The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

In that same time period, my "plant light" timer, a $15 mechanical item of a design unmodified since the 1970s, has worked flawlessly, requiring attention only when the clocks change or my schedule does. It has not informed Google, Amazon, or anyone else about its job or anything else in my home. It has generated no royalties nor invoked any support or ongoing maintenance costs. It has never needed a software upgrade.

"Smart Home" stuff even since the "x10" standards has been a solution looking for a problem to solve. A hobby for the homeowner who wants to ride the high side of the Laffer curve in effort and expense. It could be argued that quiet, flawless functioning of these products would be exactly what the customer doesn't want in this product space.

Compare it to model trains: is that hobby focused around having a lovely little table set up and watching the trains run? Or is the actual focus the torn up mess that's under construction and "we can't play with it right now but i can get it assembled to show the kids by Tuesday".

I did my whole house in Lutron’s smart switches (close to 50 of them), and I think it’s good? It’s been about 2 years now and I really haven’t had any issues.

The switches aren’t Wi-Fi connected, because Wi-Fi would be an awful choice for 50 devices that you only communicate with a few times a day. They use their own wireless frequency and communicate in a really simple/reliable way to the bridge, which is wired to my router and doesn’t need an internet connection to work.

There’s no always-running cloud service, the light switches work even when the internet is down (and I can still use the home app too in such an event, just no voice control.)

Siri is finicky sometimes, but I’d wager a 97% success rate in saying things like “set the scene Evening Downstairs” and “turn off all the lights except in the bedroom.”

My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off, which makes it so much nicer in the basement where I have 18 different lights to turn on and I can just hit one switch on my way downstairs and it’s fully illuminated (no voice command necessary) and I don’t have to visit 18 light switches to turn them off again.

Home automation tech must be invisible and fall back gracefully, and must always be interact-able in a “dumb” way, or else it’s just playing games IMO.

I think any software engineer with some industry experience will absolutely NOT install a device in his home that receives automatic updates over the internet and is critical for performing some task or using some basic functionality of the house; especially one that has a well known, highly stable and ergonomic traditional mode of interaction - controlling the lights and water, opening the windows and shades etc.

We know from experience that a nebulous interface that can change without notice and provides no clear contract is a asking for trouble and will break your house "build", so to speak, or worse, it will bork at the worst possible moment, when you have "clients" over.

In the early years of home electricity, there was a much higher chance of getting electrocuted or burning to a crisp, outlets had no grounding, insulation and conductors were of a bad quality etc. Similarly, the whole field of home automation is in its infancy, in a few decades most major mistakes will be made and early adopters will work out the kinks out of the technology (and find out why it's a bad idea to have an internet connected microphone listening in your home at all times).

Yeah over the last few weeks Alexa has grown annoyingly chatty. Pretty much every ask, like "Alexa, what's the outside temperature?" is followed by the answer and then "Did you know..." which is itself followed by me saying "Alexa stop" in an irritated voice.

"Computer, lay in a course to intercept the Romulan cruiser." "Intercept course calculated. Did you know, I can automatically reorder toilet paper for the bridge head?"

If any one from Amazon is hanging nearby, please pass along how annoying a chatty home assistant is.

I have an EE degree and a CS degree. I waste an incomprehensible portion of my life fussing with the technology that runs in my home.

Why is it so hard to configure VLANs for my security cameras using the fancy Unifi switches I have? Why isn't there just some documented JSON file somewhere that I can edit? (The key word in the previous sentence is documented -- I'm sure there is an XML or JSON file somewhere they just don't tell you where it is). Why should I have to do configuration of VLANs on my iPhone? And why are you hiding the good stuff with a pretty web-based interface. I'd like to be able to manage my network even if their "cloud" goes down.

Pfsense firewall, no problem. Local ZFS file servers, no problem. Getting my upstairs thermostat (required by the the high end Lenox AC unit) to work, big problems. Again, why does it require me to have a connection to "the cloud" as the AC technicians say. Now I need to remember some dumb password to adjust the air upstairs on my phone.

Lightning hit a power transformer down the road. Everything in my home survived, except the fancy video security night-light motion detecting "cloud" connected doorbell. So now I have two wires sticking out of the wall by my front door with a big note on the door that says "Doorbell broken, please knock". It turns out that works pretty well.

Thinking it was maybe time to declare technology bankruptcy and start over, my spouse and I looked at a few homes for sale. In one, we couldn't hear one another because the "background" music was so loud. We wandered around looking for a way to turn it down; It emanated from speakers around the house and neither the agent nor us could figure out how to silence the infernal music. Did I have to shout out the magic word, like "Alexa" or "Hey Google" or was there a Sonos remote hidden under a cushion--who knows.

I've installed garage door openers myself, but that was before cell phones. Now, I can't get the openers coordinated with my family's cars. The cars have their own distinct button programming protocols quite tricky to manage. Its a bit like learning how to be a courtroom stenographer that types on the funny corded keyboard. A neighbor with an engineering degree claims to have figured out how to program the street's gate opener to his car, but my MB and Subaru have thwarted my attempts to keep up with him.

I'm on my third sprinkler controller. The first had a big rotating switch with ambiguous buttons scattered around and a cryptic page of instructions on the inside of its cover: virtually impossible to figure out. Where were the man pages when I needed them. I replaced it with a "modern" sprinkler controller. It was, naturally, "cloud" connected, so the first step was to climb around in the 120 degree attic dragging cat6 and then install a POE wifi access point in the garage. I foolishly said to myself, "Now I can look forward to using an iPhone app to control my sprinkler." It lasted about a year before I noticed a patches of dead grass.

I figured that maybe I just needed professional help with the sprinkler controller (and I was busy inside because my spouse was complaining about all the wires everywhere--she didn't understand that it takes time to repair a doorbell from the future and run new cat6). The professional irrigation guy was great, but he said I needed a new sprinkler controller. Now, he informed me, I would be able to control my sprinklers with my iPhone, cool, I just need to figure out which app I'm supposed to use! He needed my wifi password of course so he could work on the controller when I wasn't home. No problem, I thought. I'll set up a separate VLAN for IOT (internet of things) and configure it via my Pfsense firewall to be isolated from my home's higher security subnets. At this point, I'm back at paragraph two.

I firmly believe that at this moment, Home Assistant is the best smart home system out there. No cloud, no vendor lock-in, no data, no profiling, no lock-in with licenses and companies needing to make deals.

And honestly, that's terrible. Because let's be honest, Home Assistant still kind of sucks. Not because of all the hard work the developers put into it, but because all of the hacks they need to get devices to work with the damn thing. The IKEA smart lamp bridge is unreliable, wake on LAN is unreliable, smart switches refuse to operate without a cloud connection, transmitted data formats are proprietary and unreliable, it all just sucks so bad.

There's work being done by FAANG (or would that be MAANG now?) to make interoperability between devices better, but knowing these companies that probably means the clouds get more integrated with each other.

These terrible internet smart devices should pick a protocol like MQTT or CoAP or whatever IoT protocol they fancy, and stick it proudly on the box. They can have their stupid internet uplink, bht they should Just Work if they're only connected locally. These things run fully fledged ESP32 chips with more power than you could ever need for a plant humidity sensor, just put a basic web interface on them that takes a password, a WiFi network and an endpoint to talk to. As for alternative protocols, companies like Phillips and IKEA should get their shit together already and just expose a good, documented API.

Home Automation is a hobby mostly practiced by the technically inclined. The more bridges and products that work with your smart fridge, the more value your fridge has to consumers.

About 10 seconds into reading this I got a 'cute' drop-down box that greyed out what I was half-way through reading, and insisted that I attend to a 'Get my weekly IoT newsletter' that demanded from me an email address, name, and company details.

The unbearable demands of advertising.

EDIT (ADD)

I've installed a couple of ESP32's with humidity / temperature gauges, in two of my abodes, that feed into a prometheus -> cortex store, so I can then map them on Grafana.

This is considered 'excessive' by the family, but for me it's deeply interesting and compelling, and I'll be pushing more of them out over the next few months.

But these are very basic devices, with rudimentary access to the local network, and no way (or interest) in phoning out to anything else beyond my router. This is the ideal scenario for these kinds of devices.

Has to be said I don't understand "smart devices" one bit. I simply don't understand how pulling out a phone and launching an app is preferable to an ordinary light switch. In fact I would say it's in every respect worse. And I don't want something that sits in the room listening to everything I say and uploading some unknown part of that to an unknown cloud service.

Quick story:

On the day we were closing on our 1920s house here in Massachusetts, we noticed that the oven wouldn't turn on. Then we noticed that it was shut off at the breaker.

We asked the owner why, and he said "oh, the mainboard in the oven (a Thermidor) has some issue where it beeps incessantly in the middle of the night and wakes us all up – but not a big deal: you can just turn it off and on at the breaker and it works just fine!" He'd apparently sent the mainboard in multiple times to have it serviced, but the problem persisted.

That wasn't a really satisfying answer at the closing table, so we pressed to get compensated for the oven we were rather sure we'd have to replace.

A few weeks later, as we were pricing out $2000-3000 replacement units, I had an idea to look for a smart relay to control the oven's dedicated circuit. I managed to find a 40-amp smart switch for $90 that I could control with SmartThings.

Now we can use the app or say "Alexa, turn on the oven," the switch is activated in the basement, and the oven turns on. At midnight, SmartThings turns it off if we haven't already, preventing the beeping.

$90 got us where we needed to be, and it's been working great for almost five years now.

Honestly this most infuriating thing about this entire situation is that the devices we have the most issues with are actually the ones provided by big name companies (specifically issues with Google and TP-Link in our setup).

I try my hardest to stick to Zigbee and Z-Wave devices wherever possible which has lead me to purchase devices like Samsung's SmartThings plug, or Sonoff Minis etc that I can connect straight to a Zigbee/Z-Wave dongle to expose them to HomeAssistant. This setup is actually very reliable and the only downtime we've had over nearly three years is when I've pulled the HA virtual machine down to do updates - I think we're up to about 40 or 50 zigbee devices in our network now that all work flawlessly and locally.

So what about Google and TP-Link? Google Home is becoming chatty and has started to regularly mishear commands, or it will say a device is unavailable but still perform the action successfully. TP-Link pushed a silent update out to the couple of smart plugs we had from them that disabled functionality that exposed them to Home Assistant - rendering them a complete waste of time and money.

It's mind boggling to me that the (m/b/tr)illion dollar companies of the world are the ones fucking up my smart home. It annoys me enough that I would no longer purchase hardware from any company that uses WiFi or relies on the cloud for "smart" home stuff.

I've had a lot of success with z-wave devices in my home, hooked into Home Assistant. They seem more resilient than zigbee (and much more reliable than any of the bespoke wifi stuff) and are largely all interoperable. I've got a bunch of z-wave devices like plugs and thermostats, but it comes at a high cost.

For lights I do use zigbee ones just because they're cheaper, but my Hue and IKEA mix do have communication issues sometimes (I have them both on a Deconz stick attached to my server).

But all of this relies on Home Assistant. I honestly can't imagine trying to use smart home devices as a "normal" consumer, relying on the software of specific companies. They're all largely terrible walled gardens, and I'm constantly surprised by how bad they actually are.

I love programming ESP32 arduinos - connecting stuff up.

but I will never make my home 'smart' - not with closed or open sourced.

My standard way of thinking is - can I help someone in my family to fix it or replace it, if it was to go wrong over the phone ... whilst I'm out drinking and drunk.

Because given enough time this seems to pop up again and again with anything in the house - and I do not go out drinking often (before someone asks)

Take the thing in your hands, install Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/) and let Open Source rule your world.

It works flawlessly, there is just a Himalaya steep learning curve and knowing Python helps when doing fancy automations with pyscript (there are integrated automations whihc are a pain in the bottom, and solutions such as Node Red).

In all honesty, Home Assistant opens a huge amount of possibilities but you have to commit to it.

My wife constantly wonders what she will do when I die and the whole thing goes south the day after.

I’ve become annoyed with “smart home” because the reliability is so bad. About 20% of the time the light doesn’t turn on or off.

I’ve used Alexa with Feit and Phillips Hue for about 4 years and Apple HomePod for about a year.

At least once a day, I get an error message like “Oops, I had a problem with that.” Apple seems worse about this. It sometimes works by calling the other with the same command. It always works when using the app on my phone.

I expect 100% reliability. The same as my light switch. The light switch works every time.

I also don’t like how chatty they are. I can’t turn off the voice confirmations with Apple. I don’t want it to tell me that it turned on the lights.

I laugh imagining a Star Trek episode where the computer responds as shittily as our current state of smart homes.

This is entirely on the author. Sure these vendors make awful products and poorly maintain them - but nobody is forcing anyone to buy them or integrate them into their house. I have yet to hear, or especially see, these devices make anybody’s life easier than doing the task manually.

I never think about light in my home, I flip the switch if I need it - lights seem like such a chore to my friends who have to issue commands to a speaker and that’s one of the few things this tech is supposed to be good at

Good technology gets out of the way and let’s the user do or be or experience something. This is the opposite

I can remember discussing when household appliances would be networked, back in the 1980s. I would never have predicted that in 2021 almost every appliance+ would have a networking capability, but that said capability would have been added by the manufacturer as a way to get the purchaser's email address so they could spam them and sell their information.

+ I recently bought: an air fryer and a sous vide heater. Both support WiFi and apps (the air frier won't even turn on until you pair it with the app). Neither provides any meaningful networked functionality.

I just built a vacation home from the ground up and specced the "smart" features myself and did so very carefully. I've learned the hard way because I was already "orphaned" when I bought my current primary residence which had a high-end 'state-of-the-art' home automation system that was designed into the walls by the original owner. Unfortunately, it was cutting-edge tech for 2001. The original manufacturer of the system as well as the local dealer/installer both changed owners and product lines multiple times and were out of business over a decade ago.

Fortunately, the hardware was pretty well-designed industrial grade gear consisting of cards mounted to back plane slots inside wall-mounted racks in the basement and I like working on 8-bit era arcade and pinball machines which shares many similarities. The saving grace is that the system is just old enough to predate being internet-connected, so the firmware is in EEPROM and was designed to stand alone forever if necessary.

In my new place I was determined to avoid the same issues 25 years down the road so I've selected devices that run open source firmware on widely available, multi-source commodity hardware using long-lived open protocols. For example, the 62 in-wall dimmer switches have ESP8266 boards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266) and I installed the mature Tasmota open-source firmware (https://tasmota.github.io/docs/) in them so they don't require cloud connection or try to phone home. They function normally as light switches with no connection of any kind but can be optionally controlled via wifi by a Raspberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant open-source software which hosts modular integrations with hundreds of different devices, protocols and standards.

What some people call “fussiness” I call “doesn’t work.” When I was younger I enjoyed playing with the new tech, so I was willing to overlook a lot of problems. But now I look around at the state of technology and I’m sort of flabbergasted at what we’ve let it become. Most stuff sold to consumers simply doesn’t work for a very simple and obvious definition of “doesn’t work.” Even my Wi-Fi “doesn’t work” by any normal standard of “works” that was in use before, say, 1980.

Everything is sold as a 10% product. A 10% product is a cell phone in 1994. It provides transformational, life-changing functionality…10% of the time. The other 90% of the time it just frustrates you because it doesn’t work. It took cell phones 25 years to go from a 10% product to a 98% product.

The problem is that most things aren’t cell phones. Most things sold to consumers should stay in the lab until they are closer to 98% than 10%.

A typical "conversation" in my home goes like this:

"Alexa... Turn on the downstairs lights... sigh Alexa, turn on all the downstairs lights... deep sigh Alexa, downstairs lights one hundred percent."

Then, if I'm lucky, Alexa will convince the Philips Hue to flick on a dozen lights.

When everything works - it is subtle magic. When it doesn't, it's obviously a load of poorly debugged JSON parsers with finickity wifi connections.

Ask yourself what the value is of all this additional complexity and additional “features” relative to the end sought. Do you need the damn router to be on for the stupid “smart” lightbulb to turn on? When you need the lights on to get something done, do you really want to be distracted by some undependable piece of shit doing is little smart jig? It’s like living in some absurdust play.

The market demand of a lot of these things is driven by a kind of monkey-loves-shiny-things syndrome and herd thinking. Maybe enui and idleness because anyone that truly values their short life won’t waste it on tinkering with a bunch of pointless devices that contribute no real value to his life. May his tombstone read “He tinkered with his smart devices. Then he died.”

Interestingly, a mature software engineer hates complexity. He loves to trim the fat from his code base. He hates pissing away his life dicking around and maintaining stuff that had no reason for being there in the first place. He has better things to do with his time than jerking off some code he doesn’t need.

Maybe smart devices are a distraction for nihilists. Maybe it’s like alcohol. Maybe Idiocracy II will feature a populace spending half their days trying to turn the lights on.

And nevermind the dystopian contribution these things are to the surveillance state.

IOT stuff can be great if you follow a couple rules:

1. Everything must have physical controls. If it has power, it must work. For example, if you want to control your lights, don't buy light bulbs, buy light switches.

2. Do not buy Bluetooth or WiFi devices. Use Z-Wave, Zigbee, Lutron Caseta, etc. If you must use WiFi, then it needs to be open firmware, such as Tasmota or ESPHome.

Touching on the part about the Alexa: it has become so ridiculously over-talkative lately even with “brief mode” enabled that I’m apprehensive to even ask it to do anything.

If you are part of the Amazon team: Just Because it Can Talk Does Not Mean it Needs To Talk. Especially related to shoving the “suggestions” down your throat. You ask to play a song, and the “by the way…” covers up the song! I empathize you’ve built a new feature and no one uses it but forcing them to learn via interruptions is not the way.

I personally think that the 'smart home' is a very good concept and has great potential - and can bring benefits even today. This is specially true if you are not neurotypical or have any issues (like forgetfulness). I often forget to do thinks like turn off the coffee machine. My automation ensures that this is done(either by timer, or when I leave the house), that the security system arms when I'm off the house, proper lights are turned on and off, that the robo vacuum won't start until my 3d printer is done printing (it will also turn it off), will turn on air filters when the air quality drops, etc.

That said, the state of the industry is ridiculous. Wifi is extremely convenient and the way to go (IMHO) for the vast majority of devices. It's not well suited for some battery powered sensors due to power constraints - Zigbee works, so does Bluetooth LE. Or everything could just use Bluetooth for all I care. But those protocols are not the problem (despite the industry trying to push CHIP or whatever the new name is).

No, the problem is the software. The insistence on doing stuff in the Cloud when there's no reason to do so. All the incompatible protocols and setup hoops one have to jump. All the political and monetary bickering that causes companies to deprecate 'integrations' or otherwise break functions.

Look, most devices are a combination of switches (usually on and off, a freaking bit!), some numeric values coming from sensors. Maybe strings for good UX. That is it. How many different ways of flipping bits do we need? How complicated do we really have to make retrieving a device status or a temperature value?

I just need to be able to read some simple values and flip some bits back in response - using an encrypted channel. That's it. IF one wants to do this over the Cloud to control stuff remotely, fine. Every single device with software from unknown provenance wanting to phone home - and then forcing me to try to get different clouds to talk to one another?! No thank you.

People should not have computers in their homes running software that they do not have control over. They should have the full legal and practical freedoms to study, copy, modify, and redistribute the software they are running, and to delegate those abilities to the people of their choice, since not everyone wants to be a programmer.

The current situation, where Google, Samsung, and Amazon have unaccountable devices running unauditable secret code, which they can update whenever they want, with access to the most private aspects of many people's lives (including microphones and sometimes cameras in their bedrooms), is extremely risky; no government and no company can be trusted with that kind of power.

I once had a passing interest in smart lights and outlets. I thought the idea of controlling all of my lights with my smartphone was the neatest idea ever.

I then happened upon an article that reviewed a specific smart home hub, and their trouble with the associated smart devices. In one case, his smart devices kept disconnecting, necessitating him to have to get out the ladder and crawl along a narrow crawlspace in order to access said light bulb so a reset could be carried out.

Imagine having to do that a couple times a month... Multiplied by however many bulbs you have.

I'll take a dumb red and black wire, thanks.

I cannot be the only jaded nerd to have looked at all the highly integrated "smart home" crap on the market and scoffed. I have absolutely NO desire to sysadmin my goddamn house. I've been in this game a long time, and I know none of that stuff is going to be made well, or coded well, or be able to interoperate well, and that means HEADACHES.

And people buy them! Like, they buy internet-connected LOCKS for their doors! Seriously, why would you do this?

One truth I've gradually learned over the last couple decades is that companies that decide to make a "smart" version of an ordinarily non-smart object invariably screw it up. They don't want to hire good devs, or good product design people, and they end up with a hamfisted mess. Even companies that make somewhat-smart devices can screw this up when they try and "level up" (the example I usually use is Garmin, who have shredded their reputation in the cycling community with unreliable software over the course of the last 7 or 8 years).

Do I have any "smart" things in my house? Yes, but ONLY A COUPLE, and I don't expect them to talk to anything else.

1. I have Belkin WeMo switches on some lights. I bought them because we were going on vacation and wanted to put timers on them, and it was one of these (with a nice phone app for configuration) or the traditional fiddly million-little-switch kind. They work GREAT. The software is now smart enough to peg the "on" event to dusk, which is neat (i.e., it means I no longer have to reset them twice a year for DST).

Do they talk to Alexa or Siri or whatever? No idea. Never set it up. Don't care. Not important.

2. I have a couple HomePods. One, an original model, is in the kitchen. It sounds pretty great for its footprint, and can do other things too ("hey siri, how many ounces in a pint?" or "Hey siri, give me a 12 minute timer") that come in handy when cooking. On the strength of its performance, I bought a smaller one for our bedroom/bathroom, and it's fine, too. Do they connect to anything else? Not really. That's fine.

(I mean, yes, they connect to Apple to work, but I'm comfortable with that. I mean I haven't tried to connect them to anything else in the house.)

Nobody wanted a smart home. It does not solve any significant need in anybody's life except maybe those with reduced mobility or other impairments. Anything a smart home does beyond a very few things are gimmicks that people quickly tire of. We have been conditioned to think we want a smart home through relentless advertising, bundling smart home items with other purchases, and other tricks. It is madness.

I share the neo-luddist perspective of many of the other commenters, but it's also clear that there are basic product quality issues at hand. Switching something on and off on a schedule is not a hard problem to solve, in theory, so why doesn't it work? Is there something about the ecosystem and interfaces between devices and hubs that is lacking? Did the company just not test their product sufficiently?

I invested in Z-wave light switches that are marked as GE but in reality manufactured by Jasco. The problem is that for an earlier generation of these devices a power surge / dip could fry the electronics, causing me to replace several of these switches over the years. This more speaks to the idea of long term reliability of electronics for devices that you want to replace very infrequently.

On the software end I used Smartthings. Samsung went through a big redo a year ago that caused me to redo all of the automation. That sucked. I've considered going open source but at this point smartthings is stable and the mobile app is not horrible.

Recently someone at either Amazon or smarthings thought it would be good to update the terms of service and break the integrations between the two services. I had to re-enable the integration by logging into and clicking an idiot button saying "I approve" of all the blah-blah-blah legalese. This was the worst part of my home automation story as clearly this didn't need to break.

I live in the US burbs and have a fairly large house at 3K+ square feet. There are a bunch of light switches that logically are one room. Using automation makes this much easier to control. Also kids - they don't turn shit off. I have an automation that turns off everything at 11AM on weeknights. Great reminder to go to bed but also causes my wife to be unhappy with me when the movie turns off unexpectedly, lol.

We have a smart lock on the front door. The kids have a door code and you can give contractors / cleaners their own code. That's nice. And one of the little f**kers doesn't lock the door on the way out I can create a rule that automatically locks the door after its been unlocked for 15 minutes.

Why are “smart homes” always presented as either all in or all out?

We have a handful of Wemo switches that we use to turn on various lights, mostly on a sunrise/sunset schedule. They are reasonably reliable with no more than about 1 failure to switch in a month. My husband sometimes needs to repeat himself if he is using voice commands but then, he is a mumbler and I often have to ask him to repeat what he says to me. If I needed to switch one without voice or app, I can just tap the physical button on the switch.

When we leave town, they continue to switch off/on. I no longer have to dig out one of those Daisey-wheel timers and try to figure out what is on and what is off.

None of these lights are ‘critical’ in that, if they don’t switch now and then, I’m not upset. I don’t demand 100% uptime for decades at a time. At worst, I might have to unplug and replug in the switch to reset it. I don’t try to get complicated with them and have no particular desire to automate the rest of the house.

I feel like my home is smart enough at this level, not particularly fussy, and not a source of stress.

Oh god I installed Nest fire alarm products throughout my home. Such a PAIN. Last 8 months at most before new batteries. Wireless updates kick it off the network all the effin time. Wish I could get my money back - now I am committed to this garbage product for at least 5 more years (if they last).

Worst - incredibly little value generated from nest.

Bit of a gadget addict and one of my "one of these days" aspirations is automating everything in the house. I wish I were a electronics/robotics expert so that I could DIY all of that and maybe one day, I'll learn enough.

One thing I've noticed though, just from using off-the-shelf "smart" stuff, that you can be at a point where you've simply swapped the management of physical repetitive to-do's around the house (light switches, locks, etc.) with the management of the devices that manage the physical repetitive to-dos's.

Does that extra layer of abstraction deliver on promised efficiencies? I don't know yet. But I've gotten in the habit of standing in the middle of the room, repeating misunderstood voice commands when I could've accomplished the same task twice over and in less time by just moving my ass.

I don't have any practical experience with smart homes, because I've avoided adding anything "smart" to my home, so maybe I'm far wrong. But I do work in software, and find the whole drag of constantly making sure everything is updated and coordinating properly an exhausting never ending chore. I don't want to flip a light switch and be told that the OS or firmware operating the switch is updating, or is incompatible with the ceiling fan driver, or some nonsense like that. I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but homes are already trouble enough to keep in good condition, and the dozen devices my family uses already needs so much upkeep, that I don't want to have to worry about non-obvious technical problems with, like, lamps and stuff.

My home is my escape from tech. I use software and computer technology all day at work. Yes I have a PC at home but it's an isolated system. I don't want this stuff in every facet of my life. My light switches are all conventional mechanical ones. My thermostat is digital (I didn't choose it) but unprogrammed. It is set to hold whatever temperature I select, until I change it. My locks are all key-operated. Same with my cars, I buy older cars with minimal or no electronics. I will never buy an appliance the requires an app to operate it, and will never have any devices that listen or talk to me. Alexa, Echo, etc. seem utterly pointless and invasive.

I think it's partly about judicious use of products. I had a pretty minimal smart home setup -- Google Home, Nest, and Hue. It worked 100% of the time, I never had a problem. I get that part of the issue being brought up is that it's not 100% for everyone, but I see friends having the most issues when they're constantly trying new products, and new classes of product. Also, the more complicated the behavior, the harder it is to make intuitively "smart". Stick to the basics and you can have a pretty good experience.

I try to follow a Battlestar Galactica approach to critical infrastructure in my house. There are microcontrollers but they are not networked.

I do have some Philips Hue stuff, but it is not on the cloud. Some lights use the remote control dimmer thingies, but they are attached to walls in convenient places so that the rest of my family can't lose them. Also, in places where I'm using a RC dimmer on a wall to replace a traditional switch, the old switch is easy to access should the communication fail or the dimmer runs out of power.

> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!

> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.

— https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L

The only two things in my smart home that require Internet access are my Ring doorbell and Nest thermostat. Everything else is either using non-WiFi RF (Z-wave or Zigbee) or uses WiFi but is fully controllable over the LAN and any optional cloud connectivity is disabled. Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi automated and ties it all together.

Obviously that is a far cry from "plug it in, download an app, go through the setup, and it works" but it actually works and is rock solid.

I've been on a minor hunt lately to see if I can find smart home light control which makes sense, or some technologies to put together which would.

The basic problem I've had is I've been dealing with adding new light switches in my house through old wall chases - this is miserable (or impossible). But in 2021, why do I need to pull 3+ wires to a light switch to get a light to control (and god help you if you need a dual 2-way switch - up to 6). Why can't I just run live/neutral?

The other problem is the excessive use of wifi: we have powerline ethernet, why can't communications be implemented as a low bandwidth wired protocol over a wiring system I already have?

My ideal IoT home automation would solve both of these: no wifi, use powerline ethernet (with a bridge unit somewhere for the automation), and let me go all in on decoupled switches and lighting. And then whoever does this, target selling it straight to electricians because we'd be talking huge cost-savings and simplifications for wiring up new builds, and retrofits could be handled the same.

Let me fully separate my control points and let's just commit to getting the basic technology right - if my car can be CANbus wired, why can't my house?

I am building my own lighting controls (using Bluetooth Mesh as the underlying communications technology), because I don't want the madness of IoT.

There is a misconception that building reliable products with a full TCP/IP stack and internet-based servers is a good idea. It isn't.

We don't have to go back to mechanical devices: there are ways to build reliable home automation solutions. Just don't make them all internet devices with a bazillion dependencies.

Everybody I know who installed smart home devices has abandoned them; none would recommend them.

The main issues are surprisingly poor reliability and overly chatty interfaces.

I have had great success with my home automation.

Home assistant running in a container interfaces my lights (Lutron) sensors (zwave) and entertainment (Yamaha / Apple). HA also presents a HomeKit hub that the Apple devices connect to for Siri, etc. All interfacing is via HomeKit because that’s our preferred platform, but the HA interface/app work fine and do everything as well.

None of this relies on remote services!

I know this is not for everyone but I have been loving Home-Assistant. It requires a local server and the initial setup requires some docker knowledge (unless you go the RasPi route), but after that I am impressed by how much of it "just works". I ordered a bunch of TP-Link smart switches, installed the Kasa add-on (in the Home Assistant interface, no terminal there) and it basically just works!

I think like every tech that is emerging the first few iterations are rough around the edges, but in my experience once it actually works, it is surprisingly useful. My lights are turned off automatically, my air cleaner starts when the PM10 particules are above a specific threshold, I get a notification when the CO2 level is too high in my home office, the growth light for my hydroponic garden are automated and the coffee machine turns itself on in the morning!

Protip: Anything labelled "smart" these days is emphatically not.

If anyone is looking for a hacker-friendly IoT platform, I would suggest the Universal Devices ISY994 paired with Insteon dimmers and outlets. Sure, the platform and tech is ancient (best admin console is a Java applet) but it honestly works great and combines power line networking with a couple wireless protocols to seamlessly mesh your devices together. You own the device — while there is a license for updates, the device will work fine without them (and it’s a mature product so it’s mostly just new features).

The functionality can be controlled via scripting, and there are optional links to services like Alexa that give you a lot of control over what words will trigger scenes or scripts. Most of all, it just works — the device and software aren’t super complex, it’s just a triggering system that programs your non-IP devices and adds support for additional triggers and multiple scenes.

(I have no connection to this company other than as a pretty happy user).

I am remodeling my house and opted to go without any smart outlets, lights, or even USB A or C outlets. The premium that is charged for these devices are not worth the very limited benefit and I imagine they will very quickly reach obsolescence unlike the simple outlet and light switch. I had some plug in smart outlets and switches which were a necessity at my last apartment - there were no lights in some rooms so you needed a way to turn things on and off. It worked fine but I realized that speaking to your lights has no meaningful advantage and one color is good enough.

That said I am interested in doing things with home assistant with a raspberry pi - but building it permanently into my home is not in the cards. I doubt a future home owner is going to love my cobbled together security system, but they also would not love a house that comes with a service contract or sends videos of their family to the cloud.

I have replaced every switch in my house with GE's Enbrighten series generation 2 (z-wave). I run this zwave network through home assistant and it is rock solid. Can't say the same about anything related to the cloud, this includes Alexa, and Google, both of which seem to think the 'device is not responding' randomly. Meanwhile the home assistant portan app on the phone just works every time.

Voice activation is very handy, in fact I rarely use my phsycial switches anymore. Barking commands at alexa is 90% of my use case. Its just simply 'easier' then pushing something, but voice can be very problematic at times.

What I wish for is a more specialized form of voice recognition where I can speak 'cantations' that do macros or actions. This whole 'big data' 'human intelligence' determination stuff just goes south more often than I'd like.

Why is it that tech people see the villain in sci-fi films and think "it would be great to have that in my home"?

What I'd really like to see is proper, cheap(ish) PoE IoT devices. I don't need everything to be wifi, I'd like to just run standard cable to everything, all on a secure common network, with power over the same cable.

But PoE negotiation (chips) are apparently expensive, and eth chips more expensive than an esp.

If anything, all of the smart home business I read suggests that the products on the market are the triumph of project managers and "visioneers" over actual engineers. The designs seem especially flaking and almost all of the features product an instinctive cringe in me.

Three weeks ago, three of my devices stopped working — all for different reasons — and required different steps to fix them. This week, one device suddenly start working again, another connected after some initial struggles, and a third became so intrusive I had to move it to another room. This isn’t a device or brand problem. It’s an industry problem. Smart home products look like hardware but are really software, subject to updates and changes that will break integrations, contain bugs, and add new, unwanted features. But I got help from a software upgrade at https://computools.com/consulting/ and all my devices are working fine now!

Honestly, smart home tech should embrace local first & end-user-programmable-first. I'm waiting for Dynamicland to come to my home: https://dynamicland.org/

Yeah I don’t know if I will trust software to do things for me in the house. Automation is something I will not use smart systems for. I only use them to provide me connectivity so I can control them from my phone.

I will never understand why computer geeks buy IoT crap and then complain about it. It's like buying rotten food and complaining about it. What's the point?

I know so many computer knowledgeable folks and a fair number of them have 'smart' crap in their homes. These are the same people who then tell me that the IoT is garbage and a security risk and all that. No one forced them to buy that Alexa. Why do these people buy this garbage and then just complain about it?

Why does this author of this article own any of this garbage? Just throw it all away.

I have a Homepod (short story, I needed a new speaker for the kitchen, and I was shopping for security camera at the same time) and it has been much more annoying than the simple bluetooth speaker that it replaced. The other day I was hearing strange sounds from it, rustling and crackling and murmuring, and I couldn't transfer the podcast on my phone to the Homepod like I normally do. I was convinced that either something was electrically malfunctioning, or one of our neighbors had inadvertently hacked it and were trying to watch an ASMR video, or worse, I was inadvertently listening in on somebody's open mic. I restarted the Homepod, started playing the podcast, and then my phone momentarily disconnected and the rustling and cracking started again!

Eventually I figured out that the Homepod was playing a track from some experimental percussion album that I bought years ago and haven't listened to since. Killing the Home app on my phone stopped it. So the Home app plays music??? Why is this separate from the Music app on my phone that is for playing music? Why does the Home app not show when I check my phone to see what it's playing? Maybe the app that plays music is running on the Homepod, but it plays music from my iTunes purchases? In that case, why is killing the Home app the only way I can see to control it?

I don't @#$%ing know. I don't care. I never asked it to play music that way. I don't remember being consulted. I didn't even know the functionality existed. I couldn't immediately see how to control what was playing, so I still don't know what the functionality is, and I don't care. All I know is that in the future when this happens I can stop it by killing the Home app on my phone.

I can only imagine that the Home app and the Music app are developed by Battlin' Business Units who are fighting over engagement. The focus on engagement is turning technology into the equivalent of those squeegee guys who soap up your car at an intersection and hope you mistake it for a sincere attempt to be helpful. Except those guys at least care about the yield from their engagement, and if you look angry enough they won't ignore your attempts to wave them off. On some quarterly report somewhere, every shitty experience where a feature gets shoved in your face is celebrated as evidence of a successful feature launch.

Sad but true.

My Skybell decided to forget that it belongs to my house this week. It does that a couple times per year; IDK why.

And my GE Z-Wave light switch failed after two years. It doesn't work via Z-wave, but also doesn't work as a mechanical switch either. Online, people say that the failure rate for these is really high after a couple years. So I replaced it with a dumb switch.

And for some reason SmartThings is a hell of a lot less good than it was a couple years ago.

I think one of the problems of DIY smart home implementation is ... the DIY part.

I think the DIY designs suffer from sedimentation, or buying something that works for very specific function, then forgetting about it and moving onto the next very specific function. Although individually these functions may work, together they multiply problems.

I think much of this can be reduced if DIY-er sticks to a fewer solution. Just on for communications, I have seen Bluetooth, ZigBee, LoRA, Wifi, Ethernet, and modbus in a single home...

I have a fair amount of automation, an I've had a pretty good experience. Yes, a couple things have failed over the years. But I have one steadfast rule -- the automation must fall back to normal operation. Short of a physical failure in the switch, it should always be a switch, even every bit of automation around it goes haywire. Then I'm only annoyed that the conveniences are unavailable, but I haven't forgotten how to use a light switch.

Has anybody else here had “SmartRent” thrust upon their apartment? My management recently installed a smart lock on my door that I hate. It is an order of magnitude slower than the key I used to use, not counting the time it takes for me to pull my phone out, unlock it and open the app. And my door is now arguably less secure (although I guess lockpicking isn’t that hard).

Why do apartments do this? Is it marketing? Tax breaks?

I almost feel like there's two generations of smart-home concept at play.

One of them is basically a modern reinvention of X-10. Automation is the selling point-- turn on a outdoor security light at 18:00 and off at 06:00, switch on a water pump when a moisture sensor fires, maybe turn on the indoor lights when the garage door opener starts lifting the door. This feels like a much more solvable problem. It really requires very little "smarts". We could do those things in the 80s with low-voltage signals over CAT3 wires, a bag of 74xx logic gates and jumpers, and some relays. Now, we've replaced the cables with short-range wireless protocols, but there's still very little need for a huge complicated software stack or arguably even a CPU to run the show.

The new generation seems to be about voice control and external services. It takes a bazillion times more infrastructure to capture, decode, and relay "Hey, Siri, turn on the security lights" or accept a message from some remote network relay saying you want to turn the stove off from 300km away, than it does to ask a local battery-backed clock module "Is it 18:00 yet?" And, of course, the reliance on external services tingles my spider-sense for "new revenue models" that involve the tail of user-data sales wagging the dog that is "actually making a product that does what people expect it to without surprises."

I don't think marketing does a good job of decoupling the two. I'd be more interested in a home automation platform that focused on the first option-- simple, bulletproof, and impossible to kill off when they decide they no longer want to support it. But I suspect everyone wants to sell the latter, because for some reason, babbling at your appliances is now modern and sexy rather than a sign of oncoming dementia.

I'm sort of salty because I can't find the one automation device I want. The ceiling fan in my room is on a normal switched mains outlet. I'd love to replace that switch with "on/off/on if it's over (temperature selected on knob)" This seems like it should be a $20 part and a "detach two wires and insert in new switch" install job. All I can find are vendor-specific things that aren't likely to work with my random contractor-grade fan, external boxes clearly designed for plug-in, not hard-wired devices, and systems that are clearly intended to run a whole HVAC system (and obviously won't fit tidly in the little blue wall box)

I paid an appalling amount of money to set myself up with Philips Hue. Their application is so rigid I can't make it do what I want. They have automation but they only allow you to turn on your lights when you come home and turn them off when you leave... I'd like some lights on when I leave thank you but their app doesn't allow for that very simple use case!

I always find it curious that these systems are very much event driven and not state driven. If you set the lights to have an On state between those hours, the system could periodically check them and assert the right state if it's wrong.

(although that drives you right into the scenario where you want to change the state, but some supervising entity keeps overriding you)

After a recent thread here on HN, I read the book "Calm Technology" by Amber Case. For those designing their own home automation systems, it provides nice guidelines on how to design technology that resides in the background and doesn't demand too much attention (in notifications and maintainance).

Amazon’s eternally parochial Alexa team has just recently rendered my Rainbow Echo Dot useless, by updating it to demand a kids profile, in a country where Amazon does not support kids profiles, and despite it having worked for years prior across four continents.

There never was a more apt term coined for all of this than “Internet of Shit”.

Reminded me of this fussy house from "There Will Come Soft Rains"

https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20So...

There's a bigger message beyond IoT: every new bit of technology you bring into you life requires some amount of upkeep. The same thing is true in your job: new code, new services, etc. all require upkeep, so be prepared for that, and use it when deciding if you really need something.

This is why I stick to the /r/selfhosted flavour of smart homes.

I'm OK with some challenges, but I want to be able to troubleshoot it myself and understand what is happening. DIY also helps me learn (esp32 etc).

Alexa & friends are mystery boxes of black magic. That doesn't tick any of my boxes

There's a lot to be said for taking control and building it yourself.

We live on tank water and I monitor our 3 tanks using influxdb and grafana on an ec2 instance. It's absurd overkill for the job, but man it is reliable since no-one but me ever makes any changes.

I was an early adopter of Wemo stuff and theirs has been categorically crap. They were slightly redeemed when I control them using Home Assistant but Belkin’s all and support have been shite.

Calls it "smart home" describes exclusively "cloud home" along with cloud home problems.

Meanwhile I've got homeassistant in a docker container and zwave and everything just works.

Interesting, as English is my second language I always thought that the clunk behaviour was due to my accent. But reading this thread seems like it is not, google assistant is clunk

My Nanoleaf works without even connecting it to the wifi. I just turn it on and off by unplugging it and plugging it in again. I dunno why I would want anything else.

I have a mechanical timer rebooting my cable modem and wireless router every morning.

A few people have mentioned smart bulbs. I have some data that might be useful when choosing smart bulbs if dimming ability is important to you.

I measured a few in a dark room with the bulb in a desk lamp aimed straight down at a lux meter on the desk. The bulb was 41 cm from the meter.

For each bulb I measured at 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% brightness.

The bulbs I had were a TP-Link white bulb (TPL), a Merkury Innovations white bulb (MIW), a Hue white bulb (HW), a Merkury Innovations color bulb set to white (MIC), and a Hue color bulb which I tested set to cold white (HCW), daylight white (HDW), white (HPW), soft white (HSW), and warm white (HWM).

         TPL   MIW    HW   MIC   HCW  HDW  HPW   HSW  HWW
  1%,     14,  135,   64,  135,   10,   7,  10,    5,   3
  2%,     14,  149,   64,  162,   10,   7,  10,    6,   3
  3%,     26,  162,   65,  170,   11,   8,  11,    6,   4
  4%,     43,  180,   65,  182,   11,   8,  11,    7,   4
  5%,     58,  190,   66,  200,   13,   9,  13,    7,   5
  10%,   128,  246,   77,  255,   20,  15,  20,   12,   8
  15%,   196,  303,   91,  322,   34,  25,  34,   21,  13
  20%,   261,  364,  112,  388,   54,  40,  54,   34,  21
  25%,   325,  428,  143,  451,   74,  67,  74,   46,  29
  50%,   630,  725,  400,  776,  282, 218, 282,  184, 118
  75%,   909, 1008,  820, 1099,  650, 483, 650,  410, 263
  100%, 1160, 1283, 1382, 1408, 1146, 850, 1146, 725, 463

For comparison, I also measured some non-smart bulbs. a Great Value 100W equivalent LED measured 2540, a GV 60W equivalent was 1255, and a GV 40W equivalent was 881. Two Cree 60W equivalents were 1195 and 1085. Finally, some actual incandescent bulbs: 100W 2300, 40W 790, 25W 294.

For the smart bulbs the TP-Link and the MI bulbs where the most linear. The MI bulbs fit a linear function with R^2 of 0.9997 or better, but that function would be 130 at 0 so they aren't very good if you want really low light (like a nightlight for when you get up to in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom).

The TP-Link is almost as linear (R^2 = 0.9977) and its function would be 7 at 0, so it is great for nightlight use.

The Hue bulbs are quite non-linear. The color ones get closer to 0 than the TP-Link so make great nightlights. The white one doesn't get close to 0 so is disappointing as a low light bulb.

The curve for the Hue lights fits a quadratic polynomial well. For example the Hue color set to plain white matches 1168.3 b^2 -31.431 b + 10.89 (where b is the brightness from 0 to 1) with R^2 = 0.9999. Same for that bulb on the other white settings I tested. For example set to warm white it matched 464.82 b^2 - 3.2729 b + 3.1916 with R^2 = 1.

This raises a question. I believe human perception of brightness is not linear. Is it actually better from a perception point of view to have a dimming curve that is linear like the TP-Link bulb, or a quadratic curve like the Hue bulb?

When considering smart bulbs, check to see what power-on settings they have. The Hue bulbs can be set to power on off, power on to whatever state they were in when they lost power, or power on to any specific color and brightness.

The MI bulbs power on at full brightness. This can be annoying if you have one in the room in which you sleep and you get a short power loss overnight that normally would not wake you.

If you don't mind that, and not being able to get anywhere near as dim is the others, they can be a good deal. They are 3 for $15.88 at Walmart for white. A Hue bulb would call $15.88 a down payment. (MI color is 2 for $15.88 or 4 for $19.88).

I don't remember what the TP-Link does on power on.

I've come to find that "smart" as in, I can schedule them, is quite useless in the long run.

In the last 3 months:

1) Lennox "Smart" icomfort thermostat... tasked with running the entire dual-mode heating and cooling system in the house (ie: all the heating and cooling). Hard reset itself and lost it's cloud connection. Was still showing in the app (ie: no option to add a new one), but the app wouldn't relay any information and the thermostat itself was showing "cannot communicate" error when trying to make any changes to the temperature settings. Buried deep in the installer settings menu was an option to re-pair it, where after several obscure errors, it finally re-joined the "account" and resumed proper working. The worst part is that this thermostat is basically doing the exact same thing as a normal thermostat, with no added intelligence (sensing temperature and turning relays on/off).

2) Wemo's randomly disconnecting from the app, despite google being able to control them... this is particularly concerning as they're clearly connected to something.

3) Wyze camera (v3, latest firmware...) that will run fine for months on spotty wifi (I've added an SD card for local loop recording) but the if you try to connect to it from within the app for live viewing, and it fails to negotiate a connection (due to the aforementioned spotty wifi connectivity), it will permanently disconnect itself.

4) Wyze smart irrigation sprinkler controller that is weather forecast aware, opting to skip watering if mother nature is planning on doing it anyway... will skip a watering due to forecasted rain but not check if it actually rained when calculating ground humidity levels, therefore skipping the next one as well. There is also no way to connect two sprinkler controllers (if you have more than 8 zones) in a group so that they don't run simultaneously and exhaust water pressure. They are considered 2 separate houses.

5) Meross smart garage door controller will occasionally forget whether it is open or closed, and displaying "overtime" warnings accordingly and will wait for 1 minute after a close/open command before recognizing its true state by process of elimination, "I've been closing for a minute, so now I'm closed". Bafflingly - it has an integrated magnetic sensor on the door to detect when it is actually open and closed - it knows when the door is opened by a 3rd party, and alerts accordingly.

6) Blink cam will trigger its own motion detection when it's turning on or off it's blue "recording" light, causing an infinite loop of "motion detected".

My dumbest smart house items (LED lights mostly, some bluetooth with wifi hub, some built-in wifi) are the chinese ones you see all over Amazon, and they tend to "just work" in their dumbness. They all use one of 2 apps (Smart Life or Magic Home - amusingly, most work on either since they likely all use the same wifi and control ESP). They rarely disappear, work without firmware updates, and I've yet to catch them sending anything back to the mothership (ALL smart devices are on their own wlan & subnet without packet forwarding - I would recommend everyone do this). You can pair them with Google Home, Alexa or Siri, and then get rid of the app itself if you are concerned. Many of them can be connected to simply by setting them into pairing mode, connecting to their wlan, and hitting an http api or sshing in.

I have high praise for the lutron "caseta" family of smart lights and plugs - which use a proprietary radio and a single control hub which never disconnects and doesn't pollute the wifi radio space. The only downside is that they cost more than the wifi-integrated plugs, which is a bit crazy given it's a low power zigbee-like radio and control plane.

Hopefully things get better before more critical things become "smart".