Ask HN: Dream setup for a “smart” home? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Dream setup for a “smart” home?

2 pointsmgertner6 comments

We have just closed on a new house which is a fixer upper that we plan to renovate from top to bottom. Since I am a programmer and technologist, my wife asked me to make suggestions for creating a "connected home" with modern security, climate control, etc.

I've spent some time looking at various home-related "smart" products. There's a lot out there and it's hard to know what to chose. Do we put in smart locks or do they represent a security risk? Should we go for smart glass or just some type of foil window covering? There are doubtless also amazing ideas for cool home tech that haven't even occurred to me.

What about you? If you could build your dream home to benefit from the latest in 2017 technology, which products would you choose? I'm interested in general ideas as well as specific brands.

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Most products out there are rubbish. Every manufacturer wants to own their customers through yet another form of cloud hosted smarts and yet another app for your smartphone. The Nest smoke alarms are a canonical example - they stop working because they want you to buy the next version. Samsung, LG, et al are all the same ... clueless.

As for wireless networking, these devices need batteries, lots of them and all the time. Many won't even tell you when it is time to replace their batteries.

For my home, I'm looking at using alarm cabling to every point. Using 2 cores for power and another 2 cores for data - rather like CAN-bus (which works well for cars, trucks and marine applications). I also plan to wire in quite a bit of Cat-5e/6 with PoE for security cameras, etc.

For intelligence I'm using MQTT (mosquitto). Arduino, e.g. LilyPad for small devices and PocketBeagle (it supports CAN-bus) for more complex nodes. As you might guess, I'm constantly on the lookout for clever hacks of consumer devices to add into my "system" without using cloud services. Plan for on-going work-in-progress. But you'll have lots of fun.

As for smart locks - they're all basically easy to defeat. You'd be better off using conventional locks with electric strikes that you can control from your system - but remember to carry your keys .... just in case. I find that keying all locks alike saves having too many keys.

If you're going to the trouble of running wires, run Cat 5 everywhere. It's easier to interface with general purpose computing devices.

I did a quick check of costings and you are right, there isn't much of a saving by using alarm wire and fittings. As long as you provision enough points and have a patch panel in a central cupboard, the all Cat5 approach will be far better in the long run.

For the long run, consider running pull-strings in parallel to the wiring so that adding additional capability in the future is easier. At some point I think it is possible that homes will bet low voltage power to avoid converting household current down to DC with "wall warts".

I'd run Cat 5 and use Raspberry Pi's and relays and such. Generic materials and material methods are the way to go with any construction project. Maybe some solar panels and lead acid batteries. It's a systems integration problem. A dependency on the app store has low reliability over a five year period. Wireless systems will be increasingly vulnerable because they are consumer devices and therefore have short term firmware support (and the FCC prohibits sale of wireless devices with user modifiable software in the US).

I'd put it another way, a functional smart home is primarily a design, engineering, and construction project not a shopping exercise.

I totally agree with you. With the current state of the market, a fully integrated smart home is only attainable to those who have the requisite engineering know how and skills or are willing to pay for professional design, installation and support.

Conceptually smart homes have a lot of potential benefits but as the market currently stands, I don't see how it will become mainstream any time soon. Rather like PCs were in the 1980s.

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