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I built an offline smart home

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Re: I built an offline smart home

#81

Post by WWLink »

nanolith wrote: post #56

A dozen years ago, I designed and architected a "smart lock", back when that was a thing. Anyway... one of the most important features that we didn't advertise was the ability to use it without registering with the Internet service. It could be used entirely in offline mode. In fact, in most cases, you could use this device without it ever connecting to the Internet. I think that consumers should have a choice, and t…

The Schlage lock I bought in 2015 works like that, it just uses z-wave iirc. I originally paired it with a wink hub until they went to crap, then moved it over to a hubitat elevation hub. Yeeah... should've gone with a raspberry pi and a z-wave dongle... well whatever lol.

The lock still works fantastically well. I admit the new ones with homekit support are way slicker because you can set it up so it unlocks if you hold a paired apple watch up to it. That's slick dude. Hella slick!

Re: I built an offline smart home

#82

Post by rkagerer »

efitz wrote: post #29

Smart Home has kind of been my hobby for the last 7-8 years. I have well over 100 devices controlled by my smart home setup. Before I installed the first smart device in my home, however, I had a single requirement: EVERYTHING MUST FAIL NORMAL. By this I mean that if the internet went out or a vendor went out of business or I rage quit a vendor, then the device in question had to act like it was a normal non-smart de…

What's your favored smart switch brand?

I went Leviton as they looked the most like low-key, plain-old On/Off lightswitches. But the reliability has been terrible - constantly dropping off the network or requiring a reset (at least the early models I have). It's disappointing considering I thought it was a well-established brand; after dealing with some of their tech support / engineers I'm of the solid opinion they should stick to non-smart appliances.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#83

Post by nanolith »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #80
nanolith wrote: post #56

A dozen years ago, I designed and architected a "smart lock", back when that was a thing. Anyway... one of the most important features that we didn't advertise was the ability to use it without registering with the Internet service. It could be used entirely in offline mode. In fact, in most cases, you could use this device without it ever connecting to the Internet. I think that consumers should have a choice, and t…

I work at a place that does smart locks (for businesses though) and my first question to them during the interview was what happens when the internet is out. Thankfully they thought of that and it can even be taken offline permanently after the first time setup. What I heard from other people in the industry is that when Facebook had that huge multi-day outage, it was partly because their smart locks couldn't open ex…

I had long and contentious arguments about this. It really opened my eyes to how little innovators really think about these problems. From the beginning, I was concerned about ensuring that our product fails safe, that we had good ESD protection, that our encryption protocols were industry standard, and that we went through third party security auditing.

As I liked to say, I wanted to build a product that I'd feel confident about giving to my grandmother. She should be able to use it even if she lacks familiarity with current technology, and I should feel that she's safer for having it.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#84

Post by jfim »

corethree wrote: post #38
petemir wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agreed, but Alexa fails hard if you have no internet It also fails hard with Internet. I’m sick of being on my living room asking Alexa to turn on the light just to get the bedroom light turned on (each room has its own Alexa/Light pair, so there should be no confusion).

Try google assistant. Google assistant actually has a little bit of an LLM in it, so it's a bit smarter.

It's still pretty dumb, though. For example, it'll often misunderstand "turn all the lights off" as turn the lights off or worse, turn the lights on (even though they're already on).

Re: I built an offline smart home

#85

Post by squeaky-clean »

j45 wrote: post #63
tcfhgj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alexa and Google Home are literally microphones with connections into the cloud

Even with the microphone switch turned off?

With the microphone switch turned off they don't send audio to the cloud but they're also no longer smart devices. The only words they can detect using local processing are their limited set of wake-words. But using Alexa or Google Home is literally the opposite of an offline smart home system if that's your goal.

Even if you create tasks that can function through a button press or something they still rely on the cloud.

Voice control locally is really hard though. Or at least it used to be. I thick OpenAI Whisper is available for local/offline usage if you build your own wrapper around it? I tried adding (local open-source) voice to my home system about 8 years ago, and again 3 or 4 years ago and it was very rough. It might finally be feasible with the current state of local AI.

For an example, my home robot was named "Marvin" (from H2G2) and the local detection was so poor, this is my list of "matching" wake words.

['Marvin', 'arvin', 'artin', 'marlin', 'marten', 'margaret', 'why are']

Re: I built an offline smart home

#86

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

rkagerer wrote: post #82
efitz wrote: post #29

Smart Home has kind of been my hobby for the last 7-8 years. I have well over 100 devices controlled by my smart home setup. Before I installed the first smart device in my home, however, I had a single requirement: EVERYTHING MUST FAIL NORMAL. By this I mean that if the internet went out or a vendor went out of business or I rage quit a vendor, then the device in question had to act like it was a normal non-smart de…

What's your favored smart switch brand? I went Leviton as they looked the most like low-key, plain-old On/Off lightswitches. But the reliability has been terrible - constantly dropping off the network or requiring a reset (at least the early models I have). It's disappointing considering I thought it was a well-established brand; after dealing with some of their tech support / engineers I'm of the solid opinion they…

The feature I want doesn't seem to exist. I'd like what looks like a conventional switch, but with a solenoid that flips it up and down to reflect the status of the light.

It'd be even cooler in two-ways, where using the switch on the one side of the room causes the other switch to match. Not sure why this isn't available either.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#87

Post by stacktrust »

jfim wrote: post #84
corethree wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try google assistant. Google assistant actually has a little bit of an LLM in it, so it's a bit smarter.

It's still pretty dumb, though. For example, it'll often misunderstand "turn all the lights off" as turn the lights off or worse, turn the lights on (even though they're already on).

Alexa has been most reliable when a command does not require a third-party cloud service.

For Amazon Basics WiFi smart plugs, the device type can be configured as "Light" instead of "Plug".

Echo 4 works as a Zigbee hub, avoiding dependency on a third-party cloud service.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#88

Post by squeaky-clean »

abnry wrote: post #13
smeej wrote: post #6

I keep trying to talk myself out of wanting to do this. I live in a very small studio-style home with a total of four lightbulbs in it. It takes fewer than 20 steps to get from any one corner of the house to any other. But every time I read an article like this, I can't help but think how cool I would feel if my house could tell I was coming and turned my lights on and my heat up, or dimmed and then turned everything…

Next thing you know, you're learning how to flash ESP firmware and how Zigbee protocols work. The cool factor is maybe 25% of it for me. It's mainly an obsessive hobby.

It's such a fun hobby, and easy to jump into with just knowledge of nodejs or web-dev based Python. It was my first serious foray into working with any kind of hardware at all.

And you're entirely right it's an unstoppable gateway to learning how to code arduino's and then esp32's, and then eventually hardware projects that aren't even smart home related.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#89

Post by basch »

sh1mmer wrote: post #53
efitz wrote: post #29

Smart Home has kind of been my hobby for the last 7-8 years. I have well over 100 devices controlled by my smart home setup. Before I installed the first smart device in my home, however, I had a single requirement: EVERYTHING MUST FAIL NORMAL. By this I mean that if the internet went out or a vendor went out of business or I rage quit a vendor, then the device in question had to act like it was a normal non-smart de…

> after bedtime, the lights still come on when someone goes in the bathroom, but very dim, etc. I’d be curious to hear more about this. Most of the “smart” light solutions I’ve tried struggle to go directly to a specific lighting level without some bright flash as they activate. What brand switches/lights are you using to do this with?

I’ve had wemo switches on a nighttime schedule. Dim at night, bright during the day, no flashing.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#90

Post by squeaky-clean »

nanolith wrote: post #83
squeaky-clean wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a place that does smart locks (for businesses though) and my first question to them during the interview was what happens when the internet is out. Thankfully they thought of that and it can even be taken offline permanently after the first time setup. What I heard from other people in the industry is that when Facebook had that huge multi-day outage, it was partly because their smart locks couldn't open ex…

I had long and contentious arguments about this. It really opened my eyes to how little innovators really think about these problems. From the beginning, I was concerned about ensuring that our product fails safe, that we had good ESD protection, that our encryption protocols were industry standard, and that we went through third party security auditing. As I liked to say, I wanted to build a product that I'd feel co…

I have similar feelings, except I joined after those arguments happened. After working in ad-tech I wanted to move into a job where I didn't feel guilty about what I was building. It wasn't even particularly invasive ad-tech, but still F&$# ads.

I don't want to name my company mainly so my coworkers don't learn my HN account, but basically every product feature involves a consultation with a very well known white hat hacker.

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