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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I really hope they recognize the need that people want to keep their data on their lan. Actually that would be required by the GDPR if they won't let me sign anything. My derived data is my own people, it does not belong to who ever collects it.

I.e. I just want a thermostat the is a big rotating button and speaks mqtt. It does not exist. If you want it to look good you end up with a Nest thermostat. Home Assistant needs to talk to the Nest online API, not to the device itself. Really annoying and unnecessary. I wish I could just pay 50$ more and get a Nest that does let me talk to it locally. Or whatever are they going to earn with my data? I'd probably pay it straight up.

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https://iot.mozilla.org -- can easily install the WebThings Gateway on a Raspberry Pi, or in a Docker container, or CLI install to a Linux box. It runs locally in your home. No cloud account, no cloud data center dependency, command and control accessible from the web UI served up by the home gateway. Local voice commands are possible too. My "home smart home" stays in my home. :)

Hubitat seems to be trying to be a SmartThings without the data in the cloud [1]. They seem to have a pretty active community.

[1] https://hubitat.com/

If your device supports opentherm (which is not as open as you might think, btw) you might want to look into OTGW [0]. It probably works with Nest to if the Nest allows to run without internet at all.

[0] http://otgw.tclcode.com/

My central heater is a simple on/off model. Nest will work offline with it but afaik you can't write target temperatures to it then.

To bad, my old heater had opentherm, with the OTGW I could intercept the packets between the heater and thermostat, change values (eg: date/time), issue commands (set room temperature) and add missing functionality (outside temperature for heating curve), it was ideal in every way. But I moved and my current heater has a proprietary protocol over rs485 so its a no-go for the OTGW.

In the EU there are no systems without opentherm by law luckily.

That does mean some systems are not available at all, so "luckily".

I use Venstar thermostats with Home Assistant. They're totally fine, but wifi only I believe. Local API, so no cloud nonsense. I've been running them for about a year with no major problems.

They don't seem to be available in Europe, the thermostat market is surprisingly local, i.e. we also don't have Ecobee here. The Venstars do looks nice indeed.

Hmmm maybe eBay (i got one of mine there)?

I had several Google Home devices, and you could not even boot them up unless you had a phone with an account that was opted into location history, web history, search history, and youtube watch history. Google has completely lost any concept of privacy.

At least for the ecobee, hass can add it as a local homekit device

Yeah I hope ecobee gets to Europe before I get a nest :)

>I really hope they recognize the need that people want to keep their data on their lan. Actually that would be required by the GDPR if they won't let me sign anything. My derived data is my own people, it does not belong to who ever collects it.

GDPR is a joke and easily bypassed because users are overwhemingly dumb and agree to anything without reading. By making it online service dependent they don't have to care, the experience will be horribly degraded without signing in.

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