their product. I've definitely seen "DDoS" used when there was no malice, such as when a developer accidentally releases a client that generates way more traffic than it was supposed to. Probably because we don't seem to have a good term for "event that at th…

That's fair. Maybe my security background is shining through here. I guess we used to have "slashdotting" but that doesn't generalize well :) I did do some napkin math to quantify how much that bad traffic may have been: HA estimates between 6857-25576 intallations of the MyQ integration. Let's say 16k clients. HA makes it really easy to detect and "add" the integration (which counts as an installation even if it's n…

83 rps would be a challenge when hitting a Java EE app written to make use of tutorial-level ORM code without any caching or optimizations. An app where a request takes 300ms to resolve (pulling numbers out of hat for an average poorly written Java EE app; ignorantly assuming 300 ms are spent with 100% CPU utilization of a single core), would require a 24-core machine to keep up with 83 rps. Accounting for some peaks in usage (how about 5x around 7-8am?), 400 rps could make almost every morning an "all hands on deck" event for the ops?

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#435

Partially responsible for this. (Sold Lockitron to Chamberlain in 2017 which became the basis for Amazon Key integrations.) Contrary to the popular sentiment in a lot of the comments here, there’s not much value in the analytics. As we all painfully found out in the 2010’s, there are only two viable recurring revenue streams in the IoT space - charging for video storage and charging for commercial access. Chamberlain…

So you're saying that retailers will pay Chamberlain to act as more or less a clearinghouse for package deliveries in my garage, and that in order to successfully operate this model Chamberlain needs to funnel all users through their proprietary channels in order to fully vet the delivery transaction? Or at least to prevent HA users from nibbling at Chamberlain's lunch with DIY equivalents? Do you think that they wil…

I don't think they care about HA at all, but they do care about Amazon not going through them to get access, and from the API server's perspective, both look identical.

Personally, I hope that Amazon doesn't play ball. You can TRY and seek rent from the world's largest retailer, but you need them, they don't need you.

My main takeaway is that Amazon should offer a discount to deliver packages to buildings with staff to accept the packages. They never go missing, so less refunds, and the building staff does not charge Amazon to receive packages.

The business dynamics are pretty interesting, though. It could be that paying this company reduces missing packages so much that it actually saves Amazon money, which they pass on to consumers in terms of lower prices. Or, it could be that they charge $1 per access, and Amazon passes that on to the customer, and then people are disincentivized from using Amazon. Meanwhile, a competitor (say, Walmart?) brokers a deal where they hide that fee, and take enough customers away from Amazon that Amazon has to play ball (and now the price is $2 per access). Costs go up for everyone.

The phenomenon of partnerships like my hypothetical above are very interesting to me. Every so often I check what I can use my credit card rewards points for, and most of the offers, to me, seem like "failing retailer desperately needs a customer" rather than anything I actually want. Thus, the partnerships must be a pretty important tool for companies that are not in first place.

Finally, I think about the long term effects of this sort of thing. Everyone wants a % of every transaction. "Oh, you turned your lights on when someone came to deliver a package? Pay the manufacturer of the light bulb $1 and your electric company an extra $1." This will look like "economic growth" to each of those intermediaries, but in the end, they just devalued the dollar. ("Inflation.") We end up with bigger numbers, but actually decrease the amount of "value" floating around.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that can be achieved by giving the retailer a one-off access code/secret which will be handed to the delivery driver by the retailer's company? At no point does "preventing random people in your garage" required a greedy middleman in the path between you and whoever you want to give your garage door access code.

Many people already have a keypad mounted outside that will open the garage door. You can set up a guest code there and give to Amazon, or anyone you want. There is zero need for internet-enabled smartness in the garage door opener here.

I gave amazon my code for a Christmas present that absolutely could not have been stolen from my porch (as many other recently had). As a working man, I couldn't sit at home to wait for it. I was a little nervous, but I have cameras at least. I then removed all reference to this code from my account. Then, one driver entered while I was going about my day in there and saw me waiting with a hockey stick, as I was wondering who was breaking and entering, and Amazon wrongfully told him what my code was to get in and that it was OK to go in without my permission. I quickly understood what was happening and I think he did too, so I dropped the stick and he dropped the package. No harm, no foul.

Of course, I changed my code after that, but drivers still tried to get in with my code code. I opened countless tickets with Amazon to get this reference to my code removed from their system. They gaslit me many times saying it was removed. They were incredibly rude to me when told them they were lying to me, and now I sometimes get delivery drivers getting pissed off at me (for some reason) that the code doesn't work after they ring my doorbell.

What I want people to get from this story is, don't give Amazon your code. Get a separate delivery box instead or even a storm door works to hide most packages.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your mass-market commercial product needs this by design, you will fail. To successfully sell a product to the general public, it must work out of the box.

True, but there's contractors for pretty much everything else that can be installed on your home. Why not home automation contractors?

They exist, but they're expensive. And the products they sell are not really consumer devices, they are B2B products marketed at contractors.

They're really two different markets, the bulk of the home automation market doesn't want to spend $10K+ for a contractor to check the same feature boxes that something on the shelf at Home Depot can do for a 3-digit price tag. Labor is really expensive, so home automation contractors operate almost exclusively on the high-end of the market.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#438
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that a garage door accessory company relies on showing ads is a triumph for MBAs programs and a tragedy for the human race.

The stuff I learn in this thread is so unbelievable that I don't even know what to say anymore. This feels like pulled straight from Idiocracy .

Ow, My Balls

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#440
I posted a comment here on HN not 60 days ago voicing concerns about Chamberlain MyQ's monetization push and received quite a bit of blowback from others explaining about how I was wrong. HN is quite a fickle place isn't it? Anyway as should be evident I was completely on the money.

Sounds to me like it's about time to publish some 3rd party firmware for the hubs/embedded controllers in the openers. Software developers who tolerate implementing consumer-hostile antipatterns all day long tend to be absolute shit at embedded systems security. At the end of the day it's just a garage door opener. The hardware is based on an FN-Link WiFi IOT module with fairly minimal customization. The door sensor is BLE. This shouldn't be too hard to root.

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