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Comment by ifh-hn | Hacker News Reader

I've never really got the smart home thing, and the shit being pulled with the likes of "smart" TVs and cars has really put me off any sort of network connected device I can't control.

How would you use this and ensure privacy and security? Without investing time in becoming an amateur network engineer?

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> any sort of network connected device I can't control. How would you use this and ensure privacy and security?

This was exactly the nice thing about Zigbee (and Z-Wave). They're not IP networks, they basically just work with any hub, and have no way of phoning home at all. You can use them with Home Assistant or other open source tools or write your own stack if you wanted. The thing that really blows about the switch to matter, is that it is IP based, and it looks like vendors will have another opportunity to tie specific functionality to their own hubs (and probably find a way to exfiltrate telemetry). There really wasn't anything wrong with Zigbee or Z-wave that couldn't be fixed in incremental protocol revisions (IMHO), but they don't generate money the way WiFi devices collecting telemetry or hardware churn for the sake of hardware churn does.

The solution is home assistant [0] it lets you manage and control all kinds of smart devices with a lot of customizable, hackable things. And it runs locally, so if you buy the right types of devices that don’t phone home to the cloud (or you shitcan their internet access) you can fully manage your own system.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/

Or if you want something more of an appliance, some other Hubs with Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread + Matter support are: Homey Pro, Homey Bridge, Aeotec SmartThings Hub, and Hubitat.

I only have experience with the first three (besides Home Assistant) and they work very well (though the SmartThings hub is somewhat limited when it comes to device support, graphing, etc.).

I should also mention that with Homey Bridge the dashboard is in their cloud, though the Zigbee/Z-Wave devices are fully local. Homey Pro is also local. (I think they have a Homey Pro Mini in the US now.)

Imho Home Assistant is the way to go - there's just so much weirdness going on in a regular home you need to accomodate that with any of these 'turnkey' solutions, you'll run into some limitation that you can't get around.

HA is fiddly but with enough effort you can make anything run the way you want to, and the community is pretty active.

I tried Home Assistant, but found it fiddly and to have weird limitations, e.g. the recommendation to limit statistics collection to 90 days for performance reasons (so you have to set up something like InfluxDB otherwise). The UI is also weird and not very logical.

weirdness going on in a regular home you need to accomodate that with any of these 'turnkey' solutions

Homey Pro supports user apps written in HomeyScript (which is JavaScript-based). Similar to Home Assistant, there are many community extensions, including more obscure things. For instance, our not-very-common heat pump is also supported in Homey. A lot of vendors make Homey apps as well.

In a household with more than one person, everyone eventually has to use the home automation system and with Homey (but also SmartThings), I am sure my wife can also manage it when necessary if I'm on the go. Managing Home Assistant + the hardware is going to take a lot more effort to learn.

Luckily me and my partner are all Apple, so even though the smart home is backed by Home Assistant, our interface to it is via the Home app (or Siri)

Apple doesn't make water heaters, A/Cs or furnaces, and I don't think most people would junk their own because it doesn't know how to integrate with Matter.

None of my smart home devices are Apple / HomeKit, yet they're available in Apple Home.

So these things are phoning home. The exact opposite of why Home Assistant is existing.

Before buying any IOT devices, see if you can download the firmware from the manufacturer's website. If you can't, do not buy that product.

I like Shelly's doodads. They are easy to work with, you can flash their firmware with an alternative if you want (Tasamota is popular). They have a decent onboard scheduler and the only app you need is a web browser pointed at its IP address. They don't need internet access.

As someone who is a bit of a luddite when it comes to smart home features, there are 2 things that really stand out to me that i would like.

1. Open/Close sensors, I would like to put sensors on my shed door and side gates that can tell me if they are open or closed. I will occassionally leave these open, or the kids may leave them open and would prefer they be closed each night. It's impossible for me to tell if they are closed at the moment without stepping outside.

2. Smart plugs. Being able to remotely operate / schedule plugs to shut off or on seems pretty nice. Outdoor lights being one usecase. Kids media area is another.

I use YoLink products for #1. LoRA radio based with 1/4 mile range and low power consumption. I have one on my shed door. Frequently on sale at Amazon.

Open/Close sensors + lights (and optionally luminance sensor) is what I find to be useful. When I open my home door the light turns on automatically if it's dark enough.

It seems like you have a strong enough use case to justify it!

I started with similar needs and thought it would be frivolous, but now I find it genuinely useful and can’t believe I waited so long.

Easy — you’re not their target demographics. Almost all of my friends have some sort of “smart” devices, and I’ve helped personally to install them when things were a bit annoying (Spotify not syncing, dhcp not working properly and etc.). Absolutely not a single person cared about the “privacy and security” issue.

That's just untrue, these are the exact products a privacy conscious demographic would/should buy.

Of course there are. IKEA just doesn’t care about them because the market is so small it’s just not worth it.

I think IKEA does care about this kind of stuff. In the past couple of years there has been an ongoing enshittification of smart home devices to move into the IoT space requiring a Wi-Fi connection that always pings a "home server" and when aws-east-1 is down your lights don't work or whatever.

Despite this IKEAs devices have been mostly Zigbee and have worked very well with ZB2MQTT and Home Assistant out of the box. You are not required to buy a hub either that talks to some random server. Not to mention that IKEA had the to make sure the new smart hub the released was compatible with Matter/Thread meaning that customers are not forced to send more E-waste to landfill. The bar is pretty low these days and I feel IKEA exceeds that by a large margin

You can have both, Zigbee/Z-Wave devices are really easy to set up and they are purely local.

I know I am not. I am such a luddite that I just can't understand solving the triviality of flipping a light switch.

It seems like something for bored, married people.

That's half the point, these are using local communication (Matter over Thread) and are not cloud based. Privacy by default

It's not that complicated to get, some of them have useful features.

It's just a personal tradeoff between features, downsides, and risks. Most people don't consider the risks at all (implicitly down-weighting that factor), and the value assigned to the features and downsides varies by person. I have some smart lights, because I like the convenience of those lights being on voice control. My TV is "smart" but doesn't get internet because I don't consider the risk of ads acceptable.

running home assistant on a raspberry with a zigbee usb hub is a weekend project and it gives you full control of your devices, you don't need internet access or any cloud subscription to control them.

ZigBee, Thread, and Matter are all locally controlled if you have a local controller that is controlled locally.

You'll still end up being an amateur network engineer though.

I don't have much experience with Thread + Matter (except the only device I have, an upgraded Eve Energy being a PITA), but for Zigbee/Z-Wave you do not have to be an amateur network engineer. Pairing is really straightforward and devices will automatically mesh and get routed by most mains-powered Zigbee/Z-Wave devices. It's not like you have to set up DHCP, manage an IP address range or anything like it.

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