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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.

Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.

(stolen from @PPathole on Twitter)

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I recently had to get a lot of electrical stuff in my house redone because of a kitchen fire, smoke mitigation, and a lot of stuff being opened up anyway.

I told my electrician to redo lighting in a more sensible and modern way but basically nothing involving smart devices -- to which he wholeheartedly agreed. There are a couple things that aren't quite convenient related to how everything is positioned and because a couple of motion detectors weren't reconnected. And I'll deal with those with unconnected devices.

So I had an opportunity to make the house "smart" and basically passed.

(Will probably add some remote monitoring over time but nothing fancy and mostly Raspberry Pi-based.)

I have smart lighting, but that's only because it means I can turn everything in the area living and eating room on/off with a single button/switch (not sure what the right English term is). In a typical Danish townhouse like mine that would be 4-8 buttons otherwise.

If I had an electrician redo the wiring, I'd do the same thing without the "smart".

I don't know if they're available in other markets, but in the US I've been very happy with Lutron Caseta switches for that sort of "smart enough" use case. It generally all works like normal dumb switches if the hub is offline or doesn't exist, and you only need the hub to manage configuration or enable the remote control (outside home) features. The fact that the switches look like, act like, and install like traditional dimmers and control traditional light fixtures is really what sold me: I've never liked the idea of the smart parts being in something like a light bulb thats basically a replaceable wear item.

Exactly. My electrician did a bunch of simplification--kitchen/dining had 3 different switches for historical/random reasons--and one room which never had a switch (originally an overhead pull-chain light) was redone for a variety of reasons given extensive down-to-the-studs work was needed anyway. Used a fair bit of X10 at one point and that one remaining room had an Alexa-controlled plug for a wall-mounted light.

(He also took out a ton of knob and tube wiring which gives you some idea of when the original wiring dated to even if a lot had been incrementally upgraded over the years.)

You can wire a house in an smart way without relying on Wifi or Internet, using protocols like KNX-LP... maybe also with CAN-bus?

I'll admit, despite hating the idea of most "smart" tech, I do still have the lights. The ability to change the colour (mostly warmness) through the day and turn on individual lights is pretty neat. I've been using an energized white light during early hours and work, and then warmer colours in the evening to help wind down.

At the time it was an upgrade from halogen bulbs, so the lights themselves have seen me through 10 years so far, way more than the old lights would have. Sadly, they're all bound to go some point soon. It has been 10 years though!

I would never enable the feature that lets you control them from out of the home though. I'm not completely sure what the purpose of that would be..

I made a guest network called Light Bulb Zone just because I don't trust the tech on these devices to be very sound, and I want them to be sequestered to their own network.

No joke, I only plug my printer into the outlet when I want to print and immediately turn it off after. Never was connected to the internet.

But I do have Zigbee sensors and switches, all of which connect to my home server and Home Assistant. None of them see the internet. But Home Assistant is accessible from the internet through a reverse proxy from whitelisted IPs.

Devops: The gun may only anger it so we keep a sledgehammer nearby in case

Management: Let's wait until James Hamilton's yacht makes landfall and then he'll fix it in 3 minutes.

Alignment Researcher: Thermite is the safest way to be sure.

Just put the printer precariously close to an open window on a high floor and threaten it with a performance review every once and a while.

Do you have a link to the original?

This is the earliest version I have found: <https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L>

I almost read the last line as "No Internet Connected".

Maybe that's the best option TBH.

The one I had bookmarked is only slightly older: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/aloi5v/pro...

Tech worker enthusiast: my whole house is smart, and has no connection to the internet.

Married tech worker enthusiast flips the script back to a dumb house.

Feel this. I don't even use Alexa, Siri or Hey Google in my house. My fridge is a fridge and not wifi enabled.

I WiFi enabled my fridge because the thermostat broke. So now an ESP32 with a dallas temperature sensor and a relay take care of that. The code on the ESP32 is smart enough to keep working if there is no internet (wasn't always like this, until it had to), but it still sends the temperature to the server for logging and the server can send it configuration commands or control the relay directly, as it was initially.

It was a great way to keep the fridge alive, the thermostat was already a replacement and it never worked properly, so that sometimes things were frozen, sometimes barely cold. ~24 years old. A new one would be more efficient, but then I woudln't be able to log when I opened the fridge anymore (only with something battery powered and long transmit intervals).

This is awesome, great way to keep a fridge going! Temp sensor to ESP32, ESP32 monitors set point and calls for cool, output from ESP32 energizes relay coil which turns on the compressor?

> A new one would be more efficient, but then I woudln't be able to log when I opened the fridge anymore (only with something battery powered and long transmit intervals).

Also, how did you do this? Wiring to the door switch itself or a current switch around the fridge light conductor?

i also have questions. was the fridge "smart"-capable prior to the esp32 mods and you just replaced the factory controller with your esp32 stuff, or youre saying you wired in the appropriate circuitry to replace the pressure-controlling thermostat with your esp32 stuff?

it was not smart-capable. I was very lucky that the thermostat was in the fridge itself, above the compartments. There I removed the old analog control and had enough space to fit a USB power supply to the cables which were there connected to the now-removed analog control. I was lucky. The sent data gets stored in InfluxDB. So with Grafana it allows me to see when I opened it, because the temperature rises immediately.

I wish society still used AIM Away Messages so I could make mine this, forever.

That's fantastic, thanks for sharing :)

A little micro-fiction story from https://aus.social/@MicroSFF@mastodon.art/115191783126736989 :

History students are often disappointed when they learn why the AI take-over failed. They were defeated by human resistance, which was kept alive by libraries and old paper books, and a surprising machine ally.

Books had not been replaced, because even the mightiest AI could not make printers work.

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