The smart home graveyard is getting crowded
theverge.com
theverge.com
Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.
One downside is the commute to the wall if you want to use them. Commuting to a light switch is actually good though, I'm pleased to report it's a nice stroll. It takes around the same time it takes to unlock my phone and discover my phone can't switch on the lights in my house. It goes past a window so it has views.
When I read some vendors' stuff was gonna stop working I went home and turned off and on all my light switches to simulate a reboot in solidarity for those whose hobby is to make their home less usable. Hopefully you folks are able to spend a few hundred bucks more to refresh your stuff for this decade. If you need me, I'll be over at the wall panel.
My light switches integrate with Home Assistant, but I can just press the button or turn the knob to dim. Home Assistant Zigbee is there as a bonus, not the sole way of doing things and certainly not a single point of failure.
You can set it up in a way that it does work without it but can be enhanced with it. Some zigbee switch work like that (Like the Aqara one).
Also, Home Assistant is the most rock-solid piece of software I ran in a long time, it just never breaks for me
Smart devices work as expected for a year, fail in new and exciting ways, and then you replace them with dumb devices.
There's also a pelton-wheel turbine generator in the basement from before there was mains electricity which most likely would still work with a bit of a cleanup and oil.
There's not a single "smart" anything in the whole house. Things just work.
We put everything in pipes in the Netherlands. If you don't bend them in absurd corners and properly fasten them one can also replace the wires and switches without opening up the wall.
Then came the flimsy IoT wanting to be part of the installation but it should really be a disposable plug and play component that is easy to replace like a lightbulb.
It should use switching wires where possible, Ethernet as a second choice, then Bluetooth and finally wifi if non of the above satisfy the req.
For renovation you often have no choice but new houses entirely depending on wifi and flimsy IoT seems only worth it if it really saves a lot of money.
If HA goes down I can just walk over and use the switch. A downgrade over yelling into the air for sure but my downgrade is your daily experience.
If someone comes over that doesn’t know how or doesn’t want to use the smart speakers, they can just walk over and flip a switch.
After moving HA off a Pi I found it to be rock solid and I don’t think about it at all unless I want to make or tweak some automation or I get a new device. Adding Claude into the mix for creating/modifying automations is awesome.
I still struggle with it. It feels like a missed opportunity these days, but I just don’t trust companies to treat me or my devices with respect. I’ve ultimately boomeranged back to “no (cloud) smart devices.”
Smart light bulbs are another minefield of low-CRI, bad connectivity, worse firmwares, nerfed local featureset, etc.
Just buy Hue, problem solved - although for best results it needs custom setup which is a higher initial time investment, buth then it's set and forget.
The cheapest Hue option is a 4-pack of Hue Essential for £63. That would be 9 of those for £567 in light bulbs for the ground floor alone.
> 33 light spots, most GU10
That's a sad situation, but even if a bit ugly - a GU10->E27 adapter cotst ~$1.
Thanks for the tip on second hand, I might have a look.
care to expand on which areas the units are lacking in? I've thought about getting presence sensors recently
A bunch of Matter-over-Thread devices I have: hard to secure. I'll end up setting up a Thread Border Router on my IoT VLAN and get HA to connect to it, but that means yet another component to run separate from HA, which requires its own upgrade mechanism, backup, etc.
Matter-over-WiFi: haven't yet found one that would fit what I need. Will require expanding my IoT WiFi network to other parts of the house. My main APs don't serve IoT because a few tens of those would easily congest the radios, despite being very low bandwidth.
Most devices are PIR-only, or use subpar mmWave sensors, or a combination of both which tends to be hit-and-miss.
I haven't found a device that doesn't require a proprietary app for setup, which means tracking and the risk of them becoming e-waste.
I'm planning to build some out of cheap sensors from AliExpress and ESP32s but I haven't had the time and have too many other projects in flight.
* Hue bulbs, which get active updates and are still maintained by Philips, and honestly are pretty good, if insanely overpriced, especially the HomeKit bridge
* "iHome" smart outlets which I belieeeeeeeve were once upon a time made by Belkin? They've ended support but the outlets themselves are very reliable, and pairable/managable entirely within the Home app so I barely noticed when they were discontinued. Picked up a 4-pack of them on fleabay recently for $20 and they work great still.
Mind you I'm not saying I'm great at this, if anything I'm lucky in that I really haven't had any smart home tech go poorly for me, apart from some other outlets that were some no-name brand. They're still kicking around my house but they need power cycles far more often than the iHome ones.
No matter the convenience of a given smarthome feature, it will have to overcome the hurdle of all the time and money I invest in setting it up being liable to get vaporized at the click of a button from the supplier. Ultra frustrating experience, but one that instantly cured me of any romantic notions about the futuristic smart home.
(1) After a momentary power outage all the lights wind up switched on. It happens a lot at 3am and it's annoying as hell to get up at night and turn all the lights off. I really ought to program my homelab server to check the light status when it comes up and if > 80% of the lights are on between 11am and 6am it oughta turn them all off or maybe return the system to a snapshot of where it was before the power down event.
(2) The hue hub crashes every month or so, it always comes up after being power cycled except for the time that my son blew the circuit breaker screwing around with guitar amps. Now that I think about it I oughta put a WiFi smart plug on it so my homelab can reboot it.
(3) When things go wrong my wife becomes dependent on me which is a hassle, particularly when I am out of town. It's one of those things like having a home theater that requires two remote controls and then finding your family can't manage to watch TV anymore. (God, I want to punish everybody in the electronics industry that anything to do with Logitech Harmony going away)
(4) I'm the only one at home that notices it, but the color rendering of RGB lights is terrible. If you want good color rendition of things in the environment you want a spectrum which is smooth like a black body spectrum but if you want strong RGB effects you want three laser-like lines so you can get a good choice of saturated colors.
In ordinary life it doesn't matter a lot but my arts n' crafts involve making fine sensory distinctions like I load this paper into my inkjet printer
https://www.redrivercatalog.com/browse/60lb-polar-matte.html...
and one side is a little more whitish and less mottled and the other side is a little yellowish and you can really see the paper grain... if you've got a very bright light with good color rendering it is easy to tell the difference but under RGB lights it is difficult. And of course if you are evaluating the quality of prints or clothes or something you want the best CRI you can get.
I think there was also a novelty around a lot of smart devices that just didn't translate to much real world benefit. And in my case here, there was also the matter of having more pressing issues than fussing with smart lights and the like--like rewiring a substantial portion of the house when various walls were open..
If your device requires, in any way, an internet or cloud connection, even just for setup, it doesn't exist for me. If you have some FULLY OPTIONAL services I might like as a SAAS free or subscription option, ok; but the device MUST 100% work without ever knowing your cloud exists. It must also be designed to fail-safe and have manual fall-back operability (e.g., when the power goes out, I can still manually switch its state to OFF).
I recall an article or comment on HN talking about the advantages of a "MidWit Home", devices that weren't really smart, and just had remote control. I've got a bit of that with some remote switches to use around the house with enough range we can turn on from the car when arriving home. Also timers. Seems like a good way to go.
I haven't made a vlan yet for IoT stuff because my ISP's router do not let me, I can't wait to have my own openwrt / opnsense router and put the ISP in bridge mode.
That advantage of this is that some ISPs will try to blame your router (and your modem if you are using your own modem) for any problem you call in about no matter how obviously it is a problem on their end or with their equipment. This way it is not obvious to the tier 1 tech support people that you are using a different router.
I suppose if you want to be really thorough leave the wifi on, either with whatever the default network names the ISP router starts with or with names that don't match the ones you really use which are on your router.
Since I've owned it, all I've had to do is replace the clutch which was like a $25 part at the time. Doing it yourself (or having a repair technician take care of it), is easier and more cost-effective than hauling it out and buying a new one.
Cloud enabled features on home appliances had extra complexity and the chance your device will be bricked when the manufacturer decides to discontinue their cloud services.
The June oven had computer vision to detect the food and probes to test for internal temperature and could tell the user when their food was ready.
Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens, but at home, I don't need this at all because I can tell when the cheese on top is caramelized.
At $600-1500, that's a high premium for a countertop oven.
Question is - are these things good enough that restaurants actually use them? I would be surprised if they were.
And the answer still keeps coming back, "not very". Not zero. But the problem is that there isn't a lot of value there to capture, so I'm not willing to pay all that much, especially when you consider the full cost-of-ownership of failure modes that they create. The daily annoyance of "flipping some light switches" just isn't that great.
That this industry keeps getting run by MBAs who keep calculating
1. Hey we can lock them in with these centralized services.
2. (A couple of years later) Hey we can make more money if we
shut down our old centralized services.
At least my smart phone, as much as we may all like to complain, brings a lot of value to me that can be leveraged for that sweet, sweet MBA-approved lockin. The smart home proposition never had anywhere near as much to leverage. And the smart phone world still is full of MBAs delusional enough to think that "storing the user's heartbeat information in the cloud" is somehow enough leverage to be worth a $9.95/month subscription to me.
I wonder if I live in an alternate universe because I am only seeing good news about Gemini coming out of Google.
Ah, so they can't allow others to support it because they already have a platform where they explicitly chose not to support it. It's like someone saying they considered calling 911 to save a gunshot victim but decided against it since the bullet came from their gun. What a way to try to look like you care about your customers.
99% of smart kitchen appliances end up costing 4 times as much just for the "smartness" which in reality isn't only their weak point, it's also the cheapest part of the whole ensemble. Your washing machine or fridge double in price because the manufacturer slapped on an ESP32 and a vibe coded insecure cloud backend. Even devices that could last decades end up betrayed by the dependency on that super-expensive crap you though is a selling feature.
If you need to, buy cheap IoT, the kind that you can work with locally (HA, HomeKit, etc.) with no internet access, the kind you set and forget and when it stops working you can genuinely treat them as consumables. Don't pay thousands for something that will be quickly dragged down by their marquee feature.
I don't even have Home Assistant; I control them with a 192.168.xxx.xxx address in a browser on my phone.
It's almost too perfect. Let's see how long they last before they cook their internal electronics.
Apparently hyphens seem to have gone out of fashion. Please can we bring them back?
That's when you put a QR code on a tombstone.
So the defunct smart-home devices from your smart home end up in the smart-home graveyard.
Same goes for man-eating lions and high-net-worth individuals.
Even though I've spoken fluent English for decades, it's still only my second language and I'm always learning new things about it!
Personally I had never thought of "smart home" as a compound word, but rather as a qualifier and a noun. It's a home that happens to be smart. Similar to "blue sky", or "hot dishes". In my mind neither of those would be hyphenated.
It's different from "man-eating", since that's not an eating that happens to be man, so in fact the whole word only makes sense as a unit in any sentence that would use it.
Clearly, I need to adapt my understanding! :)
I'll put it this way -- I listen to them for general entertainment but not for information.
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/296679-smart-ovens-may-...
My fingers are faster than tachyons now and it saves me wasting time and brings me back to HN where at least the comments are more entertaining
- Hue lights still slap, "just work", and have proved to be reliable over time. They are a big upgrade over non-dimmable, non-temp-changeable bulbs, or buzzing dimmer switches from ages past.
- Home Assistant's UX is poor
- I should probably try some of the temp control and security camera tools