Comment by chaz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaz | Hacker News Reader

Google's Nest seems to be setting out a home automation standard, partnering with Whirlpool, Mercedes-Benz, Jawbone, LIFX, IFTTT, Logitech, and Chamberlain. Over the weekend, Quirky announced its $79 Wink hub, partnering with Home Depot, Honeywell, GE, Rachio, and Philips.

The two announcements were obviously timed against each other. It's hard to tell who is reacting to whom, but my bet is that Quirky is hurriedly reacting to a pending Google I/O announcement this week, and getting the word out by giving the NYT an exclusive [1]. It also looks like Nest has an actual, planned microsite vs Quirky, who only has mention of GE on their website (https://www.quirky.com/ge) and doesn't have much of an official Wink page yet (https://www.quirky.com/wink is bare).

Add to that Apple's Homekit, announced at WWDC, partnering with Osram Sylvania, Skybell, TI, Chamberlain, August, Honeywell, Haier, Schlage, Philips, Black and Decker, Netatmo, Withings, and others. More brands/logos, but it's early.

Regardless, it's at least a three-horse race and we'll see it get worse before it gets better. All have serious brands on board and consumers will be confused for quite some time. A single, open, interoperable standard is coming but the race will encourage a flurry of product investments to get smarter devices in the initial stages.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/23/technology/quirky-hopes-wi...

"announced its $79 Wink hub"

I've been in this hobby for a long time (like since X-10 in the 80s, more Insteon now) and one unwanted trend I see is exploding prices. Inflation has pushed your stereotypical X-10 appliance module from $10 to currently $20. I've been mostly Insteon for a decade or so now, but the venerable X-10 appliance module is a good canary as its been around for decades unchanged. Anyway its off to the races with the new breed, hundreds of bucks for a mere thermostat, etc. The days of your linux box turning your aquarium tank lights on and off in a cron job for $30 total are pretty much coming to an end, although it'll still be possible, much slower and harder to automate and it'll cost $750 and have a phone app that demands access to your contact list, but it'll still sorta work.

Another interesting trend in home automation is abandonment of all legacy tech. Ask someone what came before the arduino in microcontrollers, "uh, nothing, they were the first ever". Ditto the new wave of home automation, the zillionth competitor still positions themselves as the "first". Not too impressed with this trend either. If I'm making fun of this marketing scheme, I'm probably not the only guy in the target market making fun of the trend.

A final interesting industry trend is the conspicuous consumption aspect. Nobody seriously tried to claim an early 80s era X-10 wall wart was a designed thing of beauty to show off to your friends, any more than a circuit breaker or a gas shutoff valve. The new wave is all about the bling as the highest priority. Does look pretty nice.

So that's the four trends I've seen in HA, your observation of extensive partnering agreements, the cost is exploding, every copycat is the first product ever, and appearance is the #1 priority. None of the trends could have been extrapolated from the earliest days in the 80s to 2010 or so.

I suspect interoperability is NOT going to turn out any better for HA than it has for home stereo-TV-dvd-xbox remote controls, or kitchen appliances (try swapping egg beaters between competing portable mixers for a good time, if you have a deep pocketbook)

Otoh, home automation might finally go from being a hobby to something normal people actually can use to make their lives easier. I also dabbled with X10 in the 90s and personally I can't wait for apple to come along and do it right. Needless to say, I completely disagree with your final observation.

"normal people actually can use to make their lives easier"

Normal people don't like capital investment of any sort either monetary or time, and newer technology seems not to change the total investment at all, beyond a modest increase, but only adjust the ratio between the two categories.

There is also the stereotypical UI tradeoff that has existed for decades in computers of "make simple things easy" which is almost always in direct opposition to "make difficult things possible". The tradeoff in the new wave of HA products is dangerous because there is the risk of not gaining traction with the noobs because simple things do not help much, while losing all the experts by making the really productive yet difficult stuff impossible.

From a "do it right" perspective, X-10 done the right way is the decade or so old Insteon system, reliable, 2way, giant address space, fast (or, faster than X-10)... "Home Automation" done the right way seems an undefined problem, and that has to be done before the solution can begin.

On the contrary, most people with the income to do so are in fact delighted to invest in things that simplify their lives and save them time. It's one of the pleasures of the modern era.

Regarding this claim about UI tradeoffs, you clearly do not remember the past seven years. Were I to travel back to 2006 and hand you an iPhone 5, you would think it was a gift from some distant alien civilization. The point being that great design continually defines upward what "make simple things easy" means. It is not diametrically opposed to making the difficult things possible.

I really, really, wish we could skip the whole vhs/betamax stage for once :-( Not only is it tiresome, it inhibits adoption across the board, we've all been there too many times before.

I'm not so sure. Doesn't this stage allow the market to dictate which features are important to (albeit early-adopter) consumers?

In a way it does, but it also hurts the early adopters that picked the wrong standard.

As a kid I was in a Betamax family. After that, I've learned to not be an early adopter when companies start pulling this garbage.

It's probably unavoidably a time of turmoil - with so much at stake there's a disincentive for all companies to universally "place nice".

A cambrian explosion of standards and partnerships from which most likely one or two durable standards will emerge, hopefully the "best", is natural - but painful if you're impatient to just get something done.

I'm glad you mentioned HomeKit, because at this point, I'm really starting to fight my desire to go out and hook all of these things up to make sure they work with HomeKit. Apple doesn't exactly have a history of really releasing the standards they say they will (looking at you, iMessage), but I'm all for the idea of standardized home automation.

When did they ever say iMessage would be an standard? I recall them stating FaceTime would be, but didn't some patent nonsense get in the way?

I'm misremembering - it was FaceTime, not iMessage. Whoops.

Unless I'm continuing to misremember, there was some patent issue that blocked FaceTime from working over cellular on the first version, but it was cleared up when AT&T finally accepted that they were the only carrier not supporting it.

No patent issue, just AT&T and money.

The patent issue is a DoD-connected company forcing Apple to abandon P2P and break the end-to-end encryption. Not unlike what happened with Skype, though quite a bit more hostile.

Remember when Steve said he was going to the standards boards the next day with the spec for FaceTime?

I checked intermittently for about a year afterwards: never saw any activity to substantiate that claim.

Would it have helped? It apparently infringes multiple patents Apple does not control. They lost to VirnetX and now Samsung is going after them.

> A single, open, interoperable standard is coming

Do you have some more info about that, or is it a gut feeling prediction?

There are standards for Home Automation communication out there - ZigBee and Z-Wave. These are the low power communication protocols that home automation devices can use to talk to each other (WiFi is too power hungry and heavy weight). If you take apart a Nest thermostat you can find an unadvertised ZigBee radio buried inside.

ZigBee is an open standard developed by an alliance of device manufacturers. Z-Wave is a proprietary standard developed by Sigma Designs. Both are able to create a low power mesh network for communication between home automation devices. These protocols have been around for a while and are supported by 100s of device manufacturers.

That said, I have no idea what Google/Nest or Apple plan to do. They may be creating their own standards for communication, or they may build a communication protocol on top of ZigBee or Z-Wave.

If you're interested in working with an interoperable standard now though, you can buy off the shelf ZigBee or Z-Wave radios, devices that speak ZigBee/Z-Wave, and build your own HA solution. However, I've found through personal experience that interoperability between devices using the same standard is not always perfect. I'm looking forward to the heavyweights getting into the ring and hopefully cleaning up the industry and making it more interoperable.

Don't forget Archos announcing their home automation kit just a few days ago

http://www.archos.com/us/products/objects/chome/ash/specs.ht...

It's very, very competitively priced! Nest, in the UK at least appears quite expensive. I also dislike how currently the intra-operability is provided via cloud services, from both a privacy and reliability of my internet perspective.

Here is the Wink website:

https://www.winkapp.com/

Google or Apple will eat Quirky for breakfast.

AllJoyn, as well. http://allseenalliance.org

I'd be really worried about an exploit allowing someone to unlock my front doors and walk into my house.

You mean lockpicks, or were you thinking of a sledgehammer?

I'm talking about the electronic version of breaking and entering, which would be incredibly difficult to prove someone did. And if falsely accused, would be incredibly difficult to disprove.

sure, kinda like if someone picked your door's pin tumbler lock... or if someone accused me of picking theirs since they knew i carry a pick set w/ me.

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