A man who got kicked off a service because of an alleged remark.
Shameless plug for Home Assistant, here. Everything is controlled locally (unless you pay for their internet pass through service which is basically just a relay), most brands of smart devices are supported, you have extreme customization capabilities, and it’s all open source.
Plus, it can run on pretty much anything.
Shameless plug for just using your little fingies to operate the light switches and thermostats. Everything is controlled locally and you only have to pay for the light and the switch (fingers should be included in your default setup)
The moment I had the ability to turn off all light, A/Cs and what not when I leave the house, I can’t look back, plus I don’t have give up my privacy.
Fingers may be included in most setups, along with actuators like arms or legs often required to approach the finger to the switch, but they still come with a wetware control unit that gets easily distracted by anything from puppies, to the fear of being late for work.
That’s a good point; generally my little fingies aren’t the problem as much as the control unit.
Honestly I’m just a bit of a luddite when it comes to “smart” tech, which I guess is somewhat funny considering I’ve worked in IT for a looong time. Or maybe it’s because I’ve worked in IT that I turned into a luddite?
I’ve been so deep for so long into the “DIY IoT”, that now I look like an IoT luddite. Funny how that works.
For example, I’ve had the idea of a bistable electro-mechanical light switch on the back burner for so long, that by the time I’ve found a practical solution, decades had passed and it was burned to a crisp, with other stuff having taken center stage.
bistable electro-mechanical light switch
I’m just going to nod and pretend I understand what this is
The idea was: a normal light switch, you can turn it on or off with your finger, and it will stay that way, even if power goes off. A remotely controllable switch, the easiest version would be a relay, that stays on as long as it is powered, and goes off otherwise. I wanted something that would be remotely controllable, but would stay in the last position no matter whether power happened to go off or not, and wouldn’t use power to stay on. There were bistable relays like that, with two coils and permanent magnets: energize one coil, it switches that way; energize the other, it switches that other way; with no power, it stays in the last position, just like if you had flipped it with a finger. Only… those bistable relays were bulky, expensive, and you couldn’t flip them with a finger. I wanted both things: flip with a finger and stay, and flip with a signal and stay.
Nowadays there are some switches that have a sort of bistable relay built in, a couple coils that switch it on or off depending on which one gets energized, and it stays that way… but in the meantime the whole idea kind of became obsolete. Now you get SSRs that use negligible amounts of power for a very long life time (no moving parts), and dirt cheap microcontrollers with also negligible power draw, that come with enough memory to store the last switch position along a firmware to connect wirelesly.
The “purist” in me would still want a bistable electro-mechanical switch, but the practical side tells me “who cares”.
Now my pet peeve is that those smart switches, don’t all come with all sorts of sensors, which are also dirt cheap nowadays.
Personally what I enjoy about hobby projects – and I’m just blithely assuming this is one – is that I can be just as much a purist as I want. Sure, it’s often impractical and ends up taking much more time than a straightforward solution would, but if I’m doing it just for me I’d rather make something “beautiful” (for some very subjective definition of the word) than useful. I’ll probably enjoy the process more, and for me the process is at least as important as the end result.
They aren’t mutually exclusive, I have a few smart lights and I try to plug them into switched outlets so I can turn them off manually and also control digitally.
Controller locally except that one case - also unless you add devices that are cloud controlled (most things that say they are Alexa-compatible, most Wifi things, etc). Which a lot of people may not realize, and it’s a LOT of things). But is totally up to people to use, and there’s often a way to make (or hack) those things to be local-only.
Home Assistant really is best-in-class though for most Home Automation things. It’s super super powerful and supports virtually EVERYTHING, especially if you can put in a little work. And for medium/advanced users, it’s peerless.
They just still have a really long way to go to be as user-friendly as it should be. Even for “advanced” users.
This is the reason my house has:
- mechanical locks
- mechanical windows
- routers using OpenWRT
- no smart home crap
- no Alexa/Google Assistant/…
- no internet connected thermostats
Fwiw, I think using a self hosted home automation setup (shout out to home assistant) paired with smart devices that don’t use internet (e.g. zigbee, zwave, or matter once it comes out) can allow you to have a smart home without these kinds of fears.
That said, I would definitely agree to using mechanical locks. Although a monitored smart security system is probably still a good idea - you’re letting a company virtually enter your house, but you can’t rely on a self hosted solution to notify you when your power goes out, for example.
This, I have plenty of smart home stuff all run locally, and every external call is something I can control and disable. Having a smart home isn’t inherently the problem; outsourcing all the computation to cloud servers run by unaccountable corporations is the problem
My experience from watching lockpicking lawyer is that locks are just social niceties that tell others ‘please don’t go here’ and have no real ability to stop anyone who doesn’t care. Other than the owner who gets locked out by forgetting their own key of course.
You definitely still want locks because most people have no idea how to pick a lock and a lot of crime is crimes of opportunity. But I don’t think there’s that much of a difference in most locks. A slightly better lock might dissuade a thief who learned how to pick cheap masterlocks, but someone who truly wants to get in doesn’t even need to pick a lock. I’d hazard a guess that break-ins happen far more often by breaking the window than picking locks.
When I installed digital locks my partner was paranoid about them until I reminded her that we live in a house with a lot of windows. If someone is going to the lengths to crack my lock rather than smashing my windows, we have other problems.
@beaumains @greenskye the problem is, with a broken window it’s pretty obvious that something happened. And for example you can point that out to insurance people. With a digital lock, that has been opened and then locked again without your knowledge, not so much.
Lol this. Everyone’s so paranoid with locks, this only makes sense if you live in a concrete bunker. Also, if they want to get in, they will. Self housing and using devices that are patched and communicate locally is the way. The only issue with this is you have to be on top of your system and ensure it’s patched and up to date, but wouldn’t you oil your manual lock occasionally?
edit: added clarification
Unless I’m mistaken, don’t HomeKit compatible devices need to be local-first too? I remember reading that if I switch my Ecobee thermostat to HomeKit (via HomeAssistant’s bridge), it will use local control instead. It’s on my todo list but I just haven’t done it yet.
I think this thread about Ecobee and HomeKit was where I started…
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And this is why you shouldn’t allow things essential to your life to be mediated by some faceless tech giant. Self-hosting may be more effort, but you can at least guarantee that any issues won’t be as a result of some bureaucratic nonsense or administrative error. This is not just smart home stuff - there are similar examples affecting email, photo galleries, file storage, etc. etc.
On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; […]
Yah … that.
Having smart devices isn’t dumb, but you have to implement them properly.
It’s dumb to hand control of your smart home over to a 3rd party, though.
This is victim blaming. He isn’t at fault for trusting a company to have the bare minimum of respect for his property and autonomy, the company is at fault for not actually having that respect. Whether the company is actually trustworthy is as immaterial as saying someone “deserved” to have their car stolen because they forgot to lock it.
You can criticize him for not being cautious in this low-trust environment, but don’t let it get to the point where the party actually at fault gets off without criticism.
This is victim blaming.
Only to some degree. The guy is a software engineer and should have known better. I’d agree if it was Jenny from accounting. You could just as well point out “victim blaming” when I called someone a moron for jumping from a three storey building and breaking his legs, because it was neither his intention nor was he aware that it could break his legs. For a software engineer to employ cloud based “smart” devices and then wonder if it backfires is borderline moronic.
He may have made a mistake but his heart seems to be in the right place. Even if not before, it is now. His stance is commendable. Let’s allow people to get better than they were before.
If I ever get into smart home crap, I’ll definitely be aiming for a local network solution >_>
Go Home Assistant. They’re getting closer to having an offline voice assistant too, so soon you won’t need to use rhasspy or another open source solution.
I’m in the process of developing a whole home HAL9000 system.
Remember to be very specific about what he can lie about.
Better make sure your HAL has no concept of pod bay doors.
Their first mistake was forgetting the 0th Law of Robotics.
Ikea’s line of smart home stuff is the best generally available consumer friendly smart home stuff I’ve seen so far. All zigbee based, hub isn’t required, has local control and open APIs.
Stories like this are why I’ve never really found the concept of a smart home appealing. I’m perfectly content to do it all analog, but hopefully there’s an alternative out there for folks who think differently than I do.
There are very good and fairly easy solutions for self hosting smart home functionality. Im using homeassistant which runs locally on my own hardware, and all my smart functionality is controlled locally so it works even without internet. And should my server crash, everything just defaults to normal “dumb” control.
