My house has smart light switches. They use ancient technologies of injection molding and metal wires. Their firmware has not needed an update and I haven't had to reboot them; they also recover instantly from power failures. I haven't measure their boot time but it's impressive. Probably 1/50 seconds is my guess, based on the AC switching frequency. Their data collection is primitive, and the retention is only a few hundred nanoseconds. They're quite good about not selling data about when I'm home to insurance companies or advertisers. And they use ancient principles of physics to destroy data securely. Their registration and account creation process didn't store my home address in some vendor's questionably secured database, so it can't be sold when these vendors fold in 5-10 years. It doesn't stop working while I'm traveling and never leaves my family without working lights, in fact I've yet to get one tech support call for light switches.
Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.
One downside is the commute to the wall if you want to use them. Commuting to a light switch is actually good though, I'm pleased to report it's a nice stroll. It takes around the same time it takes to unlock my phone and discover my phone can't switch on the lights in my house. It goes past a window so it has views.
When I read some vendors' stuff was gonna stop working I went home and turned off and on all my light switches to simulate a reboot in solidarity for those whose hobby is to make their home less usable. Hopefully you folks are able to spend a few hundred bucks more to refresh your stuff for this decade. If you need me, I'll be over at the wall panel.
> Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.
My light switches integrate with Home Assistant, but I can just press the button or turn the knob to dim. Home Assistant Zigbee is there as a bonus, not the sole way of doing things and certainly not a single point of failure.
You can get that exact same experience with Zigbee/z-wave smart switches. I have 74 of them in my house (replaced them all when I moved in) and haven’t had to think about them past that. They work by flipping the switch, they work by voice (Alexa), and via HA and anything that can talk to HA.
If HA goes down I can just walk over and use the switch. A downgrade over yelling into the air for sure but my downgrade is your daily experience.
If someone comes over that doesn’t know how or doesn’t want to use the smart speakers, they can just walk over and flip a switch.
After moving HA off a Pi I found it to be rock solid and I don’t think about it at all unless I want to make or tweak some automation or I get a new device. Adding Claude into the mix for creating/modifying automations is awesome.
I was (naively, looking back) pretty bullish on smart home devices. Automating schedules, presence detection, etc. Every time I looked to invest more into it, the marketplace felt like a minefield of e(ventual)-waste and headache.
I still struggle with it. It feels like a missed opportunity these days, but I just don’t trust companies to treat me or my devices with respect. I’ve ultimately boomeranged back to “no (cloud) smart devices.”
Homekit certification is the closest you can get. Devices are required to function offline on LAN through an Apple home hub. Apple has a much better track record supporting things than any of these random vendors. And it can be entirely replaced by Home Assistant anyways.
Just buy Hue, problem solved - although for best results it needs custom setup which is a higher initial time investment, buth then it's set and forget.
"Just buy Hue" is a massive initial expense! Due to the fact that the previous owners of my place were the least practical people on the planet, on the ground floor alone there are 33 light spots, most GU10.
The cheapest Hue option is a 4-pack of Hue Essential for £63. That would be 9 of those for £567 in light bulbs for the ground floor alone.
Buy used! They were/are really popular so there's always a number of items selling for reasonable prices, and they don't really have perishable properties (besides power on time which is _long_).
> 33 light spots, most GU10
That's a sad situation, but even if a bit ugly - a GU10->E27 adapter cotst ~$1.
Shelly BLU: lots of lost events. I have one on my kitchen. It mostly works to make the lights switch on when I walk in. Not always though, and when it doesn't it's a pain. It's also PIR alone, so small movements don't register. If I'm cooking, or doing the dishes, the timer runs out and switches the lights off. Getting them to switch on is a pain.
A bunch of Matter-over-Thread devices I have: hard to secure. I'll end up setting up a Thread Border Router on my IoT VLAN and get HA to connect to it, but that means yet another component to run separate from HA, which requires its own upgrade mechanism, backup, etc.
Matter-over-WiFi: haven't yet found one that would fit what I need. Will require expanding my IoT WiFi network to other parts of the house. My main APs don't serve IoT because a few tens of those would easily congest the radios, despite being very low bandwidth.
Most devices are PIR-only, or use subpar mmWave sensors, or a combination of both which tends to be hit-and-miss.
I haven't found a device that doesn't require a proprietary app for setup, which means tracking and the risk of them becoming e-waste.
I'm planning to build some out of cheap sensors from AliExpress and ESP32s but I haven't had the time and have too many other projects in flight.
When I had to get a lot of work done on my house after a kitchen fire (appliance but not a smart one), I told pretty much everyone involved "nothing smart." (OK, the new dryer has a moisture sensor but that's it. Didn't have much that was smart anyway aside from a couple of Alexas that I use rarely.
I think there was also a novelty around a lot of smart devices that just didn't translate to much real world benefit. And in my case here, there was also the matter of having more pressing issues than fussing with smart lights and the like--like rewiring a substantial portion of the house when various walls were open..
I still have a lot of the same stuff I bought, which falls into two main categories:
* Hue bulbs, which get active updates and are still maintained by Philips, and honestly are pretty good, if insanely overpriced, especially the HomeKit bridge
* "iHome" smart outlets which I belieeeeeeeve were once upon a time made by Belkin? They've ended support but the outlets themselves are very reliable, and pairable/managable entirely within the Home app so I barely noticed when they were discontinued. Picked up a 4-pack of them on fleabay recently for $20 and they work great still.
Mind you I'm not saying I'm great at this, if anything I'm lucky in that I really haven't had any smart home tech go poorly for me, apart from some other outlets that were some no-name brand. They're still kicking around my house but they need power cycles far more often than the iHome ones.
I would be interested in Hue, except Philips sold me an earlier iteration of a smart lamp which I loved for its ability to gently wake me up in the morning by slowly turning up the light. I love waking up without a loud alarm clock. In fact, I loved that so much I invested in a smart home hub to get Hue bulbs, and then Philips promptly bricked my original lamp. Unless I eventually bought a fancier home hub, which could grandfather it in!
No matter the convenience of a given smarthome feature, it will have to overcome the hurdle of all the time and money I invest in setting it up being liable to get vaporized at the click of a button from the supplier. Ultra frustrating experience, but one that instantly cured me of any romantic notions about the futuristic smart home.
FWIW I use a lot of Hue in my house, and I've not had that experience. But absolutely validate the frustration. That said, in the present, Hue seems to be one of the most if not the most stable ecosystems for smart lighting. Which isn't to say it's perfect but I have far fewer problems than most people I'm friends with, haha.
My Hue system is pretty good at my house, my complaints are:
(1) After a momentary power outage all the lights wind up switched on. It happens a lot at 3am and it's annoying as hell to get up at night and turn all the lights off. I really ought to program my homelab server to check the light status when it comes up and if > 80% of the lights are on between 11am and 6am it oughta turn them all off or maybe return the system to a snapshot of where it was before the power down event.
(2) The hue hub crashes every month or so, it always comes up after being power cycled except for the time that my son blew the circuit breaker screwing around with guitar amps. Now that I think about it I oughta put a WiFi smart plug on it so my homelab can reboot it.
(3) When things go wrong my wife becomes dependent on me which is a hassle, particularly when I am out of town. It's one of those things like having a home theater that requires two remote controls and then finding your family can't manage to watch TV anymore. (God, I want to punish everybody in the electronics industry that anything to do with Logitech Harmony going away)
(4) I'm the only one at home that notices it, but the color rendering of RGB lights is terrible. If you want good color rendition of things in the environment you want a spectrum which is smooth like a black body spectrum but if you want strong RGB effects you want three laser-like lines so you can get a good choice of saturated colors.
In ordinary life it doesn't matter a lot but my arts n' crafts involve making fine sensory distinctions like I load this paper into my inkjet printer
and one side is a little more whitish and less mottled and the other side is a little yellowish and you can really see the paper grain... if you've got a very bright light with good color rendering it is easy to tell the difference but under RGB lights it is difficult. And of course if you are evaluating the quality of prints or clothes or something you want the best CRI you can get.
I simply won’t install anything that doesn’t support a local API. Happy to pay for the hardware; but if your plan is to monetize it via cloud services somehow, or just assume planned obsolescence, I’m not your customer.
Even with local API I'm quite a bit hesitant, I'd rather not use anything that does not let me install an opensource firmware (e.g. wled for RGBCCT led strip controller).
I haven't made a vlan yet for IoT stuff because my ISP's router do not let me, I can't wait to have my own openwrt / opnsense router and put the ISP in bridge mode.
I've seen people suggest that instead of bridge mode go ahead and leave the ISP router in router mode, with wifi turned off, with your own router as the only device connected. Give your router a static IP on the ISP router's LAN and set it up on the ISP router as the DMZ.
That advantage of this is that some ISPs will try to blame your router (and your modem if you are using your own modem) for any problem you call in about no matter how obviously it is a problem on their end or with their equipment. This way it is not obvious to the tier 1 tech support people that you are using a different router.
I suppose if you want to be really thorough leave the wifi on, either with whatever the default network names the ISP router starts with or with names that don't match the ones you really use which are on your router.
If your device requires, in any way, an internet or cloud connection, even just for setup, it doesn't exist for me. If you have some FULLY OPTIONAL services I might like as a SAAS free or subscription option, ok; but the device MUST 100% work without ever knowing your cloud exists. It must also be designed to fail-safe and have manual fall-back operability (e.g., when the power goes out, I can still manually switch its state to OFF).
I recall an article or comment on HN talking about the advantages of a "MidWit Home", devices that weren't really smart, and just had remote control. I've got a bit of that with some remote switches to use around the house with enough range we can turn on from the car when arriving home. Also timers. Seems like a good way to go.
I want appliances that are reliable and last a lifetime, I don't care about smart features. I bought a basic washing machine back in 2005. Roper brand, which is Whirlpool's value-priced line. The cycles are programmed purely mechanically using a cam timer.
Since I've owned it, all I've had to do is replace the clutch which was like a $25 part at the time. Doing it yourself (or having a repair technician take care of it), is easier and more cost-effective than hauling it out and buying a new one.
Cloud enabled features on home appliances had extra complexity and the chance your device will be bricked when the manufacturer decides to discontinue their cloud services.
Imo, the problem with most smart kitchen devices has always been that the added benefit was never big enough to warrant the steep prices.
The June oven had computer vision to detect the food and probes to test for internal temperature and could tell the user when their food was ready.
Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens, but at home, I don't need this at all because I can tell when the cheese on top is caramelized.
At $600-1500, that's a high premium for a countertop oven.
The math I have always done is, "If I removed 100% of my issues with controlling my home appliances and I was absolutely sure it would only ever cost me, let's say, $1000, and it was never going to need maintenance and would never fail, how interested would I be?"
And the answer still keeps coming back, "not very". Not zero. But the problem is that there isn't a lot of value there to capture, so I'm not willing to pay all that much, especially when you consider the full cost-of-ownership of failure modes that they create. The daily annoyance of "flipping some light switches" just isn't that great.
That this industry keeps getting run by MBAs who keep calculating
1. Hey we can lock them in with these centralized services.
2. (A couple of years later) Hey we can make more money if we
shut down our old centralized services.
on time frames shorter than the expected replacement of the things being controlled by those services doesn't help.
At least my smart phone, as much as we may all like to complain, brings a lot of value to me that can be leveraged for that sweet, sweet MBA-approved lockin. The smart home proposition never had anywhere near as much to leverage. And the smart phone world still is full of MBAs delusional enough to think that "storing the user's heartbeat information in the cloud" is somehow enough leverage to be worth a $9.95/month subscription to me.
Recently sold a "Google (Nest) Home Audio" device after it failed to accomplish very basic tasks like "turn on the light". I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible before it's completely useless. Like, it would succeed about 20% of the time on a good day. That number used to be 80%-90%.
I wonder if I live in an alternate universe because I am only seeing good news about Gemini coming out of Google.
Same experience here -- Google Home has turned into absolute garbage, virtually unusable. It was never perfect but holy shit have they poured gasoline on the dumpster fire with whatever they have done with Gemini.
I'd be open to smart home stuff if it wasn't sending data out to third-parties. Are there any good homebrew setups anyone is using that are local-only (or at least only sending data to a "cloud" I control)?
I quickly realized that the only rational (for me) home automation solution would be 100% cloud free, off the shelf hardware. No overly complicated, security poor Home Assistant, everything is mqtt
"Whole home automation integrators" offer this but are all very expensive and proprietary in their own ways. They've been around since the early 2000s at least. All hardwired, amazing when they work, and some even have a dedicated local technician on-call.
I'm thinking it would be better to go commercial/industrial, with an actual standard like BACnet [0]. Consumer tech just always seems to be whim-driven.
Ya but that would increase complexity and costs. Currently I can use some Meross branded stuff because it can be provisioned without their cloud nonsense and is mqtt. Other bespoke devices are esphome with mqtt control (no home assistant)
Any IoT connected appliance like this should still have the core functionality usable offline. Too bad functionality like this isn't demanded by law and we continue to throwaway otherwise perfectly working hardware.
When you use a compound word like that as an attributive (before-the-noun) adjective it’s common to hyphenate it. Precisely to clarify this kind of situation.
So the defunct smart-home devices from your smart home end up in the smart-home graveyard.
Same goes for man-eating lions and high-net-worth individuals.
Don't expect to see a Verge article written with something like a New Yorker style handbook in mind. It's hard enough for them to get all the facts correct.
- Hue lights still slap, "just work", and have proved to be reliable over time. They are a big upgrade over non-dimmable, non-temp-changeable bulbs, or buzzing dimmer switches from ages past.
- Home Assistant's UX is poor
- I should probably try some of the temp control and security camera tools
Most importantly: These systems can be useful and have a good design without being cloud. A microcontroller and good user interface can be a big upgrade over a "dumb" system, without evoking the internet, or a Linux etc operating system.
I've started buying Shelly plugs. So far I'm very impressed. They have wifi, including a local AP server you use to set them up and each plug is its own web server. (There's almost certainly some flavor of ESP32 inside.) And there's a physical button on the device you can push to turn them on/off. And they do power measurement. There exists a vendor cloud plus an app but you don't need to use either.
I don't even have Home Assistant; I control them with a 192.168.xxx.xxx address in a browser on my phone.
It's almost too perfect. Let's see how long they last before they cook their internal electronics.
I like the shelly's too. I have one controlling my garage door opener and its been working out there without any air conditioning for maybe 5 years now and still going great. Our summers get to 90-100 F for a couple months too.
> Weber told me it considered open-sourcing the technology for someone else to keep it alive, but decided against it, citing the fact June’s IP is part of its Weber Connect platform.
Ah, so they can't allow others to support it because they already have a platform where they explicitly chose not to support it. It's like someone saying they considered calling 911 to save a gunshot victim but decided against it since the bullet came from their gun. What a way to try to look like you care about your customers.
99% of smart kitchen appliances end up costing 4 times as much just for the "smartness" which in reality isn't only their weak point, it's also the cheapest part of the whole ensemble. Your washing machine or fridge double in price because the manufacturer slapped on an ESP32 and a vibe coded insecure cloud backend. Even devices that could last decades end up betrayed by the dependency on that super-expensive crap you though is a selling feature.
If you need to, buy cheap IoT, the kind that you can work with locally (HA, HomeKit, etc.) with no internet access, the kind you set and forget and when it stops working you can genuinely treat them as consumables. Don't pay thousands for something that will be quickly dragged down by their marquee feature.
The AI bubble is reverting the Cloud bubble. Services are getting shut down. No cheap remote computing anymore despite having the most powerful data centers. What are you going to do, make the light bulb to talk with a chatbot?
My house has smart light switches. They use ancient technologies of injection molding and metal wires. Their firmware has not needed an update and I haven't had to reboot them; they also recover instantly from power failures. I haven't measure their boot time but it's impressive. Probably 1/50 seconds is my guess, based on the AC switching frequency. Their data collection is primitive, and the retention is only a few hundred nanoseconds. They're quite good about not selling data about when I'm home to insurance companies or advertisers. And they use ancient principles of physics to destroy data securely. Their registration and account creation process didn't store my home address in some vendor's questionably secured database, so it can't be sold when these vendors fold in 5-10 years. It doesn't stop working while I'm traveling and never leaves my family without working lights, in fact I've yet to get one tech support call for light switches.
Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.
One downside is the commute to the wall if you want to use them. Commuting to a light switch is actually good though, I'm pleased to report it's a nice stroll. It takes around the same time it takes to unlock my phone and discover my phone can't switch on the lights in my house. It goes past a window so it has views.
When I read some vendors' stuff was gonna stop working I went home and turned off and on all my light switches to simulate a reboot in solidarity for those whose hobby is to make their home less usable. Hopefully you folks are able to spend a few hundred bucks more to refresh your stuff for this decade. If you need me, I'll be over at the wall panel.
> Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.
My light switches integrate with Home Assistant, but I can just press the button or turn the knob to dim. Home Assistant Zigbee is there as a bonus, not the sole way of doing things and certainly not a single point of failure.
> Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure
You can set it up in a way that it does work without it but can be enhanced with it. Some zigbee switch work like that (Like the Aqara one).
Also, Home Assistant is the most rock-solid piece of software I ran in a long time, it just never breaks for me
Not to mention the sheer reliability (uptime) of the LCPT (legacy copper plastic technology) switches. We're talking like 99.999% uptime here.
Isn't downtime the whole point of having a switch though?
That's the difference between OFF and NULL.
You can get that exact same experience with Zigbee/z-wave smart switches. I have 74 of them in my house (replaced them all when I moved in) and haven’t had to think about them past that. They work by flipping the switch, they work by voice (Alexa), and via HA and anything that can talk to HA.
If HA goes down I can just walk over and use the switch. A downgrade over yelling into the air for sure but my downgrade is your daily experience.
If someone comes over that doesn’t know how or doesn’t want to use the smart speakers, they can just walk over and flip a switch.
After moving HA off a Pi I found it to be rock solid and I don’t think about it at all unless I want to make or tweak some automation or I get a new device. Adding Claude into the mix for creating/modifying automations is awesome.
Dumb devices work as expected for at least 20 years and then you replace them.
Smart devices work as expected for a year, fail in new and exciting ways, and then you replace them with dumb devices.
I was (naively, looking back) pretty bullish on smart home devices. Automating schedules, presence detection, etc. Every time I looked to invest more into it, the marketplace felt like a minefield of e(ventual)-waste and headache.
I still struggle with it. It feels like a missed opportunity these days, but I just don’t trust companies to treat me or my devices with respect. I’ve ultimately boomeranged back to “no (cloud) smart devices.”
Homekit certification is the closest you can get. Devices are required to function offline on LAN through an Apple home hub. Apple has a much better track record supporting things than any of these random vendors. And it can be entirely replaced by Home Assistant anyways.
Yep I have 4 different presence detectors. A few units of each. None of them work in a way that satisfies my requirements.
Smart light bulbs are another minefield of low-CRI, bad connectivity, worse firmwares, nerfed local featureset, etc.
> Smart light bulbs are another minefield
Just buy Hue, problem solved - although for best results it needs custom setup which is a higher initial time investment, buth then it's set and forget.
"Just buy Hue" is a massive initial expense! Due to the fact that the previous owners of my place were the least practical people on the planet, on the ground floor alone there are 33 light spots, most GU10.
The cheapest Hue option is a 4-pack of Hue Essential for £63. That would be 9 of those for £567 in light bulbs for the ground floor alone.
Buy used! They were/are really popular so there's always a number of items selling for reasonable prices, and they don't really have perishable properties (besides power on time which is _long_).
> 33 light spots, most GU10
That's a sad situation, but even if a bit ugly - a GU10->E27 adapter cotst ~$1.
Yeah but most of them are embedded in the ceiling, so would require some sort of renovations for that. It's really baffling that they'd do this.
Thanks for the tip on second hand, I might have a look.
>None of them work in a way that satisfies my requirements
care to expand on which areas the units are lacking in? I've thought about getting presence sensors recently
Shelly BLU: lots of lost events. I have one on my kitchen. It mostly works to make the lights switch on when I walk in. Not always though, and when it doesn't it's a pain. It's also PIR alone, so small movements don't register. If I'm cooking, or doing the dishes, the timer runs out and switches the lights off. Getting them to switch on is a pain.
A bunch of Matter-over-Thread devices I have: hard to secure. I'll end up setting up a Thread Border Router on my IoT VLAN and get HA to connect to it, but that means yet another component to run separate from HA, which requires its own upgrade mechanism, backup, etc.
Matter-over-WiFi: haven't yet found one that would fit what I need. Will require expanding my IoT WiFi network to other parts of the house. My main APs don't serve IoT because a few tens of those would easily congest the radios, despite being very low bandwidth.
Most devices are PIR-only, or use subpar mmWave sensors, or a combination of both which tends to be hit-and-miss.
I haven't found a device that doesn't require a proprietary app for setup, which means tracking and the risk of them becoming e-waste.
I'm planning to build some out of cheap sensors from AliExpress and ESP32s but I haven't had the time and have too many other projects in flight.
When I had to get a lot of work done on my house after a kitchen fire (appliance but not a smart one), I told pretty much everyone involved "nothing smart." (OK, the new dryer has a moisture sensor but that's it. Didn't have much that was smart anyway aside from a couple of Alexas that I use rarely.
I think there was also a novelty around a lot of smart devices that just didn't translate to much real world benefit. And in my case here, there was also the matter of having more pressing issues than fussing with smart lights and the like--like rewiring a substantial portion of the house when various walls were open..
I still have a lot of the same stuff I bought, which falls into two main categories:
* Hue bulbs, which get active updates and are still maintained by Philips, and honestly are pretty good, if insanely overpriced, especially the HomeKit bridge
* "iHome" smart outlets which I belieeeeeeeve were once upon a time made by Belkin? They've ended support but the outlets themselves are very reliable, and pairable/managable entirely within the Home app so I barely noticed when they were discontinued. Picked up a 4-pack of them on fleabay recently for $20 and they work great still.
Mind you I'm not saying I'm great at this, if anything I'm lucky in that I really haven't had any smart home tech go poorly for me, apart from some other outlets that were some no-name brand. They're still kicking around my house but they need power cycles far more often than the iHome ones.
I would be interested in Hue, except Philips sold me an earlier iteration of a smart lamp which I loved for its ability to gently wake me up in the morning by slowly turning up the light. I love waking up without a loud alarm clock. In fact, I loved that so much I invested in a smart home hub to get Hue bulbs, and then Philips promptly bricked my original lamp. Unless I eventually bought a fancier home hub, which could grandfather it in!
No matter the convenience of a given smarthome feature, it will have to overcome the hurdle of all the time and money I invest in setting it up being liable to get vaporized at the click of a button from the supplier. Ultra frustrating experience, but one that instantly cured me of any romantic notions about the futuristic smart home.
FWIW I use a lot of Hue in my house, and I've not had that experience. But absolutely validate the frustration. That said, in the present, Hue seems to be one of the most if not the most stable ecosystems for smart lighting. Which isn't to say it's perfect but I have far fewer problems than most people I'm friends with, haha.
My Hue system is pretty good at my house, my complaints are:
(1) After a momentary power outage all the lights wind up switched on. It happens a lot at 3am and it's annoying as hell to get up at night and turn all the lights off. I really ought to program my homelab server to check the light status when it comes up and if > 80% of the lights are on between 11am and 6am it oughta turn them all off or maybe return the system to a snapshot of where it was before the power down event.
(2) The hue hub crashes every month or so, it always comes up after being power cycled except for the time that my son blew the circuit breaker screwing around with guitar amps. Now that I think about it I oughta put a WiFi smart plug on it so my homelab can reboot it.
(3) When things go wrong my wife becomes dependent on me which is a hassle, particularly when I am out of town. It's one of those things like having a home theater that requires two remote controls and then finding your family can't manage to watch TV anymore. (God, I want to punish everybody in the electronics industry that anything to do with Logitech Harmony going away)
(4) I'm the only one at home that notices it, but the color rendering of RGB lights is terrible. If you want good color rendition of things in the environment you want a spectrum which is smooth like a black body spectrum but if you want strong RGB effects you want three laser-like lines so you can get a good choice of saturated colors.
In ordinary life it doesn't matter a lot but my arts n' crafts involve making fine sensory distinctions like I load this paper into my inkjet printer
https://www.redrivercatalog.com/browse/60lb-polar-matte.html...
and one side is a little more whitish and less mottled and the other side is a little yellowish and you can really see the paper grain... if you've got a very bright light with good color rendering it is easy to tell the difference but under RGB lights it is difficult. And of course if you are evaluating the quality of prints or clothes or something you want the best CRI you can get.
I simply won’t install anything that doesn’t support a local API. Happy to pay for the hardware; but if your plan is to monetize it via cloud services somehow, or just assume planned obsolescence, I’m not your customer.
Even with local API I'm quite a bit hesitant, I'd rather not use anything that does not let me install an opensource firmware (e.g. wled for RGBCCT led strip controller).
I haven't made a vlan yet for IoT stuff because my ISP's router do not let me, I can't wait to have my own openwrt / opnsense router and put the ISP in bridge mode.
I've seen people suggest that instead of bridge mode go ahead and leave the ISP router in router mode, with wifi turned off, with your own router as the only device connected. Give your router a static IP on the ISP router's LAN and set it up on the ISP router as the DMZ.
That advantage of this is that some ISPs will try to blame your router (and your modem if you are using your own modem) for any problem you call in about no matter how obviously it is a problem on their end or with their equipment. This way it is not obvious to the tier 1 tech support people that you are using a different router.
I suppose if you want to be really thorough leave the wifi on, either with whatever the default network names the ISP router starts with or with names that don't match the ones you really use which are on your router.
This is why I don't buy Apple products. You can't realistically use them after breaking all ties with the vendor.
Exactly!
If your device requires, in any way, an internet or cloud connection, even just for setup, it doesn't exist for me. If you have some FULLY OPTIONAL services I might like as a SAAS free or subscription option, ok; but the device MUST 100% work without ever knowing your cloud exists. It must also be designed to fail-safe and have manual fall-back operability (e.g., when the power goes out, I can still manually switch its state to OFF).
I recall an article or comment on HN talking about the advantages of a "MidWit Home", devices that weren't really smart, and just had remote control. I've got a bit of that with some remote switches to use around the house with enough range we can turn on from the car when arriving home. Also timers. Seems like a good way to go.
I want appliances that are reliable and last a lifetime, I don't care about smart features. I bought a basic washing machine back in 2005. Roper brand, which is Whirlpool's value-priced line. The cycles are programmed purely mechanically using a cam timer.
Since I've owned it, all I've had to do is replace the clutch which was like a $25 part at the time. Doing it yourself (or having a repair technician take care of it), is easier and more cost-effective than hauling it out and buying a new one.
Cloud enabled features on home appliances had extra complexity and the chance your device will be bricked when the manufacturer decides to discontinue their cloud services.
Imo, the problem with most smart kitchen devices has always been that the added benefit was never big enough to warrant the steep prices.
The June oven had computer vision to detect the food and probes to test for internal temperature and could tell the user when their food was ready.
Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens, but at home, I don't need this at all because I can tell when the cheese on top is caramelized.
At $600-1500, that's a high premium for a countertop oven.
> Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens
Question is - are these things good enough that restaurants actually use them? I would be surprised if they were.
The math I have always done is, "If I removed 100% of my issues with controlling my home appliances and I was absolutely sure it would only ever cost me, let's say, $1000, and it was never going to need maintenance and would never fail, how interested would I be?"
And the answer still keeps coming back, "not very". Not zero. But the problem is that there isn't a lot of value there to capture, so I'm not willing to pay all that much, especially when you consider the full cost-of-ownership of failure modes that they create. The daily annoyance of "flipping some light switches" just isn't that great.
That this industry keeps getting run by MBAs who keep calculating
on time frames shorter than the expected replacement of the things being controlled by those services doesn't help.At least my smart phone, as much as we may all like to complain, brings a lot of value to me that can be leveraged for that sweet, sweet MBA-approved lockin. The smart home proposition never had anywhere near as much to leverage. And the smart phone world still is full of MBAs delusional enough to think that "storing the user's heartbeat information in the cloud" is somehow enough leverage to be worth a $9.95/month subscription to me.
Recently sold a "Google (Nest) Home Audio" device after it failed to accomplish very basic tasks like "turn on the light". I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible before it's completely useless. Like, it would succeed about 20% of the time on a good day. That number used to be 80%-90%.
I wonder if I live in an alternate universe because I am only seeing good news about Gemini coming out of Google.
Same experience here -- Google Home has turned into absolute garbage, virtually unusable. It was never perfect but holy shit have they poured gasoline on the dumpster fire with whatever they have done with Gemini.
The thing I don't understand about things like smart light switches is why the default failure mode isn't just a normal dumb switch?
The only device I will connect to my home network, is anything that works with Home Assistant.
Can't we stop using the word smart to describe this kind of stuff?
Agree. At this point it should be dumbass cloud connected device with potential to stuff ads in my eyes and ears.
I'd be open to smart home stuff if it wasn't sending data out to third-parties. Are there any good homebrew setups anyone is using that are local-only (or at least only sending data to a "cloud" I control)?
I quickly realized that the only rational (for me) home automation solution would be 100% cloud free, off the shelf hardware. No overly complicated, security poor Home Assistant, everything is mqtt
"Whole home automation integrators" offer this but are all very expensive and proprietary in their own ways. They've been around since the early 2000s at least. All hardwired, amazing when they work, and some even have a dedicated local technician on-call.
I'm thinking it would be better to go commercial/industrial, with an actual standard like BACnet [0]. Consumer tech just always seems to be whim-driven.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACnet
Ya but that would increase complexity and costs. Currently I can use some Meross branded stuff because it can be provisioned without their cloud nonsense and is mqtt. Other bespoke devices are esphome with mqtt control (no home assistant)
What are you using for automations? I've been running HA for a long time but I keep trying to explore different options.
python
Any IoT connected appliance like this should still have the core functionality usable offline. Too bad functionality like this isn't demanded by law and we continue to throwaway otherwise perfectly working hardware.
You know I have developed a habit of closing any web page that shows a popup asking for subscriptions or newsletter enrollment?
My fingers are faster than tachyons now and it saves me wasting time and brings me back to HN where at least the comments are more entertaining
I would encourage customers to take Weber to small claims court to attempt to get a refund.
https://archive.is/YTIq4
It took me a moment to parse that it's the "smart-home graveyard", not the "smart home-graveyard" that's getting crowded!
Apparently hyphens seem to have gone out of fashion. Please can we bring them back?
> "smart home-graveyard"
That's when you put a QR code on a tombstone.
I don't think "smart-home" is a word. I've always seen it written "smart home".
When you use a compound word like that as an attributive (before-the-noun) adjective it’s common to hyphenate it. Precisely to clarify this kind of situation.
So the defunct smart-home devices from your smart home end up in the smart-home graveyard.
Same goes for man-eating lions and high-net-worth individuals.
Don't expect to see a Verge article written with something like a New Yorker style handbook in mind. It's hard enough for them to get all the facts correct.
They do claim to have a style guide and employ copy editors: https://transwork.org/jobs/copy-editor-verge
Their podcast is full of factual errors without correction whatsoever.
I'll put it this way -- I listen to them for general entertainment but not for information.
I think they're just using the hyphen for emphasis here, not spelling
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/37/
Notes:
Most importantly: These systems can be useful and have a good design without being cloud. A microcontroller and good user interface can be a big upgrade over a "dumb" system, without evoking the internet, or a Linux etc operating system."The smart home graveyard", aka Bot Hill
I've started buying Shelly plugs. So far I'm very impressed. They have wifi, including a local AP server you use to set them up and each plug is its own web server. (There's almost certainly some flavor of ESP32 inside.) And there's a physical button on the device you can push to turn them on/off. And they do power measurement. There exists a vendor cloud plus an app but you don't need to use either.
I don't even have Home Assistant; I control them with a 192.168.xxx.xxx address in a browser on my phone.
It's almost too perfect. Let's see how long they last before they cook their internal electronics.
I like the shelly's too. I have one controlling my garage door opener and its been working out there without any air conditioning for maybe 5 years now and still going great. Our summers get to 90-100 F for a couple months too.
> Weber told me it considered open-sourcing the technology for someone else to keep it alive, but decided against it, citing the fact June’s IP is part of its Weber Connect platform.
Ah, so they can't allow others to support it because they already have a platform where they explicitly chose not to support it. It's like someone saying they considered calling 911 to save a gunshot victim but decided against it since the bullet came from their gun. What a way to try to look like you care about your customers.
99% of smart kitchen appliances end up costing 4 times as much just for the "smartness" which in reality isn't only their weak point, it's also the cheapest part of the whole ensemble. Your washing machine or fridge double in price because the manufacturer slapped on an ESP32 and a vibe coded insecure cloud backend. Even devices that could last decades end up betrayed by the dependency on that super-expensive crap you though is a selling feature.
If you need to, buy cheap IoT, the kind that you can work with locally (HA, HomeKit, etc.) with no internet access, the kind you set and forget and when it stops working you can genuinely treat them as consumables. Don't pay thousands for something that will be quickly dragged down by their marquee feature.
Wasn't that the same June oven that, well, was a smart arson machine?
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/296679-smart-ovens-may-...
The AI bubble is reverting the Cloud bubble. Services are getting shut down. No cheap remote computing anymore despite having the most powerful data centers. What are you going to do, make the light bulb to talk with a chatbot?
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