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I just bought a home, and just started a considerable renovation. I'm putting in new water pipes, new electrical wiring, etc. I thought of putting "smart" devices (i.e. switches, alarms, thermostats, etc.) given the "advantages" these promise.

After considerable research, it's not worth the hussle or money. Let's put aside the fact that these are considerable more expensive, and won't breakeven in years (some devices smart devices simply don't breakeven).

The main reason I decided not to have any of these installed was due to how cumbersome they are to operate. Each appliance/brand has their own app/portal, which does not connect to other brands, making it impossible to have an overview of your "smart home". Even more scary, some of these devices are operated by startups, god knows, if they will be alive next year. Good luck getting that app to work with iOS 10! It's a true headache, it's even a headache for contractors, who have no clue how these work. It's going to take some time (and education) to have an OS that makes a smart home smart...

and don't get me started on the smart baby monitors, etc... if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today.

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I agree with nearly everything you have said except for:

> and don't get me started on the smart baby monitors, etc... if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today.

I even agree that the baby monitor mentioned is a little over the top (I don't care for the lights/music/coffee aspect) but it's important not to write things off just because "I was raised just fine without X". That logic doesn't hold for most things. And for high-risk babies that onesie is probably multitudes of times cheaper than expensive medical equipment to do the same level of monitoring.

(Sad Personal Anecdote Below)

My youngest sister died when she was very young (<2 mo old) due to a medical condition (birth defect). Now this isn't to say that this product would have saved her life. In fact I'm nearly 100% positive it wouldn't have. My parents were already awake due to me waking up from a bad dream and so my mom caught her stopping breathing probably almost immediately and we lived next door to a doctor who was over within minutes before she was rushed off to the hospital. She still died but I can't help but think that while she couldn't be saved there are other babies and young children out there that could be saved from such a device. Also there is nothing to say that constant monitoring wouldn't have caught signs of this a little earlier allowing my parents enough time to get her to professionals. All I'm saying is don't write off this just because you "got by fine without it".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I'm not sure how this plays in at all... Could you please expand on that?

I'm not the person you responded to, but survivorship bias is what you were originally responding to -- a claim like "we survived without the baby monitor, so it's unnecessary" falls flat because the people that didn't survive without it aren't here to tell you it would've saved them.

Eh. We still know about people who didn't survive.

Survivorship bias is when you are only seeing the successes.

The claim showing survivorship bias is from this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10181767):

> ...if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today.

There's no one here to say "I died because my parents didn't realize I stopped breathing". Yes, one can look at statistics, and see how many deaths would be prevented by this device, but the comment didn't do that. It's survivorship bias.

Well, you'd know if your siblings died, but you're right, there's some survivorship bias in the "and I" portion.

The main issues, though, are very small sample sizes and the difficulty of knowing if people really were "just fine" compared to what they would have been otherwise.

Sorry to hear about your sister, that's horrible. I absolutely agree that there is a role for these devices in monitoring medical conditions.

I have a sister who was born with a tachycardia condition which recurred in high school. I got her one of the Garmin wrist watches with a heart rate sensor so she could monitor the condition over time. Obviously it doesn't fix anything on its own, but it can help to understand the problem and feel more in control.

One of the companies that is solving this very problem is Xiaomi. Their method is quite crude - that is, they make everything themselves. But the end result is that everything they make - from an air purifier to a TV - is connected and operated via a similar / familiar OS called MIUI.

They give away their phones for very cheap, because the phone is the Trojan horse - it is the remote control for all the other devices it makes.

Xiaomi is the largest and fastest growing IoT company on the planet, and worth keeping an eye out for.

Yup, Xiamoi makes everything interoperable by making it themselves. And Apple makes HomeKit. And Google makes their own. And Microsoft makes their own. And HP makes their own. And...

See the problem?

I do. And you are right. I think we will get to a place where one company does it right, before we agree on an interoperable standard.

I'm cynica that will be the case. On the Internet TV front we have roku, apple tv, chrome cast, kindle fire TV-- all of them empty plastic boxes doing nearly the same exact thing, and yet there is no interop to speak of. It's just more walled gardens

I've been considering replacing my media PC with a Roku, so I'm curious why you would call them "empty plastic boxes" considering the Roku can stream from my local server and I block all outbound requests at my router (firewall). The advantage I see is the 5W power draw vs. my current 20W. I'm also unclear on what interoperability would mean for one of these devices. I don't think 2 Roku on the same network have any capacity to communicate either (maybe I'm wrong?).

I'm not krisdol, but I presume the "empty plastic boxes" is a reference to the fact that the amount of hardware necessary to stream video is now miniscule. My Roku is the size it is not because it needs to be that big to hold components, but so that it looks substantial to consumers and doesn't get lost in a ball of cables.

And interop for me would mean that instead of N proprietary platforms that must be targeted separately by software/content makers, there would be one universal platform with different manufacturers. The Amazon app on Roku, for example, is pretty weak; I presume it's much better with an actual Amazon device. And YouTube wasn't available on Roku for a number of years, even though you could get it on other devices, I presume because Google was trying to make their own device play with Google TV.

I agree with your take, but I don't see that happening; I prefer to take care of media acquisition on my own because I don't trust these companies to do any differently than the media companies they seek to, ultimately, replace.

Roku has the private channel feature that I think makes it more interesting than the other players, and I wish more effort was exerted to explore the possibilities with private channels. Have you used this feature?

It seems to me that if the streaming providers had better APIs, the device makers could make use of them; I imagine Amazon's devices have access to private APIs that Roku does not.

I haven't. I use the Roku to put things like Netflix and Amazon on the big screen. I remember trying a few different things to put content from my server on the Roku, but I could never get it to work smoothly; there were hitches both with the on-Roku software and with encoding issues. Instead I just bought an Intel NUC for that.

In a few years I hope I can replace them both with some sort of Android device, but for now I don't mind two devices.

I picked up a new Sky Now TV box for 8 GBP (with cashback). It's basically a re-branded Roku but you can't get all the channels. Still, quite the bargain considering it even comes with an HDMI cable. It has all the standard catchup apps such as BBC iPlayer but no Netflix (Sky are competitors).

It also has a developer mode which may be what you are referring to. I managed to side-load Plex onto it. If the Netflix app code was available then I guess that could be side-loaded too. Only one development app can be loaded at a time though.

I also looked at doing some development but the VBScript brings back too many bad memories. :)

http://digiex.net/guides-reviews/guides-tutorials/media-guid...

>My Roku is the size it is not because it needs to be that big to hold components, but so that it looks substantial to consumers and doesn't get lost in a ball of cables.

Are you sure its not because multiple-generations-removed miniaturization technology is cheaper, and the latest Roku devices are under $100? Or that perhaps it's a different economic driver, rather than so the consumer sees its physical size?

Regarding the second app, I think the issue is again non-technical -- content is not available across devices because it's a differentiator. It may seem an artificial barrier -- your Roku can decode any video stream -- but the structure of a system that created the content suggests otherwise.

Sounds like things are ready for interoperation except for the human/economic/structural element.

Assuming $50.00 for a Roku, electricity at $0.15/kWh, and 16 hours average daily usage, breakeven point is in ~3.8 years vs. an existing 20W solution.

16 hours daily usage?! Whoa nelly, that's a lot of TV watching! I suspect a lot of people on here (like me) watch less than one hour a day. The US national average is five hours, which is still startlingly high, but doesn't get you close to 16 hours per day even with multiple people in a household (as their viewing times will tend to overlap).

I suspect that stand-by power usage may be more important than active power usage for such a device. And I don't know how Roku fares for that, nor its alternatives.

The point of the disillusionment exercise was to carefully select parameters that favored narrowrail's perceived "advantage" in an improbable but still realistic way.

In other words, assuming a proverbial couch potato got a sweet deal on a new Roku 3 and pays up the wazoo for electricity, it would take a solid 4 years of usage in the prescribed manner before breaking even on a relatively small investment, rendering any perceived power savings "advantage" over an existing 20W system null...let alone other considerations like product MTBF, lifecycle, the next trending 6-second attention getter, interoperability, etc.

Get a small, open system. I own a CuBox, but something like a Raspberry Pi 2 would work just as well.

Install some linux distribution (I use OpenELEC) that boots into Kodi (formerly xbmc).

Seriously. No proprietary thing I have ever seen matches the features and usability of Kodi. It's an amazing piece of open-source software.

if all of these have youtube, hulu and netflix ...to the consumer that might be the level of interop currently required -- interop with their fav delivery platforms, not necessarily the devices themselves

Why not a good open-source standard? iOS did it "right" for mobile, but Android provided tough competition. And Apple benefited from the competition... it pushed iOS designers to keep their game up - and likewise.

Like AllJoyn?

[0] https://allseenalliance.org/

https://xkcd.com/927/

Like file systems and network shares!

weeps for the future he'll never see

What's wrong with CIFS?

We haven't seen this with instant messaging. For some inexplicable reason, the big players find great value in maintaining walled gardens.

Why would we expect things to be any different in the world of hardware?

If Xiamoi makes enough of the stack, the devices with a desirable user experience...it might not be a problem at all for both Xiamoi and the customers at this phase of IoT - the vertical integration level is likely required to get it off the ground and make it a good experience.

Eventually, a shift to a more horizontal and open approach will win out, but it seems hard to do that at the starting point of an emerging market.

Actually, Microsoft has joined as part of the "Allseen Alliance" and has done a great deal of work around Alljoyn.

One link is here -- https://ms-iot.github.io/content/en-US/win10/AllJoyn.htm

Also a colleague of mine has done a great deal of work with and talked about this work over the last year or so. Here is a link to one of his talks -- http://www.omggeek.com/elc-2015-alljoyn-101-make-smarter-dev...

Part of the issue with IoT is what do you define as IoT, the devices themselves, data ingest, management infrastructure, etc. The whole topic is pretty broad.

That is not a problem. That is competition. Imagine the opposite where a company has monopoly over the technology.

If you had to decide the brand of your power sockets, and then use only devices of that brand, would you call that competition?

There is a whole different dynamic to these devices in China. Air quality, water quality, etc. are part of middle class lifestyle in China, and many people do not trust the authorities to keep these parameters within spec. Multiple air filters in an apartment are common, and monitoring the performance of these devices is an obvious interest to their owners. This is a much more compelling home automation story than thermostats or smoke alarms that should be mostly invisible in the home environment.

I've never understood the desire to add smart technology to the smoke alarm. Once properly installed a smoke alarm should be interacted with when (1) there is a fire, (2) the battery is running flat. False alarms pretty much mean you've installed it wrong.

> I've never understood the desire to add smart technology to the smoke alarm.

Because very few things suck more than coming home from work and your house is burnt down because the smoke alarm wasn't heard by anyone and by the time the fire crews arrive it's too late. Happened to a friend of mine, house was beyond repair even though fire crews arrived 10min after a passing driver noticed the blaze.

A smoke detector is there to alert the occupants of the building so that they get out. If it was an actual alarm system that is connected to a dispatcher, the firefighters would've been notified.

Yeah, as originally designed perhaps, but what if you could add a bit of tech to make sure your pets are safe? Or you're not coming home only to inhale carbon monoxide? I don't think $99 is a ridiculous expense for such peace of mind, even if it's not proven to be full proof just yet.

My CO alarm sounds pretty loudly. You notice it the moment you open the door again smart it does not need to be.

How would you get your pet out in time if your CO alarm or smoke alarm went off when you were at work?

Perhaps coming home hours earlier from work and/or calling a neighbor would increase their odds of survival.

I find it odd that people are questioning the value of this life and death information while there are plenty of frivolous IOT devices.

Because CO kills surprisingly quickly -- unless your commute is in the order of a couple of minutes you'd be too late. Also you don't send a person into a house with a CO leak so asking you neighbour to retrieve your cat would be placing them in danger.

My point is that the smoke alarm and the CO alarm should be exactly what they are simple alarms that allow occupants to escape in an emergency. Adding IOT capabilities doesn't add to the alarm functionality in sensible ways. However, it does risk introducing vulnerabilities. I don't want my smoke alarm to start sending spam emails (this really happened with a smart fridge a couple of years ago).

You're being awfully pedantic. Have the neighbor shut your gas off. Have your landlord alert the neighbors. What if you just left for work? I can find a bunch of scenarios where the information can be useful, whereas you seem determined to argue that only the occupants (who might just be kids burning toast) should have this information.

The information is intended to allow the occupants to escape safely if required. In the case of a CO alarm no one should enter the premises until qualified engineers have made it safe. The the case of a smoke alarm the occupants are the only ones that can safely decide if it is a false alarm -- if there is a fire no one should enter the premises until the fire has been dealt with by qualified personal. What you are suggesting would mean adding a general purpose computer to essential safety equipment. Anything that adds complications and could affect the main function of the safety equipment would need to be considered very carefully.

I never suggested that unqualified personnel should enter an unsafe environment or people add anything to essential safety equipment. The Leeo just listens for alarms and lets you decide what to do with the information. It does not affect the operation of the safety equipment whatsoever.

In the case of CO2, is it better to have qualified personnel attempt to arrive at 6pm after you get home from work and hear the alarm, or sometime closer to when the leak occurred and you were alerted on your smart phone? (I don't think emergency responders are twiddling their thumbs in the evening or there's light traffic)

In the case of fire, is it better to call the personnel before the retired lady down the street notices the flames and smoke while your at work??

What is the Leeo?

A friend of mine, a great cook, regularly performs what she refers to as The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication, wherein she and a broom jointly try to persuade the alarm gods that everything is fine. When she heard that there was a smoke alarm that would pop up a notification on her phone first so she could mute it with zero shrieking, she was very excited.

It may be that her landlord installed it wrong, but landlords (and homeowners) install an impressive number of things wrong, so a business that didn't depend on "amateur does X perfectly" doesn't sound like a bad idea to me.

> A friend of mine, a great cook, regularly performs what she refers to as The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication, wherein she and a broom jointly try to persuade the alarm gods that everything is fine. When she heard that there was a smoke alarm that would pop up a notification on her phone first so she could mute it with zero shrieking, she was very excited.

The Dance of Smoke Alarm Supplication can still apply to smart smoke alarms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY

I don't know why this was downvoted; I thought it was very relevant.

Ah, the Smoke Alarm Supplication Dance. Great term. My wife and daughter had the same issue. They like to cook and can tomato sauce. Our smoke alarm would go off very easily - lots of false positives. One day my wife is vacuuming the hall and the motor in the vacuum cleaner overheats and starts putting out thick, black smoke right under the smoke alarm. Nothing from the smoke alarm... Needless to say we quickly replaced both the vacuum cleaner and the smoke alarm and made certain to get one with dual sensors...

Yes the landlord installed it wrong.

However in what scenario does a landlord install a £100 smoke alarm when s/he can install a £10 one though? No landlord I've ever had would have done this -- given that over here bills are paid by the tenant a thermostat is usually not provided.

Homeowners can at least move them when they realise they have installed them wrong.

Some landlords will install a £100 smoke alarm when they realize that they can get real-time notifications that one of their buildings is on fire. Others will do it as a fancy feature to attract higher-paying tenants.

And when the price falls to £30, as happens with these things, a lot more will do it.

>Some landlords will install a £100 smoke alarm when they realize that they can get real-time notifications that one of their buildings is on fire.

Not even on fire, maybe people are smoking inside when they aren't suppose to be. Maybe someone burns their food commonly and that needs investigated before they burn the whole damn place down one time. I can see lots of reasons for that.

That's not true - you're meant to test your smoke alarm weekly. Also false alarms can be the smoke detector acting correctly to the presence of smoke, eg. Burnt toast.

In this case the ability to remotely check the alarm status from a self check, or to remotely snooze a false alarm while clearing the smoke can be very handy

OK so you find it easier to find your phone open the app and then press that button. I find it easier to press the button on the unit. I also find it easier to touch a £10 device with food covered/wet fingers whilst cooking than to get out a £300 smart phone and touch that with food covered or wet fingers.

I agree. They are so cheap. The ones I install are less than ten dollars. Won't name the brand. They are usually on the bottom of the shelf. Hidden away from worrisome consumers that equate price with function. Many contractors buy them by the case.

I usually install two, and run a electrical line to one.

Yes, an app is fine if you burn food, and have the disposable income? I would rather see home owners spend the money on running a line to their smoke, and CO detectors though.

Weeds grow fast too. Maybe I'll go buy some.

http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=infant-child-and-teen...

Looks to me like infant mortality (under age one) has halved between 1977 and 2013. I understand the argument of "it worked fine for me", but, well, on a portfolio basis, you and I were dying a bit faster back then.

Outpatient care is a big field these days. Something that, with extremely little effort, can reduce the odds of death or disability, is quite tempting. A smart nappy/diaper with a disposable nutrition-analysing smart-chip is not that far off.

Maybe you are right... but a onesie that "knows that when a baby wakes up, the parents will, too -- so it turns on lights and music and even makes the coffee." ... is of no use to fight infant mortality.

That's not all it does, you just picked out the ridiculous part. If you'd quote the entire piece on that onesie you'd see that it actually has a bunch of features that very well might reduce infant mortality.

The author also invokes 'helicopter parenting' as if it applies to taking care of babies. Helicopter parenting is when parents disrupt other caregivers during the care for their child, it has nothing to do with being sure about whether your baby is dying. I am confident parents themselves can configure and determine when and when not to wake up when their baby is awake.

As a non-parent, do parents really drink coffee in the middle of the night when their baby wakes up? That seems like a terrible idea..

The article addresses this point directly, but because you aren't a parent, it may have gone over your head. The real problem with a smart-onesie isn't simply that it's useless, but that infants are restless, and any signal this device carries will be overwhelmed by the noise. When you're the parent of an infant, your #2 goal (after "keep the baby alive") is "ruthlessly attend to your own rest needs".

I fully understand, that's why I called it 'the ridiculous part'. I recognize that a device that wakes you up whenever your baby is awake would be crazy, but surely that isn't what the device is going to do? I read it more as 'when your baby is crying so hard you will most likely wake up, it will turn on lights and soft music to assist you in calming them'.

Mimo monitors breathing, temperature and sleeping position. All of these are factors in cot death according to easily searchable research.

I thought that a cot death meant that this remained unexplained. Now a baby monitor reduces cot deaths? I'm really interested to read about that claim.

It remains unexplained but things are correlated with it, and possibly have an unexplained causal effect.

No, baby monitors have been studied. It's not a big mystery. Monitoring doesn't make a dent in SIDS. Education does. "Don't put infants to sleep on their stomachs".

There are side effects of monitoring.

"Angelcare voluntarily recalled 600,000 under-mattress sensor pads after two infants died of strangulation when the cord attached to the pad wrapped around their necks" - http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2014/02/mimo_and_o...

Strangulation by baby monitor is correlated with having a baby monitor.

I'm pretty sure I would be the first to put all kinds of sensors onto my baby, it's toys and environment but I'm also pretty sure I would check on that stuff AND on the baby myself. Also considering the security problems.

Looks to me like a hell lot of problems added to what I would already have with the baby alone. My parents had me in their room and I survived. Others died. Maybe that's just the way it is.

There is no evidence I've found that any monitoring device improves SIDS outcomes, and there is evidence that it doesn't. Forget about the smart onesie: it's difficult to justify even classic baby monitors as a medical intervention.

The decline in SIDS over the last 2 decades tracks the education of parents not to put infants to sleep on their stomachs.

Small note, but there are other major factors in the decline of SIDS besides just not putting infants to sleep on their stomach, although they generally all stem from the idea of educating new parents about basic safety procedures that are not always intuitive.

As a father of two, my youngest being 4 months old, those features sound unusually stupid. When the baby wakes up at 3am, any device that subsequently turned on lights and music would be taken out back and shot. As for the coffee, my bog-standard Philips coffee maker has a built-in timer already, set for 6:30 am.

My baby doesn't need an app to let me know he's up. Generally the piercing fire trunk level scream does the trick. Now, does this smart baby suit help against SIDS? Nope. If there's science to prove me wrong, I will gladly revise my opinion. Honestly though, that baby suit with a built in coffee maker trigger and light turning on capability.. That's just dumb. Do we really want all the lights coming on every time the baby stirs? Is coffee making really what's needed at that moment? The potential for that technology is cool, but the execution just sounds excessively superficial. as far as infant mortality: what are the causes of infant mortality? Certainly not underlit homes and under caffeinated parents.

That's not fair. He didn't say "children should be raised to exactly the same standards as they were in 1977". He said "we were raised without the benefits of smart-onesies, and we came out fine". Those are two different arguments.

Meanwhile, the reality is that the bulk of the decline in US infant mortality is attributable to improved prenatal care. If you want to keep arguing about the value of modernizing parenting, can we start with statistics broken out by income level? Has infant mortality among the children of well-off parents declined sharply as well? If modernization is saving children, that statistic should reveal it.

It's not 'unfair'. (are you implying I was unduly harsh on the gent?)

Let's take sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Because of SIDS, it is now recommended in the videos I watched yesterday, that infants be put down on their backs with no pillows in the parents' bedroom but not in their bed. This has no bearing on prenatal care or wealth, but has an effect, which could probably be enhanced by a smart baby monitor.

It's not possible to lay an infant on its back if it's wearing a dumb onesie?

14-16 years ago, it wasn't even possible to get out of a hospital without having this explained to you in detail. I can only imagine what it's like now.

"Smart onesies" are silly.

Biometric monitoring for at-risk individuals is patently not silly. As a percentage, more babies are at-risk than young adults.

The question we should be asking is whether a smart onesie improves outcomes compared to existing best practices. If there's not a statistically significant difference and you divert money from things that would help, then pushing these onesies isn't benign, it's actively harmful.

The point as I see it being got at here is that changes in the approach to raising a child has resulted in fewer SIDS over the past 30 years [1].

Introducing new technology, or techniques, regardless of how absurd it appears, needs the data to identify whether it really does have an improvement in child safety.

Simply saying my generation (born in the 80's) turned out just fine so why change is actually incorrect. The rate of deaths was higher in the 80's compared to now and changes were made in advice that has reduced death rates.

Technology could be used to reduce this further, but we don't know until we have the data. Do I think it's likely that an IoT onesie will make a difference? Not really, purely because the cost and adoption rate would probably make it impossible to detect its impact as safety concious parents who would buy it would probably have mitigated most risks anyway. The chance of getting a significant number of would-be SIDS outcomes to be using such a device would, in my opinion, be extremely small.

[1] http://www.babywill.org/sids-information/what-is-sids/sids-s...

Again: the dominant factor in reducing infant mortality in the US has been prenatal care. Infant mortality in the sense described upthread is not about SIDS.

The latter half of your comment is a bit hand-wavy. "Purely" because of adoption numbers? What does a "smart onesie" actually have to do with SIDS? Companies have been selling ever-more-complicated baby monitors to parents for years using fear of SIDS, but SIDS is not a problem of monitoring.

So you disagree with articles like http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2014/02/mimo_and_o... "Selling Fear: Smart monitors cannot protect babies from SIDS, so what are they for?" Or the Policy Statement at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/128/5/1030.ful... which says:

> Do not use home cardiorespiratory monitors as a strategy to reduce the risk of SIDS—Although cardiorespiratory monitors can be used at home to detect apnea, bradycardia, and, when pulse oximetry is used, decreases in oxyhemoglobin saturation, there is no evidence that use of such devices decreases the incidence of SIDS.84,–,87 They might be of value for selected infants but should not be used routinely. There is also no evidence that routine in-hospital cardiorespiratory monitoring before discharge from the hospital can identify newborn infants at risk of SIDS.

When you say "probably be enhanced", was that speaking only from optimism in technology, or did it have some other basis?

Same argument as "we rode on the back dashboard with no seat belts as a kid and we survived". Completely ignoring the hundreds of thousands of kids who didn't survive. Because the ones who were killed doing something dangerous aren't around anymore to tell you not to do it. Doesn't mean we should roll back the clock on car safety.

That's different because there's a clear mechanism and the data supports it. Is there a real study with a large enough sample size showing anything similar or is it just the usual convenience and artfully vague claims?

I understand your desire for hard data, and I'll admit I doubt it's there. However it's not that much of a stretch to follow from "babies survive better when people are watching them" to "it's easier to watch a baby when there are multiple people taking care of it" to "it doesn't have to be people, necessarily" to "what if sensors could do it" to "babies live longer because sensors are watching them when humans might not be".

Completely pulling numbers out of my ass for sake of argument, for every 1000 babies that survive just fine without baby monitors, there might be one or two that didn't, because mom and dad stepped away and didn't notice the kid stop breathing. Really, people survived just fine without seat belts. We kept enough of the population to survive and even thrive as a species even in incredibly dangerous cars. But now that we have them and we recognize their value, would we go back?

I was looking at the comparison like this:

we knew that many thousands of people were dying in car crashes and also that people wearing seat-belts survived crashes at a much higher rate.

we know that a small number of kids die but we don't have that same level of evidence that the proposed solution actually works.

That's an argument for doing more studies but not for buying a bunch of IoT stuff at steep prices.

Yes but this improvement was achieved by improvements (and increased uptake of) the traditional baby monitor. His point that the smart onesy is a bad idea stands irrespective.

> Outpatient care is a big field these days. Something that, with extremely little effort, can reduce the odds of death or disability, is quite tempting. A smart nappy/diaper with a disposable nutrition-analysing smart-chip is not that far off.

Or we could save the money spent on gadget nappies and instead use the money to pay for better/more nursing (and integrating nutritional requirements into patient care).

I renovated my house a few months ago and also had to decide whether or not to go "smart" on the lighting, switches thermostat, etc. Did a lot of research and came to the same conclusion that there was little benefit and large chance that I would have obsolete technology next year.

However, I did go for an electronic doorlock (with finger print reader) and after just a few months I can not imagine ever going back to having regular keys again. If you have a family with small kids and cleaning ladies that need to come and go this saves so much logistic hassle. No need to wait for a delivery man, just give him a temp code to put it in the hall, etc.

There are definitely a few great IoT things, but just like we once imagined a PC would be used to store recipes, we just have to find out what the truly useful IoT things are.

In general, fingerprints should not be treated as a password or key. They unfortunately are being used as such by Apple and Samsung and these fingerprint locks. A key is something you keep private, but you leave your fingerprint on everything, including the doorknob you're trying to keep locked. Additionally, once compromised, the key cannot be revoked. I don't doubt it is much more convenient, but I would personally never trust the security of my home to one. The one area that electronic locks clearly win out on is with auditability. You can show when the door was opened and by whom, if they each have separate keys. And when a key is lost, that specific key can be revoked, rather than changing the entire lock.

The only type of people that door locks keep out, are mostly honest people. That's why fingerprint locks are mostly about convenience, not drastically boosted security.

If you have a normal door lock, a professional thief of the sort that would be able to (or try to) steal + use your fingerprint is already a threat. It's no worse than the ways a pro can break into your house without a fingerprint lock.

If someone has procured your finger print, and is now targeting your house, you've got much bigger problems than what a key lock can prevent. It means you're being specifically targeted, they've cased you and your house.

I don't think you become less safe with a fingerprint lock compared to a regular key. Someone trying to fool the fingerprint reader with a fake fingerprint on our house door is really not a realistic scenario compared to the scenario where a burglar simply uses a crow bar. In any case, it's not more likely than someone trying to use a fake key.

But if you don't like fingerprints you can use the RFID chip of your phone (my kids are too small to have those), fingerprints are easily revoked from the lock.

All security is an economic equation. All of it. Anything that increases the overall time/energy cost for an attacker represents an increase in security. Security is also heavily defined by lowest energy failure points and the human interface cost/benefit factor (because security itself often takes time/energy, so there's no point in expending more then whatever is being guarded is worth). In this scenario, both come into play in a way you're not giving credit to. I can't speak to your situation, but large numbers of us do not live in heavily armored homes packed with alarm systems. The door lock is essentially a mixture of minimal energy cost/social message ("nobody is home and you are not invited to just wander in") and a canary system (if someone does break it, it'll be obvious it happened).

It's become trendy any time someone mentions biometrics to talk about "finger prints being everywhere" and all that, but it's always incorrect to do so in a security discussion without considering overall economics. The fact is that, at least for now, it is not trivial to find, lift, and duplicate a fingerprint to the level needed to fool a decent reader (ala Touch ID). Long before it's worth doing that, a typical crook would simply break a window (including a door window should any exterior door in your entire house have any glass) or, likeliest of all, simply go to another house. Much of the low level crime that takes place is because a crook is interested in getting someone, not you specifically. It's a numbers game, it's not worth it to go to a lot of effort against one somewhat more secured building when the one next door may be wide open. Conversely, if you're subject to an actual persistent targeted physical threat then you've got vastly bigger problems then most are equipped to easily deal with. You have to make sure keys don't get stolen/duped, that hidden cameras aren't installed, that professionals can't pick or use more advanced subtle physical bypasses, etc etc.

Finally, it's necessary to compare to what the actual practical alternatives currently in place are. "Key under the mat/behind the flower pot/fake rock on lawn/..." or some variant is how a huge number of homes currently deal with fallback entry. Even if in general a copy of keys are carried around, being able to get into one's home no matter what is important enough that many people will at keep least one copy on premises in case they forget/lose theirs or a guest needs to get in or something. That's not a high baseline to surpass.

So there's nothing inherently wrong with using biometrics in scenarios like this. They're convenient, audit-able, cannot be lost or forgotten, and are often at least as good against expected attack scenarios as what currently is in place. There are certainly ways to make it even better, or promising alternates. Using a different factor (like a pin or electronic) key as the primary option with biometric fallback (in an electronic system fallback usage could be used as a trigger), time fencing, combining it with another option for MFA, or in the future directly improving "something you are" (such as with implants) all could be considered. But right now it's perfectly appropriate security for many homes. If anything my major concern would not be security but rather reliability, so I'd never use it exclusively. But it's silly to just write it off purely because it could be bypassed with sufficient time/energy/expertise.

> After considerable research, it's not worth the hussle or money.

Agree. There is no point in making a 75% smart home. A 10% smart home is fine, it feels like a nifty gadget here and there. It can be clever to automate just a few things, maybe get a nest or make it possible to start watering plants remotely when on holiday. But the dream of the full smart home isn't here yet. If you have 9 lights switchable on your phone, that tenth light just feels like a hassle. If you try, you end up spending more time fiddling with your smart stuff than you would ever spend walking to light switches.

I have a shortlist of demands for "smart home" things (specifically the simplest things like switches and other fixtures).

1) It should be as reliable as a regular dumb switch. It can't work 99% of the time, or take 100ms from switching to lighting.

2) It should require no extra cabling. If I can run ethernet over my power lines already, surely I should be able to reliably route around some smart home packets too-

3) It should work as far as possible with existing fixtures. I don't want to replace my switch, I just want to add a smart relay behind the switch. Switches are pieces of interior design, I don't want to be limited to a choice of 2 colors of extremely expensive "smart switches".

4) I don't want any products backed by a single/small company. It should be a reasonably big consortium or an open standard. Z-wave checks that box, barely (and it fails horribly at item 1).

If I were to build a house today I would probably try to make some good decisions in "dumb" power cabling such as trying to put all lighting together behind some central master relay to be able to do the hotel style switch-all when leaving, and also put Cat6+PoE sockets everywhere (both high and low on walls) as to be able to put sensors (motion, smoke, whatever) without ugly cable routing or using wireless.

> if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today

That's really the same argument as "we were brought up in asbestos houses with smoking people and we're fine..." isn't it :)

I thought I'd done my research when I built a dedicated movie theater in my basement, around 2004 or 2005. I hung a decent projector from the ceiling and wired DVI through the walls and ceiling. What I should have done was put an accessible conduit so it was replaceable. because.. only a few years later the projector was destroyed in a lightning storm, which also took out a fridge, toaster, a bunch of GFI outlets, router, etc.; and by that time, decent 1080p projectors were affordable ... and were all HDMI.

- conduit for those cool hidden in-wall wires like HDMI for your wall-mounted TV, etc.

- whole house surge protector

Your PoE idea is pretty good, ethernet has been around and will be for a while, and wireless will never really cut it all the time.

The light switch stuff has actually worked out well for me with a specific case. Living in apartments with basically no interior lighting at all. There'll lights in the kitchen and that's about it. You're expected to use lamps and there might be one or two switched outlets. The smart home stuff combined with some battery operated controllers that i can double sided tape to the wall I can add my own switched lamps that have wall switches without tearing the walls out to run my own wiring. Makes things much closer to a normal place. Other than that it didn't tend to get used nearly as much but it was fun being able to turn off the lights on someone from work.

I would still run cat6 as if I was going to use smart devices. You're already inside the walls.

All rooms will have gigabit ethernet sockets :-)

May I suggest adding also USB plugs to be able to load your devices without extra bulky part?

People suggest this a lot, but it only makes sense aesthetically (and even then only sometimes). From an environmental point of view it doesn't make any sense to do this.

Isn't the draw negligible nowadays? Even my cheap unbranded USB chargers remain at room temperature when nothing is plugged in. And you could always get sockets with switches.

It costs resources simply to make the device. They tend to cost much more than the simple bricks, which means they use more resources than the simple bricks.

And unlike the bricks which you have approx 1 per device, with outlets you need too many of them.

I don't agree that being costlier means they use more resources, but no argument about needing more chargers this way.

On the other hand, you could buy a single beefy converter (something that could manage a few amps) and then pass 5V DC cable along the regular AC wiring. Not sure about the efficiency of that, though.

Empty conduits seem like a better idea than cables. Tech changes way to fast to put cables directly into the wall (except for 110/230V~ power which seems to stay stable until now)

I don't know about that. Cat6 Ethernet started being manufactured in... what, 2001? 14 years ago? And few consumers have yet to find its support for 10GB Ethernet to be limiting or an issue. I can't think of what other cabling you might need to run, so if you're putting in conduits, it sure seems like a good idea to put in that Ethernet.

Except a lot of the automation devices don't use Ethernet, but other bus protocols, and maybe central low-voltage power. Which you might be able to send over Cat6, but I wouldn't bet on it, especially if you want to get it professionally installed.

I'd be very surprised if the standard IoT ecosystem that ultimately wins out doesn't use standard 110 V lines already in the walls for power and WiFi for data. Realistically I am not seeing it being worth it for the average person to spend many thousands of dollars to rewire their entire homes when the alternative is to simply get much cheaper devices that use the wireless network you already have and plug into the wiring and outlets you already have.

Run some plastic pipes with lengths of string inside them around -- then when you want to install new cabling you can easily drag the cabling through the pipes without damaging your walls.

That's why you make sure they use one of the standards based protocols, then buy something like a smartthings hub which is open enough that you can write your own apps if the vendor decides to abandon theirs. You don't need the vendor to update their app, you just need them to operate with the hub, and then talk to the hub directly to control the device.

Ah, yes. Not only do I pay $50 for my light switches, I also have to write my own interface before they behave differently from $10 light switches. What an incredible value proposition.

That would be the case in the most extreme circumstances. And likely in those circumstances, you'll make money. Much like the general Linux ecosystem, someone else has the same problem, is in college/has no kids/has a ton of spare time, and has already written the program for you.

Out of my entire household, I've written one app ever, and it was because I wanted an alert on my sump pump based on an amperage draw on an outlet... and even that was based on someone else's code. I just changed the amp draw variable.

What outlets do you use for monitoring current draw?

I haven't seen anything commercialized yet. As far as I know the only way to do it at this point is to still build your own. There are lots of options, but for something simple you can go with something like this:

https://learn.adafruit.com/tweet-a-watt/

You only need one person in the world to write an interface and then sell it for a open source bounty, via something like Patreon.

This makes it sound like I'd need to be sysadmin/devops for my home. I get paid to do that sort of thing at work. I certainly don't want to be doing it at home.

There is a standard for home automation with thousands of devices in the market. It's called KNX. The problem is that setting up a KNX network is extremely technically involved, and the nice looking devices cost a lot of money. I looked into a smart doorbell for our new home. The KNX system cost nearly ten times what the ring video doorbell cost and required me to put in KNX wiring. So I got the ring doorbell, even though it's a closed system.

It sounds like KNX isn't good enough then, and may never be if the standard truly does require special wiring. Another standard with cheaper devices and that operates over standard WiFi would probably have a much better shot.

KNX can be used over wifi, it is both a protocol and a wiring standard. Many KNX devices are not wifi-enabled however, which means you still have to use some wiring to connect things. I agree KNX is not good enough, even if it's the only home automation standard worth anything. The biggest problem however is not the wiring, which is preferable to wifi due to the reliable connectivity, but the consortium-made KNX ETS software. You use that software to change the configuration of your devices, it has no alternatives, and it is absolutely horrible.

Anyway, if all those IoT smart home vendors would just implement KNX support, and a group of open source developers would get together to build some proper management software to replace ETS, it would stand a chance. It at least has the benefit of being an ISO standard and having lots of device choice in the market.

Can anyone speak to the difficulty of homebrew automating some very simple processes?

For instance, I have no interest in buying into an ecosystem or any sort of smart appliance - but I would love to have low-watt floor lights turn on as I half-asleep stumble to the kitchen for a glass of water at 3am.

I want my idiosyncratic needs to drive 'smart' home additions - not the shared needs of target population Y.

Is there a community around this sort of thing I could link up with?

I think the safest way to go is to purchase products with open standards, namely Z-Wave and Zigbee. They're open protocols that can be used with any number of HA products; SmartThings, Wink, Vera, etc.

You can purchase Z-Wave thermostats from Honeywell, switches from Leviton, locks from Schlage and so on. I use OpenHAB in my home, which is an open-source home automation server. It can run on anything from a RPi to a blade with just a few necessary additions (namely a Z-Wave dongle and some sort of network connection.)

OpenHAB requires a fair bit of programming knowledge and the learning curve can be steep for some, but overall it's very functional. A few things I do in my house:

- When the garage door opens and it's after sunset, the hallway lights turn on and set themselves to 50% brightness.

- When I start watching a show on PleX, the living room lights fade out. If the show is paused, they'll come up enough for me to navigate around and refill my drink.

- When both my girlfriend and I are gone from the house, the A/C shuts off. When it detects we're within 1/2 mile of the house, it'll come back on so it's comfortable when we arrive.

There's a million other things you can do with OpenHAB. It has hundreds of "bindings" to different HA products and supports HTTP endpoints, etc. Proprietary standards are bound to go away eventually, but open standards with open-source software will always be around.

A great place to start is Node-Red: http://nodered.org/

Its a node.js browser based programming environment that allows you to connect anything to anything. You can run it on any desktop platform, as well as Beaglebone, Raspberry Pi, etc.

There are all sorts of nodes for networking, such as push notifications, social media, protocols like MQTT, or XMPP. You can make system calls, which means you can kick off python, bash, C, or other scripts/programs. That means you can cURL anything, and process it however you want. If you're on a Beaglebone or Raspberry Pi, this also means you can access GPIO/ADC/PWM/whatever you have drivers for.

There is also an interface for Arduino, but this requires a PC to run the actual server, and the Arduino is just a peripheral. The embedded linux boards can run the entire thing by themselves.

Great. Thanks for the suggestions.

I remember when we bought our new house and the neighbour had an electric cat flap installed into the wall cavity (battery was still accessible). Then it broke. They had to cut it out and replaced it with a standard flap mounted externally.

I've started working on exactly this problem. I don't think that sticking everything to a specific vendor is the right solution, and hoping that everybody is going to adopt the same standard is just not going to happen.

I'm building a simple open source API that will connect all your devices together regardless of whether they have a fancy API or not. [1]

I just started working on it so it's definitely far from done, but I think that this might be a step in the right direction.

[1] http://github.com/hjem/hjem

It always concerns me when a programmer reads a customer problem and offers a technical solution. It could be that an open-source API really will solve the problems he mentioned, but if you want adoption, you'll need to get better at explaining how they customer's life is going to get better.

If I say, "X is too much hassle" and someone replies with "Good news, I put a bunch of PHP up on Github", I'm not seeing less hassle. I'm seeing more hassle. Now I don't have to just worry about a half-dozen vendors, their possibly-janky products, and their willingness to spend 30 years supporting something that fell out of fashion. Now I can also worry about trying to glue all that together with somebody's hobby code that, if the average open source project is any guide, will be swiftly abandoned.

Well I don't think OP was trying to help everyone immediately, but he is at least making a start.

The beta API someone threw up on github obviously isn't going to help the average consumer, but it might be the start of a community of enthusiasts. Maybe one day those enthusiasts build a robust system with wider adoption and a company behind it.

If you want something that 'just works', then github is probably not the first place you should look.

> If you want something that 'just works', then github is probably not the first place you should look.

Yes, and that's my point. The expressed problem was that somebody renovating a home looked at a bunch of the options and said that they were too much hassle, too much risk. When somebody says, "This technology doesn't look like something I want to deal with for 20 years," it seems to miss the point to add, "Hey, here's some source code to something even less likely to last 20 years."

I'm not saying it's bad to try write code for fun. I too have a GitHub repository with some dubious home automation code. [1] But as a developer, when a user talks about a problem, I think it's vital to truly listen to the problem and then only talk about a solution if it actually solves something for them.

[1] Basically, redshift for my house: https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise

Yeah, and the more long-term players in the automation space give you reliable parts with long-term availability from different sources... but they are even more expensive, don't integrate well with fancy gadgets (apps) and, biggest show-stopper, don't make the configuration tools easily available, so you need to call a tech for nearly everything instead of doing it yourself, which is stupid for a private home.

I think there needs to be some sort of open source implementation against an open standard. These look interesting and MQTT is pretty popular.

https://home-assistant.io

http://www.stavros.io/posts/messaging-for-your-things

While smart devices are inchoate at present, and likely to be difficult to get right (I see why you're not interested right now), I think it's a mistake to dismiss the concept based on current tech.

Long term probably most of the devices/materials we own will be networked in some way, acting as sensors, reacting to local conditions by changing, updatable with software. That's all a bit fuzzy, but specifically things like heated floors and lighting which sense presence, windows which react to lighting conditions or insolation requirements, voice controls, panels which turn into display surfaces or speakers and a desk which could charge and update objects wirelessly when placed on it would all be very useful and far more powerful if driven by software which was updatable. Software will eat the world, one object/material at a time.

I don't know if the revolution will be in one OS which runs your home (though corporations would love to sell you that), it might be more in our tools, clothes and structures gradually becoming networked and part of a global computer. Specific operating systems seem to me to be declining in importance as the network grows and a constellation of devices which talk to each other arises. There are of course potential downsides like security and privacy but I think those will be outweighed by the obvious benefits.

Do we need any of this? No, and our ancestors lived without it. Will we want any of it? Probably, if on balance it improves our quality of life.

I agree with you on everything except the smart onesie. If used intelligently it could be very useful. For example, if your kid's temperature drops every night and then they wake up then maybe they are cold. Or something.

What about doing it with Z Wave enabled devices. I'm thinking of starting 'automating' my home and everything points to having a Vera Light and Z Wave stuff.

I've started down that road with Philips Hue lights. Admittedly expensive, but nice and I can build up the system over time. They're Zigbee and Philips are very very open with them. Incidentally they do the best warm-white I've ever seen in an LED bulb, which is nice.

I'm actually looking at one of the Hue Tap switches now; they're a battery-less switch (kinetic power) with three buttons (I think) that you can customize. So I can, for example, put one in my bedroom and have a button on it that turns all the lights off in the house for when I'm about to go to sleep, etc. No need to run cables through walls and have switches where you want.

i think we are in the trough of disillusionment with regards to IoT devices

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