Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 154 posts

Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?

#71

Post by TimothyGee »

viccuad wrote: post #12

I really don't grok why I should want to use my smartphone to move up and down my wifi connected blinders. Yet that's all I see when all of this is pictured: gimmicks. I want to see a demo of a room alarm clock: with rising light (in brightness and temperature), birds chirping, room getting warmer, music/radio a while later.. and the same for going to bed.

I set up my house such that when I unlock the front door using my code, the downstairs lights come on if it's after sundown. I also have a camera capture the first few minutes of the door changing state. I get alerts if the door is opened outside of normal away hours (8-4 on weekdays). I also have a vacation mode that will control various lights in the house to simulate occupancy. I also set up a nightlight mode that will detect motion after dark and turn lights on and off as you pass through the house. This was all done with off-the-shelf components and minimal Lua scripting. Admittedly not life-changing, but more useful than moving blinds up and down!

Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?

#72

Post by vonmoltke »

mrweasel wrote: post #32

Maybe I'm just not getting it, but why would I want a "Smart Home"? It seems to be a little like a Smart TV, everyone wants more features, but really they're newer going to use the built in voice control or install any apps. We need a few basic feature and the rest just sits their, unused, contributing to the complexity of the device. I have yet to see an intelligent house feature I would like. I understand that some…

There are potential security applications for things like that. For instance, a randomized on-off pattern for lights in your house to help throw off casual thieves. Or, tying the system to the burglar alarm so that all the lights come on and the blinds open when the alarm goes off in order to bring more unwanted attention to the thieves.

As others have mentioned, there is also the light-sensitive timer use case.

Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?

#74

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #34
mseebach wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current circuit layouts are wasteful, you have to run enormous amounts of wire between the outlets and the switches, just to be able to control the lights. Much better to just run power directly to the outlets. The control logic should ideally go into the socket, but with 50k hour lifetimes of LED bulbs, the lost efficiently of putting it in one over the other place is trivial. Also remember that putting the controls…

LEDs may have 50k hour lifetimes, but that's very far from true of the constant current drivers. I've had several expensive (Phillips/GE) LED bulbs fail after a year of sparse usage. That's more like 1.5k hours. The cheap chinese ones I also tried lasted on average four months (I bought 8 bulbs), all of them blew up electrolytic capacitors on the buckpucks (with release of magic smoke). As for the needing an electric…

50k hours is probably ambitious for some, but not too far off the mark. The Achilles' heel here is the capacitors, they are the weakest link. 10k hours is easy, and they should never fail before that absent some design or manufacturer defect, or atypically high ambient temperatures.

>I've had several expensive (Phillips/GE) LED bulbs fail after a year of sparse usage.

You have an electrical problem in your home. Perhaps a poor connection on the neutral leg of the circuit. It is even potentially unsafe, as in a possible arcing condition.

Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?

#75

Post by ocdtrekkie »

brudgers wrote: post #38

Automated building systems are hard to get right even in the commercial space where the specifiers, installers, and operators are professionals and end users are given dummy thermostats to make them feel better or just outright locked out of controls and windows are inoperable. Even then it all depends on dedicated circuitry: webs of low voltage wires for power and signaling snaking from control panels in closets. Su…

The obsession over Bluetooth-this and WiFi-that continually drives me crazy. Home automation companies aren't investing in the sort of technologies we NEED because they're more focused on the sort of technologies they can SELL.

Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?

#76

Post by joezydeco »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #40
jmuguy wrote: post #28

Sounds like my experience with Nest last summer. Got the thermostat, can't get it connected to my wireless. Support basically tells me to get bent until I go into full IT guy mode and prove its an issue with the unit. Replacement unit comes, doesn't work at all (first one was at least a nice looking thermostat with no connected features). Third unit comes and it's been fine ever since. For some reason I thought it wo…

Knowing that pretty much all software is buggy and Nest and Wink are pretty new to market, do you want to depend on them with your life? In the northeast US this weekend we will be having a high temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit in some areas. I don't want to rely on a flaky device determining if the heat should be on. What happens if the temp drops really low, like with a power failure? Did they test that? Same…

If the power is off, no thermostat will be able to start your furnace.

What's scarier is the thermostat going down at inopportune times. Last January Nest pushed a firmware update that bricked some units...right during the coldest night of the year for us. My early adopter neighbor was up at 2am rewiring his old Honeywell dial to keep his family warm.

Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?

#77

Post by fps »

alistairSH wrote: post #59
tehwebguy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turning off the lights on the other side of the house after you are already in bed is such a nice feature :)

If you're in bed, how do you know those lights are on? Also, why wouldn't you turn the light off as you left the room? Most of these "smart home" devices really do seem like a gimmick at this point. Maybe in the future, they'll be well enough debugged and refined to be useful, but for now, I just don't see a benefit in a normal* home. My dad uses Nests, "smart" locks, and remote cameras alarms (off-season) on his bea…

I live with my wife and two kids, and I'm the only one that cares about the size of the heat and electric bill. I know the lights are on because they've been left on every night since we've lived there, and if I don't walk around the house every night before bed and shut off the lights, they're still on in the morning.

I don't know a single person with kids that doesn't have to do this wonderful nighttime ritual - visit every room in the house and set the electronics to the correct setting. It's very simple and I believe a computer would do it better and faster.

I agree - all this automatic light dimming for movies and "scenes" seems like a gimmick. But I'd love to have a button on my phone that switched every light in my house off as if I had flipped a switch.

Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?

#78

Post by jsabo »

jmuguy wrote: post #45
ssharp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm becoming more of a luddite or cranky old-man, approaching my mid-30's, but I don't see any benefit at all to using the Nest smoke alarm. I'm replacing tried and true, simple, technologies, with a new device that seems way more complicated than it needs to be.

No, there really isn't a reason to use it. It looks pretty, and I have to admit that's basically why I bought it in the first place.

I like the theory of it integrating with the thermostat's auto away feature, so it can detect you even if you're not in the same room as the tstat for a while. It needs to be connected to mains for it to work in real time though, so that combined with all of the problems it has working as a smoke detector convinced me to not get one.

Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?

#79

Post by upofadown »

I've been into the home automation thing since before forever. There have been many periods of excitement over the years. They come and go. As a result I have to admit to a high level of skepticism about the current period.

The companies that generate and are influenced by this excitement tend to make two main errors.

1. They don't understand that without an open standard for controls and sensors they are just fooling themselves. No one is going to permanently install something in their house that is sure to be useless in 10 years.

2. They don't understand that people don't want to control everything ... they instead want to not have to control everything. Being able to control a light from your phone is not really any better than being able to do it from the light switch. People instead want the light to just do the right thing without having to think about it. They don't want a thermostat controllable from a phone. They want a thermostat that makes it so they are comfortable and not paying any extra money they don't have to. As a result, the home automation people actually want is a much harder problem than what everyone always seems to assume.

Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?

#80

Post by modoc »

herf wrote: post #66
linker3000 wrote: post #56

There's a few 'handy' things I'd like to do - for example, I am considering replacing my basic central heating/hot water controller with a Raspberry Pi and having features such as a low-heat, vacation mode where the system knows I am 'x' miles away from coming home (tied to my phone's location) and it will fire up everything again. Although I'd consider doing more (ESP8266 modules with MQTT looks interesting, albeit…

Water heaters use a lot of household energy--automating them is a great idea. One smartthings customer did it here: http://community.smartthings.com/t/water-heater-automation/1...

My understanding is that modern tank water heaters are extremely efficient, 96%+ so I don't think they use that much energy these days?
Post reply on HN