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

I built an offline smart home

androidauthority.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 192 posts

Re: I built an offline smart home

#51

Post by thrdbndndn »

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…

> I avoided things [..] where you had to cycle power or disconnect the device to reset it

I totally agree with your principle about fail normal, but how is this a violation to that?

Re: I built an offline smart home

#52

Post by CharlesW »

js2 wrote: post #45
dylan604 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I have not looked into using the Apple ecosystem, but just assumed it was all centered around the HomePod. Not needing the Homepod now makes me more interested

You need an AppleTV or HomePod to act as the hub. Without that, you get no automation nor ability to control devices from outside your home. An AppleTV is also needed for Thread support. Using an iPad for a hub is deprecated and not supported in the new architecture. You can of course use HomeKit devices with Home Assistant in both directions. HA can obviously serve as the automation hub for HK devices ("accessories"…

> An AppleTV is also needed for Thread support.

Or a HomePod mini, or a 2nd gen HomePod, or a supported 3rd-party device that can act as a Thread border router.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#53

Post by sh1mmer »

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?

Re: I built an offline smart home

#54

Post by moandcompany »

m463 wrote: post #48
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…

> 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 in what bulbs you use (e.g. along color temperature, color rendition, light output, power consumption/efficiency, etc) versus the smart bulb.

The Lutron Caseta series of lighting products are basically the gold standard for being "fail normal" functional without network connectivity to the system control bridge, and the system also uses different RF frequencies than 2.4GHz Wifi based "smart" switches, so it doesn't rely on or potentially create congestion issues on your home Wifi network(s).

Re: I built an offline smart home

#55

Post by paranoidrobot »

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.

> 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.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#56

Post by nanolith »

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 they should only need to connect to additional services or a subscription model if there are useful reasons to do so. Most consumers simply do not need their "smart lock" to phone home. If you wanted to do more interesting things, like issue temporary keys to run an Airbnb, then sure, it makes financial sense to pay a small subscription fee. But, most folks just want a little convenience.

Of course, it helps that I'm generally distrusting of businesses and of how behaviors will change after my departure. If you want your products to be ethical, the ethics must be built in from the beginning.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#57

Post by tass »

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 have a similar setup, and use a mix of Leviton, Inovelli and Lutron switches.

No flashes from any of them.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#58

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

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…

I recently bought some Philips wiz switches. I could have bought cheaper for literally 1/4 cost but they are internet first with zero local support or like tuya which is offline but still needs internet to work.

Most of the stuff either looks to be subsidized to keep online access which will earn data or offline capability is charged more because they dont get data

Re: I built an offline smart home

#59

Post by godelski »

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 skyscrapers. You don't expect them to fall but you question what happens if they do. You will explicitly design them to fall in on themselves (say after... idk... a plane hits them?) so that they do not fall on their side and take out other buildings around them. An important aspect of security design is explicitly around this whole idea. When your systems fail do you want them to "fail open" or "fail closed"? 2) Fail open would be like TSA, where if you start firing off rounds in the queue the system fails and you get "access" to the rest of the airport. 3) Failing closed is typical of safes, where you accept the fact that you will need to take a blowtorch and drill into the safe. (the TSA thing did happen, just not in America)

While these examples are a bit extreme the ideas are incredibly important for many products. I'll give a good example of this by looking at Android Auto. If a user gets frustrated with the system and is not able to accomplish their task in the way __they want to__, they will disconnect their phone, look down at it, do the thing, and reconnect. No matter how much you want to push voice operations, if the person doesn't like that, they fail over to a more dangerous set of actions than if you had just let them use the console a little longer or let them do a specific task. At least their eyes would be closer towards the road. I'm often amazed that there are lack of consideration for these type of things in home and auto platforms where there are often high stakes. How things fail is one of the most important things when designing systems (I'd argue it even matters for things like law and medicine).

Re: I built an offline smart home

#60

Post by j45 »

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…

I started with Lutron Caseta switches specifically for the fail normal feature. They even had wireless remotes for their switches that require no software or cloud at all.
Post reply on HN