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The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

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Re: The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

#51

Post by tristanperry »

blamazon wrote: post #5

The article talks about how Matter will save everything. What the heck? Don't we already have zigbee and Z-wave that work fine? Why do we need another communications protocol?

It is 'yet another' standard yes, but it's worth pointing out that Matter was jointly launched by the ZigBee Alliance (who now call themselves the Connectivity Standards Alliance).

So it's not exactly a rival to ZigBee at least.

Z-Wave are going a different direction though, and I wouldn't be surprised if Z-Wave slips into obscurity over the next decade.

Re: The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

#52

Post by tialaramex »

Swizec wrote: post #21
brimble wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire market of smart-home shit's gonna keep being terrible until/unless some decent, reliable, inter-operable, long-lived standard takes over or is imposed. It's all too expensive to be worth it unless you can be pretty sure it'll keep working for at least a couple decades. Imagine if lightbulb sockets were proprietary! It'd be madness. The current state of things with smart home stuff is worse than that, becau…

> Imagine if lightbulb sockets were proprietary Pretty sure lightbulb sockets used to be proprietary. And in the UK it used to be common to buy appliances with just a cable that you wired up to a plug because there was no common standard for outlets. There was even a brief period when appliances plugged into lightbulb sockets! Remember the 90’s and what phone chargers looked like until the EU put its foot down and sa…

AIUI the reason appliances in the UK used to be supplied with a bare cable is that it avoids the need for extra SKUs. If you sell a Washing Machine which can do anywhere from 100 to 250V AC input, you can make 5000 of them, and you don't care if 50 or 500 of those sell in England, it's all the same to you since it's the same SKU. If the English ones need BS1363 plugs (as they do today) then that's a separate SKU.

The reason it changed is that it turns out a ludicrous number of people can't safely and correctly wire a plug. On older circuits if you wire Earth where Neutral should go, the appliance will probably work, but now you've significantly increased the risk of faults becoming fatal. Also UK plugs are fused and left to their own devices almost everybody will put a 13A fuse in the plug (the maximum size commonly available and equivalent to the maximum ~3kW energy draw for 240V home mains) even though very few appliances need that. So now when there's a fault and your 5W bedside clock radio is drawing 2kW (plenty of energy to start a fire), the fuse doesn't blow and instead your house burns down. It's very easy to tell manufacturers "Put the right size fuse in" because they're ordering crates of fuses they can just order the correct one, but home owners know the 13A fuse will "work" so they're not going to buy a 5A fuse instead and risk finding they've got the wrong kind.

As a nerd kid I cared a lot about this, and I would maybe find about half of appliances I was allowed to examine were wrong in some way, most often over-size fuse but sometimes loose wiring or even just straight up wrongly wired. Today those appliances have a pre-installed plug which is almost certain to have the right size fuse and be correctly wired just because it was done as a production line task so somebody was actually trained and given the appropriate equipment.

Re: The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

#53

Post by Nextgrid »

______-_-______ wrote: post #12

Let's say I want to dip my toe into smart homes, maybe get a smart light switch or two. I care about: - privacy - staying out of the cloud (so things like TFA don't affect me) - an open protocol interoperable between vendors Can anyone recommend a good "for dummies" guide written from that angle? I know that software-wise Home Assistant is generally recommended, but how do you decide what hardware to get?

You'll need an electrician to install them, but Shelly modules are what I use: https://shelly.cloud

They must be wired behind your existing wall switches so you don't lose any functionality - you can use the switch as normal.

There is no cloud; the modules themselves have a local web interface and some basic scheduling/timer features (as well as a rudimentary REST API), and are supported by Home Assistant if you need more advanced features.

Re: The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

#54

Post by cptskippy »

orev wrote: post #10
jl6 wrote: post #4

So do all their products now become e-waste or is there some salvageable value?

Insteon has been around for longer than Cloud existed, and their devices will work with HomeSeer or HomeAssistant. But non-techie people probably wont be able to get those working. Maybe a glut of these will be on eBay soon.

> Maybe a glut of these will be on eBay soon.

They're already selling out. I sold a box of old devices for profit this week.

I had removed about 20 of them from my last home and never got around to installing them (in-wall) at my new home so I put them on eBay and already made back most of my investment.

Re: The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

#56

Post by cptskippy »

The really unfortunate thing is that Insteon predated internet based smart home infrastructure. The protocol was completely local and almost all devices work offline.

Insteon could have been an example of how to fail gracefully by updating their hubs with mDNS support and updating their Apps to use local discovery and the already existing local API that all Hubs support. They could have sent a farewell email to customers and given them a solution that would have worked for a few years at least.

Instead they squandered whatever limited resources they had left and then shuttered their service abruptly and went into hiding leaving everyone in a lurch. They couldn't have even bothered with an email notice a month ahead of their shutdown.

Re: The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

#57

Post by gregmac »

bradstewart wrote: post #15
exabrial wrote: post #2

It's a device that doesn't need to be cloud connected... that's cloud connected. Smart home stuff needs a local network to the home, that's it. A server going down in Virginia shouldn't mean a person can't run their vacuum robot.

Insteon devices function perfectly well without the cloud. I have several dozen of their light switches and motion sensors. The quality local communications (wireless that doesn't use 2.4GHz and interfere with WiFi + powerline) was the entire reason I went with them. The cloud-connected hub to enable remote control was a bolt-on, and by far the least reliable part of their ecosystem. So while I totally agree that sma…

> The cloud-connected hub to enable remote control was a bolt-on, and by far the least reliable part of their ecosystem.

Not only that, but least useful? I never understood the use case for why you'd want remote lighting control.

Better: set up automations.

* Outside lights go on when it's dark, until ~11pm.

* Outside lights also turn on with motion

* Some inside lights turn on when it gets dark IF no lights have been manually changed in the past few hours

* Inside lights turn off later in the night if they were turned on automatically AND haven't been adjusted manually since

These rules worked exceedingly well for me: We never came home to a dark house. If we were away, we didn't have to do anything yet the house didn't look like we were away. If we were home, the lights weren't "changing by themselves" (high spouse-acceptance-factor importance).

Re: The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

#58

Post by happimess »

cproctor wrote: post #36
______-_-______ wrote: post #12

Let's say I want to dip my toe into smart homes, maybe get a smart light switch or two. I care about: - privacy - staying out of the cloud (so things like TFA don't affect me) - an open protocol interoperable between vendors Can anyone recommend a good "for dummies" guide written from that angle? I know that software-wise Home Assistant is generally recommended, but how do you decide what hardware to get?

If you're up for some light soldering, I'd recommend picking up a few Sonoff Basics and/or wall plugs and then flashing them with ESPHome ( https://esphome.io/ ). These devices are simple and cheap ($5-6 each), basically just an ESP8266 chip connected to a relay, a button, and a status LED. You have to solder to attach four pins to the board so you can flash it, then you can close it up forever. Future updates happen…

I think you meant "Sonoff Basic relays" in your last paragraph.

Great info thanks.

Re: The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

#59

Post by car_analogy »

gh02t wrote: post #8

The reason these companies keep faltering is that they push cloud-based and/or locked in product ecosystems. Then they are either forced to a) operate on a pyramid scheme where new customers finance the ongoing costs of existing users or b) a subscription model that gives them a strong incentive to keep customers as locked into their ecosystem as possible. Either of these leave customers high and dry when the house o…

> The reason these companies keep faltering is that they push cloud-based and/or locked in product ecosystems.

There is a bigger reason - what problem do they solve? How much money and/or time will using their products save me? The one area where there might be worthwhile savings is smart thermostats, but could 90% of those savings be accomplished with an offline thermostat with a timer?

Re: The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

#60

Post by gregmac »

jmull wrote: post #26
exabrial wrote: post #2

It's a device that doesn't need to be cloud connected... that's cloud connected. Smart home stuff needs a local network to the home, that's it. A server going down in Virginia shouldn't mean a person can't run their vacuum robot.

Do you even need a local network? For home automation the hobby , all the complexity is a feature. Fiddling with phones, apps, watches, identities, connections, security, networks, etc. is the fun of it. Outside the hobby, though, I don't think people really want to deal with all that. Generally, home devices you might automate are things you interact with -- locally. Local controls for a local device work really wel…

> Generally, home devices you might automate are things you interact with -- locally. Local controls for a local device work really well, and the simplicity is hard to beat. Home automation wants to interject poor controls between you and everything.

No it doesn't. Only shitty "smart home" stuff does that.

Home automation automates things. There is no need to control, because it happens without needing to do anything. Simple example is outside lights turning on when it gets dark, though you don't need a whole system for that.

More complex example is: inside lights turn on when it's dark and off at an appropriate time only if no one is home.

I'm with you on the local control thing though. I use lots of scenes (one button to control multiple lights to preset levels) but they're all triggered via a button on the wall or an automation. You can control via app, but I almost never use that -- maybe if I'm on the couch and too lazy to get up to change something. Can also be set up to control remotely, but that's totally pointless with actual home automation.

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