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Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

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Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#151
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. My alexa went in the drawer after she was offering to call the crisis line for me during a spirited session of gaming. I genuinely think the Amazon team (at least in that particular regard) want to do some good. But until they can teach their machines how to understand context, I just don't want my unfiltered conversations going around potentially to medical institutions or law enforcement.

Has anyone found Alexa way too easy to trigger? As someone who frequently talks about people with a similar name, I'm amazed at how often Alexa chimes in. I think 'OK Google' is at a sweet spot (although my parents for ages were convinced 'hi google' would work if they tried enough :)

Sometimes mine starts responding to... nothing. As in, in the midst of silence in the middle of the night, like a dog barking at ghosts, it'll answer a question literally nothing asked.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#152
post #55

> The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers... > The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol and increase compatibility for consumers. Curious if I as a hobbyist will benefit from this? Or if this will become a: it works perfectly, but only if all your devices connect to ou…

I really hope they recognize the need that people want to keep their data on their lan. Actually that would be required by the GDPR if they won't let me sign anything. My derived data is my own people, it does not belong to who ever collects it. I.e. I just want a thermostat the is a big rotating button and speaks mqtt. It does not exist. If you want it to look good you end up with a Nest thermostat. Home Assistant n…

Hubitat seems to be trying to be a SmartThings without the data in the cloud [1]. They seem to have a pretty active community.

[1] https://hubitat.com/

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#153

I hope whatever standard they come up with does not require a home WiFi network to operate. Mobile internet is already faster than your average home internet line and there is an increasing trend where people rely entirely on their mobile phones for network connectivity.

> there is an increasing trend where people rely entirely on their mobile phones for network connectivity

There is? Is it any meaningful percentage of households?

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#154

I bought a home and the previous owner used Z-Wave for everything. The whole thing worked irregardless of internet working or not. Whatever they invent if it is useless without internet access its a step back from something that has already worked. All my home automation / smart home integrations will have to be Z Wave compatible or I will not use it. If my internet goes out will all my things be useless without it?

First, personally my philosophy is to have any smart home type stuff have a dumb backup. You never know what might happen to your smart hub or whatever so having physical switched lights/ appliances is important.

Second, hopefully this doesn't come across as patronizing but based on your post it sounds like you aren't sure about this. IP is not "The Internet". You can have your own little private IP network which runs without the internet. If this is an open standard there should at least be the option to create a local only hub which only requires your local network is online.

That's not guaranteed considering who is backing this project, but it should be possible.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#155
post #138

We are building a new house right now. All subcontractors know the rules - no "smart" devices or "wifi enabled" appliances or mechanicals. All lightswitches are plain-old hi-voltage only switches. Thermostats are dumb, unprogrammable, with no memory or scheduling or timing. The locks on the doors use physical keys. The smartest thing we have are the sonos speakers and we pug those in with ethernet. Everyone will be p…

Do you not have any mobile devices, or do you rely on 4G? Or do you use the device Edward Snowden recommended to connect your phone to the internet via ethernet cables?

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#156

I hope whatever standard they come up with does not require a home WiFi network to operate. Mobile internet is already faster than your average home internet line and there is an increasing trend where people rely entirely on their mobile phones for network connectivity.

That's a bold statement. Anecdotally, I know of no one that relies entirely on mobile connectivity for their home.

While mobile internet may be becoming faster, it's still severely hindered by data caps and throttling.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#157
post #129

As someone who is perfectly happy with Home Assistant and Z-Wave, I worry that a bunch of mega corps getting together to create a standard will crowd out the market, and prevent non-local, privacy-honoring options from continuing to be manufactured. If average consumers are told to simply "look for the CHIP logo", and the CHIP standard includes facilities for must-phone-home messages akin to streaming DRM, I'm afraid…

I think people who expect Home Assistant to be useful to the general consumer are delusional. Home Assistant is an amateur piece of software with severe UX shortcomings and broken auto-update functionality (it phones home continuously and often bricks itself after auto-updates). I appreciate the enthusiasm in the home automation community, and I agree there's a need for an offline solution, but Home Assistant is not…

You are perhaps taking about a particular distribution of HA and not HA itself. I run mine out of Python venvs on Ubuntu LTS.

I can't remember hearing of autobricking installs on hass.io which might be what you are referring to but I doubt it.

Citation please.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#158

For someone who thinks Zigbee already is an open standard, well, it is NOT really open though. A standard being publicity available does not always make it open-source friendly. Linux considers it a proprietary protocol [1] so Zigbee driver cannot be part of Linux kernel. Although Zigbee spec allows non-commercial individuals to freely use it, a commercial organization must be a member of the Zigbee Alliance in order…

Well, it also talks about using Thread, which I just learned has the same "must be a member of blahblahblah" restrictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)).

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#159
post #129

As someone who is perfectly happy with Home Assistant and Z-Wave, I worry that a bunch of mega corps getting together to create a standard will crowd out the market, and prevent non-local, privacy-honoring options from continuing to be manufactured. If average consumers are told to simply "look for the CHIP logo", and the CHIP standard includes facilities for must-phone-home messages akin to streaming DRM, I'm afraid…

I think people who expect Home Assistant to be useful to the general consumer are delusional. Home Assistant is an amateur piece of software with severe UX shortcomings and broken auto-update functionality (it phones home continuously and often bricks itself after auto-updates). I appreciate the enthusiasm in the home automation community, and I agree there's a need for an offline solution, but Home Assistant is not…

You're focusing too much on the home assistant part, and not enough on the local control part. There are solutions with hubs such as some parts of the Wink hub that do work locally without internet. I'm sure there are professional-grade installers who install various pieces of software that use Z-Wave and/or Zigbee to setup a locally controlled home automation solution.

Needing connected to the internet (and all the latency associated with it) is an anti-feature that most consumers aren't even aware of or think of, hence why I hope solutions that have the feature aren't crowded out before the market for home automation truly takes off

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