And this is why all of my "smart" home devices are managed through Home Assistant without Internet access. I simply won't buy a device that can't be used that way. I shouldn't have to create an "account" or provide a name and email address to use a device that I physically own. A good way to start is to look for Zigbee devices; the protocol is local only by design and the Zigbee coordinator/router can be a simple USB dongle connected to an ordinary PC.
So much this, considering the wave of shitty cloud subscription based smart home products (half of which have already been bricked by their backing companies going out of business), Home Assistant sounds like something that's too good to be true.
It also demonstrates to a wide, non-technical audience that home networking, and eschewing cloud services is not difficult at all. I have strong hopes for a local-first future.
In fact, I hope, considering how much the EU has been pushing digital sovereignity, I'd love if they introduced some legislation that mandated that any product that could be concievably made to work without a cloud, should be forced to do so.
Half of the home automation crap they are selling phones home to some central server (Tuya I'm looking at you mainly), and there are lot of products like my AC which also only work with a cloud integration which I'm not super comfortable with.
Sadly the vast majority of consumers are not going to care, or worse, they could think that the local option is inferior. Most people don't run their own automation. A lot of people don't even set up their own WiFi. Mainstream products, as expected, aim for the least amount of required knowledge.
Valetudo. I haven’t had personal experience using it (due to an unsupported model of NAND memory chip), but I’ve heard good words: https://valetudo.cloud/
That said, I did some research last year before buying my first robot vacuum. I wasn’t able to find a project - Valetudo included - that would support the bigger, fancier robots made by Roborock etc. If you’re looking to decloud a recent model, I don’t have a good answer.
I have a Xiaomi one, and that also connects to the cloud if you wanna use the smartphone app, but you can just not connect it to the internet, set it down, push the button and it does its thing
Honestly, the dumber the better. The old 0 smarts Vileda VR102 still outperforms most of the expensive sensor laden connected units I've encoutered. Sadly no longer available (except online at 4x their original cost).
Roomba redux[1]. Seems ill advised to have appliances that cannot function when offline and reminded me of push back I got at Google for telling them offline maps were essential (in spite of the product manager insisting "everyone has internet everywhere, and where it isn't at the moment it will be by next year.")
Unrelated: That entire article and illustrations are all gen-AI. yuck.
It's wild that they needed this even explained to them, but I figured as much given how terrible Maps and some other Google products are at working in offline mode. One of the most basic features in Maps, simply adding a pin to the map, has been broken for many years if you don't have an active internet connection. There's absolutely no reason you need internet to save a pin locally and it originally worked fine, but they clearly can't be bothered to fix simple glaring issues like that now.
I can recommend Mapy. You can download maps per country, state and even region, so not overly much storage space used. Route planning and navigating offline - it even let's you plan tours based on kilometers and/or time (this is particularly nice when hiking in an unfamiliar region). Modes are: car, bike, mountain bike and foot. I've been using it for years now and like it a lot. It's free with some premium options, I believe. https://mapy.com/en/
Thank you for your service. I spent a few years traveling all around North America and I can assure you that offline mode is very necessary for Maps. These Bay Area engineers need to go to the Rocky Mountains sometime and see how their phones act there when they have zero connectivity.
I guessed before I got to the article this would be eightsleep, the smart mattress being shilled by half of the podcast / influencer community, alongside LMNT drink and Athletic Greens powder.
All overpriced tat that is surplus to requirement. You don't need thousands of pounds of "smart mattress" to sleep. You need to stop staring at last nights REM/deep/light sleep split on your blue light emitting phone an hour before bed, do something relaxing, maybe take a warm shower an hour before bed, cool your sleeping room and slow your breathing as you lay down. Saved you ... £3000, and presumably some subscription.
For the other two, eat healthier in general, and more green vegetables, respectively.
I guess the mattress goes hand-in-hand with the current sleep tracking trend. Your Garmin, Oura, Whoop or Apple Watch cannot give you good analysis of your sleep based purely off of your heartrate. There is little to no backing for this one metric to prove a sleep score, or readiness score, and by paying attention to these laughably inaccurate scores you just placebo yourself into feeling worse (or better, but usually worse) about last nights sleep.
To be fair the situation LMNT and alike is useful in isn't one where you just eat healthier in general, it's specifically useful when youre losing a lot of electrolytes usually during exercise, counterintuitively eating healthier may make that worse as healthier usually means less salt which is the primary electrolyte lost. LMNT and alike comes in there to replace electrolytes when needed without messing up your diet too badly, it's just 95% of the population don't exactly need this, but for people who do it's a genuinely valuable product.
I feel like we need some sort of "Offline-First" or "Offline-Compatible" certification process for "smart" devices. It would require some threshold of usability and total safety without network connection, which would vary depending on the device category. Companies in compliance could put a badge on their products so wary consumers know who to trust.
As the resident Tech Guy in a few circles (family/friends) I often get asked what I'd recommend with regard for "smart" products. Due to the widespread and apparently default lack of support for offline-friendly operation, my answer is always the same: dumb as possible.
edit: a more succinct way of expressing my thinking is to say "the less software the better" by which which normies are are often amused.
Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
I recently had to get a lot of electrical stuff in my house redone because of a kitchen fire, smoke mitigation, and a lot of stuff being opened up anyway.
I told my electrician to redo lighting in a more sensible and modern way but basically nothing involving smart devices -- to which he wholeheartedly agreed. There are a couple things that aren't quite convenient related to how everything is positioned and because a couple of motion detectors weren't reconnected. And I'll deal with those with unconnected devices.
So I had an opportunity to make the house "smart" and basically passed.
(Will probably add some remote monitoring over time but nothing fancy and mostly Raspberry Pi-based.)
I have smart lighting, but that's only because it means I can turn everything in the area living and eating room on/off with a single button/switch (not sure what the right English term is). In a typical Danish townhouse like mine that would be 4-8 buttons otherwise.
If I had an electrician redo the wiring, I'd do the same thing without the "smart".
Exactly. My electrician did a bunch of simplification--kitchen/dining had 3 different switches for historical/random reasons--and one room which never had a switch (originally an overhead pull-chain light) was redone for a variety of reasons given extensive down-to-the-studs work was needed anyway. Used a fair bit of X10 at one point and that one remaining room had an Alexa-controlled plug for a wall-mounted light.
(He also took out a ton of knob and tube wiring which gives you some idea of when the original wiring dated to even if a lot had been incrementally upgraded over the years.)
I don't know if they're available in other markets, but in the US I've been very happy with Lutron Caseta switches for that sort of "smart enough" use case. It generally all works like normal dumb switches if the hub is offline or doesn't exist, and you only need the hub to manage configuration or enable the remote control (outside home) features. The fact that the switches look like, act like, and install like traditional dimmers and control traditional light fixtures is really what sold me: I've never liked the idea of the smart parts being in something like a light bulb thats basically a replaceable wear item.
I'll admit, despite hating the idea of most "smart" tech, I do still have the lights. The ability to change the colour (mostly warmness) through the day and turn on individual lights is pretty neat. I've been using an energized white light during early hours and work, and then warmer colours in the evening to help wind down.
At the time it was an upgrade from halogen bulbs, so the lights themselves have seen me through 10 years so far, way more than the old lights would have. Sadly, they're all bound to go some point soon. It has been 10 years though!
I would never enable the feature that lets you control them from out of the home though. I'm not completely sure what the purpose of that would be..
I made a guest network called Light Bulb Zone just because I don't trust the tech on these devices to be very sound, and I want them to be sequestered to their own network.
No joke, I only plug my printer into the outlet when I want to print and immediately turn it off after. Never was connected to the internet.
But I do have Zigbee sensors and switches, all of which connect to my home server and Home Assistant. None of them see the internet. But Home Assistant is accessible from the internet through a reverse proxy from whitelisted IPs.
I WiFi enabled my fridge because the thermostat broke. So now an ESP32 with a dallas temperature sensor and a relay take care of that. The code on the ESP32 is smart enough to keep working if there is no internet (wasn't always like this, until it had to), but it still sends the temperature to the server for logging and the server can send it configuration commands or control the relay directly, as it was initially.
It was a great way to keep the fridge alive, the thermostat was already a replacement and it never worked properly, so that sometimes things were frozen, sometimes barely cold. ~24 years old. A new one would be more efficient, but then I woudln't be able to log when I opened the fridge anymore (only with something battery powered and long transmit intervals).
This is awesome, great way to keep a fridge going! Temp sensor to ESP32, ESP32 monitors set point and calls for cool, output from ESP32 energizes relay coil which turns on the compressor?
> A new one would be more efficient, but then I woudln't be able to log when I opened the fridge anymore (only with something battery powered and long transmit intervals).
Also, how did you do this? Wiring to the door switch itself or a current switch around the fridge light conductor?
i also have questions. was the fridge "smart"-capable prior to the esp32 mods and you just replaced the factory controller with your esp32 stuff, or youre saying you wired in the appropriate circuitry to replace the pressure-controlling thermostat with your esp32 stuff?
it was not smart-capable. I was very lucky that the thermostat was in the fridge itself, above the compartments. There I removed the old analog control and had enough space to fit a USB power supply to the cables which were there connected to the now-removed analog control. I was lucky.
The sent data gets stored in InfluxDB. So with Grafana it allows me to see when I opened it, because the temperature rises immediately.
History students are often disappointed when they learn why the AI take-over failed. They were defeated by human resistance, which was kept alive by libraries and old paper books, and a surprising machine ally.
Books had not been replaced, because even the mightiest AI could not make printers work.
The Automatic setting only allows devices to talk to a manufacturer whitelist of connections for things like firmware updates. The other two options are self-evident.
I've found that "Restrict to Home" occasionally causes problems with older devices.
It’s rightfully overlooked now because HomeKit Secure Routers are basically dead.
I actually have a router that supports it, but I don’t dare turn it on because I have no confidence on it continuing to exist and the migration path back off it looks like a pain.
I wonder if things have changed since that article was published a year-and-half ago, because my eero, with the firmware from a few days ago, still supports it.
I assume it’s in some kind of maintenance support mode. Actually removing support from routers would be a nightmare for anyone who’s set up their home by pairing devices through a HomeKit router - all their HomeKit devices would become unpaired.
Matter turned into a cluster fuck of devices. Use you're android phone to provision a device and connect it to your setup, most people use Google Home or homeassistant, smartthings is also an option, maybe others. But it's only to onboard the device for the most part. It'll still connect to your WiFi, give you next to no visibility as to what's going on in a failure and no interface to control it should your controller go down.
It's also not very well supported in things like homeassistant, despite what they say.
I’ve only got a handful of Matter devices, but haven’t experienced any problems with them. Have had them connected to HomeKit for a year or more, and got around to connecting them to Home Assistant last week - I was actually very impressed at how seamless it was to connect them to Home Assistant (generate pairing code in Apple Home, copy/paste into HA, done) - they’re now all directly connected to both HA and HomeKit and seem entirely functional on both.
I hoped so, I was wildly disappointed. In my experience so far Matter sucks just as much as what came before - unreliable connections, slow transfer, odd compatibility issues. The best IoT devices in my mind are still WiFi with HomeKit support - I can trivially block them at the router to keep them from phoning home.
Matter is that. However, version support varies by controller: some type of devices supported in one, but not in another. Multi-admin is supported, so that's good.
When people ask me about Internet connected door locks, I tell them about the coworking space I used to be a member of.
More than once I got stuck standing outside in the rain waiting for the smart door lock to come back online after a squirrel jiggled the cable drop by running down it or some k8s pod in the cloud service got knocked over by a chaos gremlin or someone was using a vacuum cleaner that generated too much noise in the wifi spectrum or who even knows what.
Also, there's a fundamental security issue with allowing doors to be unlocked remotely. Door locks aren't particularly secure (it doesn't take too much expertise to learn how to lockpick them), but they require someone's physical presence in order to unlock/bypass as that provides a disincentive for criminals to be seen lurking around a door with various tools in hand. Once you remove the requirement for a physical presence, it's more or less risk-free to attempt to hack the door and you can wait until you are successful to then approach the door.
I am same resident tech guy and I always answer the same way - never connect anything to wifi, no matter what it is. it is that simple and always works. if whatever thing you have does not work without wifi - return it.
WiFi is acceptable, but it must be locally managed. My Midea AC came with a WiFi dongle (for some proprietary cloud/app integration) that I replaced by an ESP32 equivalent for local control through Home Assistant. HA runs on my LAN, and is remotely accessed by a VPN.
You lose convenience/functionality though. E.g. it’s convenient for me to turn on the aircon an hour before I get home in the summer.
Edit: I'm not talking on a day to day basis, but when I go on a trip. And I don't have a porch nor I like beer.
Amazing that some people downvote for stating the obvious, which is that you can lose some convenience. There's trade offs when you connect something to the Internet? That's also obvious.
When I get back home in the summer from a short trip away, with a toddler and a million bags it is definitely convenient for me to have a cool home and not a 40+ degrees celsius one.
You can remotely control devices that don’t themselves have any access to the internet via local smart home platforms that are internet accessible, e.g. Apple Home or Home Assistant.
If your schedule is consistent a standard programmable thermostat does the job for pretty cheap.
My Ecobee is convenient but will probably go back to an offline model when it dies or loses support. Once I dialed in my preferred schedule, I rarely touch it except to lock a set temperature when going out of town.
I have a rule that I don't put in any smart devices that aren't at least as smart as a dumb device. They must do everything a dumb device can do when there is no internet.
I've had good luck with the TP-Link/Kasa/Tapo wall switches and bulbs.
When my dogs go outside at night, I turn on 4 lights with "Alexa, turn on the dogs lights." I'd have to go to my kitchen and garage to do that otherwise, and I certainly wouldn't have those sets of lights wired up in a circuit otherwise control in that arrangement.
The switches I buy, do all of the dumb stuff, plus more - and the "plus more" parts can be quite useful.
Network connected switches can be a reasonable compromise for a retrofit but if you're remodeling it's a much better idea to run data cabling instead of electrical to all the wall switches and install all the relays in a centralized location.
> I just use my hands to turn light switches on and off.
Difficult if you're not there though? Whereas a smart bulb/switch can turn it on when you're not there (crime deterrence) or when you're almost home (handy in hallway with no light.)
(Niche uses, perhaps, but "I just use my hands" is reductive silliness.)
Both of your use cases do not require any from of smart device and certainly no internet connection.
In fact you could even use an simple analog switch if you want the lights to go on at certain times. And for the hallway I would suggest the tried and true motion sensor.
Sure for really complex logic and a lot of flexibility you might want an micro controller eventually but those are truly niche uses.
"Smart" devices are insanely overengineered for the simple problems they solve and the huge problems they can cause.
> And for the hallway I would suggest the tried and true motion sensor.
By the time I'm in the dark hallway, it's a bit late. "But just add a motion sensor outside!" Yeah, except this is a block of flats and you can't add stuff to the communal areas like that.
> if you want the lights to go on at certain times
I don't. I want the lights to go on -as if we were at home-. Which is "random times depending on which room and what people are doing and if there is cooking going on and ..." Home Assistant learns from smart bulb activations and can simulate our presence effectively.
It consists of a mechanical timer, a dial, and a relay. It plugs into a receptacle. It does not require an internet connection.
> or when you're almost home (handy in hallway with no light.)
This wall switch occupancy sensor that can switch 2A (240 watts at 120V, more than enough for one hallway) is $23, it’s a decora device so figure $2 more for a 1-gang stainless decora wall plate (or less than buck if you go with plastic!): https://www.homedepot.com/p/Lutron-Maestro-Motion-Sensor-Swi...
However, that much current can power (72) 10W LED recessed cans that each put out about ~1000 lumens. Or enough light for approximately 2400 square feet of interior space.
> (Niche uses, perhaps, but "I just use my hands" is reductive silliness.)
These are not niche functions, occupancy sensing and time of day scheduling are in basically every commercial lighting control system and fairly common in homes. They’re solved problems with cheap commodity devices available that don't require an internet connection.
[can't see any of the links because homedepot is blocking EU/UK]
> It consists of a mechanical timer, a dial, and a relay.
Great but it only works on fixed times. Which isn't what we want.
> This wall switch occupancy sensor
Would only work once we're inside. Which isn't what we want.
(And there's no possibility of putting one outside.)
> They’re solved problems with cheap commodity devices
For certain simplistic scenarios where things are easily installable, etc. Which is great! I'm not saying everyone should use smart things. Just pointing out, repeatedly, that the "cheap commodity devices" do not, and indeed cannot, perform the same functions as smart devices.
I don't even like icemakers in my refrigerators. Meanwhile, my parent's Samsung refrigerator keeps annoying them with ads on it's uselessly huge screen.
I disagree with your point about quality, but I'll indulge you for the sake of discussion. Given the choice between "lower quality" that will always work, or convenient-until-inevitably-bricked, I'll always advocate for the former.
The question was about when they ask for a smart device specifically. Not when they ask for a dumb device. My comparison is NOT between smart vs non smart devices.
Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear. When someone asks me about smart devices, e.g. a washing machine, I really pressure them about why they need it to be smart, and encourage them to go dumb.
We could even go more basic... safe defaults when disconnected should be mandatory.
For example, if I pull the thermostat off my wall, the furnace should drop into a fallback mode that keeps the heat above freezing (I'm in Canada where this is a concern.)
I moved into a new house and did not set up the lawn irrigation system. Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.
A standard furnace and thermostat won’t even know if you pull the thermostat off the wall, much less have any way to handle it beyond “full blast heat 24/7”
More challenging: you expected the sprinkler setup to do the opposite. Instead of following its last-known plan (the schedule) it should stop doing anything (possibly killing the plants it’s watering)
Good off-line only mode in a reasonable plan for what to do without the Internet makes a lot of sense, but at some point, there’s a control system and you need to change it (or even just have one in the thermostat example)
> there’s a control system and you need to change it
Why does the control system have to live on someone else's server in "the cloud"?
There's no reason for smart home devices to require an internet connection to the producer's service. Companies could just as easily put compute on device, or sell some sort of "bridge" (aka a home server appliance) that runs the compute and the accessories connect to.
Fully offline, local network only.
Save the online stuff just for analytics or other value-add features, but core functionality shouldn't require a web service.
The only reason it's 100% internet connection required all the time is to sell subscriptions, aka consumer hostile behavior.
In both cases the control system is physically in your house. It sounds like the sprinkler system did work completely offline (though it's not clear if you'd actually be able to change anything without internet - that would be a problem if not), they didn't set up an account so the system was in "offline" mode and dutifully ran the sprinklers on the last known schedule.
For the thermostat the example was physically removing the control system, which is typically not connected to the furnace through any sort of internet connection, and expecting the furnace to know what to do.
The way I see it is... I'd rather my lawn be yellow, plants dead, than a burst pipe underground causing significantly more expensive remediation.
I agree it's not likely (especially if the system is running as-scheduled), but it was a surprise is all. What if I didn't set up the service at all, and it dropped below 0 C? I would be in for a nasty surprise in the spring.
Yeah both my furnace and sprinklers require a local controller to do anything, and that just maintains my settings. Idk what an internet connected version of those things looks like, but would hope it's the same except local settings can be read/written remotely.
> Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.
I'd have expected (and strongly prefer) that it keep running with whatever the last settings were. That's almost surely going to be healthier for the lawn, ornamentals, and vegetable garden than shutting off.
I would wager that most people with automated irrigation systems prefer plant growth/protection over water conservation.
I'm not sure how you'd program a furnace to run to keep a house above freezing without any temperature feedback from the house. You could potentially run it until the area immediately surrounding the furnace itself was above freezing, but that would be nowhere near enough in some cases and way, way more than needed in other cases. You might able to use outdoor weather compensation (easier/more effective/comfortable with hydronic heat distribution than with ducted air heating) if programmed correctly, but my experience is that most are either not installed or are configured to be far too hot [because call-backs are expensive and paid by the HVAC company usually].
The connection between the furnace and the thermostat probably shouldn't go through the internet.
So it's perfectly reasonable for the furnace to turn off when it is disconnected, because disconnection would be a very strong signal for an error state instead of regular intermittent network/service issues.
They're not, "smart" thermostats have a WiFi frontend that allows devices to connect to it from the network but the thermostat itself is hardwired to the furnace/HVAC.
You could in theory put one next to the furnace in your machine closet but that would be dumb and expensive
Certainly, the standard smart thermostat set up is that your ecobee is connected to the Internet, but controls the furnace using good old-fashioned signal wires
Which is only extremely tangentially related to "if I pull my thermostat off the wall"
The overwhelmingly most common connection between a thermostat and furnace is a contact closure when calling for heat, with no ability to differentiate between “thermostat is present but not calling for heat” and “thermostat is not present” as both present as "these T-T contacts are not closed/shorted together".
the connection to my thermostat is via a cable, if I pull it out of the wall it won't be connected to anything at all. the whole furnace is not connected to anything but mains power.
yeah the default in this case has to be “off” to prevent damage from running blind, on that note other things in the house should be certified to be able to handle being frozen perhaps
Typically when people are concerned about their house freezing in cold climates, they are primarily worried about water freezing, expanding, and cracking pipes and fittings.
It is extraordinarily hard to design something that can withstand that pressure and still be fit for purpose. The item needs to be able to withstand pressures in excess of ~10k psi for -10c, with the pressure rising as temp decreases.
The standard solution for people that need to winterize a building that will not be heated is to drain as much water as possible from the lines, and then fill them with a liquid with a lower freezing point.
> I moved into a new house and did not set up the lawn irrigation system. Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.
Not running when disconnected is definitely a safe default, but I'm not sure it's automatically desired. If I found out I couldn't use my sprinkler system unless it was connected to the internet, I'd be annoyed at the unnecessary gating of such functionality.
Only two examples and you are already contradicting yourself. One service should keep running and the other should turn off in the event of loosing the connection to the “outside world”.
What we need is a “in the
event of X - keep doing Y”.
It isn't clear that 'conserve water' is a reasonable default position. Perhaps 'keep doing what it was programmed to be doing' would be a better position?
Depends... the focus here isn't on convenience or utility, but on safety.
The furnace defaults to on to save the water pipes. The sprinkler defaults to off to conserve water as the system is potentially unmonitored and a burst pipe could cause issues.
Defaulting a furnace to on certainly shouldn't be considered safe. What if it's leaking CO into your house, what if it gets dangerously hot and causes a fire?
A thermostat and controls are a necessary requirement for HVAC systems and defaulting anything to "run" if your control plane doesn't exist anymore is definitely not the safe option.
The other issue is that in almost all situations (like this one) what you think is a safe and sane default won't align with what other people think.
There should be defaults and they should be clearly defined, but I don't think it's always obvious to determine what they are.
While I agree with your overall point, this clause is irrelevant to/not supportive of it. The presence of a thermostat wasn't going to help you here either and there are vastly more furnaces with connected thermostats than disconnected to worry about.
CO detectors and alarms are needed to address this risk.
Your thermostat is in a far less likely place to be overloaded with CO should the alarms start going off, though. If the thermostat is gone, you have to physically go to the furnace itself or shut off power at the circuit breaker.
Freezing water pipes are bad, but a furnace running non-stop is going to exceed its duty cycle and pose a greater hazard.
Whatever was implemented as this poorly-thought-through fail-safe would be implemented in the furnace itself, thus that furnace implementation could manage any safety-related concerns, though heating equipment is overwhelmingly rated to 100% duty cycle already. (My goal for my boiler is to have at least 22 hours per day of heating demand to ensure that I'm using the exact minimum temperature water to maintain temp in the house, to maximize efficiency.)
My furnace runs pretty close to non-stop when it’s below -30 outside, I imagine a bigger concern than duty cycles if it did that when it wasn’t -30 would be that it would still be pushing the indoor temperature to 50°C above the outdoor temp.
If something is leaking CO into your house, then it's a major safety issue and needs to be immediately scrapped. Whether or not it's internet connected is the least of your worries.
> What if it's leaking CO into your house, what if it gets dangerously hot and causes a fire?
Furnaces have multiple checks when they turned on, even on the dumbest furnaces. There are multiple safety mechanisms preventing it from getting too hot. CO leak - what thermostat will do for you here?
> The sprinkler defaults to off to conserve water as the system is potentially unmonitored and a burst pipe could cause issues.
I had a friend in Australia who ran cattle on his farm. Failing open would waste water, but failing closed would mean dead cattle (and hundreds of thousands in losses). It depends on the application.
You can already see the “sane defaults” vary with the person.
When it comes to safety it’s a bit more clear cut. The job of a heating system is to heat so don’t turn off heating when this can endanger people and houses.
The job of a lawn irrigation system is to irrigate. Who wants a dead lawn just because the internet or wifi are down, or to conserve water only when the system is disconnected from the internet but not from electricity?
Depends on the part of the world. If you intend on turning off your furnace in Canada, you best be prepared to winterize your house too! (Lots of cottagers do this... indoor plumbing is flushed and water is turned off at the pump, etc.)
I've said for years that any smart thermostat should have a bimetallic backup that controls maximum ranges and acts in the dumbest way possible. Just max temp and min temp for AC and heat. Nothing that should ever be hit... but there nonetheless.
This is the biggest reason why I look for Matter-compatible smart home devices. It means I can put them on a locked down network, with no internet access, and I know at least the Matter supported compatibility will function offline.
I think it would be smart for Matter to lean into the "offline local control" aspect of their branding and certification requirements.
How easy is it to commission a Matter device onto a specific WiFi network? And how easy is it to set up a Thread network without Internet access?
I haven't actually tried this, but:
- The Home Assistant Matter commissioning tool doesn't have any documentation at all about how the network is selected AFAICS.
- The Thread organization seems extremely proud of how Thread devices can access the Internet. Apple TV doesn't seem friendly at all to preventing its Thread Border Router from forwarding to the Internet. Home Assistant's OTBR add-on has no useful configuration whatsoever AFAICS. The easiest way to get it right would seem to be to buy something like a Sonoff POE-capable Thread dongle and sticking it on a VLAN, except that those, for some reason, seem to support Thread RCP but not being a Border Router themselves, and then you're back to managing your own OTBR installation.
Thread as i see it currently is a locked ecosystem that cannot be breached. so far, all the Thread devices I have been interested in will only accept their own manufacturers' thread border router.
I'm pretty sure "all the Thread devices I have been interested in will only accept their own manufacturers' thread border router." that device won't get thread/matter certified.
Are you sure this isn't a case of different matter version support? In which case, in my experience, thread border router works just fine, but the controller needs to support such devices.
I can only speak to my experience, certified devices by the largest firms will mostly not interoperate (fails around authN).
Apple: Keeps Thread credentials locked to HomeKit's border routers.
Google: Shares some credentials, but only within Google Account environment.
Amazon: TBD, but their Matter implementation is mostly cloud-tied.
Samsung: Hybrid approach; still best when used inside SmartThings, their 1.4 update seems to support for joining existing Thread networks. Still have to test it.
So, even though Thread theoretically allows full interoperability, no vendor wants to be reduced to a dumb router in someone else’s ecosystem.
there is no easy way to bridge Apple Thread to Home Assistant or Google Thread, even though it is theoretically supposed to be possible from a protocol standpoint.
If you have such solutions, let me know, because I would take full advantage of it, and will regale your contributions in multiple home automation threads.
I have every thread device I own in both Apple Home and Google Home and it seems to be just working fine? I even remember adding some devices to google and some to apple and then sharing between them. I have border routers from both tho, maybe that's why it works?
> Apple: Keeps Thread credentials locked to HomeKit's border routers.
The Home Assistant iOS app can extract the Thread credentials from Apple’s border routers and send them to Home Assistant. The documentation for what happens thereafter is not amazing.
This.
Also, not only offline-compatible but any anomaly from the api should result in the product simply ignoring the response.
A simple check for 'does not connect' only handles totally offline mode, error in responses is a lot more common.
Couldn't agree more. The main issue is the data-greed mentality that has arisen over the last 20 years or so (basically every company trying to copy Big Tech). They all want to harvest user data and make the users as dependent as possible (which also opens up the door for subscription services later on, and their walled garden won't allow users to easily move).
My rule #1 in home automation is making sure none of the technology fails its original function without connection.
I implement Home Assistant to assist in homes for non-technologist. Every single thing i implement must function independently, without the vendor or any internet connection. i.e., z-Wave locks must function with or without connectivity. Switches must switch on/off with or without zigbee, and valves must be able to close/open without that wifi.
This is a very smart idea. I couldn't turn my Ring Alarm off and I was on the same Wifi connection as the system. In retrospect, it would be quite smart to switch over to local network.
> Companies in compliance could put a badge on their products so wary consumers know who to trust.
This would only work out for the companies if the average consumer actually cared about "offline-first", which they very much don't. It would be a very small and ever shrinking market.
this is a great idea that I've been toying with too. Something like OU / Orthodox Union certification for Kosher or UL for electrical & electronic equipment. A Right-To-Operate & Right-to-Repair certification
There are a few sub-certifications:
- OF: Offline-First as you mentioned
- JE: Jailbreak-Escrow -- the firmware install keys are held in escrow and will be published if the company goes defunct -- allowing ongoing repair & control.
- FE: Firmware-Escrow -- firmware source will be published if the company goes defunct.
- FA: Firmware-Audit -- firmware is compiled by certifiers to verify BOM, security, privacy & online dependencies.
Another benefit would be a "nutrition label" showing active online traffic & data shared.
And can it function either without electricity (like is your Toto Washlet flushable without power) or at least in a steady state (powered, but needs no human input, environmental sensors, or network support to operate). This is useful for shabbos modes as well as failsafe.
great suggestion. I'm baffled at how many devices force a dependency from a mechanical feature --> electricity --> online control logic when the mechanical feature should work fine alone
CTA is supposed to be providing this. They develop industry standards and help make them accessible to consumers to encourage a healthy consumer electronics marketplace.
The best piece of home "automation" in my house is a big flashing red LED in the ceiling near the front door that is connected to a magnetic reed switch that tells us if we left the garage door open.
I'm genuinely shocked this isn't the default. Imagine if your fridge stopped working because it could not connect to the internet. Which I had forgotten about mine, and it did not connect for like two years, it worked just fine.
We had a monolith (but not monorepo) that had big Conway’s Law problems. We wanted to start making microservices. We had a couple sidecars that I either wrote or did reconstructive surgery on, but the few microservices we had were dumb. One created head-of-line problems for fanout, asking a question that could have been a Consul long poll. The other really could have been run entirely in Bamboo if we hadn’t cheaped out on agent size.
I killed the former, but the latter used a larger slice of all of our modules than all of the sidecars combined. It was also an offline process, writing into dark content in S3. So I could break it for an hour without anyone noticing, and in some environments I could go a full work day without rolling it back as long as I watched for production alerts (and I was on the team that did).
If I got rid of it then all library and runtime upgrades would get harder, though half the team ignored my advice anyway and then we had occasional P1s or 2s because of it.
My experience, there and elsewhere, is that offline logic of any flavor at least pays for itself in terms of code-build-test cycles, fairly quickly and self-evidently. But some people think it sounds counterintuitive and push people to “go fast” without it. Which only happens if they double down and cut more corners.
While I fully agree with you in principle, how would that realistically happen? Countries typically only pass laws after something major enough happens. If this was an IoT device that God forbid killed someone, sure, they'd be an outcry against it in the papers, and lawmakers may be galvanized enough to do something.
Call me cynical or just disappointed and jaded, but short of some EU consumer advocacy group pushing for it, I don't see how anything would realistically happen. 99% of laws are made after something bad-bad has already happened.
> There's other examples of such a thing in a bunch of industries already.
Often because the government is threatening to impose regulation. I’m not sure how many examples there are of industries independently choosing to collaborate to regulate themselves.
That's essentially what Matter + Thread is. The Matter smart home standard, which can run on the Thread wireless protocol, allows products to work without an internet connection for local controls.
Matter is pretty common on newer smart home products, while Thread is a bit newer so it's only supported on some products right now.
I think the group of people who would buy something with "smart" in the name and also really care about reliability is pretty small.
For instance, most people who want a reliable mattress would buy one that doesn't require, or allow configuration.
It seems to me that most of the home automation enthusiasts are actually into configuration and troubleshooting as a hobby. And maybe doing party tricks. There's nothing wrong with that. But I don't think there are enough people to really make this badge work.
I simply don't care how it was done, the fact of rebooting mattresses is already just too much. It is both a huge kick in the pants, and hilarious at the same time. What, the heck, are we doing, I dunno ...
That was exactly my first thought when reading the headline, together with fond thoughts of Squornshallows Zeta. I was really surprised to have to scroll this far down to see a Hitchhiker's Guide reference. I mean, the joke basically writes itself.
How could it ruin somebodys sleep, when they could just simply pull the plug? And in case of the preheated matress just lay it outside or put some ice on it. Seems like constructed problems to me.
And: whoever buys products that can only be run when it connects to a foreign server is an idiot. There should be laws preventing cloud-only physical products, as this causes unnecessary waste as soon as the companies stop offering the service (for whatever reason). They should at least habe to offer containerized versions of the backend service that can be run locally.
Haven't read the article but sounds like the Cory doktrow's radicalized where a lady cannot go to work because her toaster is not working because the cloud provider used by the toaster company went bankrupt.
Soooo you couldn't change some mattress setting on a cloud-controlled mattress. Not exactly "ruin sleep worldwide" and "go rogue". What trash journalism.
Also those images, wow, I really would have preferred no images over these soulless, generic AI-generated impressions.
Do all content-spam “journalists” use the same LLM prompt to dial up the faux drama?
> Picture this: You're tucked in, ready for a night of optimized REM cycles, when your app pings an error. No more tweaking the chill to a crisp 55°F or firing up the "cool mode" for those midnight hot flashes.
> The core temperature control? Utterly crippled without the cloud. Users reported the app freezing on loading screens, refusing to connect, and leaving them stranded in whatever thermal hell their last setting dictated.
Toothless rhetorical questions, false or confusing stakes, awkward attempts at flippant tone…
Why would they have set it to an hellacious temperature? Wtf mattress goes to 55 degrees? Why are these stakes existential? Sleep on the couch or the floor ffs…
> The hits kept coming. Smart sleep tracking? Dead in the water—no logging of phases, no biometric insights, just a void where your sleep score should be.
These stakes seem low. I guess it sells, but…
And then a roundup of internet comments like “unacceptable” with unfunny padding.
If this is what the future of “internet journalism” looks like, I’m optimistic that enough demand will remain for the real thing that they’ll find a way to fund some.
That's just the awful default voice of most LLMs if you ask it to write an article. I think it feels even more cringe because we can easily identify it now.
We suffer them sometimes because there is some nugget of information in there. I'd prefer the link to go to a not-AI article on the subject, but here we are.
this isn't fallout from the AWS Outage, it's fallout from a bunch of idiots at another company designing a product badly and then selling it and not caring how bad it was
I want to see the postmortem, although I'm sure we never will.
> Eight Sleep's system, which relies on backend servers for everything from real-time adjustments to data syncing, had no fallback. "It's unacceptable," fumed one early complainant on X, echoing the frustration of many who shelled out for "seamless" smart sleep only to face analog purgatory.
I'm guessing that this is a typical "smart" device setup where the cloud is essentially a tunnel between the app and the device that also saves a copy of all transmitted state for backup and data mining. The simplest design from the company's POV, but the worst design for resilience.
The real question: Was this an explicit or implicit product decision? ie, was it an explicit PM decision that local comms didn't match product requirements, or did they outsource it to the lowest bidder and have no idea this was a ticking time bomb, or did eng have to cut features to make some deadline, etc? If Eight Sleep doesn't have an at least an internal postmortem then someone should lose their job.
As a user, I would prefer the devices communicate locally and use a cloud tunnel only as backup. But this means engineering has to support two communication stacks, which is obviously more expensive than one. And the local network option is probably harder to build since cloud-based has so much tooling available.
My baseline expectation - that I can't believe I'm actually typing out - is that an appliance should operate as expected without Internet access. My only smart device is a door lock because a PIN is easier than a house key for our lifestyle, but even that isn't connected to Wi-Fi.
Weirdly eightsleep apparently is sending 16GB of data per month worth of telemetry. It's been pointed out that that's about enough for a live audio stream of everything that happens in your bedroom. It can't be cheap to process that much data.
These wifi based smart home devices just fundamentally don't serve their customers.
1. You pay money for a device
2. You pay money for monthly service
3. They sell your private data on the backend, not to worry though, it's "anonymized", but of course it gets sold and then deanonymized
4. AWS goes down and your house doesn't work
5. Eventually they go out of business or get bored and you have to buy and install all new stuff.
I mean not to defend the telemetry philosphy (my smart home setup is local only with a couple of tell-tale heart exceptions[1]) but I'd expect that any cheap sensor net where your trying to infer data from indirect sensors would be grabbing as much data as possible especially if it didn't have strong local processing.
But yeah don't buy products that don't work local only, if they require online the temptation will be to great at some point to abuse that requirement.
[1] They're slowly driving me insane and I'll destroy them for the peace of mind at some point if an update doesn't brick them first.
Javascript on a local machine would be easier to settup than a network. But I've installed linux from floppies before and so I know how to do each by hand. If you rely on a standare distribution it sets up the network and starts a browser automatically so you just need to set a url which seems easier - but only because the complexity is hidden.
Most smart appliances are ticking timebombs, and most serve no real purpose. I get that sometimes they can be neat, and I myself went through a phase myself of building a "smart apartment".
All I learned is the smart speaker assistants degrade over time, companies (even relatively big ones) go bust and take down any app support as they go, and that my life isn't too busy to fit small tasks into my day.
Incredible premiums to (maybe) simplify some relatively small home tasks. I've found it much more fulfilling to do many of those tasks myself and treat it like downtime from the other things I do.
Not entirely related, but sleeping hot I've managed to mitigate the terrible sweaty nights in summer by using an outlast topper. It's not a miracle, but at least I just feel hot and not incredibly hot. I honestly didn't believe it would do something, but it does something
I lived on an island in the middle of the Panama Canal for a few years, one of the hottest and most humid places imaginable. We had no AC. Everyone used a top sheet instead of a comforter or blanket, and had a ceiling fan going at night. It worked surprisingly well.
Ceiling fans are really underrated. Even if you have AC, you can probably save money/energy at night by running the AC at a higher temp with a ceiling fan.
I go camping often throughout the year, and sometimes sleep in a tent in 85-100+F weather. If I put a box fan at the foot of the bed, blowing straight over me, it will cool me down to the point where I wake up and pull a blanket over me. (I always start with a sheet because cool air blowing directly onto on the bottom of my feet is uncomfortable.) Don't underestimate the power of the simple box fan.
I've found thermal cooling with a bit of a dab of cold water on my body (sleeping above duvet), with a fan blowing on it for a few minutes is enough to get me to sleep.
IoT products tend to be a disgrace of either criminal negligence or malevolence.
I wonder whether the first pushback will be when people who worked on IoT products have trouble finding jobs at companies doing anything else (other than clubbing baby seals, or running blockchain scams).
It was unusual for my Amazon Alexa to turn more into the paperweight that it has become. Too many devices are helplessly dependent on the cloud, and when that cloud breaks, or the company stopped supporting the device, consumers are left without.
The more I see shit like this, the more I want to pursue my little fantasy job of starting a factory that builds dumb devices. A simple microwave. A simple dishwasher. Stuff that isn't connected to any garbage cloud and just works. No touchscreens. Just physical buttons. Something that works equally well for elderly as for us geeks.
This affected me and my wife. We have an Eight Sleep mattress courtesy of my employer, which is probably the only way I'd have something that expensive. I've slept on everything from Navy bunks to plain dirt to the nice memory foam mattress we have now. I'm not finicky. But while I'm not going to shill for Eight Sleep, I've gotta say that they're really nice. Well, normally, when they're working as expected.
It has an automatic routine where our bed[0] is nicely cool when we climb in at bedtime. Then it warms up a little overnight when we're in deep sleep. Finally, it gets uncomfortably warm at alarm time, as a way to encourage you to want to get out of bed. It also uses sensors to detect how much you're moving around, pairs that with the room temperature, and uses that to, say, turn the temperature down if you're thrashing around on an especially warm night.
Know how in San Francisco, the weather's almost always perfect except for those rare days when it's too warm to get comfy at night? Honestly, it's ideal for getting through those without having to crank the window air conditioner[1].
During the outage, my wife and I both woke up because we were too hot. Our bed wasn't overly warm, like if it were on the "it's time to wake up, get moving!" setting. It was just a normal "ugh, it's so hot in the room, I wish I could sleep!" kind of thing. I'm glad to hear they're upping their offline game to handle these situations more gracefully.
I don't know if I'd recommend anyone go out and buy an Eight Sleep. They're pretty pricy and you can buy a lot of air conditioning for that money, if the cooling feature is the main reason you'd want it. However, if you have the opportunity to get one on someone else's budget[2], absolutely do it! It's really very pleasant to climb into a cool bed on a warm night, and presumably vice versa.
They work as advertised. Except, you know, when the Internet's out.
[0]Our settings are individualized, but similar.
[1]For those outside SF, AC is unusual here. We almost never need it so most places don't have it.
[2]Huh, wonder if you could use it to spend down an FSA?
The article (quasa.io, first time seeing this domain, first time ever on HN) doesn't inspire confidence with those AI generated images (which seem to be all over other articles too). It seems to be AI slop to me.
Although googling on the subject, there are other articles in other websites on the same subject.
Can people stop using these utterly cringe ai generated photos? It doesn’t make your content more interesting and I actually think less of what you have to say, especially if it’s from Grok.
> But when AWS went dark, the system locked into that toasty preset, disabling any cooling override. Browne spent the night marinating in his own perspiration, tweeting updates like a man betrayed: "Backend outage means I'm sleeping in a sauna
It might not be easily reachable? Some people put the wire inside the drywall for aesthetic reasons for stuff that you rarely unplug, like a TV. A matress can fall in that category.
Power goes to an external pod that has the water reservoir, pump, heating/cooling elements, etc.
It has to be user accessible to refill water, it needs space for airflow, and has to be next to the bed because the mattress water/data/power lines run to it on a limited length umbilical.
It uses a standard IEC C13/C14 power cord. There's no sane configuration where it would be anything more than trivially easy to unplug the power.
But you'll get more retweets and social media engagement if you just stew yourself in your smart device hell and let everyone else know how its going.
People do that perhaps - but it isn't allowed by any code I'm aware of - at least not by default. wires in walls have strict standards that mattress manufactures would't want to meet.
Or sleeping on the couch. Better than a pool of your own sweat.
TBQH I don't even see why heated mattresses exist when heated blankets are so effective and doubtlessly cheaper. Now, a cooling mattress is another story..
Heated mattresses are more effective on a cold night since heat rises through you into the blanket. But you can get pads that work with your existing mattress.
A cold mattress with a warm top blanket is one of the irrational joys of life. A warm blanket is more satisfying when you have something cool to contrast it with.
I'm curious as to why this would have a heating element and why that would be the default.
I thought that a cool/cold bed was better for getting to sleep, since the body lowers its own temperature at night as part of it's natural circadian rhythm and because cooling helps produce melatonin.
And when you are asleep, cooling gives you a deeper sleep and can reduce insomnia. So instead of a £3000 mattress that heats up (and by default does so), you just need a thin duvet (or even just the cover in summer).
In the US, garage door openers have a big red handle that you can pull to disconnect the garage door opener and open it manually.
Multiple people have died, because the power went out during a fire, and they couldn't figure out how to evacuate without a working garage door for opener.
This whole article feels like majorly overblown. I mean yes would be nice if the 2 mattress has an offline mode, but I'm sure everyone was fine for a day without it.
There's an ancient joke about liberal arts majors who, when presented with a malfunctioning microwave that's throwing sparks, desperately try to turn it off; eventually an engineering student wanders by and pulls the plug.
And this is why all of my "smart" home devices are managed through Home Assistant without Internet access. I simply won't buy a device that can't be used that way. I shouldn't have to create an "account" or provide a name and email address to use a device that I physically own. A good way to start is to look for Zigbee devices; the protocol is local only by design and the Zigbee coordinator/router can be a simple USB dongle connected to an ordinary PC.
So much this, considering the wave of shitty cloud subscription based smart home products (half of which have already been bricked by their backing companies going out of business), Home Assistant sounds like something that's too good to be true.
It also demonstrates to a wide, non-technical audience that home networking, and eschewing cloud services is not difficult at all. I have strong hopes for a local-first future.
In fact, I hope, considering how much the EU has been pushing digital sovereignity, I'd love if they introduced some legislation that mandated that any product that could be concievably made to work without a cloud, should be forced to do so.
Half of the home automation crap they are selling phones home to some central server (Tuya I'm looking at you mainly), and there are lot of products like my AC which also only work with a cloud integration which I'm not super comfortable with.
Sadly the vast majority of consumers are not going to care, or worse, they could think that the local option is inferior. Most people don't run their own automation. A lot of people don't even set up their own WiFi. Mainstream products, as expected, aim for the least amount of required knowledge.
Not true, you underestimate the power of hone improvement obessesed tinkering dads
EightSleep is even better, you have to create two accounts if you have a partner
Any suggestions for robot vacuum?
Valetudo. I haven’t had personal experience using it (due to an unsupported model of NAND memory chip), but I’ve heard good words: https://valetudo.cloud/
That said, I did some research last year before buying my first robot vacuum. I wasn’t able to find a project - Valetudo included - that would support the bigger, fancier robots made by Roborock etc. If you’re looking to decloud a recent model, I don’t have a good answer.
I've got Valetudo running on a Dreame LS40. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask me.
It's been installed for a few months now, and I bought it specifically to install Valetudo on it.
I have a Xiaomi one, and that also connects to the cloud if you wanna use the smartphone app, but you can just not connect it to the internet, set it down, push the button and it does its thing
Honestly, the dumber the better. The old 0 smarts Vileda VR102 still outperforms most of the expensive sensor laden connected units I've encoutered. Sadly no longer available (except online at 4x their original cost).
Paying $4000 and $20/month for the privilege of living a Black Mirror episode is peak 2020s.
Roomba redux[1]. Seems ill advised to have appliances that cannot function when offline and reminded me of push back I got at Google for telling them offline maps were essential (in spite of the product manager insisting "everyone has internet everywhere, and where it isn't at the moment it will be by next year.")
Unrelated: That entire article and illustrations are all gen-AI. yuck.
[1] https://fntalk.com/tech/dead-roombas-stranded-packages-and-d...
It's wild that they needed this even explained to them, but I figured as much given how terrible Maps and some other Google products are at working in offline mode. One of the most basic features in Maps, simply adding a pin to the map, has been broken for many years if you don't have an active internet connection. There's absolutely no reason you need internet to save a pin locally and it originally worked fine, but they clearly can't be bothered to fix simple glaring issues like that now.
I can recommend Mapy. You can download maps per country, state and even region, so not overly much storage space used. Route planning and navigating offline - it even let's you plan tours based on kilometers and/or time (this is particularly nice when hiking in an unfamiliar region). Modes are: car, bike, mountain bike and foot. I've been using it for years now and like it a lot. It's free with some premium options, I believe. https://mapy.com/en/
Thank you for your service. I spent a few years traveling all around North America and I can assure you that offline mode is very necessary for Maps. These Bay Area engineers need to go to the Rocky Mountains sometime and see how their phones act there when they have zero connectivity.
I guessed before I got to the article this would be eightsleep, the smart mattress being shilled by half of the podcast / influencer community, alongside LMNT drink and Athletic Greens powder.
All overpriced tat that is surplus to requirement. You don't need thousands of pounds of "smart mattress" to sleep. You need to stop staring at last nights REM/deep/light sleep split on your blue light emitting phone an hour before bed, do something relaxing, maybe take a warm shower an hour before bed, cool your sleeping room and slow your breathing as you lay down. Saved you ... £3000, and presumably some subscription.
For the other two, eat healthier in general, and more green vegetables, respectively.
I guess the mattress goes hand-in-hand with the current sleep tracking trend. Your Garmin, Oura, Whoop or Apple Watch cannot give you good analysis of your sleep based purely off of your heartrate. There is little to no backing for this one metric to prove a sleep score, or readiness score, and by paying attention to these laughably inaccurate scores you just placebo yourself into feeling worse (or better, but usually worse) about last nights sleep.
To be fair the situation LMNT and alike is useful in isn't one where you just eat healthier in general, it's specifically useful when youre losing a lot of electrolytes usually during exercise, counterintuitively eating healthier may make that worse as healthier usually means less salt which is the primary electrolyte lost. LMNT and alike comes in there to replace electrolytes when needed without messing up your diet too badly, it's just 95% of the population don't exactly need this, but for people who do it's a genuinely valuable product.
It's definitely overpriced and over engineered, but maintaining body temperature during sleep is a massive factor of sleep quality.
Gateway timeout, 504 host error. I can't access the article about an outage because of an outage. Reliability is hard, apparently.
And the company that posted it describes itself as "a blockchain platform offering decentralized solutions for remote work"
gulp
The original link works for me now, but here's a different site with more detail and some responses from 8Sleep:
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/aws-crash-causes-2000-...
(Hoping someone will print it out and mail it to me.)
Gateway timeout, 504 host error. My mattress is stuck foot-side up.
I feel like we need some sort of "Offline-First" or "Offline-Compatible" certification process for "smart" devices. It would require some threshold of usability and total safety without network connection, which would vary depending on the device category. Companies in compliance could put a badge on their products so wary consumers know who to trust.
As the resident Tech Guy in a few circles (family/friends) I often get asked what I'd recommend with regard for "smart" products. Due to the widespread and apparently default lack of support for offline-friendly operation, my answer is always the same: dumb as possible.
edit: a more succinct way of expressing my thinking is to say "the less software the better" by which which normies are are often amused.
Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.
Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
(stolen from @PPathole on Twitter)
I recently had to get a lot of electrical stuff in my house redone because of a kitchen fire, smoke mitigation, and a lot of stuff being opened up anyway.
I told my electrician to redo lighting in a more sensible and modern way but basically nothing involving smart devices -- to which he wholeheartedly agreed. There are a couple things that aren't quite convenient related to how everything is positioned and because a couple of motion detectors weren't reconnected. And I'll deal with those with unconnected devices.
So I had an opportunity to make the house "smart" and basically passed.
(Will probably add some remote monitoring over time but nothing fancy and mostly Raspberry Pi-based.)
I have smart lighting, but that's only because it means I can turn everything in the area living and eating room on/off with a single button/switch (not sure what the right English term is). In a typical Danish townhouse like mine that would be 4-8 buttons otherwise.
If I had an electrician redo the wiring, I'd do the same thing without the "smart".
Exactly. My electrician did a bunch of simplification--kitchen/dining had 3 different switches for historical/random reasons--and one room which never had a switch (originally an overhead pull-chain light) was redone for a variety of reasons given extensive down-to-the-studs work was needed anyway. Used a fair bit of X10 at one point and that one remaining room had an Alexa-controlled plug for a wall-mounted light.
(He also took out a ton of knob and tube wiring which gives you some idea of when the original wiring dated to even if a lot had been incrementally upgraded over the years.)
I don't know if they're available in other markets, but in the US I've been very happy with Lutron Caseta switches for that sort of "smart enough" use case. It generally all works like normal dumb switches if the hub is offline or doesn't exist, and you only need the hub to manage configuration or enable the remote control (outside home) features. The fact that the switches look like, act like, and install like traditional dimmers and control traditional light fixtures is really what sold me: I've never liked the idea of the smart parts being in something like a light bulb thats basically a replaceable wear item.
You can wire a house in an smart way without relying on Wifi or Internet, using protocols like KNX-LP... maybe also with CAN-bus?
I'll admit, despite hating the idea of most "smart" tech, I do still have the lights. The ability to change the colour (mostly warmness) through the day and turn on individual lights is pretty neat. I've been using an energized white light during early hours and work, and then warmer colours in the evening to help wind down.
At the time it was an upgrade from halogen bulbs, so the lights themselves have seen me through 10 years so far, way more than the old lights would have. Sadly, they're all bound to go some point soon. It has been 10 years though!
I would never enable the feature that lets you control them from out of the home though. I'm not completely sure what the purpose of that would be..
I made a guest network called Light Bulb Zone just because I don't trust the tech on these devices to be very sound, and I want them to be sequestered to their own network.
No joke, I only plug my printer into the outlet when I want to print and immediately turn it off after. Never was connected to the internet.
But I do have Zigbee sensors and switches, all of which connect to my home server and Home Assistant. None of them see the internet. But Home Assistant is accessible from the internet through a reverse proxy from whitelisted IPs.
Devops: The gun may only anger it so we keep a sledgehammer nearby in case
Alignment Researcher: Thermite is the safest way to be sure.
Management: Let's wait until James Hamilton's yacht makes landfall and then he'll fix it in 3 minutes.
Just put the printer precariously close to an open window on a high floor and threaten it with a performance review every once and a while.
Do you have a link to the original?
This is the earliest version I have found: <https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L>
The one I had bookmarked is only slightly older: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/aloi5v/pro...
I almost read the last line as "No Internet Connected".
Maybe that's the best option TBH.
Tech worker enthusiast: my whole house is smart, and has no connection to the internet.
Married tech worker enthusiast flips the script back to a dumb house.
Feel this. I don't even use Alexa, Siri or Hey Google in my house. My fridge is a fridge and not wifi enabled.
I WiFi enabled my fridge because the thermostat broke. So now an ESP32 with a dallas temperature sensor and a relay take care of that. The code on the ESP32 is smart enough to keep working if there is no internet (wasn't always like this, until it had to), but it still sends the temperature to the server for logging and the server can send it configuration commands or control the relay directly, as it was initially.
It was a great way to keep the fridge alive, the thermostat was already a replacement and it never worked properly, so that sometimes things were frozen, sometimes barely cold. ~24 years old. A new one would be more efficient, but then I woudln't be able to log when I opened the fridge anymore (only with something battery powered and long transmit intervals).
This is awesome, great way to keep a fridge going! Temp sensor to ESP32, ESP32 monitors set point and calls for cool, output from ESP32 energizes relay coil which turns on the compressor?
> A new one would be more efficient, but then I woudln't be able to log when I opened the fridge anymore (only with something battery powered and long transmit intervals).
Also, how did you do this? Wiring to the door switch itself or a current switch around the fridge light conductor?
i also have questions. was the fridge "smart"-capable prior to the esp32 mods and you just replaced the factory controller with your esp32 stuff, or youre saying you wired in the appropriate circuitry to replace the pressure-controlling thermostat with your esp32 stuff?
it was not smart-capable. I was very lucky that the thermostat was in the fridge itself, above the compartments. There I removed the old analog control and had enough space to fit a USB power supply to the cables which were there connected to the now-removed analog control. I was lucky. The sent data gets stored in InfluxDB. So with Grafana it allows me to see when I opened it, because the temperature rises immediately.
I wish society still used AIM Away Messages so I could make mine this, forever.
That's fantastic, thanks for sharing :)
A little micro-fiction story from https://aus.social/@MicroSFF@mastodon.art/115191783126736989 :
History students are often disappointed when they learn why the AI take-over failed. They were defeated by human resistance, which was kept alive by libraries and old paper books, and a surprising machine ally.
Books had not been replaced, because even the mightiest AI could not make printers work.
Apple Homekit certification is a good, easy label to recommend. It requires offline/LAN-only basic operation.
Apple Homekit certification is a good, easy label to recommend. It requires offline/LAN-only basic operation.
One of the overlooked features of the Apple Home app is its ability to firewall your IoT devices. If you have a compatible router:
Home Settings → Wi-Fi Network & Routers → HomeKit Accessory Security
The options are:
The Automatic setting only allows devices to talk to a manufacturer whitelist of connections for things like firmware updates. The other two options are self-evident.I've found that "Restrict to Home" occasionally causes problems with older devices.
It’s rightfully overlooked now because HomeKit Secure Routers are basically dead.
I actually have a router that supports it, but I don’t dare turn it on because I have no confidence on it continuing to exist and the migration path back off it looks like a pain.
That's a shame. News article covering the apparent abandonment: https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/03/22/apple-has-abandon...
I wonder if things have changed since that article was published a year-and-half ago, because my eero, with the firmware from a few days ago, still supports it.
I assume it’s in some kind of maintenance support mode. Actually removing support from routers would be a nightmare for anyone who’s set up their home by pairing devices through a HomeKit router - all their HomeKit devices would become unpaired.
And it works very well with Home Assistant after the initial setup via an Apple device (needed so the device can connect to the desired wifi).
It's the right approach, but if only it was an open and cross-platform protocol.
Isn't that basically what the Matter protocol is?
Matter turned into a cluster fuck of devices. Use you're android phone to provision a device and connect it to your setup, most people use Google Home or homeassistant, smartthings is also an option, maybe others. But it's only to onboard the device for the most part. It'll still connect to your WiFi, give you next to no visibility as to what's going on in a failure and no interface to control it should your controller go down.
It's also not very well supported in things like homeassistant, despite what they say.
I’ve only got a handful of Matter devices, but haven’t experienced any problems with them. Have had them connected to HomeKit for a year or more, and got around to connecting them to Home Assistant last week - I was actually very impressed at how seamless it was to connect them to Home Assistant (generate pairing code in Apple Home, copy/paste into HA, done) - they’re now all directly connected to both HA and HomeKit and seem entirely functional on both.
I hoped so, I was wildly disappointed. In my experience so far Matter sucks just as much as what came before - unreliable connections, slow transfer, odd compatibility issues. The best IoT devices in my mind are still WiFi with HomeKit support - I can trivially block them at the router to keep them from phoning home.
Matter is that. However, version support varies by controller: some type of devices supported in one, but not in another. Multi-admin is supported, so that's good.
This. Not buying an Apple device just to set something up.
HomeKit certification doesn't mean that it can only be configured via Apple devices.
But it’s certified to support apple for lan mode and not necessarily something else, right?
I wouldn't recommend picking one that doesn't tell you what tools you can use to configure it, but that's a wise precaution regardless of HomeKit.
When people ask me about Internet connected door locks, I tell them about the coworking space I used to be a member of.
More than once I got stuck standing outside in the rain waiting for the smart door lock to come back online after a squirrel jiggled the cable drop by running down it or some k8s pod in the cloud service got knocked over by a chaos gremlin or someone was using a vacuum cleaner that generated too much noise in the wifi spectrum or who even knows what.
Also, there's a fundamental security issue with allowing doors to be unlocked remotely. Door locks aren't particularly secure (it doesn't take too much expertise to learn how to lockpick them), but they require someone's physical presence in order to unlock/bypass as that provides a disincentive for criminals to be seen lurking around a door with various tools in hand. Once you remove the requirement for a physical presence, it's more or less risk-free to attempt to hack the door and you can wait until you are successful to then approach the door.
I am same resident tech guy and I always answer the same way - never connect anything to wifi, no matter what it is. it is that simple and always works. if whatever thing you have does not work without wifi - return it.
This test even works on Windows versions. 11 needs internet to set up, and it's garbage.
WiFi is acceptable, but it must be locally managed. My Midea AC came with a WiFi dongle (for some proprietary cloud/app integration) that I replaced by an ESP32 equivalent for local control through Home Assistant. HA runs on my LAN, and is remotely accessed by a VPN.
you have your shit together obviously - my uncle jack can't spell vpn...
so the rule stays the same with slight modification - nothing every gets connected to wifi unless you have phd in networking :)
You lose convenience/functionality though. E.g. it’s convenient for me to turn on the aircon an hour before I get home in the summer.
Edit: I'm not talking on a day to day basis, but when I go on a trip. And I don't have a porch nor I like beer.
Amazing that some people downvote for stating the obvious, which is that you can lose some convenience. There's trade offs when you connect something to the Internet? That's also obvious.
When I get back home in the summer from a short trip away, with a toddler and a million bags it is definitely convenient for me to have a cool home and not a 40+ degrees celsius one.
You can remotely control devices that don’t themselves have any access to the internet via local smart home platforms that are internet accessible, e.g. Apple Home or Home Assistant.
IMO, its more convenient to pick up some cold beer on the way home and enjoy it on the porch while the AC chills things down.
If your schedule is consistent a standard programmable thermostat does the job for pretty cheap.
My Ecobee is convenient but will probably go back to an offline model when it dies or loses support. Once I dialed in my preferred schedule, I rarely touch it except to lock a set temperature when going out of town.
yup!!! but you also do not lose any sleep over aircon turning on your gas stove :)
I have a rule that I don't put in any smart devices that aren't at least as smart as a dumb device. They must do everything a dumb device can do when there is no internet.
I've had good luck with the TP-Link/Kasa/Tapo wall switches and bulbs.
I just use my hands to turn light switches on and off. Worked for 200 years so far and I see no sign of that ever changing.
When my dogs go outside at night, I turn on 4 lights with "Alexa, turn on the dogs lights." I'd have to go to my kitchen and garage to do that otherwise, and I certainly wouldn't have those sets of lights wired up in a circuit otherwise control in that arrangement.
The switches I buy, do all of the dumb stuff, plus more - and the "plus more" parts can be quite useful.
Network connected switches can be a reasonable compromise for a retrofit but if you're remodeling it's a much better idea to run data cabling instead of electrical to all the wall switches and install all the relays in a centralized location.
> I just use my hands to turn light switches on and off.
Difficult if you're not there though? Whereas a smart bulb/switch can turn it on when you're not there (crime deterrence) or when you're almost home (handy in hallway with no light.)
(Niche uses, perhaps, but "I just use my hands" is reductive silliness.)
Both of your use cases do not require any from of smart device and certainly no internet connection.
In fact you could even use an simple analog switch if you want the lights to go on at certain times. And for the hallway I would suggest the tried and true motion sensor.
Sure for really complex logic and a lot of flexibility you might want an micro controller eventually but those are truly niche uses.
"Smart" devices are insanely overengineered for the simple problems they solve and the huge problems they can cause.
> And for the hallway I would suggest the tried and true motion sensor.
By the time I'm in the dark hallway, it's a bit late. "But just add a motion sensor outside!" Yeah, except this is a block of flats and you can't add stuff to the communal areas like that.
> if you want the lights to go on at certain times
I don't. I want the lights to go on -as if we were at home-. Which is "random times depending on which room and what people are doing and if there is cooking going on and ..." Home Assistant learns from smart bulb activations and can simulate our presence effectively.
> Difficult if you're not there though? Whereas a smart bulb/switch can turn it on when you're not there (crime deterrence)
This 24 hour timer can turn on two devices (lamps) on for whatever time interval you program, it’s $12: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Defiant-15-Amp-24-Hour-Indoor-Pl...
It consists of a mechanical timer, a dial, and a relay. It plugs into a receptacle. It does not require an internet connection.
> or when you're almost home (handy in hallway with no light.)
This wall switch occupancy sensor that can switch 2A (240 watts at 120V, more than enough for one hallway) is $23, it’s a decora device so figure $2 more for a 1-gang stainless decora wall plate (or less than buck if you go with plastic!): https://www.homedepot.com/p/Lutron-Maestro-Motion-Sensor-Swi...
Wall switch occ sensors get more expensive as the current they can switch gets higher, one that can do 6A is $87: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Lutron-Maestro-Dual-Tech-Motion-...
However, that much current can power (72) 10W LED recessed cans that each put out about ~1000 lumens. Or enough light for approximately 2400 square feet of interior space.
> (Niche uses, perhaps, but "I just use my hands" is reductive silliness.)
These are not niche functions, occupancy sensing and time of day scheduling are in basically every commercial lighting control system and fairly common in homes. They’re solved problems with cheap commodity devices available that don't require an internet connection.
[can't see any of the links because homedepot is blocking EU/UK]
> It consists of a mechanical timer, a dial, and a relay.
Great but it only works on fixed times. Which isn't what we want.
> This wall switch occupancy sensor
Would only work once we're inside. Which isn't what we want.
(And there's no possibility of putting one outside.)
> They’re solved problems with cheap commodity devices
For certain simplistic scenarios where things are easily installable, etc. Which is great! I'm not saying everyone should use smart things. Just pointing out, repeatedly, that the "cheap commodity devices" do not, and indeed cannot, perform the same functions as smart devices.
You’ve been turning lights on for 200 years?!
And I eat shits bigger than you for breakfast.
I don't even like icemakers in my refrigerators. Meanwhile, my parent's Samsung refrigerator keeps annoying them with ads on it's uselessly huge screen.
https://devices.esphome.io/made-for-esphome
Relevant xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/2030/
Which will just lead you to a lower quality smart device with the same pitfalls but less features a lot of the time.
I disagree with your point about quality, but I'll indulge you for the sake of discussion. Given the choice between "lower quality" that will always work, or convenient-until-inevitably-bricked, I'll always advocate for the former.
The question was about when they ask for a smart device specifically. Not when they ask for a dumb device. My comparison is NOT between smart vs non smart devices.
Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear. When someone asks me about smart devices, e.g. a washing machine, I really pressure them about why they need it to be smart, and encourage them to go dumb.
Ah, I see, fair enough
We could even go more basic... safe defaults when disconnected should be mandatory.
For example, if I pull the thermostat off my wall, the furnace should drop into a fallback mode that keeps the heat above freezing (I'm in Canada where this is a concern.)
I moved into a new house and did not set up the lawn irrigation system. Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.
Well that brings up two immediate issues
A standard furnace and thermostat won’t even know if you pull the thermostat off the wall, much less have any way to handle it beyond “full blast heat 24/7”
More challenging: you expected the sprinkler setup to do the opposite. Instead of following its last-known plan (the schedule) it should stop doing anything (possibly killing the plants it’s watering)
Good off-line only mode in a reasonable plan for what to do without the Internet makes a lot of sense, but at some point, there’s a control system and you need to change it (or even just have one in the thermostat example)
> there’s a control system and you need to change it
Why does the control system have to live on someone else's server in "the cloud"?
There's no reason for smart home devices to require an internet connection to the producer's service. Companies could just as easily put compute on device, or sell some sort of "bridge" (aka a home server appliance) that runs the compute and the accessories connect to.
Fully offline, local network only.
Save the online stuff just for analytics or other value-add features, but core functionality shouldn't require a web service.
The only reason it's 100% internet connection required all the time is to sell subscriptions, aka consumer hostile behavior.
I agree?
In both cases the control system is physically in your house. It sounds like the sprinkler system did work completely offline (though it's not clear if you'd actually be able to change anything without internet - that would be a problem if not), they didn't set up an account so the system was in "offline" mode and dutifully ran the sprinklers on the last known schedule.
For the thermostat the example was physically removing the control system, which is typically not connected to the furnace through any sort of internet connection, and expecting the furnace to know what to do.
The way I see it is... I'd rather my lawn be yellow, plants dead, than a burst pipe underground causing significantly more expensive remediation.
I agree it's not likely (especially if the system is running as-scheduled), but it was a surprise is all. What if I didn't set up the service at all, and it dropped below 0 C? I would be in for a nasty surprise in the spring.
All the irrigation lines I've seen in Canada are just a foot or so under the grass, and it's cheap plastic with cheap couplers.
You have to drain them yearly.
That's fair, though it's not a given that the sprinklers are for turf-grass instead of something more important.
More interestingly (to me): did it have a local interface or was the only way to update it tied to the internet?
There was a local interface, but I don't think it had advanced scheduling capabilities.
Yeah both my furnace and sprinklers require a local controller to do anything, and that just maintains my settings. Idk what an internet connected version of those things looks like, but would hope it's the same except local settings can be read/written remotely.
> Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.
I'd have expected (and strongly prefer) that it keep running with whatever the last settings were. That's almost surely going to be healthier for the lawn, ornamentals, and vegetable garden than shutting off.
I would wager that most people with automated irrigation systems prefer plant growth/protection over water conservation.
I'm not sure how you'd program a furnace to run to keep a house above freezing without any temperature feedback from the house. You could potentially run it until the area immediately surrounding the furnace itself was above freezing, but that would be nowhere near enough in some cases and way, way more than needed in other cases. You might able to use outdoor weather compensation (easier/more effective/comfortable with hydronic heat distribution than with ducted air heating) if programmed correctly, but my experience is that most are either not installed or are configured to be far too hot [because call-backs are expensive and paid by the HVAC company usually].
your furnace doesn't know what temperature your house is if the furnace isn't connected to a thermostat
The connection between the furnace and the thermostat probably shouldn't go through the internet.
So it's perfectly reasonable for the furnace to turn off when it is disconnected, because disconnection would be a very strong signal for an error state instead of regular intermittent network/service issues.
They're not, "smart" thermostats have a WiFi frontend that allows devices to connect to it from the network but the thermostat itself is hardwired to the furnace/HVAC.
You could in theory put one next to the furnace in your machine closet but that would be dumb and expensive
I have a nest and it's wired directly to your furnace via the thermostat control wires.
While it is controllable via the cloud, even without wifi it continues to function.
Are there any furnaces that do that?
Certainly, the standard smart thermostat set up is that your ecobee is connected to the Internet, but controls the furnace using good old-fashioned signal wires
Which is only extremely tangentially related to "if I pull my thermostat off the wall"
The overwhelmingly most common connection between a thermostat and furnace is a contact closure when calling for heat, with no ability to differentiate between “thermostat is present but not calling for heat” and “thermostat is not present” as both present as "these T-T contacts are not closed/shorted together".
the connection to my thermostat is via a cable, if I pull it out of the wall it won't be connected to anything at all. the whole furnace is not connected to anything but mains power.
yeah the default in this case has to be “off” to prevent damage from running blind, on that note other things in the house should be certified to be able to handle being frozen perhaps
Typically when people are concerned about their house freezing in cold climates, they are primarily worried about water freezing, expanding, and cracking pipes and fittings.
It is extraordinarily hard to design something that can withstand that pressure and still be fit for purpose. The item needs to be able to withstand pressures in excess of ~10k psi for -10c, with the pressure rising as temp decreases.
The standard solution for people that need to winterize a building that will not be heated is to drain as much water as possible from the lines, and then fill them with a liquid with a lower freezing point.
Exactly...
Fail "safe"...not Fail "keep running"
> I moved into a new house and did not set up the lawn irrigation system. Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.
Not running when disconnected is definitely a safe default, but I'm not sure it's automatically desired. If I found out I couldn't use my sprinkler system unless it was connected to the internet, I'd be annoyed at the unnecessary gating of such functionality.
> Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule
I'd consider this a very important feature
Only two examples and you are already contradicting yourself. One service should keep running and the other should turn off in the event of loosing the connection to the “outside world”.
What we need is a “in the event of X - keep doing Y”.
It isn't clear that 'conserve water' is a reasonable default position. Perhaps 'keep doing what it was programmed to be doing' would be a better position?
Depends... the focus here isn't on convenience or utility, but on safety.
The furnace defaults to on to save the water pipes. The sprinkler defaults to off to conserve water as the system is potentially unmonitored and a burst pipe could cause issues.
Defaulting a furnace to on certainly shouldn't be considered safe. What if it's leaking CO into your house, what if it gets dangerously hot and causes a fire?
A thermostat and controls are a necessary requirement for HVAC systems and defaulting anything to "run" if your control plane doesn't exist anymore is definitely not the safe option.
The other issue is that in almost all situations (like this one) what you think is a safe and sane default won't align with what other people think.
There should be defaults and they should be clearly defined, but I don't think it's always obvious to determine what they are.
> What if it's leaking CO into your house
While I agree with your overall point, this clause is irrelevant to/not supportive of it. The presence of a thermostat wasn't going to help you here either and there are vastly more furnaces with connected thermostats than disconnected to worry about.
CO detectors and alarms are needed to address this risk.
Your thermostat is in a far less likely place to be overloaded with CO should the alarms start going off, though. If the thermostat is gone, you have to physically go to the furnace itself or shut off power at the circuit breaker.
Freezing water pipes are bad, but a furnace running non-stop is going to exceed its duty cycle and pose a greater hazard.
Whatever was implemented as this poorly-thought-through fail-safe would be implemented in the furnace itself, thus that furnace implementation could manage any safety-related concerns, though heating equipment is overwhelmingly rated to 100% duty cycle already. (My goal for my boiler is to have at least 22 hours per day of heating demand to ensure that I'm using the exact minimum temperature water to maintain temp in the house, to maximize efficiency.)
My furnace runs pretty close to non-stop when it’s below -30 outside, I imagine a bigger concern than duty cycles if it did that when it wasn’t -30 would be that it would still be pushing the indoor temperature to 50°C above the outdoor temp.
If something is leaking CO into your house, then it's a major safety issue and needs to be immediately scrapped. Whether or not it's internet connected is the least of your worries.
> What if it's leaking CO into your house, what if it gets dangerously hot and causes a fire?
Furnaces have multiple checks when they turned on, even on the dumbest furnaces. There are multiple safety mechanisms preventing it from getting too hot. CO leak - what thermostat will do for you here?
> The sprinkler defaults to off to conserve water as the system is potentially unmonitored and a burst pipe could cause issues.
I had a friend in Australia who ran cattle on his farm. Failing open would waste water, but failing closed would mean dead cattle (and hundreds of thousands in losses). It depends on the application.
You can already see the “sane defaults” vary with the person.
When it comes to safety it’s a bit more clear cut. The job of a heating system is to heat so don’t turn off heating when this can endanger people and houses.
The job of a lawn irrigation system is to irrigate. Who wants a dead lawn just because the internet or wifi are down, or to conserve water only when the system is disconnected from the internet but not from electricity?
Fair — honestly my expectation would be that if it could not connect to the cloud service, I should be able to configure a schedule offline.
That isn't the case, and so if the safe default is off, that definitely hampers utility, which isn't a very good selling point, heh.
No, the furnace shouldn't do anything. It should fail open.
Depends on the part of the world. If you intend on turning off your furnace in Canada, you best be prepared to winterize your house too! (Lots of cottagers do this... indoor plumbing is flushed and water is turned off at the pump, etc.)
Without a thermostat you have no idea what the temperature is. We are talking about failure, not turning the furnace off.
Surely there's some reasonable duty cycle, like (I don't live in one of those places) 10 minutes on, 50 minutes off, something like that.
A burst pipe is preferential to a house that burns down.
I've said for years that any smart thermostat should have a bimetallic backup that controls maximum ranges and acts in the dumbest way possible. Just max temp and min temp for AC and heat. Nothing that should ever be hit... but there nonetheless.
You could just put a backup dumb thermostat in parallel with the smart one.
This is the biggest reason why I look for Matter-compatible smart home devices. It means I can put them on a locked down network, with no internet access, and I know at least the Matter supported compatibility will function offline.
I think it would be smart for Matter to lean into the "offline local control" aspect of their branding and certification requirements.
How easy is it to commission a Matter device onto a specific WiFi network? And how easy is it to set up a Thread network without Internet access?
I haven't actually tried this, but:
- The Home Assistant Matter commissioning tool doesn't have any documentation at all about how the network is selected AFAICS.
- The Thread organization seems extremely proud of how Thread devices can access the Internet. Apple TV doesn't seem friendly at all to preventing its Thread Border Router from forwarding to the Internet. Home Assistant's OTBR add-on has no useful configuration whatsoever AFAICS. The easiest way to get it right would seem to be to buy something like a Sonoff POE-capable Thread dongle and sticking it on a VLAN, except that those, for some reason, seem to support Thread RCP but not being a Border Router themselves, and then you're back to managing your own OTBR installation.
Thread as i see it currently is a locked ecosystem that cannot be breached. so far, all the Thread devices I have been interested in will only accept their own manufacturers' thread border router.
I'm pretty sure "all the Thread devices I have been interested in will only accept their own manufacturers' thread border router." that device won't get thread/matter certified.
Are you sure this isn't a case of different matter version support? In which case, in my experience, thread border router works just fine, but the controller needs to support such devices.
I can only speak to my experience, certified devices by the largest firms will mostly not interoperate (fails around authN).
Apple: Keeps Thread credentials locked to HomeKit's border routers.
Google: Shares some credentials, but only within Google Account environment.
Amazon: TBD, but their Matter implementation is mostly cloud-tied.
Samsung: Hybrid approach; still best when used inside SmartThings, their 1.4 update seems to support for joining existing Thread networks. Still have to test it.
So, even though Thread theoretically allows full interoperability, no vendor wants to be reduced to a dumb router in someone else’s ecosystem.
there is no easy way to bridge Apple Thread to Home Assistant or Google Thread, even though it is theoretically supposed to be possible from a protocol standpoint.
If you have such solutions, let me know, because I would take full advantage of it, and will regale your contributions in multiple home automation threads.
I have every thread device I own in both Apple Home and Google Home and it seems to be just working fine? I even remember adding some devices to google and some to apple and then sharing between them. I have border routers from both tho, maybe that's why it works?
> Apple: Keeps Thread credentials locked to HomeKit's border routers.
The Home Assistant iOS app can extract the Thread credentials from Apple’s border routers and send them to Home Assistant. The documentation for what happens thereafter is not amazing.
This is one of two things I require when looking at a smart device:
1. Must work offline on my local network (like Matter through Home Assistant)
2. Must have a physical button for operation when there is no network available or someone doesn't want/have a phone.
This. Also, not only offline-compatible but any anomaly from the api should result in the product simply ignoring the response. A simple check for 'does not connect' only handles totally offline mode, error in responses is a lot more common.
I rather feel that we don't need most so called smart devices because:
1) they aren't smart
2) they are answers to questions/need that don't exist in the first place
While I 100% agree... that's just our opinions. The gadgets are selling. We have to deal with that.
same thing was said about "smart phones" but here we are... :)
Couldn't agree more. The main issue is the data-greed mentality that has arisen over the last 20 years or so (basically every company trying to copy Big Tech). They all want to harvest user data and make the users as dependent as possible (which also opens up the door for subscription services later on, and their walled garden won't allow users to easily move).
This is the way.
My rule #1 in home automation is making sure none of the technology fails its original function without connection.
I implement Home Assistant to assist in homes for non-technologist. Every single thing i implement must function independently, without the vendor or any internet connection. i.e., z-Wave locks must function with or without connectivity. Switches must switch on/off with or without zigbee, and valves must be able to close/open without that wifi.
Home Assistant has basically built this system already with their platinum level certification.
It's a huge project but only the smaller IoT companies are taking it seriously
48Hrs in a faraday cage and only power. Whatever works from inside goes on the certified offline list of features.
This is a very smart idea. I couldn't turn my Ring Alarm off and I was on the same Wifi connection as the system. In retrospect, it would be quite smart to switch over to local network.
> Companies in compliance could put a badge on their products so wary consumers know who to trust.
This would only work out for the companies if the average consumer actually cared about "offline-first", which they very much don't. It would be a very small and ever shrinking market.
this is a great idea that I've been toying with too. Something like OU / Orthodox Union certification for Kosher or UL for electrical & electronic equipment. A Right-To-Operate & Right-to-Repair certification
There are a few sub-certifications:
- OF: Offline-First as you mentioned
- JE: Jailbreak-Escrow -- the firmware install keys are held in escrow and will be published if the company goes defunct -- allowing ongoing repair & control.
- FE: Firmware-Escrow -- firmware source will be published if the company goes defunct.
- FA: Firmware-Audit -- firmware is compiled by certifiers to verify BOM, security, privacy & online dependencies.
Another benefit would be a "nutrition label" showing active online traffic & data shared.
And can it function either without electricity (like is your Toto Washlet flushable without power) or at least in a steady state (powered, but needs no human input, environmental sensors, or network support to operate). This is useful for shabbos modes as well as failsafe.
> like is your Toto Washlet flushable without power
Hey, I got myself a water-pressure powered bidet so it still works without power.
great suggestion. I'm baffled at how many devices force a dependency from a mechanical feature --> electricity --> online control logic when the mechanical feature should work fine alone
CTA is supposed to be providing this. They develop industry standards and help make them accessible to consumers to encourage a healthy consumer electronics marketplace.
The best piece of home "automation" in my house is a big flashing red LED in the ceiling near the front door that is connected to a magnetic reed switch that tells us if we left the garage door open.
I'm genuinely shocked this isn't the default. Imagine if your fridge stopped working because it could not connect to the internet. Which I had forgotten about mine, and it did not connect for like two years, it worked just fine.
> I feel like we need some sort of "Offline-First" or "Offline-Compatible" certification process for "smart" devices.
If there's a subscription, then it doesn't work offline.
I’m shocked they wouldn’t have that as a primary design approach, how absolutely depressing is that for a physical product?
Matter/Thread is pretty much that; any online features are in addition, not core functionality.
Isn't this kind of (but not completely) the idea behind smart device standards like Matter?
I had a dilemma at my longest job.
We had a monolith (but not monorepo) that had big Conway’s Law problems. We wanted to start making microservices. We had a couple sidecars that I either wrote or did reconstructive surgery on, but the few microservices we had were dumb. One created head-of-line problems for fanout, asking a question that could have been a Consul long poll. The other really could have been run entirely in Bamboo if we hadn’t cheaped out on agent size.
I killed the former, but the latter used a larger slice of all of our modules than all of the sidecars combined. It was also an offline process, writing into dark content in S3. So I could break it for an hour without anyone noticing, and in some environments I could go a full work day without rolling it back as long as I watched for production alerts (and I was on the team that did).
If I got rid of it then all library and runtime upgrades would get harder, though half the team ignored my advice anyway and then we had occasional P1s or 2s because of it.
My experience, there and elsewhere, is that offline logic of any flavor at least pays for itself in terms of code-build-test cycles, fairly quickly and self-evidently. But some people think it sounds counterintuitive and push people to “go fast” without it. Which only happens if they double down and cut more corners.
Jeff Geerling talked about it on a video about his Washer. Totally agree.
While I fully agree with you in principle, how would that realistically happen? Countries typically only pass laws after something major enough happens. If this was an IoT device that God forbid killed someone, sure, they'd be an outcry against it in the papers, and lawmakers may be galvanized enough to do something.
Call me cynical or just disappointed and jaded, but short of some EU consumer advocacy group pushing for it, I don't see how anything would realistically happen. 99% of laws are made after something bad-bad has already happened.
It could be a voluntary certification established by a private organization. There's other examples of such a thing in a bunch of industries already.
> There's other examples of such a thing in a bunch of industries already.
Often because the government is threatening to impose regulation. I’m not sure how many examples there are of industries independently choosing to collaborate to regulate themselves.
That's essentially what Matter + Thread is. The Matter smart home standard, which can run on the Thread wireless protocol, allows products to work without an internet connection for local controls.
Matter is pretty common on newer smart home products, while Thread is a bit newer so it's only supported on some products right now.
Same with games
I think the group of people who would buy something with "smart" in the name and also really care about reliability is pretty small.
For instance, most people who want a reliable mattress would buy one that doesn't require, or allow configuration.
It seems to me that most of the home automation enthusiasts are actually into configuration and troubleshooting as a hobby. And maybe doing party tricks. There's nothing wrong with that. But I don't think there are enough people to really make this badge work.
This is a weird take, especially in an environment where so many products are now “smart” whether you want them to be or not.
If the products are smart even if I don't want them to be, it's even easier for them to not have this certification badge, even if I want them to.
I wasn’t talking about the hypothetical certification. I was talking about this:
> I think the group of people who would buy something with "smart" in the name and also really care about reliability is pretty small.
Oh yes, that's true. A lot of people probably end up with smart stuff who might rather have dumb things.
Definitely. I bought a smart tv because I wanted an OLED and at the time there were no dumb OLED tvs. I imagine that’s still the case.
I can't be the only one who imagined mattresses folding up with people inside
That will be a premium feature available through the gold subscription 49$ a month
A few got stuck in inclined positions,but these don't actually tilt enough to crush even under normal conditions.
I simply don't care how it was done, the fact of rebooting mattresses is already just too much. It is both a huge kick in the pants, and hilarious at the same time. What, the heck, are we doing, I dunno ...
Relevant: "I found a backdoor into my bed" https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/removing-jeff-bezos-from-my...
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43129439
The frequency by which I truly wish Douglas Adams was still alive is closing in on a very new pitch, I do have to say.
Mattresses disconnecting from the global God Computer and ruining everyones sleep, just .. I can't.
Its far, far too funny.
I'm pretty sure Mattress Software Developers are on the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B. Or maybe, C.
This!!
That was exactly my first thought when reading the headline, together with fond thoughts of Squornshallows Zeta. I was really surprised to have to scroll this far down to see a Hitchhiker's Guide reference. I mean, the joke basically writes itself.
> I mean, the joke basically writes itself.
I think this is how we got into this mess in the first place. Brains the sizes of planets, making new brains that are actually planets. And so on.
How could it ruin somebodys sleep, when they could just simply pull the plug? And in case of the preheated matress just lay it outside or put some ice on it. Seems like constructed problems to me.
And: whoever buys products that can only be run when it connects to a foreign server is an idiot. There should be laws preventing cloud-only physical products, as this causes unnecessary waste as soon as the companies stop offering the service (for whatever reason). They should at least habe to offer containerized versions of the backend service that can be run locally.
Some adjustable mattresses versions were stuck in the reading position and could not be lowered to the sleeping position
>matress just lay it outside or put some ice on it
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic!?
Haven't read the article but sounds like the Cory doktrow's radicalized where a lady cannot go to work because her toaster is not working because the cloud provider used by the toaster company went bankrupt.
Soooo you couldn't change some mattress setting on a cloud-controlled mattress. Not exactly "ruin sleep worldwide" and "go rogue". What trash journalism.
Also those images, wow, I really would have preferred no images over these soulless, generic AI-generated impressions.
Do all content-spam “journalists” use the same LLM prompt to dial up the faux drama?
> Picture this: You're tucked in, ready for a night of optimized REM cycles, when your app pings an error. No more tweaking the chill to a crisp 55°F or firing up the "cool mode" for those midnight hot flashes.
> The core temperature control? Utterly crippled without the cloud. Users reported the app freezing on loading screens, refusing to connect, and leaving them stranded in whatever thermal hell their last setting dictated.
Toothless rhetorical questions, false or confusing stakes, awkward attempts at flippant tone…
Why would they have set it to an hellacious temperature? Wtf mattress goes to 55 degrees? Why are these stakes existential? Sleep on the couch or the floor ffs…
> The hits kept coming. Smart sleep tracking? Dead in the water—no logging of phases, no biometric insights, just a void where your sleep score should be.
These stakes seem low. I guess it sells, but…
And then a roundup of internet comments like “unacceptable” with unfunny padding.
If this is what the future of “internet journalism” looks like, I’m optimistic that enough demand will remain for the real thing that they’ll find a way to fund some.
That's just the awful default voice of most LLMs if you ask it to write an article. I think it feels even more cringe because we can easily identify it now.
The lead character in the first image has a sort of “essence of forehead”
What trash journalism
It's not journalism. It's a blog post from a blockchain company.
they're even more blatant in some other articles: https://quasa.io/media/indie-filmmaking-flees-los-angeles-cr...
I think we can just immediately write this site off as "probably complete-trash blogspam"
Do people really like these AI-generated articles?
We suffer them sometimes because there is some nugget of information in there. I'd prefer the link to go to a not-AI article on the subject, but here we are.
I scrolled too far to find this comment. That was hard to read, had ChatGPT "grammar" all over and AI images with frowny customers to top it off
this isn't fallout from the AWS Outage, it's fallout from a bunch of idiots at another company designing a product badly and then selling it and not caring how bad it was
This company has received this feedback (and claimed "it's coming soon") for actual years, now. This was raised in some of their earliest HN threads!
I want to see the postmortem, although I'm sure we never will.
> Eight Sleep's system, which relies on backend servers for everything from real-time adjustments to data syncing, had no fallback. "It's unacceptable," fumed one early complainant on X, echoing the frustration of many who shelled out for "seamless" smart sleep only to face analog purgatory.
I'm guessing that this is a typical "smart" device setup where the cloud is essentially a tunnel between the app and the device that also saves a copy of all transmitted state for backup and data mining. The simplest design from the company's POV, but the worst design for resilience.
The real question: Was this an explicit or implicit product decision? ie, was it an explicit PM decision that local comms didn't match product requirements, or did they outsource it to the lowest bidder and have no idea this was a ticking time bomb, or did eng have to cut features to make some deadline, etc? If Eight Sleep doesn't have an at least an internal postmortem then someone should lose their job.
As a user, I would prefer the devices communicate locally and use a cloud tunnel only as backup. But this means engineering has to support two communication stacks, which is obviously more expensive than one. And the local network option is probably harder to build since cloud-based has so much tooling available.
My baseline expectation - that I can't believe I'm actually typing out - is that an appliance should operate as expected without Internet access. My only smart device is a door lock because a PIN is easier than a house key for our lifestyle, but even that isn't connected to Wi-Fi.
Weirdly eightsleep apparently is sending 16GB of data per month worth of telemetry. It's been pointed out that that's about enough for a live audio stream of everything that happens in your bedroom. It can't be cheap to process that much data.
These wifi based smart home devices just fundamentally don't serve their customers.
1. You pay money for a device
2. You pay money for monthly service
3. They sell your private data on the backend, not to worry though, it's "anonymized", but of course it gets sold and then deanonymized
4. AWS goes down and your house doesn't work
5. Eventually they go out of business or get bored and you have to buy and install all new stuff.
I mean not to defend the telemetry philosphy (my smart home setup is local only with a couple of tell-tale heart exceptions[1]) but I'd expect that any cheap sensor net where your trying to infer data from indirect sensors would be grabbing as much data as possible especially if it didn't have strong local processing.
But yeah don't buy products that don't work local only, if they require online the temptation will be to great at some point to abuse that requirement.
[1] They're slowly driving me insane and I'll destroy them for the peace of mind at some point if an update doesn't brick them first.
My Mattress Factory dumb mattress demonstrated incredible resilience during the outage, helping maintain its 100.00% uptime.
My mattress is starting to sag. I'd consider it 99.99% uptime at this point.
Who needs a PID controller when you can just send things over the internet and have some overdesigned nodejs script to fumble with numbers right?
JavaScript programmer is cheaper. And so the decision was excellent.
Javascript on a local machine would be easier to settup than a network. But I've installed linux from floppies before and so I know how to do each by hand. If you rely on a standare distribution it sets up the network and starts a browser automatically so you just need to set a url which seems easier - but only because the complexity is hidden.
If you're happy with this then you can't complain when things get enshittified
There might have been some sarcasm included.
Ah sorry, my sarcasm detector was running on us-east-1 ;)
https://web.archive.org/web/20251021173904/https://quasa.io/...
Title truncated from "The Strangest Fallout from the AWS Outage: Smart Mattresses Go Rogue and Ruin Sleep Worldwide"
Most smart appliances are ticking timebombs, and most serve no real purpose. I get that sometimes they can be neat, and I myself went through a phase myself of building a "smart apartment".
All I learned is the smart speaker assistants degrade over time, companies (even relatively big ones) go bust and take down any app support as they go, and that my life isn't too busy to fit small tasks into my day.
Incredible premiums to (maybe) simplify some relatively small home tasks. I've found it much more fulfilling to do many of those tasks myself and treat it like downtime from the other things I do.
My local pub, vet hospital, and many many other neighborhood establishments were still battling the outage well after the work day had ended.
Opticians equipment was partially offline, the machine they use to take retina photo's couldn't sync.
It captured the image locally so the opticians where back and forth checking them manually.
Even though this is a light-hearted headline, there is a larger problem brewing as critical tech is increasingly connected to the cloud.
“Brewing…” et tu, smart coffee maker?
The I See What You Did There 2000™.
Yeah, I've got one of those.
wait is this the same company that had a backdoor that allowed their employees to ssh into customer mattresses to collect sleep data?
https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/removing-jeff-bezos-from-my...
Ability to ssh into my mattress (locally) would be a feature not a bug. :D Of course, allowing remote access is ridiculous.
Not entirely related, but sleeping hot I've managed to mitigate the terrible sweaty nights in summer by using an outlast topper. It's not a miracle, but at least I just feel hot and not incredibly hot. I honestly didn't believe it would do something, but it does something
I lived on an island in the middle of the Panama Canal for a few years, one of the hottest and most humid places imaginable. We had no AC. Everyone used a top sheet instead of a comforter or blanket, and had a ceiling fan going at night. It worked surprisingly well.
Ceiling fans are really underrated. Even if you have AC, you can probably save money/energy at night by running the AC at a higher temp with a ceiling fan.
I go camping often throughout the year, and sometimes sleep in a tent in 85-100+F weather. If I put a box fan at the foot of the bed, blowing straight over me, it will cool me down to the point where I wake up and pull a blanket over me. (I always start with a sheet because cool air blowing directly onto on the bottom of my feet is uncomfortable.) Don't underestimate the power of the simple box fan.
Wait, camping and box fan don't exactly jive in my mind. Car camping with electric I suppose?
Camping for me is 30lbs in a backpack. Definitely no fans or power banks.
I've found thermal cooling with a bit of a dab of cold water on my body (sleeping above duvet), with a fan blowing on it for a few minutes is enough to get me to sleep.
My memories of sleeping in 40+ degree C weather when I was a kid by using a wet towel as a blanket are coming back to me
Personally I use air conditioning but for those that can’t this is great advice
Even with AC air gets trapped between the mattress, the person, and covers. Different materials help circulate air and keep a cooler feel.
True, then you don’t have to use as much electricity too
IoT products tend to be a disgrace of either criminal negligence or malevolence.
I wonder whether the first pushback will be when people who worked on IoT products have trouble finding jobs at companies doing anything else (other than clubbing baby seals, or running blockchain scams).
It was unusual for my Amazon Alexa to turn more into the paperweight that it has become. Too many devices are helplessly dependent on the cloud, and when that cloud breaks, or the company stopped supporting the device, consumers are left without.
I refuse to call them engineers if they shipped it without a manual, offline mode for an $8000 (lifetime costs) piece of equipment.
>“Eight Sleep confirmed there’s no offline mode yet, but they’re working on it.”
Peter Neumann's Risks Digest, since 1985!
https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/
Smart is an outdated adjective for these devices.
I'm really glad my Toto Neorest doesn't depend on cloud services.
The more I see shit like this, the more I want to pursue my little fantasy job of starting a factory that builds dumb devices. A simple microwave. A simple dishwasher. Stuff that isn't connected to any garbage cloud and just works. No touchscreens. Just physical buttons. Something that works equally well for elderly as for us geeks.
Oh well, I guess it'll remain a fantasy.
This affected me and my wife. We have an Eight Sleep mattress courtesy of my employer, which is probably the only way I'd have something that expensive. I've slept on everything from Navy bunks to plain dirt to the nice memory foam mattress we have now. I'm not finicky. But while I'm not going to shill for Eight Sleep, I've gotta say that they're really nice. Well, normally, when they're working as expected.
It has an automatic routine where our bed[0] is nicely cool when we climb in at bedtime. Then it warms up a little overnight when we're in deep sleep. Finally, it gets uncomfortably warm at alarm time, as a way to encourage you to want to get out of bed. It also uses sensors to detect how much you're moving around, pairs that with the room temperature, and uses that to, say, turn the temperature down if you're thrashing around on an especially warm night.
Know how in San Francisco, the weather's almost always perfect except for those rare days when it's too warm to get comfy at night? Honestly, it's ideal for getting through those without having to crank the window air conditioner[1].
During the outage, my wife and I both woke up because we were too hot. Our bed wasn't overly warm, like if it were on the "it's time to wake up, get moving!" setting. It was just a normal "ugh, it's so hot in the room, I wish I could sleep!" kind of thing. I'm glad to hear they're upping their offline game to handle these situations more gracefully.
I don't know if I'd recommend anyone go out and buy an Eight Sleep. They're pretty pricy and you can buy a lot of air conditioning for that money, if the cooling feature is the main reason you'd want it. However, if you have the opportunity to get one on someone else's budget[2], absolutely do it! It's really very pleasant to climb into a cool bed on a warm night, and presumably vice versa.
They work as advertised. Except, you know, when the Internet's out.
[0]Our settings are individualized, but similar.
[1]For those outside SF, AC is unusual here. We almost never need it so most places don't have it.
[2]Huh, wonder if you could use it to spend down an FSA?
The article (quasa.io, first time seeing this domain, first time ever on HN) doesn't inspire confidence with those AI generated images (which seem to be all over other articles too). It seems to be AI slop to me.
Although googling on the subject, there are other articles in other websites on the same subject.
It would appear this website is down. 504 error.
At least not smart shitters, right?
Can people stop using these utterly cringe ai generated photos? It doesn’t make your content more interesting and I actually think less of what you have to say, especially if it’s from Grok.
Meanwhile, (checks mattress tag) Pottery Barn has had 100.0% uptime for the past two years!
> But when AWS went dark, the system locked into that toasty preset, disabling any cooling override. Browne spent the night marinating in his own perspiration, tweeting updates like a man betrayed: "Backend outage means I'm sleeping in a sauna
He didn’t thought about… unplugging the bed?
It might not be easily reachable? Some people put the wire inside the drywall for aesthetic reasons for stuff that you rarely unplug, like a TV. A matress can fall in that category.
Power goes to an external pod that has the water reservoir, pump, heating/cooling elements, etc.
It has to be user accessible to refill water, it needs space for airflow, and has to be next to the bed because the mattress water/data/power lines run to it on a limited length umbilical.
It uses a standard IEC C13/C14 power cord. There's no sane configuration where it would be anything more than trivially easy to unplug the power.
But you'll get more retweets and social media engagement if you just stew yourself in your smart device hell and let everyone else know how its going.
People do that perhaps - but it isn't allowed by any code I'm aware of - at least not by default. wires in walls have strict standards that mattress manufactures would't want to meet.
Highly doubtful that someone would do that, but OK: turn off the breaker then.
Sounds like if you make your bed you might as well lie in it then eh?
That's terrifying when a heated mattress is resistive heating and can cause a fire.
Or sleeping on the couch. Better than a pool of your own sweat.
TBQH I don't even see why heated mattresses exist when heated blankets are so effective and doubtlessly cheaper. Now, a cooling mattress is another story..
Heated mattresses are more effective on a cold night since heat rises through you into the blanket. But you can get pads that work with your existing mattress.
A cold mattress with a warm top blanket is one of the irrational joys of life. A warm blanket is more satisfying when you have something cool to contrast it with.
I'm curious as to why this would have a heating element and why that would be the default.
I thought that a cool/cold bed was better for getting to sleep, since the body lowers its own temperature at night as part of it's natural circadian rhythm and because cooling helps produce melatonin.
And when you are asleep, cooling gives you a deeper sleep and can reduce insomnia. So instead of a £3000 mattress that heats up (and by default does so), you just need a thin duvet (or even just the cover in summer).
their LLM probably didn't suggest it
In the US, garage door openers have a big red handle that you can pull to disconnect the garage door opener and open it manually.
Multiple people have died, because the power went out during a fire, and they couldn't figure out how to evacuate without a working garage door for opener.
This whole article feels like majorly overblown. I mean yes would be nice if the 2 mattress has an offline mode, but I'm sure everyone was fine for a day without it.
There's an ancient joke about liberal arts majors who, when presented with a malfunctioning microwave that's throwing sparks, desperately try to turn it off; eventually an engineering student wanders by and pulls the plug.
Nothing terrifies me more than those heated mattresses, you’re basically sleeping on a comfortable stove top.
Does this remind anyone of the Jin Yang fridge hack, from "Silicon Valley"?
Buy stupid products; win stupid prizes?