Time and time again It takes just one MBA trying to boost numbers to turn a good product into a data collection nightmare.
Honestly is there any IoT brand that we can trust long-term? Maybe IKEA stuff?
Honestly is there any IoT brand that we can trust long-term? Maybe IKEA stuff?
That is, be cautious about anything that will directly link to your wifi (and so doesn't need a bridge) unless you can confirm you can isolate them on their own wifi network or firewall them off should you feel the need to now or in the future, or anything that uses proprietary protocols where you can't rip out the bridge if the provider goes rogue.
Hue bulbs uses zigbee, so the bulbs themselves are not a problem. The bridge is. There are "dumb" zigbee bridges/interfaces, including USB controllers you can use with open source options like Home Assistant.
If you can't avoid a proprietary bridge, only buy what you can afford to replace, or where the device is still serviceable to a sufficient degree if you turn off/remove the bridge (e.g. Lightwave switches go "dumb" if you turn off the bridge, but still work), or if you firewall it (e.g. if you can still control it via wifi even if the bridge can't reach the internet).
Anything you can flash Tasmota [1] on should be good to go as well. I believe that includes all or most Shelly devices as well.
IKEA so far seems like a decent bet as well.
[0] https://shellystore.co.uk/ [1] https://tasmota.github.io/docs/
Of course, there's no guarantee for future products, but once they're set up they're not gonna change unless you go in and update their firmware.
I think if these had Z-Wave they would have cost a few dollars more each, due to licensing. It would be nice because I do have a Z-Wave mesh up and running alongside a zigbee mesh and a few oddball Wi-Fi only devices like these shellies, but they work well enough with home assistant that I don't consider to be a drawback yet.
The only thing I wish they could do better is expose more of their configurable options via whatever API they present to home assistant. A couple of these devices speak mqtt which opens up a few more capabilities, but there are still many fine-tuning aspects like controlling the way a switch attached to the device functions, i.e. whether it behaves as if it is detached or functional - useful with toddlers around) are invisible unless you are using the built-in web configuration page.
I really don't understand many of the "smart" device manufacturers. They clearly aren't capable of running the services required to manage their devices, so why do they keep insisting on doing so? My parents have a smart radiator that couldn't be managed for over a month because a server in Norway was down. Why not just have it be manageable by Homekit and skip the infrastructure cost?
Why don't companies offer better, longer-lasting products that can be community-driven after EOL? Because money.
99% of IoT devices would be fine with just "here is MQTT address" and a way to push updates (preferably with gateway downloading updates and devices updating only from gateway)
Raspberry, Arduino and others: Release some awesome open-sourced hardware standard for the smart home: lighting, measuring, interfacing!
Or does something already exist?
Not really. I do not use incandescent bulbs nor bulbs that require account. You've chosen 216 and you'll find it everywhere in nature.
It's our fault we're letting them do that. Bad behavior should be affecting profits. Probably through regulation.
Companies are not sentient “profit-maximizing machines, they’re a collection of people. And it’s people making the decisions.
Individually the organisation is made up of people, but at large it's a big anonymous machine because those people are rewarded super-duper one-dimensionally: Help profits and you're rewarded or hurt them and you're out.
It makes about as much sense to anthropomorphise corporations as it does to anthropomorphise lawnmowers. They can not feel empathy.
The onus might be on us as the public to change the laws to outlaw bad behaviour, but this does not absolve the companies, and especially the people within them who conduct, condone, or reward deceptive and unfair business practices.
this is an extremely dumb take, of course the people working at companies are responsible for bad dumb decisions that make their products worse.
For home audio, Sonos is great. Their voice assistant is completely locally processed.
Fun fact: eQ-3 is a subsidiary of the DIY electronics store ELV: https://www.eq-3.com/about-eq-3.html
Ideally, there would be a wired HomeKit secure video option, but I have yet to see it.
How?
I was under the impression that you cannot actively decide which device becomes the primary one?
I 'only' got a wired ATV and a HomePod mini - and the mini is the primary hub way more often that i'd like it to be (like... none of the time, at all :) )
Scrypted supports quite a few cameras, doorbells etc...
Sonos might have been good in the past when they were selling a way of streaming your ripped mp3s around your house, they are no longer good now that they think they own the content too.
I have many devices and use them every day - but if I had a clean slate I don't think I'd buy them again.
Sonos has a ~10 year support timeline on their speakers. That's longer than even Apple supports any of their devices, and they're often considered the gold standard of long support of tech products.
I hate being made to defend Sonos twice as it makes me feel like a shill, but it is truly how it is.
Get Bose or something similar - they'll just keep working without strings attached/tracking/on-the-road/etc forever.
ps. I'm happily using 10y+ old iMac 27" with popOS - works great.
You pay a huge premium in trade for less wires, great multi-room audio, decent sound and a long support timeline.
I will say that I hope Sonos and Google bury the axe at some point, and the Cast (or at least DIAL) protocol gets added.
Bose and other bluetooth speakers don't have any strings attached because:
* you don't have to be connected to the internet to use it
* you don't have to have account with them to use it
* you don't have to grant tracking permissions to use it
* manufacturer can decide to discontinue product or go bankrupt - it doesn't matter, you can still use product as you did before, you're unaffected
* you don't have to worry about software deprecation - new versions of sonos client for iOS require recent versions of Apple devices - you can't install client on older phones/tablets to use your speaker
Tangential PSA: Red Sea (aquatics) does/did this too. I can't control the lights on my fucking aquarium without all four of them being connected to the internet over wifi and managed through an account registered with an app with location sharing enabled. Only the iOS app worked; the Android version was completely broken.
The app lets you group lights and model the lighting curves however you want but there's no reason this couldn't have been done over Zigbee. I assume my LAN is now part of some Mossad botnet.