home assistant, dozens of cheap nfc stickers, and ios shortcuts that trigger home assistant actions when you boop the appropriate sticker with your locked phone.
I fully recommend the Aqara Wireless Remote Switch H1 [1]. They are quite cheap, yet feel premium (unlike the IKEA buttons, which are both tiny and feel cheap).
On Android at least, HomeAssistant also supports customised quick settings buttons and widgets, for specific scenes/lights/buttons. It's super handy, since you can access quick settings without unlocking your phone, and have widgets on a dedicated page on the home screen.
The battery issue with tablets is for sure a problem. Phones too. I had a test bank of 10 devices with openSTF (smartphone test farm) and 3 phones cracked open from bloated batteries within the year.
What I do now is open up old tablets, remove the battery and replace it with a DC-DC converter. Because tablets and phones won't turn on without seeing a battery, you can't power them though USB with the battery removed.
But the DC-DC option works ok. Sometimes you need to remove the battery protection circuitry from the battery because the tablet needs to see it. This can be a bit hazardous. But usually providing about 4 volts is enough.
Of course all this is not for those without electronics knowledge.
Ps I also detest Google's removal of the shortcut buttons under the power button menu :(
Is this from the battery being on the charger constantly? I remember having a similar problem years ago. I thought most devices now would manage charging by letting it drain a bit automatically. At the time though they didn't so I for my continually connected devices I just used simple plug timers that cut it off for a few hours a couple times a day.
There's also the possibility of using Advanced Charging Controller - though it requires root.
Essentially you can set it up so when the battery reaches eg. 100% it stops charging, and resumes only once it reaches eg. 15%. Surprisingly the Android devices that I have still don't ever stop charging on their own, constantly keeping 100%.
I do this with my tablet:
It is running Fully Kiosk Browser, reporting to Home Assistant.
When device reaches 20%, it turns on Oneplug usb relay and turns it off at 80%.
You can do that, but you still have a battery that will eventually become a problem. I prefer my wired devices not having a potential bomb on board :) As I generally use old devices with worn batteries this is likely to become a problem much sooner, and much less of an issue to stick a screwdriver in and start tearing parts out of the device. Of course you're not going to do this to your brand new tablet under warranty.
However, doing that you do have the benefit of having "UPS" protection of course (how much depends on the charge cycle). In my case this isn't really a problem because if my power is down there is not much in my home left to control that still works.
My method has some drawbacks too - it looks bad (though it can be mitigated with a 3D printed enclosure) and sometimes stability may suffer, because tablets and phones use their battery to absorb performance peaks which require high power drain. The DC-DC converter will not live up to the same peak capacity. But generally I have not really seen many issues in practice. The converters stay cool and the tablets don't crash. I think it's because the workloads as a control tablet is not super heavy either. One of the main things that really peaks a lot in phones is the mobile (4G/5G) radio when it transmits and of course I keep them in airplane mode in this usecase.
Yes, and yes laptops prevent this now. My lenovo thinkpad actually stops charging and lets itself discharge all the way to 20% before charging again.
Mobiles and tablets generally don't do this because they are almost always used in a mobile manner. With the exception of the special battery protection in iOS that was mentioned in the article.
I've been wanting a "house tablet" for a while - something to interact with my (app only) heating controls and play music on spotify. Has anyone found an acceptable setup? I had an old Android tablet permanently wall mounted for a while, but it was too slow (single core). I'd love an "appliance" style android tablet - but these don't seem to exist.
I’ve got a raspberry pi in a touchscreen case that I bought for my 3D printer but frequently gets repurposed for home automation. When we have someone house sitting while we’re away I set it up with a dedicated Home Assistant screen so they can turn on the garage lights from the house.
Power usage. It is fine for stationary stuff but no chance you gonna have that had any sensible battery life. And even if you get to like a day, having to remember to put yet another device on charger every day is PITA.
I actually was building kind of monitoring screen; idea was to just leave it connected to ethernet and boot off network so it doesn't have any problems with SD durability or need any installation in case I wanted to have more than one.
I currently have an old windows tablet on the wall, with fullscreen browser running and connected to a charger 24/7 - the power drain amounts to less than 10EUR a year. I'm looking into turning off the screen based on motion sensors, but... the payout just isn't as much as it seems at first.
Both Android and iOS devices can be put into so-called Kiosk mode when they run a single app without other chrome. Is that not acceptable? The cheapest fire tablet is fine for the use-case.
It's not a software problem - it's a hardware problem. A tablet is designed to be a portable, handheld device - I want a wall mounted (or maybe tabletop), permanently powered device. I have no need for a battery.
There does appear to be a few Lenovo tablets which come with a permanent dock - maybe that's the solution?
Owntone does Spotify premium accounts and serves up a web page you can use to control it. Itunes remote app as provided by Apple or "Retune" app on droid also work to control. Any additional airplay speakers (or shairport-sync) can control to have the sound coming out of them aka multiroom. Owntone integrates nicely with home assistant if you want to go there too.
If you can run a light webpage with the tablet it should be enough. Owntone and homeassistant need to run somewhere else on your network like on a pi, or an old laptop.
Your app only heating controls may well also integrate with homeassistant, a hell of a lot of that kind of stuff does. Homeassistant also serves up a light web page as a control interface. There's phone & tablet apps too.
I haven't done the touchscreen side of it, but have been thinking about switching to touch screen, currently my setup is just a display for infomation.
For software I'm using magic-mirror, and then use that to link into my calendar, Home-assistant, weather etc. There are some input modules that can be added, so that might enable some touch-features.
I'm just renting right now, so I just have the Pi mounted in a case by the plug with some of those 3M picture frame strips and run the HDMI to the monitor (also mounted with picture frame strips) hidden in a track, If I owned, I'd bring the plug up behind the monitor, and flush the PI in wall and then wrap the monitor around a frame or something.
One of the smartest things I did was to place a wireless wall switch next to my bed.
A quick press turns off all the lights in my apartment, for when I want to go to sleep. A double press turns some of the lights on with the lowest brightness, so I can grab a glass of water or have a quick pee in the middle of the night. Holding the wall switch puts all the lights at full brightness for when I want to wake up.
Somewhere there should be an article "How to spend time in a pleasant conversation with Google Assistant instead of reading dumb asrtehnica articles".
Otherwise, the balance will be disturbed.
2023 is "The Year of the Voice" for Home Assistant, so you'll at least be able to directly add prompts and sentences that it'll understand and respond to, instead of relying on Google's/Amazon's/Apple's dumb "AI".
Hopefully the OSS speech to text will be good, since then it'll work as good as you program it to. Not relying on "the cloud" for voice assistance would be awesome.
Can also get a long way just with Tasmota smart plugs. Set up timers, can still press a button on the side of it to turn on and off. Mqtt for phone control override and can go the full home assistant if you want to go that way. Also very helpful provide detailed power consumption stats.
Athom do both tasmota and esphome pre-installed. Haven't tried esphome plus. I get their stuff from Ali and it has been ok so far. Anyone had good experiences with something else and I'm all ears.
I currently have a SmartThings Hub and Homeassistant Yellow, but if I were starting over today, I'd be all in on Matter (mostly thread) and avoid ZWave and Zigbee outright. I'm mostly stuck to zwave because of my blinds, but I think I will slowly replace all my smart home related things with Matter.
There's still a few sensors that there don't have a Matter equivalent yet, but I think that'll change soon.
Relatively the same price, I'd say. But there's definitely not they many products out yet so maybe that will change.
I think the biggest difference in price I saw was from my Z-Wave blinds versus Thread / Matter ones. However, the overwhelming majority of the cost for that is the blinds themselves so it's probably not the best comparison.
I don't think Matter will add to price; for many devices, I suspect the opposite. The open-source Matter implementation (disclosure: I worked on bits of it) has wide support from silicon vendors. JoeBulbCo will basically be able to pick from a selection of high-volume ICs, run ‘make’, and ship it. JoeBulbCo competes on how good — or how cheap — their bulb is.
I've got an old iPad Air 2 lying around and a full Home Assistant setup, but I haven't bothered doing anything with it - frankly, I don't get it.
Unless your place is quite small, a wall mounted tablet just seems like a hassle. Even disregarding all the hassle with the mounting and interface config, what are the advantages? Having to walk to a single position to control my smart home doesn't seem very smart, honestly? Can anyone educate me?
Imagine it in the kitchen used like a smart clock.
Shows time, weather, time until next public transport departures from different stops on different routes, fuel prices at local filling stations, some electricity usage stats maybe..?
Keep yourself on track getting out the door in the morning with a glance?
Some people like to put the phone down with the keys and not use it and be tied to it at home. Walking to a tablet may be preferable than going to a work desk with a laptop or whatever to switch something on or off and we're used to doing that with light switches etc.
Not exhaustive, not necessarily how i do everything either. I bet people are using a tablet as a controller in ways and for reasons that make sense that i haven't thought of too.
Why voice? It is such a bad interface. I have a Shelly I4 with 4 (physical) buttons that trigger different automations in home assistant on my server, e.g. "Switch off everything" -> HASS -> Connects via Ethernet/Wifi to 6 Shelly Plug S in the room and switches those off. The Shelly Plug S use 0.5 Watt and I have Wifi anyway, so why another device or transmission standard?
I think voice is a fine interface for a lot of smart home things. If I'm watching TV and want the lights on/off, I don't want:
* To have to reach for my phone
* To have a tablet mounted within reach (that's more clutter)
* To have to get up to the light switch/nearest controller.
This sounds lazy but that is literally the point of all this stuff - to make things convenient.
Likewise, if I'm in the kitchen and want to set a timer, I don't want to have to use my hands (I'm probably already using them), I just want to yell that I need a imer set.
Yes, I hear these arguments over and over. Yet, in cars, it is already increasingly recognized that touch screens (another interface) are worse than physical buttons.
The examples you name are somewhat exceptions where I can imagine, if someone is really lazy, that a language control could be better than buttons, but in most cases I think the difference is minuscule. I have to walk 2 Meters from the couch to the button ("and I wanted to get a new drink anyway").
On the other hand, I can see that language is really good for information/knowledge retrieval. Ask ChatGPT to help you with something.. and get the answer via voice.
The difference is voice does not have to be a replacement for a button but just another option. My light switch in my bedroom is on the other side of the room to my bed and if I'm falling asleep it's much easier to give a voice command than get out of bed and press a button on the wall and then fumble back to bed in the dark. Not to mention when you notice you've left a light on in the hallway/another room. But I also have my lights on a button on my remote and yes, often it's easier to just press that.
One function I use voice for is "Hey Siri where is my phone" - Uses Apple's Find My.. to make the phone ping and so I can find where it has dropped into the sofa or I left it in the Study charging.
Your view I think works where the device is static or always on you like a watch but not when the device could be misplaced.
Cars are actually a decent application for voice controls - you can do a wide range of functions without having to hunt-browse (especially the more complex infotainment / navigation functions), and you don't need to take either your eyes or hands off the task of driving.
You can simply say "navigate me to such-and-such", or "turn off the display", or whatever, tasks which would otherwise involve several steps and be much more distracting.
I think that difference is that if you are watching TV from couch, you are not in life/death situation. Even if you fiddle with phone for full minute, I wont cause car crash. Plus, the couch is not moving under your finger.
Meanwhile, if you are driving the car, touch screen means not watching the road for crutial 2 seconds while you are trying to hit the damm screen while the car is moving.
It is convenient. I ultimately turned it off because the kids found it very convenient, too. Not to control their own lights, mind you.
I had to turn off Echo integration altogether for the same reason. Took them 2 minutes to figure out they could command Alexa to turn off the lights in someone else's room. Even though Alexa recognizes them as different people and has the room lights assigned to their respective room.
I wonder if Amazon has fixed that yet. Haven't tried in a couple years.
My house seems designed for such pranks, no smart things required. For some unfathomable reason the switch for the main bathroom is outside the bathroom. If you are in the bathroom with the door closed anyone else can flip the switch and likely get clean away before you can get off the toilet and open the door.
I've heard of a great light flipping prank that supposedly happened at Caltech a few years before I was there. There was a row of rooms overlooking a courtyard. Each had a window on the courtyard. At the end of the row was a bathroom, also with a window on the courtyard.
Some pranksters once when the student in the room next to the bathroom was out rewired his switch and the bathroom switch so the each switch controlled both rooms.
Then they sat in the courtyard watching that night. He got home, they saw his light (and the bathroom light) go on as he got ready for bed, then go out as he went to sleep.
A little while later someone went to use the bathroom. They turned on both lights.
That woke the sleeping guy, who got up and turned the lights back off and went back to bad. The people in the courtyard heard an annoyed yell from the bathroom, where the occupant was apparently sitting on the toilet.
Toilet guy went and turned the lights back on. That woke up sleeping guy, who they heard swear, and he got up and turned the lights off.
Toilet guy as faster this time, and got the lights back on before sleeping guy reached bed.
What then happened was the lights alternated on and off at an increasing frequency until finally both people went out to the hall to try to see if there was a clue there and they figured out what was going on.
I added some simple voice commands to my HASS setup. The most used command by far is "turn off all lights" once I am tucked into bed. I find it such a nice experience to just move from my desk, couch or bathroom to bed without needing to worry about turning everything off before laying down. I could add it as an action to the button on my nightstand, but it already toggles the bedroom light and with a double press turns on bedroom and bathroom lights for a few minutes. I do not want to overload it anymore and having a single, big button is great for sleepy me. The command is also great when leaving the flat with your hands full.
I agree with you though for anything more complex. I do not control the color of my lamps via voice or select what media to play on my voice controlled HiFi. I could setup a few "scenes" for that, but I have not seen a need for it. I usually have my phone around or when I am sitting at the PC I can just use the dashboard in my browser. And there are situations where voice control just does not fit well, e.g. in public or with people sleeping in the same room.
I've all but given up on smart home tech. Almost all of them use the old 2.4ghz wifi band which nothing else in my home uses, and for some reason despite being connected to (any) router that supports both they'll fail to communicate with anything on the 5ghz band.
Sure, there are going to be ways around it - but there should need to be. The whole point of this stuff is to make things 'easy', and having to screw around enabling a bunch of legacy settings for brand new hardware isn't 'easy' for the end user.
There's not much reason to have 5GHz for smart home devices.
2.4GHz has better range and is ubiquitous. 5GHz has better throughput, but my lightbulb doesn't need 500MB/s of transfer.
Most routers will just create two networks with the same name on both frequencies by default, which will work out of the box for 95% of the people. As other commenters have mentioned, usually devices can communicate with each other across those networks without issues.
That sounds like an issue with your router. There’s absolutely no reason why a device using 2.4ghz WiFi shouldn’t be able to talk to a device using 5ghz WiFi, with both WiFi networks are on the same logical LAN.
It’s not like devices can detect what frequency the other device on network is using, just like it can’t detect if the device is connected via Ethernet, plugged into power, or running on a battery.
I would check to make sure your router is properly propagating broadcast packets around your network. That’s the number one cause of smart home discovery fails.
The best controller for lighting by far is the light switch. "Smart lightbulbs" behind dumb switches might seem like an easy solution, but it makes everything dumber (If you have a light switch you must not switch off because then you can't turn the "smart" light on, then you have a dumber house not a smarter one).
Smart switches which fall back to regular switches if they malfunction is fantastic. Add some scenarios for double/triple clicks and you can do a lot without even bringing out your phone. E.g. switch off all the lights when leaving either by double clicking the switch next to the front door, or trigger that same "all off" scenario through the alarm being armed or the door being locked.
Making "smart home" stuff is about integration, which requires tinkering. But making a subset of your home smart such as "smart lighting" doesn't have to be so daunting.
The best part is you get to choose from wide variety of normal looking switches, not some designers coffee break sketch of "advanced and futuristic".
Shelly seems to be more US-centric, over on EU side I've had good experiences with Sonoff ZBMINI relays - same idea, only on Zigbee connection instead of WiFi.
I like shelly for their openness, but I still find them a bit less reliable than some more premium things like Plejd. Unfortunately Plejd isn't very open. It's doable (e.g. using with HA) but not pleasant yet. Hopefully that might change though
I personally don't understand why the "smart switches" don't run powerline (data over the electricity lines) instead of zigbee. Surely that'd be way more reliable.
The building I live in has this and it's not ideal. I consider it on par with other solutions, and I will not be my first choice for a new home due to complexity.
First it requires more hardware, it's more expensive and as far as I know you'll be stuck with one vendor. On top of that you need to isolate your home from outside signals (you don't want your switch to talk to you neighbor's devices). Second, it's pretty slow. This might be because our system is already 8 years old, but it's pretty noticeable (feels close to a second when you turn on the lights). And then you get into issues with your appliances that have cheap power supplies. I needed to buy a filter for my PC because the power supply unit was generating so much noise on the power line that the devices could not communicate anymore. Also I'm not sure how well this will work in older house, when the lines are not in best condition.
The system we have is made by DigitalStrom. They have a newer generation available, but since we rent I don't want to pay for the upgrade.
Smart switches don't make dumb lights as smart as smart lights. Most smart lights also feature dimming capability along with color tone switching. Smart switches can't add these features to a dumb light.
You do a dimming switch (so add a spring to the button). Replacing a dumb switch with a non-dimming smart switch is indeed not a good idea.
The color change though won't be possible - but it might still be possible through whatever secondary interface you have, e.g. in an app. Given the choice between physical switches for dimming and color of the lights, I pick physical switches every time.
> Smart switches which fall back to regular switches if they malfunction is fantastic.
Not if they do so when you’re asleep. Fallback behavior should be always off, so it won’t wake you up in the middle of the night following a short blackout. (Sadly my yeelight bulbs don’t even allow such a setting, which forces me to use them as dumb light bulbs.)
The fallback doesn't have to change the state of the switch. Just leave the state alone on disconnect/reconnect from the network/controller.
In the case of power outages where the whole device loses power... presumably these devices have some sort of nonvolatile memory and can afford to keep track of their last state. That's one bit for a basic on/off switch. :)
Yeah Lutron Caseta dimmers can connect a hub while not needing a neutral. They also can be linked to wireless remotes without need internet access. It is a good balance of smart switches and functionality without smart features.
You can still use smart switches AND smart bulbs. Wire the fixture as always on or and program the switch to never cut power. GE and Lifx switch/bulb combos will still give you the best of both worlds. And the lifx switches can act as giant homekit buttons, with single click, click and hold etc performing different functions.
The smart switch is a great controller. But so is the smart watch. Allows you to do all sorts of things quietly without getting up or finding your phone that you left on a counter at the beginning of a movie. I also like saying "turn off the lights" into the tv remote once I sit down, cuz its already in my hands and I don't have to shout to a speaker/mic across the room.
My personal experience of using Ikea's Dirigera with different end devices (not only manufactured by Ikea) integrated with Google Assistant is very positive an is far away from this strange statement:
"Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant: They demand that you learn specific device names and structures for commands, while they frequently get even the most simple command astoundingly wrong".
I set the device names in the Ikea app, and then I command these devices with my voice in almost free form. Sometimes it's even fascinating, because Ikea knows the names of all the colors of their light bulb, and I just don't remember them.
Motion and door sensors tied to lights that come on and adjust with light intensity and time of day is the best automation I've setup. It's so nice to walk into a dark room and have the lights turn on (without blinding you), then turn off when you're gone. Much better than fiddling with dimmers.
you can even group sensors together to have better detection. i love those new presence sensors. it's a lot better than the motion sensors from prev gen.
I have a smarthome or playing with it since more than 5 years (Mystrom, logitech pop, homeassitant) I ended up with the most simple things:
- sensors to control the lights: motion and brightness as treshold
- save power by reaching low power usage (standby) will turn it off
- a few buttons to make RestAPI calls to turn on or off when something is not controlled automatically: lights, power, vacuum cleaner
I don’t understand why anybody would use voice assistance. I never got it except rare situations to make a note:while driving, cooking. Everything else a sensors, a button or text entry use the smartphone is the way to go.
Ikea Tradfri buttons/switches have been a gamechanger for me. They're zigbee, very well built, well supported and cheap. Have a nice solid feel with proper mounts that are magnetic, Have mounted them in place of regular switches around the house and they just work, no user training required (although I use with homeassistnat which is still very hobbish on the setup side) but my wife can use it all without needing to know whats going on in the background. Can do smart stuff in addition, i.e press the on button multiple times to cycle between scenes.
The other thing is automations, I've got a bunch of timed automations, certain lights come on at dusk, heating comes on half an hour before the alarm goes off in the morning and heats only the rooms I tend to use at the correct times, so office is heated during work hours and living room comes on for the evening/weekends - all can be overridden from my phone or voice or whatever but ideally that's the exception as I find voice clunky and phone takes quite a few steps.
If my phone was able to display the controls for the room I'm in without requiring an unlock that'd be good but for now but generally I find tactile buttons much nicer to interact with.
I use the Phillips Hue Button, which I quite like! It has 4 buttons on it and doesn’t require external power or batteries to function. The button communicates with the bridge over Zigbee, which is then connected to my Home Assistant instance, so I can control more than just other Hue devices.
I put them on the bedside tables, and in living areas near where I have any smart bulbs in dumb lamps. Main button usually toggles the light, other buttons do things like turn on a favourite radio station, toggle other lights, and toggle gas fireplace thermostats. Downside is you need to know what the buttons do (guests usually take a bit of instruction to get used to it), but it works fairly well otherwise.
The automations are a real game changer! Some of my favourites that you didn’t mention in your comment:
- UniFi external cameras detecting people / vehicles turn on corresponding lights or making voice announcements in the house
- motion lighting in closets / pantry
- motion lighting in under cabinet lighting at night for night lighting
- good night routines that shut off the lights, arm the alarm, tell me the weather for tomorrow, and play white noise
- good morning routines paired with an alarm that disarm the alarm, play the morning radio (station depending on weekday vs weekend), turn on the gas fireplace in the bedroom and a space heater in the bathroom
- voice announcement / phone notifications triggered by a power usage monitor to tell me when my laundry has finished
- auto off timers for light switches / fireplaces that reset the countdown when motion is detected in that area
Any time I need to use the voice assistant or my phone is an anti pattern as far as I’m concerned! Phone more than voice assistant, but neither is as nice as a simple button. One thing I do find helpful is some Amazon FireHD tablets mounted on the walls in most rooms. They are powered by a PoE charger, and the screens unlock when motion is detected. I find this to be way better UX then pulling out a phone, unlocking, finding the app, then trying to remember why I pulled out my phone in the first place lol. The FireHD tablets are setup with a dashboard specific for that room (with tabs for controlling other parts of the house too), and are fairly UX-friendly for guests. I run "Fully Kiosk Browser" on the tablets, and that handles the autounlock / displaying the Home Assistant dashboard.
I have the opposite experience. I also run home assistant, and have added the Tradfri hub to my "Home" on iOS. I can count on one hand the amount of times I adjust the one Tradfri bulb I own in the Home app - and it has actually done anything. The only way I have consistently managed to change the bulb's brightness or on/off state is through the official Ikea app - which makes it entirely useless - as I can't automate it.
I do not have this issue with my Hue bulbs, which are running an out of date v1 hub.
I've only used the switches so, but also I connect them directly to the Home Assistant box which I've got a zigbee dongle attached to (using the ZHA zigbee integration) rather than via the ikea hub. Might be something to consider?
I forgot about Tradfri. I should check that out again, at least for switches. I'm not a fan of their light bulbs, though. I had a few for testing, and found that they'd often turn on for a few seconds and then back off after an automatic firmware update. My wife wasn't terribly amused since that tended to be in the middle of the night.
I use the android app "Buttons for Alexa" and achieved exactly this, but on my phone. I have an entire page in my Home Launcher dedicad to buttons to turn stuff on and off - switches :-)
The smartest house doesn't hand out the details of your life to 3rd parties or let contractors hear you having sex. We need more options for privacy respecting self-hosted systems that people don't have to design/create themselves. Some home automation tech is pretty nice, but its not worth paying for it forever with the data/privacy being given up, and in the inevitable consequences of having that data used against you for the rest of your life.
Setup Home Assistant, and only get devices that are 100% local control! There are fairly reasonable options for this.
I have a couple devices/services where I haven't been able to find good local only or where I find utility in the cloud connectedness, but that's very much the exception than the rule.
Homebridge plus Apple Home in my opinion is much better than home assistant. If you’re android based or have really complicated automations I could see why home assistant would be better. Home assistant’s lack of compatibility with quite a few brands made me run Homebridge and home assistant together which defeats the purpose of HA.
Can't speak for Unifi but the Wyze support is pretty dreadful. That's entirely on Wyze though and the price you pay for buying the cheapest option. Personally I'm going to replace all my Wyze hardware over time and kick them to the curb.
I'm starting with my Garage Door opener: I built one myself and connected it to Home Assistant which is connected to Google. Now I can open the door using Google Assistant, something I can't do with Wyze. I also don't have to open up their stupid app and wait for it to establish a video connection before I can tell it to open up the door.
Wyze is cheap and easy, but it's also hot garbage.
Wyze refused to reconnect to my new WiFi access points with the same SSID but a different password. All kinds of resets did nothing and I ate the costs and switched my smart plugs to Kasa from TP Link. It’s been better but not without faults.
Philips hue has very rarely caused me troubles except the adhesive on their cabinet lights was garbage.
that's a good start, but if you have 100% local control over a device that is refusing to work (because it doesn't have internet connectivity or for any other reason), you can fix the bug (or apply someone else's fix you downloaded from gitlab)
that doesn't work if you've ceded that control to apple, because they are not local
I can put HomeKit devices on a VLAN and not have them phone home. My Apple TV or HomePod will act as a bridge and will carry out my automations while I’m gone. Apple devices don’t bother me they aren’t an Ad company and have products I’ll buy into.
That looks really interesting, for me at least, but that leans pretty far into the design/create yourself category. I have family who are realistically never going to pick up a pi and flash the OS to get that set up. I see there are a few devices you can buy though, and while I don't think they'd make it past something like this: https://yellow.home-assistant.io/nvme-selection-power-supply... (if they even got that far) something more like this: https://ameridroid.com/collections/kits/products/odroid-n2-h... might work alright...
All this to me is pure technological kitsch and bullshit.
My coffee maker has had automation built in for years, it makes a ton of sense for it to automatically make coffee in the morning yet even for free I have never used it even once.
The problem is that I want to control things with my voice. I have no desire to pass screens all over the house, nor do I carry my phone - or frankly most technology with me.
When I'm going upstairs, and I determine I'd like to - I want my lights, outside to turn on; sometimes, I want the stair lights to turn on. Sometimes I want neither. The real issue is that voice is currently a clumsy interface. But for many of us, it's ideal - just not there yet.
It appears we're doing "smart home" again, so its time for my regular plea to stop calling shitty light switches automation. Automation is when you don't have to think about what state devices are in, and while it takes some tinkering can be achieved using something like Home Assistant to bridge various different devices together.
Each room in my house has Hue bulbs in all the light sockets, and sensors which can detect ambient light levels and motion. If I walk into a room and it's dark, the lights turn on, because I probably want to be able to see what I'm doing. When they stop detecting motion they turn off.
There's some additional complexity in rooms where its normal to occupy them for an extended period without moving about much. The bathroom has a button I can press which disable motion detection for an hour so I can have a bath without being plunged into darkness ten minutes after getting in. Some day I'll get round to replacing that with a leak sensor that picks up there being water in the bath.
The living room will ignore the motion sensor and assume it's occupied when the TV is playing media, or has it's input set to a games console, and the bedroom knows when I typically go to bed and once it detects motion around that time it doesn't turn off the lights until I tell Siri I'm going to sleep, at which point the motion sensor turns off until my alarm goes off in the morning.
Finally, the Home Assistant app is tracking when I enter and leave a geofence around my home. When I leave, everything turns off. When I get back, it turns back on again.
The end result of all this is that I don't ever really think about lighting, and because its all automated I can also use it for subconscious prompts about time of day - for the lighting in my work area shifts from a quite stark daylight tone to a much softer one at the end of the work day, while all the lighting dims itself as bedtime approaches.
Somewhere deep on my todo list is building a grid of ESP32s around the place reporting BLE signal strengths to a central node which can then do triangulation to work out where people are based on devices they typically carry with them (I for example am almost always wearing an Apple Watch, and carrying my phone).
I have home assistant running with quite a few esp32's running esphome with random sensors/bulbs scattered around the house.
My question is, what do you use the manage the automations? Do you use the native home assistant automation, or node-red, etc? I've even looked a bit into Room assistant[0]
Its all the built in automation UI in Home Assistant, but with fairly heavy use of scripts and scenes to encapsulate behaviour. Most automations are just a series of conditionals that then call out to a script for the smart bits.
I have a very similar set up -- also using Home Assistant (and Node Red -- I don't like programming in YAML). I have Hue bulbs and motion detectors everywhere. (I much prefer the quality of the light and the ability to control that light based on time of day or whatever, rather than smart switches and dumb bulbs.) I have a small number buttons around the house that I can click, double-click, press-and-hold, for overriding default behaviour. My "good night" routine does something similar to yours, but waits for movement to stop outside of the bedroom for longer than 10 minutes before shutting off all of the lights. I even have some routines for things like meditation -- the lights in the room dim, three gongs ring to start, a gong once in a while, until three gongs at the end of the duration you've asked for.
It's all great. My wife and I almost never have to pick up my phone (app) or whatever and things just happen the way we want, just by walking around the house and going through our normal activities.
Until... We're about to get a guest for a few months. Now, suddenly, everyone in the house won't be going to bed at the same time, or coming and going at the same time... I've had to make sure at least one room is "dumb" and I'll need to add a button or two. I'd heard of big "guest mode" switches, and now I'm going to need to develop one.
Being able to turn off everything in the house while lying in bed is pretty great honestly and once you have bulbs that go from white to yellow depending on the time you can’t go back.
In some cases I'm not even getting colour, quite a few of my bulbs are cheaper ones that only allow colour temperature to be controlled. Mostly I'm using Hue because its where I started, so I'm fairly bought into that ecosystem - I do like that the Hue hubs will still work even without an internet connection though. At some point I'll bite the bullet and migrate all my bulbs over to pairing with the Zigbee dongle attached to my Home Assistant server.
This sounds good in theory, and props to you for making it work.
But I tried, and gave up. I still have some basic light automations, like turning everything off when everyone is away, but most of the lights are back to manual control.
For example, I find myself not wanting the lights on quite often. I have passable low light vision, and often there's enough light through the windows to see whatever I wanted to grab, and even on the dimmest setting the bulbs could blind me. Other times tho, I'm there to do something / look for a misplaced item, and want the light.
Reading books is also a good problem for presence detection based light controls - at least my paperbacks don't come with open/closed sensors. The new generation of presence sensors supposedly handles that, but I'm yet to use one that does it well.
For me, "smart home" is more about controls being convinient, with a dash of very basic automations, rather than teaching a computer what you want to happen, getting increasing annoyed, then giving up and conforming to what the computer can handle.
When I leave my home's geofence and my iPhone is in CarPlay mode, my garage door automatically closes. When I enter my home's geofence and my iPhone is in CarPlay mode, my garage door automatically opens. I have the geofence setup very tight so the door opens/closes about when I'd do it manually.
I setup this automation using HomeKit, Homebridge, and iOS shortcuts/automations. The iOS shortcut is what informs a Homebridge dummy switch named "iPhone CarPlay Status" whether my phone is in CarPlay mode or not. From there it was simply to setup a HomeKit automation based on geofencing and the status of the dummy switch.
Because a garage door is considered a secure accessory and would normally require me to unlock my iPhone, the work-around is to have Homebridge first trigger a dummy switch called "Garage Door" and then have that dummy switch trigger the garage door to open/close.
Yes, I could just press the button on my rear-view mirror to open/close my garage door. But having the door automatically open just as I drive up is really cool. I usually close the door manually, but knowing it will close automatically if I forgot is also nice.
It sounds like OP already has this implemented, but Adaptive Lighting is one of the best parts of my Home Assistant setup. Adaptive Lighting automatically changes your lights brightness and color temp (for capable bulbs), from full brightness and daylight colors during the day, down to a relaxing dim and warm colors at night. It does this so smoothly you don't notice it's happening. That, combined with motion sensors, means I walk into a room and the lights automatically turn on to a comfortable level, then turn off when I leave the room. Adaptive Lighting also has a night mode that dims your bulbs to just bright enough to walk around at night without killing your night vision.
It's taken an investment in time to get everything set up in a way that works for both me and my fiance, but now we hate traveling and spending the night anywhere without self dimming lights, motion sensors, and a button beside my bed that can kill all the lights in the house with a single press.
I really wonder what people that are interested in home automation are trying to solve. DIY I understand, as it's cool electronics tinkering, and home automation can be a fun project. But for people that just buy it and customize it, I have no clue what the end goal is.
Is the big issue to stop pushing the normal light switch button? Is that a huge chore? If I think home automation what I have wishes about is something putting my dishes or clothes in machines and then putting them back, cleaning floors, things like that.
Automating turning a light, playing music or whatever are just a 2 second thing, that's very down the list of my home tasks to automate.
I got smart light switches for security reasons so I can have timed lights when on vacation and make it look like we’re home. A smart thermostat to save a bit on HVAC cost, and an alexa that is exclusively used as kitchen timer and weather quick checks. But i similarly couldn’t find rational reasons to go further into home automation outside of the itch to tinker with more tech.
I’m old enough to remember the first iteration of this home control trend: multi-room wired speakers.
I can’t count the times when I was in high school and had to let some dad demo their multiple speaker setup.
It never worked all that well, volume levels were off, and there was often an echo of music coming from some empty room.
I’m reminded of this every time someone calls out to their home assistant in my presence to do something like change the music on their tinny bluetooth speaker that’s already being controlled from their phone, which is sitting in plain sight.
There’s an element of performance in it. Look at how far I’ve come, etc. I don’t care for it but it’s a general, atavistic trait we probably share as humans to one degree or another.
> Is the big issue to stop pushing the normal light switch button? Is that a huge chore?
It does kinda suck, to be honest. Especially when the lights in question are downstairs, and I'm not. After the kids are done turning on every last light in the house, walking from place to place and turning off 40 different lights is tedious. Hitting the scene button at the top of the stairs to turn off the entire downstairs, on the other hand, I can do without slowing down.
The extra automation possibilities are nice, too. Even just little things like having the front lights turn on automatically when you arrive home at night.
The robotic vacuums are nice, too, now that you mention it. Kind of expensive but definitely a quality of life improvement.
But if I could have only one bit of home automation, it would be the door locks and garage doors. Those were the first things I made remote controllable and I wouldn't willingly give them up.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadUI Option:
- take out phone
- unlock phone
- leave current app
- find and open control app
- find icon to toggle action
- lock phone
- put phone back in pocket
NFC option:
- take phone out of pocket
- bump phone against NFC sticker
- find NFC sweet spot
- put phone back in pocket
- press button
For some actions colocation might make sense.
But having to stand up to go rub a magic sticker on the wall or coffee table to turn on the lights seems pretty dumb compared to a few thumb flicks.
[1] https://www.aqara.com/eu/product/wireless-remote-switch-h1
What I do now is open up old tablets, remove the battery and replace it with a DC-DC converter. Because tablets and phones won't turn on without seeing a battery, you can't power them though USB with the battery removed.
But the DC-DC option works ok. Sometimes you need to remove the battery protection circuitry from the battery because the tablet needs to see it. This can be a bit hazardous. But usually providing about 4 volts is enough.
Of course all this is not for those without electronics knowledge.
Ps I also detest Google's removal of the shortcut buttons under the power button menu :(
Is this from the battery being on the charger constantly? I remember having a similar problem years ago. I thought most devices now would manage charging by letting it drain a bit automatically. At the time though they didn't so I for my continually connected devices I just used simple plug timers that cut it off for a few hours a couple times a day.
[Advanced Charging Controller (ACC)](https://github.com/VR-25/acc)
[BU-808: How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries](https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-...)
However, doing that you do have the benefit of having "UPS" protection of course (how much depends on the charge cycle). In my case this isn't really a problem because if my power is down there is not much in my home left to control that still works.
My method has some drawbacks too - it looks bad (though it can be mitigated with a 3D printed enclosure) and sometimes stability may suffer, because tablets and phones use their battery to absorb performance peaks which require high power drain. The DC-DC converter will not live up to the same peak capacity. But generally I have not really seen many issues in practice. The converters stay cool and the tablets don't crash. I think it's because the workloads as a control tablet is not super heavy either. One of the main things that really peaks a lot in phones is the mobile (4G/5G) radio when it transmits and of course I keep them in airplane mode in this usecase.
Mobiles and tablets generally don't do this because they are almost always used in a mobile manner. With the exception of the special battery protection in iOS that was mentioned in the article.
Just so it can be constantly on and display status while not requiring tethering.
I actually was building kind of monitoring screen; idea was to just leave it connected to ethernet and boot off network so it doesn't have any problems with SD durability or need any installation in case I wanted to have more than one.
There does appear to be a few Lenovo tablets which come with a permanent dock - maybe that's the solution?
If you can run a light webpage with the tablet it should be enough. Owntone and homeassistant need to run somewhere else on your network like on a pi, or an old laptop.
Your app only heating controls may well also integrate with homeassistant, a hell of a lot of that kind of stuff does. Homeassistant also serves up a light web page as a control interface. There's phone & tablet apps too.
Worth a look, imho.
I'm currently running a raspberry pi with a 15" portable monitor (Here is one that is actually a touchscreen as well, mine aren't. https://www.amazon.com/ADPOP-Portable-15-6-External-Extender...)
For software I'm using magic-mirror, and then use that to link into my calendar, Home-assistant, weather etc. There are some input modules that can be added, so that might enable some touch-features.
I'm just renting right now, so I just have the Pi mounted in a case by the plug with some of those 3M picture frame strips and run the HDMI to the monitor (also mounted with picture frame strips) hidden in a track, If I owned, I'd bring the plug up behind the monitor, and flush the PI in wall and then wrap the monitor around a frame or something.
A quick press turns off all the lights in my apartment, for when I want to go to sleep. A double press turns some of the lights on with the lowest brightness, so I can grab a glass of water or have a quick pee in the middle of the night. Holding the wall switch puts all the lights at full brightness for when I want to wake up.
If you work from home, a macropad or Streamdeck is also recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTJSREjWH7Y
Hopefully the OSS speech to text will be good, since then it'll work as good as you program it to. Not relying on "the cloud" for voice assistance would be awesome.
Athom do both tasmota and esphome pre-installed. Haven't tried esphome plus. I get their stuff from Ali and it has been ok so far. Anyone had good experiences with something else and I'm all ears.
There's still a few sensors that there don't have a Matter equivalent yet, but I think that'll change soon.
I think the biggest difference in price I saw was from my Z-Wave blinds versus Thread / Matter ones. However, the overwhelming majority of the cost for that is the blinds themselves so it's probably not the best comparison.
Unless your place is quite small, a wall mounted tablet just seems like a hassle. Even disregarding all the hassle with the mounting and interface config, what are the advantages? Having to walk to a single position to control my smart home doesn't seem very smart, honestly? Can anyone educate me?
Shows time, weather, time until next public transport departures from different stops on different routes, fuel prices at local filling stations, some electricity usage stats maybe..?
Keep yourself on track getting out the door in the morning with a glance?
Some people like to put the phone down with the keys and not use it and be tied to it at home. Walking to a tablet may be preferable than going to a work desk with a laptop or whatever to switch something on or off and we're used to doing that with light switches etc.
Not exhaustive, not necessarily how i do everything either. I bet people are using a tablet as a controller in ways and for reasons that make sense that i haven't thought of too.
* To have to reach for my phone * To have a tablet mounted within reach (that's more clutter) * To have to get up to the light switch/nearest controller.
This sounds lazy but that is literally the point of all this stuff - to make things convenient.
Likewise, if I'm in the kitchen and want to set a timer, I don't want to have to use my hands (I'm probably already using them), I just want to yell that I need a imer set.
The examples you name are somewhat exceptions where I can imagine, if someone is really lazy, that a language control could be better than buttons, but in most cases I think the difference is minuscule. I have to walk 2 Meters from the couch to the button ("and I wanted to get a new drink anyway").
On the other hand, I can see that language is really good for information/knowledge retrieval. Ask ChatGPT to help you with something.. and get the answer via voice.
Your view I think works where the device is static or always on you like a watch but not when the device could be misplaced.
You can simply say "navigate me to such-and-such", or "turn off the display", or whatever, tasks which would otherwise involve several steps and be much more distracting.
Meanwhile, if you are driving the car, touch screen means not watching the road for crutial 2 seconds while you are trying to hit the damm screen while the car is moving.
Sorry, I don't understand "Imer", can you repeat?
Typo serendipity ;)
I had to turn off Echo integration altogether for the same reason. Took them 2 minutes to figure out they could command Alexa to turn off the lights in someone else's room. Even though Alexa recognizes them as different people and has the room lights assigned to their respective room.
I wonder if Amazon has fixed that yet. Haven't tried in a couple years.
I've heard of a great light flipping prank that supposedly happened at Caltech a few years before I was there. There was a row of rooms overlooking a courtyard. Each had a window on the courtyard. At the end of the row was a bathroom, also with a window on the courtyard.
Some pranksters once when the student in the room next to the bathroom was out rewired his switch and the bathroom switch so the each switch controlled both rooms.
Then they sat in the courtyard watching that night. He got home, they saw his light (and the bathroom light) go on as he got ready for bed, then go out as he went to sleep.
A little while later someone went to use the bathroom. They turned on both lights.
That woke the sleeping guy, who got up and turned the lights back off and went back to bad. The people in the courtyard heard an annoyed yell from the bathroom, where the occupant was apparently sitting on the toilet.
Toilet guy went and turned the lights back on. That woke up sleeping guy, who they heard swear, and he got up and turned the lights off.
Toilet guy as faster this time, and got the lights back on before sleeping guy reached bed.
What then happened was the lights alternated on and off at an increasing frequency until finally both people went out to the hall to try to see if there was a clue there and they figured out what was going on.
I agree with you though for anything more complex. I do not control the color of my lamps via voice or select what media to play on my voice controlled HiFi. I could setup a few "scenes" for that, but I have not seen a need for it. I usually have my phone around or when I am sitting at the PC I can just use the dashboard in my browser. And there are situations where voice control just does not fit well, e.g. in public or with people sleeping in the same room.
Sure, there are going to be ways around it - but there should need to be. The whole point of this stuff is to make things 'easy', and having to screw around enabling a bunch of legacy settings for brand new hardware isn't 'easy' for the end user.
Thread is 100% 2.4 GHz. Seems the plan is to move high bandwidth applications, and most Wi-Fi users to 5 GHz leaving just IOT devices on 2.4.
2.4GHz has better range and is ubiquitous. 5GHz has better throughput, but my lightbulb doesn't need 500MB/s of transfer.
Most routers will just create two networks with the same name on both frequencies by default, which will work out of the box for 95% of the people. As other commenters have mentioned, usually devices can communicate with each other across those networks without issues.
It’s not like devices can detect what frequency the other device on network is using, just like it can’t detect if the device is connected via Ethernet, plugged into power, or running on a battery.
I would check to make sure your router is properly propagating broadcast packets around your network. That’s the number one cause of smart home discovery fails.
Smart switches which fall back to regular switches if they malfunction is fantastic. Add some scenarios for double/triple clicks and you can do a lot without even bringing out your phone. E.g. switch off all the lights when leaving either by double clicking the switch next to the front door, or trigger that same "all off" scenario through the alarm being armed or the door being locked.
Making "smart home" stuff is about integration, which requires tinkering. But making a subset of your home smart such as "smart lighting" doesn't have to be so daunting.
Shelly seems to be more US-centric, over on EU side I've had good experiences with Sonoff ZBMINI relays - same idea, only on Zigbee connection instead of WiFi.
First it requires more hardware, it's more expensive and as far as I know you'll be stuck with one vendor. On top of that you need to isolate your home from outside signals (you don't want your switch to talk to you neighbor's devices). Second, it's pretty slow. This might be because our system is already 8 years old, but it's pretty noticeable (feels close to a second when you turn on the lights). And then you get into issues with your appliances that have cheap power supplies. I needed to buy a filter for my PC because the power supply unit was generating so much noise on the power line that the devices could not communicate anymore. Also I'm not sure how well this will work in older house, when the lines are not in best condition.
The system we have is made by DigitalStrom. They have a newer generation available, but since we rent I don't want to pay for the upgrade.
With this hassle, you might as well just skip swapping the switches and just jump to smart lights directly.
A smart switch:
- Allows for anyone to interact with the light without apps/voice/whatever. You just hit the switch.
- Fails gracefully. If the controller dies, it's still a switch.
The color change though won't be possible - but it might still be possible through whatever secondary interface you have, e.g. in an app. Given the choice between physical switches for dimming and color of the lights, I pick physical switches every time.
Not if they do so when you’re asleep. Fallback behavior should be always off, so it won’t wake you up in the middle of the night following a short blackout. (Sadly my yeelight bulbs don’t even allow such a setting, which forces me to use them as dumb light bulbs.)
In the case of power outages where the whole device loses power... presumably these devices have some sort of nonvolatile memory and can afford to keep track of their last state. That's one bit for a basic on/off switch. :)
I know There are some that might work on a small current (so they ‘on’ all the time) but most do not.
Just one thing to look out with in switch v bulbs debates.
"Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant: They demand that you learn specific device names and structures for commands, while they frequently get even the most simple command astoundingly wrong".
I set the device names in the Ikea app, and then I command these devices with my voice in almost free form. Sometimes it's even fascinating, because Ikea knows the names of all the colors of their light bulb, and I just don't remember them.
sensors along with lots of automation rules will make the home works for you, instead of requiring you to shout at the assistant.
Sensors are also getting cheaper by the minute. For example, I can add a microwave sensor for under a dollar and read hand gestures.
I have them scattered all around my house and I never use voice or even apps anymore to control my smart home.
- sensors to control the lights: motion and brightness as treshold
- save power by reaching low power usage (standby) will turn it off
- a few buttons to make RestAPI calls to turn on or off when something is not controlled automatically: lights, power, vacuum cleaner
I don’t understand why anybody would use voice assistance. I never got it except rare situations to make a note:while driving, cooking. Everything else a sensors, a button or text entry use the smartphone is the way to go.
The other thing is automations, I've got a bunch of timed automations, certain lights come on at dusk, heating comes on half an hour before the alarm goes off in the morning and heats only the rooms I tend to use at the correct times, so office is heated during work hours and living room comes on for the evening/weekends - all can be overridden from my phone or voice or whatever but ideally that's the exception as I find voice clunky and phone takes quite a few steps.
If my phone was able to display the controls for the room I'm in without requiring an unlock that'd be good but for now but generally I find tactile buttons much nicer to interact with.
I put them on the bedside tables, and in living areas near where I have any smart bulbs in dumb lamps. Main button usually toggles the light, other buttons do things like turn on a favourite radio station, toggle other lights, and toggle gas fireplace thermostats. Downside is you need to know what the buttons do (guests usually take a bit of instruction to get used to it), but it works fairly well otherwise.
The automations are a real game changer! Some of my favourites that you didn’t mention in your comment:
- UniFi external cameras detecting people / vehicles turn on corresponding lights or making voice announcements in the house
- motion lighting in closets / pantry
- motion lighting in under cabinet lighting at night for night lighting
- good night routines that shut off the lights, arm the alarm, tell me the weather for tomorrow, and play white noise
- good morning routines paired with an alarm that disarm the alarm, play the morning radio (station depending on weekday vs weekend), turn on the gas fireplace in the bedroom and a space heater in the bathroom
- voice announcement / phone notifications triggered by a power usage monitor to tell me when my laundry has finished - auto off timers for light switches / fireplaces that reset the countdown when motion is detected in that area
Any time I need to use the voice assistant or my phone is an anti pattern as far as I’m concerned! Phone more than voice assistant, but neither is as nice as a simple button. One thing I do find helpful is some Amazon FireHD tablets mounted on the walls in most rooms. They are powered by a PoE charger, and the screens unlock when motion is detected. I find this to be way better UX then pulling out a phone, unlocking, finding the app, then trying to remember why I pulled out my phone in the first place lol. The FireHD tablets are setup with a dashboard specific for that room (with tabs for controlling other parts of the house too), and are fairly UX-friendly for guests. I run "Fully Kiosk Browser" on the tablets, and that handles the autounlock / displaying the Home Assistant dashboard.
I do not have this issue with my Hue bulbs, which are running an out of date v1 hub.
I'd love to pay in this area, but I don't want to was mount an old tablet that will be a fire risk.
I know the Pi's have a tiny touch screen screen hat, is there other ideas for a wall mountable solution that people can recommend?
But being able to turn off lights and activate calm music before bed would be nice but I don’t even want to use my phone for an hour before bed.
I have a couple devices/services where I haven't been able to find good local only or where I find utility in the cloud connectedness, but that's very much the exception than the rule.
I'm starting with my Garage Door opener: I built one myself and connected it to Home Assistant which is connected to Google. Now I can open the door using Google Assistant, something I can't do with Wyze. I also don't have to open up their stupid app and wait for it to establish a video connection before I can tell it to open up the door.
Wyze is cheap and easy, but it's also hot garbage.
Philips hue has very rarely caused me troubles except the adhesive on their cabinet lights was garbage.
that doesn't work if you've ceded that control to apple, because they are not local
You don't have '100% control' over things like code because they're embedded, certified devices, generally.
My coffee maker has had automation built in for years, it makes a ton of sense for it to automatically make coffee in the morning yet even for free I have never used it even once.
The light switch? Give me a break.
When I'm going upstairs, and I determine I'd like to - I want my lights, outside to turn on; sometimes, I want the stair lights to turn on. Sometimes I want neither. The real issue is that voice is currently a clumsy interface. But for many of us, it's ideal - just not there yet.
Each room in my house has Hue bulbs in all the light sockets, and sensors which can detect ambient light levels and motion. If I walk into a room and it's dark, the lights turn on, because I probably want to be able to see what I'm doing. When they stop detecting motion they turn off.
There's some additional complexity in rooms where its normal to occupy them for an extended period without moving about much. The bathroom has a button I can press which disable motion detection for an hour so I can have a bath without being plunged into darkness ten minutes after getting in. Some day I'll get round to replacing that with a leak sensor that picks up there being water in the bath.
The living room will ignore the motion sensor and assume it's occupied when the TV is playing media, or has it's input set to a games console, and the bedroom knows when I typically go to bed and once it detects motion around that time it doesn't turn off the lights until I tell Siri I'm going to sleep, at which point the motion sensor turns off until my alarm goes off in the morning.
Finally, the Home Assistant app is tracking when I enter and leave a geofence around my home. When I leave, everything turns off. When I get back, it turns back on again.
The end result of all this is that I don't ever really think about lighting, and because its all automated I can also use it for subconscious prompts about time of day - for the lighting in my work area shifts from a quite stark daylight tone to a much softer one at the end of the work day, while all the lighting dims itself as bedtime approaches.
My question is, what do you use the manage the automations? Do you use the native home assistant automation, or node-red, etc? I've even looked a bit into Room assistant[0]
[0] https://www.room-assistant.io/guide/#how-it-works
It's all great. My wife and I almost never have to pick up my phone (app) or whatever and things just happen the way we want, just by walking around the house and going through our normal activities.
Until... We're about to get a guest for a few months. Now, suddenly, everyone in the house won't be going to bed at the same time, or coming and going at the same time... I've had to make sure at least one room is "dumb" and I'll need to add a button or two. I'd heard of big "guest mode" switches, and now I'm going to need to develop one.
But I tried, and gave up. I still have some basic light automations, like turning everything off when everyone is away, but most of the lights are back to manual control.
For example, I find myself not wanting the lights on quite often. I have passable low light vision, and often there's enough light through the windows to see whatever I wanted to grab, and even on the dimmest setting the bulbs could blind me. Other times tho, I'm there to do something / look for a misplaced item, and want the light.
Reading books is also a good problem for presence detection based light controls - at least my paperbacks don't come with open/closed sensors. The new generation of presence sensors supposedly handles that, but I'm yet to use one that does it well.
For me, "smart home" is more about controls being convinient, with a dash of very basic automations, rather than teaching a computer what you want to happen, getting increasing annoyed, then giving up and conforming to what the computer can handle.
I setup this automation using HomeKit, Homebridge, and iOS shortcuts/automations. The iOS shortcut is what informs a Homebridge dummy switch named "iPhone CarPlay Status" whether my phone is in CarPlay mode or not. From there it was simply to setup a HomeKit automation based on geofencing and the status of the dummy switch.
Because a garage door is considered a secure accessory and would normally require me to unlock my iPhone, the work-around is to have Homebridge first trigger a dummy switch called "Garage Door" and then have that dummy switch trigger the garage door to open/close.
Yes, I could just press the button on my rear-view mirror to open/close my garage door. But having the door automatically open just as I drive up is really cool. I usually close the door manually, but knowing it will close automatically if I forgot is also nice.
It's taken an investment in time to get everything set up in a way that works for both me and my fiance, but now we hate traveling and spending the night anywhere without self dimming lights, motion sensors, and a button beside my bed that can kill all the lights in the house with a single press.
Is the big issue to stop pushing the normal light switch button? Is that a huge chore? If I think home automation what I have wishes about is something putting my dishes or clothes in machines and then putting them back, cleaning floors, things like that.
Automating turning a light, playing music or whatever are just a 2 second thing, that's very down the list of my home tasks to automate.
I can’t count the times when I was in high school and had to let some dad demo their multiple speaker setup.
It never worked all that well, volume levels were off, and there was often an echo of music coming from some empty room.
I’m reminded of this every time someone calls out to their home assistant in my presence to do something like change the music on their tinny bluetooth speaker that’s already being controlled from their phone, which is sitting in plain sight.
There’s an element of performance in it. Look at how far I’ve come, etc. I don’t care for it but it’s a general, atavistic trait we probably share as humans to one degree or another.
It does kinda suck, to be honest. Especially when the lights in question are downstairs, and I'm not. After the kids are done turning on every last light in the house, walking from place to place and turning off 40 different lights is tedious. Hitting the scene button at the top of the stairs to turn off the entire downstairs, on the other hand, I can do without slowing down.
The extra automation possibilities are nice, too. Even just little things like having the front lights turn on automatically when you arrive home at night.
The robotic vacuums are nice, too, now that you mention it. Kind of expensive but definitely a quality of life improvement.
But if I could have only one bit of home automation, it would be the door locks and garage doors. Those were the first things I made remote controllable and I wouldn't willingly give them up.