- Buy an Homepod/Apple TB as a home station
- Everything works locally, even the internet is down.
- no Accounts.
- only one privacy policy: Apple's
- but ofc, you can control everything remote, and Apple makes sure its easy and secure.
Since its Apple, they have to make sure there are downsides, too (beside price):
- If Apple does not deem it worthy, it will not get implemented. [1]
- Things that should be simple are not. Try to set the lights to turn on 10 minutes before your alarm goes off. I'll wait here.
I see a market for a company which builds on home-assistant.
You can tell the nerds: If "corporate" does sth you dont like, you can always go back to home-assistant.
And for everybody else, you can offer a support, a list of compatible/certified devices, an extendable, open API, a vetted applications/script market place, a secure remote connection, ...
[1] It has been a few years, but last time I checked, CO2 Levels still can only be reported as labeled Levels ("high/low/.."), with the actually ppm Value hidden in some auxiliary value. No way around it, Apple needed to put CO2{ type: integer, range: 0-10000} in some json some where, and they did not come around to do it for like half a decade, at which point I stopped caring.
The reason really is the extreme arrogance of every single manufacturer that wants you to install their app and use their ecosystem. That might have worked if one of them became super dominant and pushed everyone else out. But because that didn't happen, now I have to install 20 apps for 20 different manufacturers with no guarantees of interoperability.
Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly stay away until this is resolved. Skyrocketing inflation is not doing anything to change my mind either.
That one was pretty obvious to everyone, open hard- and software is a must for the longevity of (internet of) things that cost < USD 1000. It's the sad reality we settled on in our weird economic system, and every once in a while someone needs to relearn it the hard way: No company is going to offer support for cheap things, so it must be done by an open (source) community.
I've settled on a ZigStar Stick for my always-on Raspberry Pi and stick to compatible devices[0] only. I even just stick to the dashboard of Zigbee2MQTT[1], as Home Assistant[2] feels too bloated for my use cases.
Self-hosting and open source will certainly win in the case of smart homes.
With each manufacturer doing their own thing, you’re also dependent upon each company keeping their servers online for X years. And when they inevitably decide that this isn’t the market for them (eg Belkin Wemo), you’re stuck with switches or plugs that potentially don’t work at all. Smart home items should have lifespans on the order of decades. But companies treat the products as something that is obsolete after a year.
Matter is a solution to that. It's a standard pathway for things to talk to (say) a light bulb. The control interface is local, not cloud-based. And configuring a Matter device from $random_company doesn't require $random_company's bizarro-world app; instead, it involves a QR code or a short alphanumeric sequence.
That Matter light bulb still needs something to control it, but the light bulb is not tied to one control ecosystem -- at all. It works with any Matter-supporting system.
That bulb can even work multiple different Matter systems concurrently. Which sounds dumb, but that helps smooth our transition periods wherein a person switches from one system to another. The old system can continue to operate just fine while the new system is implemented, and then once the new hotness is behaving Good Enough the old one can just be switched off.
It's also a bit of a trap. Many devices "work with Matter" but either they don't really until a future firmware update, and even then, a lot of them have certain features locked into the vendor app.
There's also complications around networking. Matter over WiFi works great if your networking gear can withstand potentially hundreds of devices connected. Matter over Thread seem to work under specific conditions, but I still haven't been able to pair the first device.
There's also potential issues around device certification.
All in all, Zigbee is a more reliable platform for the moment IMO, even though I have some issues with it as well.
I use Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/). It has an integration for lots of manufacturers. Single app, single entry point, cross manufacturer automations.
Home Assistant is well beyond the skills of the vast majority of people to install, set up, and maintain. And they don't want to have to maintain something like that. They want an appliance that they plug in and just works.
Sure. Most people don't have much beneath-the-skin technical inclination at all. We see this right now in 3D printing: Bambu Labs printers are popular because they're simple to use: A person can unbox it, plug it in, load some filament, and start printing widgets from their pocket supercomputer basically immediately.
But it is available as a plug-in appliance, and they're getting better and better at the Just Works aspects all the time.
And in a world where everything is relative, it's a hell of a lot easier to get started with Home Assistant than it is to get started with something like KNX or Crestron.
It also wants all three of wifi, Bluetooth, and location on, otherwise it provides a reminder that you have them switched off - even though it works just with wifi on.
My current strategy is to buy only Z-Wave gear. I run my own home automation software on a Raspberry Pi, but someone (i.e. nearly everyone) who wouldn't want to do that could (in theory!) buy a Z-Wave hub appliance, install its companion app, and it should be pretty easy to deal with that way.
But this seems not to be a well-advertised way of doing things, unfortunately.
The smart home is a thousand small problems to solve and should never be one catch all.
The automatic cat feeder works well. So does the roomba. I like my automated blinds but will stick with manual light switches. I consolidated my home theatre remotes. Note how they’re all seperate problems.
The smart home is here. It’s just that it was never a use case for a singular smart home platform. It was always 1000 seperate problems to solve that in no way ever belonged together and the experience was always worse when trying to combine it.
They will possibly all converge when they expose a "tool interface" to some kind of model-on-prem(ish) device that you install in your home. Think of an OpenAI or Anthropic or Apple or Samsung-branded "cortex" or "brain" that controls everything to some degree using fast local models, but outsource more complex orchestration up to the cloud. Smart home products will integrate with these devices because its going to open up a whole new generation of the same devices they sell, just with AI model integration this time.
These devices already have a precedent, your apple tv or google/amazon speaker thing. I think we will see these probably become LLM/model/AI gateways in the future.
We are basically already there, with HomeKit plus open bridge that can make any device visible on HomeKit (like nest cameras) and usable in automations (it works the other way also, it’s just a good way to get compatibility).
I would like to explore some open source solutions though, it would mean setting up a local system on a Mac mini for speech recognition and local processing. Bonus is you could use Anthony Daniels (KITT) as your assistant voice.
Synchronizing lights is hard, so in the living room kitchen where we have 4 different lights, having a way to turn them on and off is useful. We don’t have automatic lights anywhere else, but I notice at least, where we don’t, the light switches don’t get dirty (and you don’t get dirty from using the light switch), so maybe we will make them all automatic eventually just for hygiene reasons.
>I use Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/). It has an integration for lots of manufacturers. Single app, single entry point, cross manufacturer automations.
I think it’s also just that there’s not that much it makes sense to automate in the home. I run Home Assistant, and I do not have much of the typical home stuff on it. Why would I want to automate lights? My cat feeder has a timer already. I’m not about to get a smart lock and can’t imagine why I would want to automate one.
The useful things I do use it for are:
-heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing)
-automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost
-a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer
-a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies.
That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.
There are some really nice things that home automation enables that was previously impossible.
I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really bad wildfire smoke.
I can save a lot of money on AC if I open the windows at night and use the attic fan to pull in outside air. But if smoke rolls in, then we'd all be breathing 200+ AQI air all night.
I have outdoor AQI sensors, which if the AQI spikes, will close up the house and turn on the air purifiers.
> Why would I want to automate lights?
We're bad at remembering to turn lights on and off. We like having our porch light on an hour or two after sunset, but don't need to leave it on 24/7. We also have stairwell baseboard lighting that's completely unnecessary during the day, but very nice to have already be on if we get up in the middle of the night. To each their own, though. These are just nice to have. The AQI automation is an actual health benefit to us though.
I have all kinds of lights automated. Lights that turn themselves off with a software timer. Lights that turn off when nobody is home. Lights that turn themselves on when I get home. Lights that do things in response to the status of other lights. Lights that fade on slowly every evening beginning at sunset and reaching 100% brightness at civil twilight, and do the opposite every morning.
I suppose that it does make some things less frustrating.
The days when I'd come home from work and see that the porch light got left on all day or find that the pantry light has been left on for hours are all behind me. That's not as important (money-wise) with LEDs as it was with incandescents, but it's good.
It's also fun -- for me, at least -- to think of ways to automate things.
Like: I have a bedroom that tends to get hot on sunny days and overlooks a busy road, and I don't like feeling like I'm on display. So I'd like those blinds closed at night, and open during the day. Sounds simple. I can do that the old fashioned way by opening and closing the blinds with my hands.
Except: If it's hot in there, then maybe they can just stay closed during the day.
Except: Maybe I can let ambient daylight in, and only close the blinds during the day during times when the position of the sun allows for direct sunlight to pour in.
Except: If it's cold in the room and it's during the heating season, then that sunlight is useful energy that saves me money and they should stay open.
Perhaps I could manage all that myself manually every day (and maybe I'll remember to try to get it right, or maybe I won't bother trying at all), or I can code something up one time that does it for me. The latter might not actually be less work, but it's more fun and it's probably going to be more reliable than I am myself.
I automate lights because we have a bunch of then to manipulate: four switches for the living room. Shades are worse, we have 10 windows so automating them so they open and close at once on demand is a win (I told my wife we should always keep them open and she was really against that, so automated was a marriage saver).
I have some security stuff setup to turn on a siren when tweakers poke around my open garage and doorway after 11 PM. It doesn’t do anything else, this is just a way to scare them off a bit and to let me know something is up. H the light will also turn red if detects a person at the door (again to ward tweakers off or make them feel watched at least).
I’ve been recently discovering the joy of robovacs, except we have three floors and so I found we need three of them, ugh.
Wait until you're disabled and there are days you can't get out of bed.
Having your bedroom lights fade in at low brightness a few minutes before your alarm goes off is also really nice.
If you live in an area that's not great time wise there are also a lot of arguments to be made for making it look like your home is occupied when you're away.
I have some lights on mechanical timers so the living room has a minimal amount of light in the evening, and they turn off automatically at midnight. That's useful to me, and it was cheap and simple. Haven't had to touch it in 10 years, except to adjust the timers to the seasons. The mechanical timers (Ikea) predate Alexa, and it's cheaper to just keep using them.
I also have a porch light that used to have a light sensor, but those sensors keep failing after a few years, and it's a hassle. Instead, Alexa has a schedule for that porch light switch, and you can specify "turn on at sunset" and "turn off at sunrise", and it's perfect.
And I have an Alexa rule for turning off the other lights that it controls (living room, dining room, family room, hallways, but not the porch light) at midnight. Simple and useful in case I forget to turn the lights off.
The smartest thing is having a light switch you walk over to. Doesn’t fail randomly, doesn’t need an internet connection to operate, doesn’t stop working when your internet is down.
My garage remote is in a PIN number lock box next to the garage. Open lock box, press remote, close lock box.
PIN number lock boxes are pretty unsafe, one could consider 2 simple solutions to stop someone trivially determining your PIN:
1) after closing the box, randomize the digits: humans are pretty bad at randomization, imagine modeling the randomization delta it won't be perfectly uniform, and the different discs would display similar distributions of rotation. Suppose spinning a disc to randomize it, one might have a peak at delta=+3 and sidelobes with lower frequency. Just a handful of observations when the codes were randomized will reveal the relative positions of the true code, and the only missing information is 10 possible global rotations, which is easy to brute force
2) A second approach is to not let an attacker learn anything by always presenting them with the same information: instead of randomizing, always reset to the same value (0000 or 9999 or any other value of choice). But in this case another attack becomes extremely easy: acoustically detecting the number of indentation clicks used per wheel by recording: without access to actuation direction that gives 1 bit of direction doubt per wheel or only 2^4 = 16 combinations left, easy to brute force.
My lock box is round the back of our apartment building. Anyone sus would get stopped and asked why they’re there long before they got to it.
Anyone installing recording gear to record the clicks, or trying lots of combinations would - in addition to drawing unwanted attention - be pretty dumb to invest the time as there are much better and easier targets.
And good point, didn’t mention that, I do randomize the pin digits.
It is all tradeoffs between security and convenience. We aren’t hiding state secrets and that opens lots of options.
I mean, they could also just saw open the box or rip it off whatever mounting brackets it's on. At some point you have to acknowledge you're making unauthorized access inconvenient rather than impossible.
Smart home seems to suffer from the old-school AI curse in that it stops getting the name as soon as it works. Roomba, thermostat automation and remote control, casting content between devices, the video door bells, siri (to say nothing of dishwasher, rice cookers, laundry machine, etc). Anything that works gets bundled into an appliance and becomes normal. Smart home only means stuff that's at the edge of working, plus maybe some stuff that requires gluing multiple discrete appliances together (ie unlikely to work easily). In particular lighting for the latter, which has stiff competition against light switches.
I was going to say I feel like my smart home technology is working great.
Then I remembered that I have to make shortcuts to bridge two products, it fails half the time, my ikea bridge has to be restarted every 30 minutes, and my smart garage door opener takes 30 seconds to respond now.
Recurring revenue, K-factor, long shelf life and low actuation rate.
Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product.
Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app.
Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years.
Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day.
Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.
You're describing those things as failures. I see them as successes.
A smart device that doesn't need a subscription to feed and keep track of, doesn't consume hours of my life trying to get my attention, doesn't get shared with the world, and doesn't bother me with needless bullshit? It just quietly does its thing and it also lasts 8 years?
That sounds great! Count me in!
(Actually, I'm already a member. My personal favorite smart devices come with open-source ESPHome firmware pre-installed, and they have all of the features I've described above. These manufacturers make their money by exchanging money for widgets in simple one-time transactions, not by being sneaky under-handed rent-seeking slimeballs who live to optimize ways continuously extract money out of my billfold for the rest of my life.)
Perhaps it popped because of devices from Google, Amazon, Apple, Sonos, etc. that surveil everything you say in their presence. My houses are fairly automated, but I have excluded any device with a microphone.
Most of this smart home stuff doesn't do much. Managing lights and entertainment just isn't that interesting. It doesn't cook or clean. Vacuum, maybe.
There's been generation after generation of lighting control. There was a 1950s/1960s thing of putting everything on relays with 24V control signals and panels full of rocker switches. There was x10 in the 1980s. There were "smart" light bulbs in the 2010s. It's just not all that useful.
I mentioned this a few years ago, after I came back from an "Internet of Things" meeting in Dogpatch, in San Francisco. The Samsung guy pitched a refrigerator with a tablet mounted in the door. It didn't really have any more functionality than a refrigerator plus a tablet, but cost more. I asked him why, and he told me because there's a fraction of the population that likes to show off their kitchens, and it would be marketed to them. There were a few other IoT things pitched, all forgettable.
What struck me at the time was that we were in a room that really needed intelligent control. It was an office/meeting space, about 5000 square feet, in an old industrial building. Openable windows looked out on the bay, and there was a manual system with a shaft with a chain fall and a rack and pinion system to open the windows. A similar mechanical setup controlled windows in an openable skylight. The room also had a modern HVAC system, ceiling fans, and lighting.
None of this was coordinated. What should have been happening was that, as people came in and the CO2 level went up, the bay side windows and skylight windows should have opened, to get the CO2 level down and cool the room a bit. As the sun set and the outside temperature dropped, the bay side windows should have mostly closed, the ceiling fans should have started in the upward direction, and the skylight windows should have stayed open, to prevent the room from cooling too much while keeping the CO2 level down. Lighting should have increased as darkness fell.
As it got later, and people started to leave, the bay side windows could close completely and the fan RPMs could drop. When everybody left, as noticed by motion detectors, the system should have dimmed the lights and done a quick fresh air purge - skylights open, bay windows open, fans to max in the downward direction. Temperature would drop, but unless it went below 60F, no need to turn on heat on an empty room. Then everything seals up tight for the night. Very little energy consumption.
Tomorrow is another day, and the room should continue to react to the people load.
But no. You rarely see that kind of control. Except in hotel function rooms. Hotels put in systems like that because they have big rooms with widely varying people load, and customers who complain if a conference room is stuffy or hot or cold. Hotels have significant HVAC costs, and it's worth it to have the HVAC systems adapt to room usage. Honeywell and Johnson Controls sell systems for this for commercial buildings. They have both inside and outside sensors, and can operate fans, dampers, and HVAC separately.
I worked in a building that had that kind of "smart" controls. It was anything but.
In practice, it started opening and closing shutters for no reason, when clouds obscured the sun, and then went away. Or even when some sort of reflection hit some sensor, somewhere in the building.
I'm sure it's doable, but unlike factories, where automation is related to income and thus profits, most commercial buildings are built by the cheapest of cheaters, and so they will skimp on sensor, on intelligence, on integration, or whatever, just to follow the minimally-compliant features. So you get all kinds of erratic behavior, lack of redundancy, stupid intelligence that ends up overridden by humans.
Right. It works for hotels, because, if your hotel conference rooms are uncomfortable, some conferences will switch hotels next year. So there's a strong business case for getting HVAC control right.
Schools and colleges have the same HVAC problem, with huge variations in people load, but don't have the same incentive to get it right.
(I once found a computer room in the Gates Building at Stanford that had two packaged air conditioning systems at opposite ends of the room. One was heating and the other was cooling. You're supposed to get a control box that synchronizes your HVAC units when you have more than one, but they didn't. Each was running on its own thermostat. Huge energy consumption with an error like that.)
Matter is hopefully changing it. It's a local first standard, based on IPv6 with security and provisioning in mind. BLE is used to give devices wifi or Thread credentials. Thread is a new protocol to replace ZigBee. Lower power using the same radio hardware. Ikeas new line is all Matter.
My one issue, while building a custom HA controller is... There's no standard for discovering the HA controller and have it join WiFi... So that will require an app. Just to do mDNS and TLS bootstrapping. Maybe I'll use a cloud relay and Web Bluetooth for it. Would relieve both issues and provisioning could happen in any browser supporting Bluetooth.
Great observations! I've no idea what the sales numbers show for smart home products. To me they all represent more effort to manage things I'm already happy with as is. My fav lighting gadget is the dimmer switch, which got introduced to the consumer market in 1959!
It depends on what you need to be "smart" about your house. If you live in an apartment there is not much to be automated. However, (if like me) you live in a free-standing house with solar panels, possible power outages and all heating done through electricity, a PHEV you want to charge, being able to have smart energy management is actually very useful.
Ideally my house should have 3 phase power, but I'm not yet inconvenienced enough to go through the headache of getting this organized. This means that at any time my maximum power draw can be 13.8 kW (60A at 230V).
Generally this is enough, but I have on occasion tripped my mains due to drawing too much at a particular moment, I have the following significant power draw items:
- 4x underfloor heating circuits at 3kW each.
- 2x electric geyser at 2.5kw each.
- Electric oven and induction stove, not sure on amount but I think they can collectively pull 6kW easily.
- Pool pump at 0.6kW.
- Inverter re-charging batteries at night (I only have 10kWh of storage and want backup power at night in case of a power outage), I can configure maximum draw here, but could probably pull up to 8kW if I wanted.
- PHEV at 3kW.
When we had regular load shedding here (South Africa) it was very easy for the power to trip if I didn't manage things, particularly if I left underfloor turned on in the winter at night. What would happen is that power would have been off for ~2 hours, then comes back and everything on a thermostat would turn on AND the inverter would start charging its battery.
If I proactively turned the floors off then I wouldn't generally have an issue.
Even without a power outage, it is possible to trip things when using stove/oven with underfloor heating turned on or if both the geysers happened turn on their elements at an inopportune moment.
IoT can allow this to all be managed, it can have rules like:
- Don't run ALL the underfloor heating circuits at the same moment, alternate between them.
- If the stove/oven is in use, don't turn on the element for either of the geysers, it can wait.
- Temporarily stop charging the PHEV or inverter's batteries until there is less power demand.
- Temporarily turn off the pool pump if it would help.
It can also create other opportunities around solar energy production, you can do things like have only "excess" energy go into your (PH)EV provided it has a minimum charge level.
Other automations which I wouldn't mind:
- Exterior lights on a schedule based sunrise/sunset.
- When I'm away it would be nice to be able to remotely turn on/off particular interior lights and open/close curtains at particular times of the day.
What I actually have automated:
- My alarm system has (not great) app, I have wired it up to my garage door so I can remotely let in the armed response security company in the event of the alarm going off and I'm not at the house.
- I use the Tuya ecosystem to automatically turn my geyser and pool pump off on a schedule and if there is a power outage or load shedding. This allows me to heat the geyser still even if there is a power outage and it's the middle of the day with lots of sun on my solar panels.
HA is something I want to look at one day (when I have more time), meanwhile the Tuya ecosystem is very useful considering its minimal amount of time investment required.
I don’t know why you’d want to over pay on basic widgets that are really just glorified timers, not to mention are likely just full of security issues waiting to happen.
arguing with an AI that is intentionaly obtuse, is not what anyone wants when its time to try enjoying your home. noone needs to have a conversation with thier lightswitch, its for turning light on or off not pretending to be your pal and trying to exploit emotional reflexes.
i have a broken record for this, "stop wasting time and effort trying to pretend to be human, and get to work building something that does what its told to do."
The market needs competition.
Apple has this reasonable offer:
Since its Apple, they have to make sure there are downsides, too (beside price): I see a market for a company which builds on home-assistant. You can tell the nerds: If "corporate" does sth you dont like, you can always go back to home-assistant. And for everybody else, you can offer a support, a list of compatible/certified devices, an extendable, open API, a vetted applications/script market place, a secure remote connection, ...[1] It has been a few years, but last time I checked, CO2 Levels still can only be reported as labeled Levels ("high/low/.."), with the actually ppm Value hidden in some auxiliary value. No way around it, Apple needed to put CO2{ type: integer, range: 0-10000} in some json some where, and they did not come around to do it for like half a decade, at which point I stopped caring.
The reason really is the extreme arrogance of every single manufacturer that wants you to install their app and use their ecosystem. That might have worked if one of them became super dominant and pushed everyone else out. But because that didn't happen, now I have to install 20 apps for 20 different manufacturers with no guarantees of interoperability.
Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly stay away until this is resolved. Skyrocketing inflation is not doing anything to change my mind either.
That one was pretty obvious to everyone, open hard- and software is a must for the longevity of (internet of) things that cost < USD 1000. It's the sad reality we settled on in our weird economic system, and every once in a while someone needs to relearn it the hard way: No company is going to offer support for cheap things, so it must be done by an open (source) community.
I've settled on a ZigStar Stick for my always-on Raspberry Pi and stick to compatible devices[0] only. I even just stick to the dashboard of Zigbee2MQTT[1], as Home Assistant[2] feels too bloated for my use cases.
Self-hosting and open source will certainly win in the case of smart homes.
[0]: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/
[1]: https://flemmingss.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/zigbee2mqt...
[2]: https://www.home-assistant.io/
With each manufacturer doing their own thing, you’re also dependent upon each company keeping their servers online for X years. And when they inevitably decide that this isn’t the market for them (eg Belkin Wemo), you’re stuck with switches or plugs that potentially don’t work at all. Smart home items should have lifespans on the order of decades. But companies treat the products as something that is obsolete after a year.
Matter is a solution to that. It's a standard pathway for things to talk to (say) a light bulb. The control interface is local, not cloud-based. And configuring a Matter device from $random_company doesn't require $random_company's bizarro-world app; instead, it involves a QR code or a short alphanumeric sequence.
That Matter light bulb still needs something to control it, but the light bulb is not tied to one control ecosystem -- at all. It works with any Matter-supporting system.
That bulb can even work multiple different Matter systems concurrently. Which sounds dumb, but that helps smooth our transition periods wherein a person switches from one system to another. The old system can continue to operate just fine while the new system is implemented, and then once the new hotness is behaving Good Enough the old one can just be switched off.
It's also a bit of a trap. Many devices "work with Matter" but either they don't really until a future firmware update, and even then, a lot of them have certain features locked into the vendor app.
There's also complications around networking. Matter over WiFi works great if your networking gear can withstand potentially hundreds of devices connected. Matter over Thread seem to work under specific conditions, but I still haven't been able to pair the first device.
There's also potential issues around device certification.
All in all, Zigbee is a more reliable platform for the moment IMO, even though I have some issues with it as well.
I use Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/). It has an integration for lots of manufacturers. Single app, single entry point, cross manufacturer automations.
Home Assistant is well beyond the skills of the vast majority of people to install, set up, and maintain. And they don't want to have to maintain something like that. They want an appliance that they plug in and just works.
Sure. Most people don't have much beneath-the-skin technical inclination at all. We see this right now in 3D printing: Bambu Labs printers are popular because they're simple to use: A person can unbox it, plug it in, load some filament, and start printing widgets from their pocket supercomputer basically immediately.
But it is available as a plug-in appliance, and they're getting better and better at the Just Works aspects all the time.
And in a world where everything is relative, it's a hell of a lot easier to get started with Home Assistant than it is to get started with something like KNX or Crestron.
[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/green/
Plus, their apps insist on advertising their other crap to you at every opportunity.
Stop pestering me because you think I haven't given you enough money yet. Go away.
It also wants all three of wifi, Bluetooth, and location on, otherwise it provides a reminder that you have them switched off - even though it works just with wifi on.
My current strategy is to buy only Z-Wave gear. I run my own home automation software on a Raspberry Pi, but someone (i.e. nearly everyone) who wouldn't want to do that could (in theory!) buy a Z-Wave hub appliance, install its companion app, and it should be pretty easy to deal with that way.
But this seems not to be a well-advertised way of doing things, unfortunately.
The smart home is a thousand small problems to solve and should never be one catch all.
The automatic cat feeder works well. So does the roomba. I like my automated blinds but will stick with manual light switches. I consolidated my home theatre remotes. Note how they’re all seperate problems.
The smart home is here. It’s just that it was never a use case for a singular smart home platform. It was always 1000 seperate problems to solve that in no way ever belonged together and the experience was always worse when trying to combine it.
They will possibly all converge when they expose a "tool interface" to some kind of model-on-prem(ish) device that you install in your home. Think of an OpenAI or Anthropic or Apple or Samsung-branded "cortex" or "brain" that controls everything to some degree using fast local models, but outsource more complex orchestration up to the cloud. Smart home products will integrate with these devices because its going to open up a whole new generation of the same devices they sell, just with AI model integration this time.
These devices already have a precedent, your apple tv or google/amazon speaker thing. I think we will see these probably become LLM/model/AI gateways in the future.
We are basically already there, with HomeKit plus open bridge that can make any device visible on HomeKit (like nest cameras) and usable in automations (it works the other way also, it’s just a good way to get compatibility).
I would like to explore some open source solutions though, it would mean setting up a local system on a Mac mini for speech recognition and local processing. Bonus is you could use Anthony Daniels (KITT) as your assistant voice.
Working on it, they all already expose a tool interface, you just have to know where to look for it and how to use it!
Synchronizing lights is hard, so in the living room kitchen where we have 4 different lights, having a way to turn them on and off is useful. We don’t have automatic lights anywhere else, but I notice at least, where we don’t, the light switches don’t get dirty (and you don’t get dirty from using the light switch), so maybe we will make them all automatic eventually just for hygiene reasons.
What I wrote above:
>I use Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/). It has an integration for lots of manufacturers. Single app, single entry point, cross manufacturer automations.
I think it’s also just that there’s not that much it makes sense to automate in the home. I run Home Assistant, and I do not have much of the typical home stuff on it. Why would I want to automate lights? My cat feeder has a timer already. I’m not about to get a smart lock and can’t imagine why I would want to automate one.
The useful things I do use it for are:
-heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing)
-automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost
-a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer
-a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies.
That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.
There are some really nice things that home automation enables that was previously impossible.
I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really bad wildfire smoke.
I can save a lot of money on AC if I open the windows at night and use the attic fan to pull in outside air. But if smoke rolls in, then we'd all be breathing 200+ AQI air all night.
I have outdoor AQI sensors, which if the AQI spikes, will close up the house and turn on the air purifiers.
> Why would I want to automate lights?
We're bad at remembering to turn lights on and off. We like having our porch light on an hour or two after sunset, but don't need to leave it on 24/7. We also have stairwell baseboard lighting that's completely unnecessary during the day, but very nice to have already be on if we get up in the middle of the night. To each their own, though. These are just nice to have. The AQI automation is an actual health benefit to us though.
I have all kinds of lights automated. Lights that turn themselves off with a software timer. Lights that turn off when nobody is home. Lights that turn themselves on when I get home. Lights that do things in response to the status of other lights. Lights that fade on slowly every evening beginning at sunset and reaching 100% brightness at civil twilight, and do the opposite every morning.
I suppose that it does make some things less frustrating.
The days when I'd come home from work and see that the porch light got left on all day or find that the pantry light has been left on for hours are all behind me. That's not as important (money-wise) with LEDs as it was with incandescents, but it's good.
It's also fun -- for me, at least -- to think of ways to automate things.
Like: I have a bedroom that tends to get hot on sunny days and overlooks a busy road, and I don't like feeling like I'm on display. So I'd like those blinds closed at night, and open during the day. Sounds simple. I can do that the old fashioned way by opening and closing the blinds with my hands.
Except: If it's hot in there, then maybe they can just stay closed during the day.
Except: Maybe I can let ambient daylight in, and only close the blinds during the day during times when the position of the sun allows for direct sunlight to pour in.
Except: If it's cold in the room and it's during the heating season, then that sunlight is useful energy that saves me money and they should stay open.
Perhaps I could manage all that myself manually every day (and maybe I'll remember to try to get it right, or maybe I won't bother trying at all), or I can code something up one time that does it for me. The latter might not actually be less work, but it's more fun and it's probably going to be more reliable than I am myself.
I automate lights because we have a bunch of then to manipulate: four switches for the living room. Shades are worse, we have 10 windows so automating them so they open and close at once on demand is a win (I told my wife we should always keep them open and she was really against that, so automated was a marriage saver).
I have some security stuff setup to turn on a siren when tweakers poke around my open garage and doorway after 11 PM. It doesn’t do anything else, this is just a way to scare them off a bit and to let me know something is up. H the light will also turn red if detects a person at the door (again to ward tweakers off or make them feel watched at least).
I’ve been recently discovering the joy of robovacs, except we have three floors and so I found we need three of them, ugh.
> Why would I want to automate lights?
Wait until you're disabled and there are days you can't get out of bed.
Having your bedroom lights fade in at low brightness a few minutes before your alarm goes off is also really nice.
If you live in an area that's not great time wise there are also a lot of arguments to be made for making it look like your home is occupied when you're away.
I have some lights on mechanical timers so the living room has a minimal amount of light in the evening, and they turn off automatically at midnight. That's useful to me, and it was cheap and simple. Haven't had to touch it in 10 years, except to adjust the timers to the seasons. The mechanical timers (Ikea) predate Alexa, and it's cheaper to just keep using them.
I also have a porch light that used to have a light sensor, but those sensors keep failing after a few years, and it's a hassle. Instead, Alexa has a schedule for that porch light switch, and you can specify "turn on at sunset" and "turn off at sunrise", and it's perfect.
And I have an Alexa rule for turning off the other lights that it controls (living room, dining room, family room, hallways, but not the porch light) at midnight. Simple and useful in case I forget to turn the lights off.
An alarm with a built in light does that slowly getting brighter thing just fine.
These days a smart home doing that slowly getting brighter thing regularly fails.
Mine has literally never failed, and I haven’t owned an alarm clock in two decades this reply is peak HN.
Your smart home has never failed? What brand are you using?
The smartest thing is having a light switch you walk over to. Doesn’t fail randomly, doesn’t need an internet connection to operate, doesn’t stop working when your internet is down.
My garage remote is in a PIN number lock box next to the garage. Open lock box, press remote, close lock box.
That’s smart.
PIN number lock boxes are pretty unsafe, one could consider 2 simple solutions to stop someone trivially determining your PIN:
1) after closing the box, randomize the digits: humans are pretty bad at randomization, imagine modeling the randomization delta it won't be perfectly uniform, and the different discs would display similar distributions of rotation. Suppose spinning a disc to randomize it, one might have a peak at delta=+3 and sidelobes with lower frequency. Just a handful of observations when the codes were randomized will reveal the relative positions of the true code, and the only missing information is 10 possible global rotations, which is easy to brute force
2) A second approach is to not let an attacker learn anything by always presenting them with the same information: instead of randomizing, always reset to the same value (0000 or 9999 or any other value of choice). But in this case another attack becomes extremely easy: acoustically detecting the number of indentation clicks used per wheel by recording: without access to actuation direction that gives 1 bit of direction doubt per wheel or only 2^4 = 16 combinations left, easy to brute force.
My lock box is round the back of our apartment building. Anyone sus would get stopped and asked why they’re there long before they got to it.
Anyone installing recording gear to record the clicks, or trying lots of combinations would - in addition to drawing unwanted attention - be pretty dumb to invest the time as there are much better and easier targets.
And good point, didn’t mention that, I do randomize the pin digits.
It is all tradeoffs between security and convenience. We aren’t hiding state secrets and that opens lots of options.
I mean, they could also just saw open the box or rip it off whatever mounting brackets it's on. At some point you have to acknowledge you're making unauthorized access inconvenient rather than impossible.
Smart home seems to suffer from the old-school AI curse in that it stops getting the name as soon as it works. Roomba, thermostat automation and remote control, casting content between devices, the video door bells, siri (to say nothing of dishwasher, rice cookers, laundry machine, etc). Anything that works gets bundled into an appliance and becomes normal. Smart home only means stuff that's at the edge of working, plus maybe some stuff that requires gluing multiple discrete appliances together (ie unlikely to work easily). In particular lighting for the latter, which has stiff competition against light switches.
I was going to say I feel like my smart home technology is working great.
Then I remembered that I have to make shortcuts to bridge two products, it fails half the time, my ikea bridge has to be restarted every 30 minutes, and my smart garage door opener takes 30 seconds to respond now.
So on second thought, yeah, this all sucks.
Maybe you should put a smart power socket in front of the Ikea bridge to power cycle it every 30 minutes?
(I'll see myself out then.)
Recurring revenue, K-factor, long shelf life and low actuation rate.
Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product.
Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app.
Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years.
Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day.
Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.
You're describing those things as failures. I see them as successes.
A smart device that doesn't need a subscription to feed and keep track of, doesn't consume hours of my life trying to get my attention, doesn't get shared with the world, and doesn't bother me with needless bullshit? It just quietly does its thing and it also lasts 8 years?
That sounds great! Count me in!
(Actually, I'm already a member. My personal favorite smart devices come with open-source ESPHome firmware pre-installed, and they have all of the features I've described above. These manufacturers make their money by exchanging money for widgets in simple one-time transactions, not by being sneaky under-handed rent-seeking slimeballs who live to optimize ways continuously extract money out of my billfold for the rest of my life.)
Perhaps it popped because of devices from Google, Amazon, Apple, Sonos, etc. that surveil everything you say in their presence. My houses are fairly automated, but I have excluded any device with a microphone.
Not my Sonos setup doesn't, have had it for close to a decade now. Would replace it with brand new Sonos gear if I could.
Also, wouldn't be hard to put in a solution to block that type of traffic over the mic.
Sonos updated its policies a.coupme years back to allow selling customer data.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sonos/comments/1desj5c/sonos_update...
Also the devices don't fucking work and all require their own dumb app most of the time.
ya the one that connects via local network unlike the cloud provider ones are very unreliable most of the time
Most of this smart home stuff doesn't do much. Managing lights and entertainment just isn't that interesting. It doesn't cook or clean. Vacuum, maybe.
There's been generation after generation of lighting control. There was a 1950s/1960s thing of putting everything on relays with 24V control signals and panels full of rocker switches. There was x10 in the 1980s. There were "smart" light bulbs in the 2010s. It's just not all that useful.
I mentioned this a few years ago, after I came back from an "Internet of Things" meeting in Dogpatch, in San Francisco. The Samsung guy pitched a refrigerator with a tablet mounted in the door. It didn't really have any more functionality than a refrigerator plus a tablet, but cost more. I asked him why, and he told me because there's a fraction of the population that likes to show off their kitchens, and it would be marketed to them. There were a few other IoT things pitched, all forgettable.
What struck me at the time was that we were in a room that really needed intelligent control. It was an office/meeting space, about 5000 square feet, in an old industrial building. Openable windows looked out on the bay, and there was a manual system with a shaft with a chain fall and a rack and pinion system to open the windows. A similar mechanical setup controlled windows in an openable skylight. The room also had a modern HVAC system, ceiling fans, and lighting.
None of this was coordinated. What should have been happening was that, as people came in and the CO2 level went up, the bay side windows and skylight windows should have opened, to get the CO2 level down and cool the room a bit. As the sun set and the outside temperature dropped, the bay side windows should have mostly closed, the ceiling fans should have started in the upward direction, and the skylight windows should have stayed open, to prevent the room from cooling too much while keeping the CO2 level down. Lighting should have increased as darkness fell. As it got later, and people started to leave, the bay side windows could close completely and the fan RPMs could drop. When everybody left, as noticed by motion detectors, the system should have dimmed the lights and done a quick fresh air purge - skylights open, bay windows open, fans to max in the downward direction. Temperature would drop, but unless it went below 60F, no need to turn on heat on an empty room. Then everything seals up tight for the night. Very little energy consumption. Tomorrow is another day, and the room should continue to react to the people load.
But no. You rarely see that kind of control. Except in hotel function rooms. Hotels put in systems like that because they have big rooms with widely varying people load, and customers who complain if a conference room is stuffy or hot or cold. Hotels have significant HVAC costs, and it's worth it to have the HVAC systems adapt to room usage. Honeywell and Johnson Controls sell systems for this for commercial buildings. They have both inside and outside sensors, and can operate fans, dampers, and HVAC separately.
I worked in a building that had that kind of "smart" controls. It was anything but.
In practice, it started opening and closing shutters for no reason, when clouds obscured the sun, and then went away. Or even when some sort of reflection hit some sensor, somewhere in the building.
I'm sure it's doable, but unlike factories, where automation is related to income and thus profits, most commercial buildings are built by the cheapest of cheaters, and so they will skimp on sensor, on intelligence, on integration, or whatever, just to follow the minimally-compliant features. So you get all kinds of erratic behavior, lack of redundancy, stupid intelligence that ends up overridden by humans.
Right. It works for hotels, because, if your hotel conference rooms are uncomfortable, some conferences will switch hotels next year. So there's a strong business case for getting HVAC control right.
Schools and colleges have the same HVAC problem, with huge variations in people load, but don't have the same incentive to get it right.
(I once found a computer room in the Gates Building at Stanford that had two packaged air conditioning systems at opposite ends of the room. One was heating and the other was cooling. You're supposed to get a control box that synchronizes your HVAC units when you have more than one, but they didn't. Each was running on its own thermostat. Huge energy consumption with an error like that.)
Matter is hopefully changing it. It's a local first standard, based on IPv6 with security and provisioning in mind. BLE is used to give devices wifi or Thread credentials. Thread is a new protocol to replace ZigBee. Lower power using the same radio hardware. Ikeas new line is all Matter.
My one issue, while building a custom HA controller is... There's no standard for discovering the HA controller and have it join WiFi... So that will require an app. Just to do mDNS and TLS bootstrapping. Maybe I'll use a cloud relay and Web Bluetooth for it. Would relieve both issues and provisioning could happen in any browser supporting Bluetooth.
None of the problems put forward by the article are protocol related, so I'm not sure why you think Matter would/could change it.
I expect the more significant concern would be OpenClaw opening your front door for someone else.
I think it's just a joke/reference to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey
Great observations! I've no idea what the sales numbers show for smart home products. To me they all represent more effort to manage things I'm already happy with as is. My fav lighting gadget is the dimmer switch, which got introduced to the consumer market in 1959!
It depends on what you need to be "smart" about your house. If you live in an apartment there is not much to be automated. However, (if like me) you live in a free-standing house with solar panels, possible power outages and all heating done through electricity, a PHEV you want to charge, being able to have smart energy management is actually very useful.
Ideally my house should have 3 phase power, but I'm not yet inconvenienced enough to go through the headache of getting this organized. This means that at any time my maximum power draw can be 13.8 kW (60A at 230V).
Generally this is enough, but I have on occasion tripped my mains due to drawing too much at a particular moment, I have the following significant power draw items:
- 4x underfloor heating circuits at 3kW each.
- 2x electric geyser at 2.5kw each.
- Electric oven and induction stove, not sure on amount but I think they can collectively pull 6kW easily.
- Pool pump at 0.6kW.
- Inverter re-charging batteries at night (I only have 10kWh of storage and want backup power at night in case of a power outage), I can configure maximum draw here, but could probably pull up to 8kW if I wanted.
- PHEV at 3kW.
When we had regular load shedding here (South Africa) it was very easy for the power to trip if I didn't manage things, particularly if I left underfloor turned on in the winter at night. What would happen is that power would have been off for ~2 hours, then comes back and everything on a thermostat would turn on AND the inverter would start charging its battery.
If I proactively turned the floors off then I wouldn't generally have an issue.
Even without a power outage, it is possible to trip things when using stove/oven with underfloor heating turned on or if both the geysers happened turn on their elements at an inopportune moment.
IoT can allow this to all be managed, it can have rules like:
- Don't run ALL the underfloor heating circuits at the same moment, alternate between them.
- If the stove/oven is in use, don't turn on the element for either of the geysers, it can wait.
- Temporarily stop charging the PHEV or inverter's batteries until there is less power demand.
- Temporarily turn off the pool pump if it would help.
It can also create other opportunities around solar energy production, you can do things like have only "excess" energy go into your (PH)EV provided it has a minimum charge level.
Other automations which I wouldn't mind:
- Exterior lights on a schedule based sunrise/sunset.
- When I'm away it would be nice to be able to remotely turn on/off particular interior lights and open/close curtains at particular times of the day.
What I actually have automated:
- My alarm system has (not great) app, I have wired it up to my garage door so I can remotely let in the armed response security company in the event of the alarm going off and I'm not at the house.
- I use the Tuya ecosystem to automatically turn my geyser and pool pump off on a schedule and if there is a power outage or load shedding. This allows me to heat the geyser still even if there is a power outage and it's the middle of the day with lots of sun on my solar panels.
HA is something I want to look at one day (when I have more time), meanwhile the Tuya ecosystem is very useful considering its minimal amount of time investment required.
The value prop is just really really low.
I don’t know why you’d want to over pay on basic widgets that are really just glorified timers, not to mention are likely just full of security issues waiting to happen.
People tried to monetize it too early.
The only "monetization" I want in my smart device, is
1. I give you money
2. You give me widget.
3. That's it. "Customer relationship" over.
smart devices dont play well.
arguing with an AI that is intentionaly obtuse, is not what anyone wants when its time to try enjoying your home. noone needs to have a conversation with thier lightswitch, its for turning light on or off not pretending to be your pal and trying to exploit emotional reflexes.
i have a broken record for this, "stop wasting time and effort trying to pretend to be human, and get to work building something that does what its told to do."
What bubble? What pop?
This feels like "I am not seeing ads anymore therefore it doesnt exist"
Was this whole article just a set-up for that punchline??
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