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I built an offline smart home

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Re: I built an offline smart home

#91

Post by efitz »

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…

I went with Lutron Caseta. It is way more reliable than z-wave when you have a large number of devices, but they limit each hub to 75 devices which kinda sux.

As a side note Lutron did a pretty good job with led brightness which is a big deal at night with lots of devices.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#92

Post by gnicholas »

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…

Do your luminance sensors trigger lights to go on automatically, or just in conjunction with motion? Also, how do you set up HomeKit rules to make this happen?

Re: I built an offline smart home

#93

Post by kccqzy »

faeriechangling wrote: post #24
Aloha wrote: post #20

I went with the Apple HomeKit compatible camp, because it does indeed all work locally across your local LAN without a network connection - its not foolproof, but it mostly just works, and works well at that - and more importantly works when the internet is out. The biggest thing with Apple is they get that houses have more than one person living in them, and provided everyone has an Apple device, it all just works.

I do not have any faith in Alexa OR Google home, despite Amazon on paper being a juggernaut of market share and Google being a juggernaut of AI. How they are fundamentally architected is bad. Cloud-based services that run over a single WAN connection? That basically guarantees Google Home and Alexa are bound to be only ever used for frivolous things you don't really need because the smart assistants are fundamentally…

Before Google bought Nest, I even remember Nest made sure their products could all communicate with each other on the local network without the Internet. Nest devices set up a local network for themselves in the IPv6 ULA range. IPv6 addresses are so plentiful that a made-up ULA network won't cause any problems. I thought that was a pretty clever technique to ensure falling back to offline use. It did generate some questions on various online forums when people discuss Nest home devices were sending out IPv6 RAs.

I guess but cannot confirm that Google has continued this practice. It didn't seem like the problems you mention exist, unless Google did something stupid and disabled all of this perfectly working functionality.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#94

Post by gnicholas »

moandcompany wrote: post #54
m463 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For this reasons I have no smart light bulbs in my house. hmm... wonder why bulbs can't fail normal. maybe they should make bulbs with a deadman switch. If they don't get a "ping" from a controller in a certain amount of time, they revert to normal light bulbs? or yeah... smart switches.

In my experience, unless you have a strong need for something like dynamic color temperature control over your light bulbs/fixtures, it's more practical and economical over time to use a "smart" light switch, rather than a "smart" light bulb. The smart bulbs may have appeal for people that are unable or not allowed to modify their light switches. By keeping the "smarts" at the switch level, you have a lot more choice…

We have a fan/light in our bedroom that has a single switch and two chain pulls. We use smart bulbs for that light (I think it was $30 for two, so that the fan can function independently. Also avoids the need to install a custom light switch. I suppose if the bulbs burn out faster than other LED bulbs, it might be worth it to do something else. But if the bulbs last a decent amount of time, and assuming prices keep going down, I imagine we'll get smart bulbs again to replace them.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#95

Post by gnicholas »

Aloha wrote: post #20

I went with the Apple HomeKit compatible camp, because it does indeed all work locally across your local LAN without a network connection - its not foolproof, but it mostly just works, and works well at that - and more importantly works when the internet is out. The biggest thing with Apple is they get that houses have more than one person living in them, and provided everyone has an Apple device, it all just works.

Word to the wise: you have to have a HomePod or Apple TV to do anything other than control devices when you are home, with no automations. I couldn't even install smart light bulbs without a hub. Also, you can't share with your spouse/family (so they can control lights) without a hub.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#96

Post by candiddevmike »

j45 wrote: post #72
tharne wrote: post #41

The Smart Home is the ultimate triumph of capitalism. A product that nobody needs who's biggest value is mining user's data in order to sell that user more shit they don't need.

You'd be surprised how much time you can actually save yourself and get back for living towards other things by automating the right few things for yourself. Get a stopwatch and try it out.

Pretty sure I spend more time fucking with my smart home setup than me or anyone in my family will "save". It's a gimmick at best.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#97

Post by kccqzy »

tharne wrote: post #75
paranoidrobot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mining user's data The article is about offline Smart Homes. Using something like HomeAssistant, and products supporting integrations with local control you can eliminate data going to third parties.

I get that it was about offline Smart Homes. I just got stuck on the fact that the author said they weren't concerned about privacy.

Did we read the same article? The author didn't say that.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#98

Post by syndicatedjelly »

godelski wrote: post #59
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…

> EVERYTHING MUST FAIL NORMAL. I'm often surprised how little discussion I see of failure analysis and especially failure design is in software engineering. It is one of the most important concepts in engineering, but I guess we still operate like software can't kill you. For those unfamiliar with this type of analysis I'll give you 3 examples. 1) Imagine you are building skyscrapers in city with a bunch of other sky…

> I'm often surprised how little discussion I see of failure analysis and especially failure design is in software engineering. It is one of the most important concepts in engineering, but I guess we still operate like software can't kill you.

This is a major reason why many "traditional" engineers do not consider programmers to be true engineers.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#99

Post by hasoleju »

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…

Can you explain the steps you have to take if you want to move through your house without the lights?

Is the switch always "on" and the sensor then turns on the light and you just have to turn the switch "off"?

And then if the switch is turned "off" will you need to first turn it "on" again in order to make the automation work properly again?

Re: I built an offline smart home

#100

Post by aussieguy1234 »

corethree wrote: post #36

The futuristic idea of a smart home is that you can talk to your smart home. "Computer, dim lights by 30%" "Computer, open curtains." "Computer, vacuum the floor." "Computer, play some jazz" All of these are phrases are actual literal phrases that I use in my home, some on a daily basis. It can only be done, with current consumer tech, through the internet. All you need is a roomba, some 4$ smart bulbs, a spotify acc…

>In the future they will most likely be hooking up some LLM super computer to the home. In that case it can only be online.

Well, not necessarily. The open source LLMs i.e. Mistral/Llama 2 can be run offline if you have a good consumer grade GPU.

I'd like to see an open source LLM control home devices Alexa style.

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