I do not, nor will I ever use, any "smart" device. "Smart" devices are
- unnecessarily complicated
- privacy destroying
- overpriced
- vendor lock-in
- often infected with online ads you can't get rid of
- likely to stop working if the vendor goes bust, their business model changes, or they just feel like it
IMO, it is rarely or never a smart decision to get a "smart" device.
- I want to know everything about you and who you talk to
- I will control and change things without your say-so
- You can't leave me easily
- no you can’t know what you need to know to self host when I leave. How dare you think of other vendors that’s basically cheating on me
I find a mix of DIY and premade devices to be pretty good. I have all of my lights on Lutron Caseta (completely local, works when Internet is down) and can control them from my workstation, the wall, physical remotes, Apple devices, and Siri. I have Home Assistant bridged to Home Assistant, so can do things like control my workstation's LEDs from the Home app or Siri. Home Assistant has kind of interesting integrations, like something that reads the humidity sensor in my bathroom and the outdoor humidity to suggest how long the window needs to be opened to properly ventilate it after a shower.
I think the smart home is pretty OK. It gives you a single pane of glass to control all controllable devices, which ends up being quite worthwhile. (On a video call and need more light? Just switch them on from your computer. Too cold? Turn down the AC. No corporate tracking, just convenience.)
The worst thing that came from "the internet of things" is that people now assume that having great home automation equates to having to use cloud-connected devices that aren't really under your control. It just isn't so.
But then there's a lot of stuff that our governments could solve but they never will.
I used to have an Ecobee thermostat. A good idea, but it wouldn't work at all without a connection to their server. Their server uptime was a complete joke which made my thermostat useless.
I also had a few smart plugs for lamps.
I spent way too much time fiddling with all this garbage, so I trashed it all.
All these "smart" devices are anything but.
All of my lights, outlets, and dozens of other niche things, never connect to the internet, and everything is fully functional when there's no internet connection.
Home Assistant with Zigbee devices is fantastic for avoiding vendor lock-in[0]. EspHome and Tasmota fill in nicely for if/when you want wifi devices.
I could make all this computer controlled over a home server if I wanted to, but what's the point?
My wife said the same thing as you at first, and originally had no desire for any of it.
Instead of buying dimmer switches to replace the on/off wall switches, I got dimmers that go in the gang box behind the existing switches. I did this for her, because she preferred a real switch and now we can on/off with a real switch (as it worked originally) or control brightness/on/off with voice, app, or zigbee remotes.
Since I did this on all our wall switches, my wife went from using the real switches 100% of the time to now around 0-5% of the time. When we're away from home she always makes a comment on how annoying it is to NOT have it.
Asking for a brightness change while watching a movie or cooking with dirty hands, automatically tuning the lights to something warmer at night and brighter during the day, forgot to turn something off and you're already in bed, automatically turn on the lights inside the front door when we open it with an arm full of stuff, having energy monitoring, virtual 3-way switches without any re-wiring, adding additional lights to switches that don't have real switches, controlling the TV without a remote, the list goes on.
If the reliability of it all wasn't 99%+, I wouldn't want it. I keep it because everything "just works".
I’m using openHAB instead of HA for the tinkerability, but the new versions are pretty power user friendly
My battery powered Zigbee devices last at least a year without needing a recharge/replacement, which was a huge selling point (door/vibration sensors, temperature, etc), although zwave is similar if I understand correctly. Most of mine are on year 3 now and probably need new batteries soon.
My order of preference would be Matter, Zigbee, Wifi, and Bluetooth being a last resort option. Z-wave isn't on the list only because I decided against getting a controller for it.
I love that we have options like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)
They're all plugged into wall power all the time, and powerline Ethernet works fine.
What am I missing?
Most of the remotes switches, sensors, and some others are all battery powered and last at least a year without needing to be changed.
In fact, they would be largely useless or cumbersome if they needed a wire.
When I have humidity/temperature, light, motion, etc in every single room how many freaking power points am I meant to have in my house, aha. Maybe American houses have walls absolutely studded with power points but most other places don't.
We have a heat pump, so we change the temperature roughly twice a year: heating temperature in winter, air conditioning temperature in summer.
But my Ecobee reports the temperature in three rooms (and occupancy, which I tie into automating lights), outside temperature, outside and inside humidity, fan/heat/cool start/stop times, and some other more obscure metrics up to the mothership, and the excellent third-party website Beestat[1] tracks all of those using Ecobee's well-documented API. It lets me spot anomalies, and helps me understand if I've got the resistive heating configured to come on at the best time.
If we had time-of-day rates for electricity, it would optimize for those, but we don't have time-of-day-rates.
(If I had gas heat, or if I didn't work from home, I'd at least schedule temperature changes to set things cooler at night or when we're away -- maybe driven by the occupancy sensors! -- but apparently that's not effective with heat pumps.
(At least, I think I'm only doing that: I suppose it's possible the software that talks to them via BT got them on my WiFi without my permission? Doubtful but hmmm...)
Anyway at some point there was a software update to the controller app and it couldn't find them. After much back and forth, I uninstalled that app, and the iPhone's iHome or whatever app then recognized two of them, but not the third. That one started freaking out and randomly turning itself on and off.
Now it's mostly off, but comes on for a bit about once a week. Yes, I'm lazy about changing lightbulbs.
All this drama for... freakin' lightbulbs that can change color. Doesn't make me want to further smartify my home.
I figure some simple fake LED candles are my future mood lighting. I'd spring for a Mathmos Lava Lamp[0] if they didn't look like sex toys.
[0]: https://mathmos.com/lava-lamps/lava-lamps-for-children-and-a...
This is true of anything these days...hell even as someone who's into electronics/firmware development stuff and whatnot, I wouldn't even bother trying to fix a $20-50 (or even more) device, let alone the average person. Stuff is complicated enough these days that you pretty much have to become the expert on any device in order to fix it.
The Xiaomi zigbee stuff is pretty good/standard, amongst others. IoT can be great, I find the most useful thing is using cheap Xiaomi motion sensors with wifi led lights so that lights turn on/off based on presence in the room.
- install a cert so we can MITM the traffic and see what they're phoning home about
- turn off the phoning home without breaking local functionality
- configure a different address for cloud I/O, such that I can run the "cloud" part on my own infra if I want those features
Start with Windows, iOS (Siri), and pretty much any updateable software.
Let's change that. Anything less is a RCE vulnerability.
* Assuming no malicious lobbying.
I personally would not consider anything IoT because anything connected to the internet is a) a vector for intrusion into my network and b) has a lifetime measured in single digit years. Anything going into a home should realistically have a lifetime of at minimum ten years. For capital improvements like a furnace or thermometer connected to it (or a washing machine, or a stove), it should be measured in decades. Even lightbulbs aren't that disposable anymore thanks to LEDs.
Google discards things after a handful of years. Anything cellphone related has a lifetime of 5 years max, and for most it's more like 2 to 3.
Keep that shit away from my home and my car.
I'm staring at a pair of wifi enabled lightbulbs above the island in my kitchen that are stuck on the same hue I set them to three years ago when the app actually worked...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/134131981597
Adjusted for inflation this would cost almost $500. Probably explains why the ones in my bungalow starter home were just bimetallic coils with mercury switches.
Maybe a little. But I think a big part of it is businesses realizing they can make a lot more money, at least in the short term, if people have to replace their products more often.
Ex: You have a thermostat or an alarm system that runs Debian, Debian gets a vulnerability, you try to upgrade it, but you need to change Debian versions, and your old stack isn’t supported on the newer version. Nowadays you need to keep patching all your old appliances, keep the old domain names and exact URLs, and need to actively look for vulnerabilities. All of that can only be provided by a subscription, not the initial purchase cost:
Actually, I'm pretty sure DVDs and music CDs and games only exist because that was their only option. If you look at what the law is and what they're trying to do, you don't own the rights to the game you buy.
If they could forcefully take it back from you and disable the in game radio because their license expired, they would. And they do, when they can. Same with movies you "buy" instead of renting for money. They can and do just change their licensing and remove it from your account.
Game launchers also do this. If you get banned in 1 game, they can just delete your entire account and all linked services because you're not really buying the game.
You're barely even buying a license to use it. You basically have zero rights other than where technology has limited them.
Anyway, that aside, software shouldn't be your only concern. It has all of the visibility right now, but tech hardware should also be up there. Physical life of tech is currently terrible. An unopened, factory sealed electronic left in a store will still die after like 5 to 10 years. Nobody wants to or can feasibly repair it so it's just e-waste. Analog equipment exists for some things with higher tech solutions adding functionality and reducing power in some cases, but I'm curious to see more data about how these truly compare.
I came across this while looking at how to backup data for a long time. I was also curious about the case of analog devices in space. It's been hard to find a lot of info about it.
Thank You. And that is precisely why I increasingly hate anything that comes with software.
Let's say the update fails catastrophically (loses power during flashing etc) and the device is bricked. I'm not home, it's dead of winter, pipes freeze, burst, and flood my home. Far fetched? Maybe, maybe not. Who is liable for this? I'm sure the "click to agree" EULA when the thermostat boots up absolves them of responsibility.
There's a lot of survivor bias here. I have had plenty of dumb physical things fail in what seems like unreasonably short times.
But I do have done physical dumb devices that are 100+ years old. I do not interpret that to mean that everything from that era / factory / manufacturer lasts 100 years, just that all of the surviving items did.
Physical dumb devices that are 100+ years old are usually made out of pretty durable, but individually replaceable parts. Thus they get fixed if they do break. The mechanisms are usually pretty easy to figure out, so you can spot if a spring is broken, a bolt is loose, a thing stopped turning, etc.
Can you rephrase this? I don't understand the point you're making. Two verbs against the same subject but with different temporal context, perhaps you stuggle with communicating sometimes?
This is a weirdly confrontational comment.