If only there was a person, maybe even an organisation, to preach [1] to people that proprietary software will respect their interests and freedoms temporarily at best...
Maybe they could even come up with a "Respects Your Freedom" certification program for hardware that won't screw you over.
This would achieve "freedom 4: The freedom to turn on the light".
[1] (so that they don't have to arrive there by deduction and observation)
--
Today, even my parents know that "you need an app to use this" is equivalent of "beware, you'll soon be screwed by this".
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
I haven’t fully jumped into home automation although I would like to and have thought about it for a while. I think I would only like to have things connected to an airgapped LAN that never connects to the internet. Maybe put it on my tailscale net. This is exactly why.
You can also skip the LAN completely. Either ZigBee or zwave (or Matter if you're feeling futuristic) can be used entirely offline. There's lots of products that support those protocols for quite a while now.
IF you have an app that allows that. All of the apps I've used required a WAN connection first. One app required an immediate firmware update for the bulbs to even work. I imagined it similar to game devs releasing shiny round discs. Just put something on the disc so that it can be sent to replication in time for street date, but have it immediately for a full "update" of the code that gave the devs 6 additional weeks. I'd be amazed if there was even game code on the disc at this point.
With those devices, you shouldn't need a product-specific app. There will be edge cases and some interesting implementations which actually need the extra features of course, but in general, you should be able to connect them to a dedicated bridge device or a home-assistant server and that's it. Those can update the firmware of many devices if needed and should expose the available devices as switches / dials / colour selectors.
I mean, ideally you buy a thing, connect it to your existing controller and never see anything with the company logo or their app.
Does Zwave and Zigbee with Matter on the way at some point. HomeKit integration is in beta right now.
My fear is that Philips will do something stupid by pushing a firmware to the bulbs to lock folks into only using their hubs. Or maybe change colour reporting to some annoying method that won’t allow for accurate colour on a non-Hue hub.
Do you have a link or a brand/model? I'm just recently shopping for smart home equipment and the Hubitat seems quite full-featured and I'd like to compare.
It's perfectly suitable and it looks like one of the better out-of-the box solutions out there that respect user privacy. If I don't have any SBCs and just want something that works without fiddling, I'd likely go for Hubitat too.
That said if you're up for fiddling, something like https://www.amazon.ca/Waveshare-VisionFive2-Processor-Integr... will provide much more oopmh (and it's RISC-V) with 4GB ram and m2 slot, at $100 CAD, with mainline kernel support (so any USB devices will just work). Grab a zigbee USB + SBC like that, and you'd be able to run much more on your hub that just a gateway for your devices.
You don’t pay for HW specs. You pay for the whole package, with software and their continues updates.
And they take compatibility seriously. I’m a refugee from home assistant from 5 years ago, when each major update would break part of my automations because they deprecated some API. No such thing with Hubitat.
Oh thanks for that, it looks very handy! I use ZWave and Home Assistant's support is functional but flakey since they moved to zwave-js. Plus I have better things to do that maintain my automation server.
though I sympathize with the frustration - I've learned just to log-in and move on, life is short so unless you want to baby around home assistant I'd go with a managed solution. more productively, the author can go with home assistant if they want to DIY. (it's ironic they suggest homekit which requires you to have and be logged into an icloud account).
the problem with home assistant is that it's easy enough to have a computer on and run the docker container. but then you have to either open ports in your firewall or use some sort of proxy in order to have outside network internet access, and then maybe your computer goes down for whatever reason. it's kind of a hassle unless you're already running a server for other things imo (and I say this as someone who runs my own surveillance with blue iris and poe cameras)
> Javascript plus a "curl | sudo sh" attitude to life equals "yeah no, I am never touching this thing".
I get why there are people that don’t like how some installers do this, but this trope is really turning into the “but I don’t even own a TV” of OSS commentary.
Just use the Docker image if you don’t like it. Or get their appliance which actually supports ongoing development.
I don't like how HAOS is the only currently-supported way to use the SkyConnect to get Zigbee + Matter support currently, and messing with firmware on the SkyConnect was exactly the opposite reason why I got one in the first place. It doesn't "just work", even for just ZigBee, and now I've sunk hours into troubleshooting it without a working ZigBee setup in HA. Meanwhile, the Sonoff ZigBee bridge worked flawlessly the first time setting it up with my phone and their eWeLink app.
Smart Home 2023Q3 status: still for hackers only if you want more than a few lightswitches that you can just toggle from your phone, and even if you do want that, stick to one vendor + system only.
After a few days with ZigBee I was ready for an extended vacation. Finally got rid of the whole thing and everything is on a dedicated WiFi network now that is an integral part of the house, in other words: if I sell this house that WiFi network + all HA stuff goes with it including a nice manual of how it all hangs together.
Highly recommended: Shelly gear, it is easy to configure and seems to be rock solid, I've got a bunch of their remote control radiator valves, several remote control relays and a tri-phase consumption/production meter. It all worked flawlessly since installation. And instead of a regular Pi I got one that was built into a keyboard. It was mostly because I couldn't get a bare one but in the end I think this was the better option.
> if I sell this house that WiFi network + all HA stuff goes with it including a nice manual of how it all hangs together
I had something similar. Rock solid. Wired back haul. Nice manual. I knew it wouldn’t add $$$ to the house but I was a little surprised to find out it actually put a lot of people off. It had negative value as I had to rip it out and go analog.
Even nerds looking at the house wanted to do their own thing not maintain someone else's ideal and normies refused to spend ANY mental energy on understanding it.
That could well happen, so, for that eventuality I have a little cardboard box with the old radiator valves and thermostat. The solar panels and the inverters would be a bigger issue though, this all runs locally, not in the cloud (it was a bit of a job to find inverters that do not require a cloud connection, what a nonsense that is). But given that altogether these give the house its A++++ energy label (it is in the top .1% or so for houses of this size and age with respect to energy consumption) I'm pretty sure that buyers would be A-ok with it. Energy efficiency is a massive factor in people's buying decision here (as well as location and general state of the house, obviously).
But your point is well taken and I'll be sure to introduce the subject at the handover if it ever comes to that.
Here it's a mandatory disclosure item and it's important enough that you can filter by it on the real estate listing sites. More so because now house insulation comes with a mandatory 'bat study' requirement which is absolutely bonkers. So houses that are already energy efficient are at a premium.
What also helps is that the whole system runs without any user intervention. The manual is mostly aimed at people hired to add stuff at some point in the future, or in case something breaks.
Recently set up HA with a Zigbee dongle, took less than 15 from zero (newer used HA before) to be able to control my dimmer, most of that time was spent on finding my USB device path in /dev.
Connect the usb dongle, start docker container, initial HA setup, find my Zigbee device and done.
Wait a few months. My HA Zigbee integration works great… most of the time. Sometimes it loses all the devices and I have to reboot. Never found the time to dig into why.
Can’t confirm, the only issues I’ve had were with Deconz, since switching to Zigbee2MQTT (using the same ConBee stick) there have been no issues whatsoever.
If you know where to find the mesh view of your zigbee network, the one that has all of the links between the nodes rendered using bezier curves, at the bottom of that page there are three icons. The first icon is called Network, and if you view that page there should be an option for editing the channel That the zigbee network is on.
Tapping that option should bring up a dialogue that lets you migrate to a different channel with a warning about how some devices may not automatically migrate and will need to be removed and re-added if so.
I definitely have a small setup, but getting ZigBee running was fairly straightforward. Two steps: 1) buy a ConBee dongle and 2) install and setup Zigbee2MQTT.
+1 for the HUZBZB-1. I waxed more poetically about my setup already[1], but I've had that little guy for over 4 years, it was plug-and-play on day 1, and I've never had a single issue with a Zigbee or Z-Wave device. (Wi-Fi? don't even get me started...)
And yeah, it'll be another year or two before Matter/Threads really starts picking up steam. I'll just pick up a new dongle when there's 10 of 'em in that same timeframe.
(Disclaimer: my house is 800 sqft and I don't share any walls with neighbors. Zigbee is SUPPOSED to be mesh and Just Work assuming you have enough devices, but I can't speak from experience on that front.)
I think if you stick with Homekit certified accessories you can probably have a multi-vendor setup that's OK. Homekit can be flaky at times, though, and I would definitely recommend Home Assistant instead if you are a hacker.
I bought a cheap ConBee (is that what it’s even called?) Zigbee USB dongle, plugged it in, passed it through to my HA container, and it’s flawless. Plenty of things you can knock HA for, but good ZigBee support is easily attainable. I have…a large setup. 30 lights, door locks, ZigBee switches, blah blah blah. And I’m not smart guy. Such an improvement over WiFi
This is even better than the docker version, because it's able to set up a bunch of stuff for you that you'd have to do manually with docker, like the current ZWave integration.
Yea; I run HomeAssistant via the official Docker container and have been pretty happy with it. It's only accessible on my local network, and my phone/laptop/etc use Wireguard to talk to it if I'm somewhere else.
Once you’re kind of settled there take a look at NodeRED. Integrates really cleanly with Home Assistant and for most of the kinds of people on HN that are already technically inclined, it makes much more complex automations and integrations a piece of cake.
Yep this is how I'm doing it. Combined with ESPHome I've got a nice, local-only automation system using sourceable off-the-shelf parts (but I'm so, so happy that Athom are making open-source flashed IoT devices - which go and live on my IoT network).
Note that you don't need the Community Store if you're running HA via Docker.
Every plugin that is in that store must have a custom_components folder.
Drop that into the bind-mounted volume holding HA's configuration.yaml and restart. HA will pick it up automatically, and you'll be able to install it in Integrations and Devices.
Also, no one’s forcing you to pipe curl into sudo sh. I don’t think a software project listing this as an installation method is that big of a red flag to be honest.
Tbh, I’m put on more on alert by the spelling errors in the linked post than I am by the ostensible threat of a server timing my requests in order to serve malware.
It’s good practice to check anything that you’ll pipe to `sudo`, but this article’s level of paranoia is kind of self-defeating, no?
At some point, we all trust the things we run on our machines. We rely on communities — and our participation in them — to vet installations.
There is no perfect solution. Someone will always be misled.
Why is "sudo" emphasized so heavily, anyway? Running as your ordinary user, that shell script can send someone your session cookies, authenticate with your SSH agent, and really anything that you can do. Sure, maybe not running as root protects the integrity of the OS and prevents some persistent keylogging attacks, but honestly... you don't need a keylogger when you just grab the cookies, or install your own binaries farther up in the path (good old ~/.local/bin/firefox instead of /usr/bin/firefox).
Frankly, being anything other than super paranoid is almost a little reckless.
Also, shit-talking Home Assistant is a pretty weird take. I wouldn't write it in Python configured half in YAML and half in SQLite either, but ... not having to write it myself was the fun part.
Anyone who really complains about curl | sudo is just doing it for nerd points, because I guarantee you they happily install all sorts of other software without "vetting" it.
And if someone caught someone doing trickery it'd be big news.
There are those of us who are security minded and will in fact download the script and check the sha1/sha256 and review the script before running it. Any time I see this curl sudo thing is when there's always another (manual) option. The shell scripts themselves aren't so complex that you can't figure out what they're doing, they're normally fairly straightforward, unless they were generated by some tool, or are in fact malware, so you can see if something looks funky before you run it. Sure, there can be a malware that makes it so you can't tell, but normally not.
If I don't trust the website to do curl | sudo bash then why do I trust the software that I would eventually install?
Even the old argument of "middleware devices modified the script en-route" is mostly removed by HTTPS everywhere.
And there are people like you who actually look at the script (and the compiled code, too!) to find things, because if they do find something in a script as big as HomeAssitant, they'll be famous.
I don't use any of this home automation junk, but this kind of begs the question - why would such an app need root access to your devices in the first place?
Yeah, that's a conceivable use case for a dedicated box, I guess. But why would that be necessary (or desirable?) Seems like opening port 80 would be the last thing you'd want a home appliance to do... lol
80 is desirable because it’s the default port of web browsers and means you can just visit the DNS or up address & not have to remember to tack on some arbitrary port number. Or use some sort of proxy if setup.
And there’s nothing wrong with using port 80 security wise. Binding a port doesn’t mean you’re opening it on the firewall for the world to see. Plus if you’re opening some port on the firewall, what port you use doesn’t matter - it’ll be scanned by an automated scanner shortly regardless of port.
The downsides of choosing port 80 for your all-important lightbulb dimmer switch telemetry are that:
1. browsers don't even attempt encryption,
2. the port could be open to the world, and
3. lots of people are already running more meaningful shit on port 80.
Seriously, you want to sell me a lightbulb that needs root access and then opens an unencrypted port and then makes outbound calls...? Are you nuts? That's beyond lazy design. It's almost like an intentional insult.
[edit] If you set up a home service on your local network, surely you can also bookmark the obscure port number next to the 128/ address in front of it. The only purpose served by turning your light bulbs into a beacon from hell on port 80 would be letting strangers totally penetrate your house. What happens if you start up a webserver? Do the lights go off?
1. OK, but it's a LAN - who cares. It's either that or you're in self signed cert hell anyway.
2. If that's the case you have major issues going on which are irrelevant to the port chosen
3. On a single IP - so what? Every device can open it's own port 80 on your LAN without any conflict
> Seriously, you want to sell me a lightbulb that needs root access and then opens an unencrypted port and then makes outbound calls...? Are you nuts? That's beyond lazy design. It's almost like an intentional insult.
This doesn't make any sense. Are you talking about a single light bulb or actual orchestration software? Both need to communicate to actually do anything.
> edit] If you set up a home service on your local network, surely you can also bookmark the obscure port number next to the 128/ address in front of it. The only purpose served by turning your light bulbs into a beacon from hell on port 80 would be letting strangers totally penetrate your house.
This also doesn't make any sense. There is no reason a device on your local network listening on port 80 makes it a 'beacon from hell' - because again, listening on LAN & WAN are 2 very different things. And the port it's using has 0 bearing on security.
> What happens if you start up a webserver? Do the lights go off?
Absolutely nothing - because again there is no conflict with different devices on your LAN using the same ports to listen on.
You're mixing up a number of different things here & making issues where there aren't any. A device on your network opening port 80 doesn't magically make it accessible to the world for poking & prodding or result in any conflicts that cause things to stop working.
And when it comes to orchestrators like Home Assistant - you can choose any port you so desire. But changing the port doesn't make it any less or more secure.
Shit gets complicated, and being able to dynamite a railroad track through a mountain of nuance is just easier.
"Oh, that path is actually not a temp directory and requires permissions different than the user account?" - sudo
"Oh your firewall blocks my outgoing telemetry data?" - sudo
"Oh your firewall blocks my localhost request but I don't actually realize that's what happens but when I try it with sudo it just works everywhere?" - sudo
There are myriad reasons apps want root access, and almost none of them are good reasons, but that doesn't mean it's not simpler for them to get sudo from a user than it is to get dev eyes addressing (let alone understanding) the nuance.
I think the downvotes might be because I specifically said outbound connections? Although if you have IoT devices it's not unreasonable that they should be able to initiate conversations with your other devices (that would then need permission to accept inbound connections from your IoT devices).
Or maybe the downvotes are because everything I was saying was conjecture / hypothetical anyway, and you're now asking a more specific question to the general question being answered.
I thought the question was "why do apps that don't need sudo request sudo?" And my answer was "perhaps because it's easier to fix permissions problems by getting permission for everything than it is to get them by understanding why your app is getting blocked by them in the first place." Whether it's inbound or outbound or taking video surreptitiously doesn't really answer the question of "why, if the app doesn't actually need it?"
At any rate, I don't actually know why because I don't ask for permissions that I don't need. I also don't know why you're getting downvotes as I didn't downvote you: this answer, like my previous one, is speculative, as is somewhat inevitable when trying to answer "why" questions that relate to the motivations of others.
For the record, I thought your original answer was excellently well constructed. The bulldozer analogy is completely recognizable to anyone who's tried to engineer any software that needed to run a local server and somehow get its data out. Geez why didn't we all think of forcing the user to run it as root? /s
Maybe more interestingly: I do think that the motivations of others are totally calculable. Society is an autocomplete. One big honkin LLM replete with all the hallucinations. Pretending to be a member of this society is to pretend that I wish to better understand why I'd be downvoted for a thought - to pretend that it's just me, a neuron, looking for back propagation. Yay for the neuron.
people act weird around any kind of script, more-so than executables, i've never really understood it.
I periodically get told that a published browser userscript of mine is malicious or suspicious in emails simply because of the cautions and wording around the userscript installers themselves (it's just a css tweak, a theme), meanwhile the executables I have in the wild have generated zero similar feedback.
my theory is that since the script is more easily read that it attracts people to read it without any theory or knowledge of what they're even looking at .
Even if you don't review it before running it, after
$ curl https://whatever/foo.sh > foo.sh
$ sh foo.sh
if something goes terribly wrong you can examine foo.sh to try to figure out what happened and how to fix it. Even if foo.sh managed to delete itself you can just grab it again.
After
$ curl https://whatever/foo.sh | sh
if something goes wrong and you then try
$ curl https://whatever/foo.sh > foo.sh
to get a copy of the script to examine a malicious server can tell that you aren't piping to a shell [1] and give a non-malicious script.
Since it takes an insignificant amount of effort to defend against this why not get in the habit of doing it?
Yes, exactly the point I was trying to make. curl | sudo bash is just making it obvious what the glossy GUI installer with its dialog boxs and animated progress meters is doing anyway.
Microsoft.. The only company I have ever heard mention CRIME and BREACH and invokes their specter in .Net to do awesome things like.. Not let you enable websocket compression in SignalR.
Of course Microsoft is fine with it - the official Windows way of installing things has forever been "Pssst, hey there, why don't you download this .exe and run it and keep pressing ok until it's done"
How is this much different than how a deb or something gets installed? Actually, Windows installers are expected to be signed by default and it'll warn you if they aren't.
I wasn’t even aware this was a supported installation method anymore. If it is, it’s hidden on the site. When was the author’s last experience with homeassistant?
If the answer to cloud enshittification is “I know! I’ll use a different company’s solution instead of this open source project because I want to make an outdated stand against curl|bash” then I think the thought process is misguided.
HomeAssistant has changed officially supported installation methods so much, I personally don't know what's supported. Docker, tarball, installer, their own OS Part 1, etc were all different ways you can run it.
Last I checked, the bare metal pip3 method was "always" going to be supported. So the "Just use Docker" comments ignore this.
The author complains about a lack of product leadership at Phillips, but HA has always been renown for ignoring their users.
HAOS has been a pretty good experience when I set it up at my parents house though. I don't begrudge HA from trying to figure out the most reliable way to support installation methods - they're in a complicated space, and techies like us do tend to build unique-snowflake home setups.
I'm running the docker container (since I already had a home server running docker containers), but a NUC with HAOS for my folks has been working great.
I do begrudge them for putting in placeholders for features for years that weren't functional. Like a map that was blank and entire sections that weren't functional. I also begrudge them for doing things like removing Python 3.7 support 1.5 years before it was EOL. I begrudge them for re-architecting entire features like Open Z-Wave three times over the five years I used them. I begrudge them for asking their projects be removed from other open source projects.
HA is one guy's pet project to goof around with the latest and greatest technologies.
I put HAOS on an RPi4, plugged in a Zigbee/Z-Wave adapter, and never looked back. It runs 15ish Sengled RGB bulbs wonderfully, I've got all sorts of lights macro'd and timer'd (e.g. porch light comes on at sunset, turns off at midnight). Reliability is crazy, the UI is wonderful, I can access it from all sorts of devices and native apps...and there's a few other devices it sucks in too (air filter, Chromecasts, my NAS health, etc.) Now I haven't done any of the other actually useful projects I have in my backlog (thermostat, motion sensors, security cameras), but I'm extremely confident that HA can handle any that I throw at it.
All that being said, I find it a little odd that this article is somehow decrying HAOS as a worse alternative to a proprietary, anti-user black box developed by companies trying to squeeze more profit, just because they played fast-and-loose with some shell scripts at some point. (Aside: I just installed Homebrew on a new Mac today, and it's still just a curl | sh)
Most of the major consumer IoT vendors have had major security incidents (Wyze, Hue, Nest, Arlo, many others), and if nothing else, my little HAOS Rpi gets a little obscurity compared to the big names getting hit by script kiddies. Not to mention it's easy for me to keep it local-only and just join it to my Tailscale network.
But given all the allusions to HomeKit, I suspect the author has total faith in Apple to do it right (not a wholly misplaced assumption) and wants everything to just talk HomeKit.
Which we might actually get (in practice) as Matter makes inroads! Hell, I'd love for everything to talk HomeKit because HA can emulate a HomeKit Controller, and that means less cloud APIs. Win for everyone!
Has anyone actually been hacked by a curl|bash installer because of the curl-bash-iness of it (and not a theoretical PoC--I'm well aware of those blog posts)?
Maybe I’m just a naive idiot, but I thought her point was not the danger of sudo’ing random shell scripts per se but any sort of “solution” to restore the prior capabilities of a consumer product that required that level of technical acumen.
But every single other reply seems to be either “well yeah obviously read the script first” or “how dumb, just use docker,” so like I said, maybe I’m the dumb one.
I mean its really putting all the onus on the buyer of the product in the hopes that they have technical capabilities or alternatively just stilling all the benefits to the corporate company. Sad state of play.
I think her point is that managing your home automation through this level of involvement is not the end goal she’s looking for. I may be wrong, but it sounds like she wants stuff to plug in and work without having to go down the road of setting up custom automation stitching stuff.
I love Home Assistant, but I regularly find myself opening the Hue and Lutron apps anyway. And I’m someone who runs a NUC. I don’t mind administration, but I don’t want to HAVE to do that when I’ve already paid for a thing that supposedly does most of that.
What are alternatives for things like light bulbs, switches, sockets, etc other? We are currently building a new house and I have requested non-smart wall switches/sockets etc. The default (as our build is off a standardised plan) is for 'smart' switches/sockets using some brand of Cloud-based service which I believe isn't an open protocol like Zigbee. It seems to me that no matter which ecosystem it's always attached to the cloud somehow.
It is a shame Phillips Hue has gone down this path as I would have seriously considered their gear otherwise.
Maybe I'm a luddite but I can't see any advantage installing with gear reliant on cloud access.
you can roll your own with matter devices and home assistant. that being said, ideology aside - life is short so I've opted to use smartthings which has been fine for me personally for several years now
Aside from z-wave, which I already have and doesn't seem to be super reliable, I've been looking at some of the first gen matter stuff. I'm not sure if it's ready for prime time yet.
I recently started with home assistant. 80 bucks mini PC from Amazon, 25 bucks zigbee stick and bunch of different relays, modules, switches around the house. Easily setup HVAC fresh air ventilation (already had ducts in place but it was stupid x minutes per hour, now it is dependent on outside temperature), easily made my dumb switches smart where needed without them looking any different from the rest. In addition esphome on garage door opener motor with couple zigbee sensors on garage doors themselves to make my motors "smart"...
Unfortunately, to get there most out of it you have to go to AliExpress to have a selection of modules, but I made it a journey, rather than a project
...including all the big names like Hue. Nest. Ring. Yale. Schlage. Ikea. HomeKit. Plex. Sonos. Alexa. Sure, you can integrate arbitrary digital/MQTT/Zigbee/BLE stuff you find on AliExpress for pennies, or you can buy the name-brand stuff from big box stores.
You're not locked into just the Hue ecosystem just because you have their bulbs. I don't understand why HomeKit doesn't just talk to the bulbs instead of allowing Phillips to force you to go through their hub. This is on Apple for not supporting the lights directly.
AliExpress offers variety that brand names don't. I am talking about relays mostly. Different setups, different voltage, etc. If something of the shelf that fits your need available from a reputable brand - that's always preferable. But if you need to implement something not available - AliExpress likely get that covered.
Go with something that supports Matter, like Nanoleaf. You can add a bulb with Matter to HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon's thing, etc. at the same time. With HomeKit, at least, you can keep everything as local as you want, and still have shiny apps to manage all your gear.
Yeah it’s all very stupid. We got rid of it all and are grateful to have dimmer switches on the walls. The occasional smart socket is nice but home lighting is a solved problem that phones don’t make better.
Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.
Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
If you're ok with wifi protocols, Kaufman[1] makes bulbs, switches and plugs that all run ESPHome out of the box. I have some bulbs and one of the plugs and they all work nicely.
KNX for new buildings. But it's quite expensive, like $25 per portand there's a maximum on 64 devices on a twisted pair line. You can have up to 15 lines on a backbone with line repeates (= area) and then max 15 areas with area couplers. There are also KNX to IP routers.
Some of these things had excuses, for instance the original version of SmartThings had a very stupid hub and made up for it with cloud services. That's not the case for Hue at all.
This is why I really try to buy devices that can run Tasmota. Any Tuya compatible device can be flashed to work with Tasmota. I have actually left some devices with the Tuya firmware on there - their app is pretty decent. But I know if I need to I can flash Tasmota and make it appear on my network like a legacy Phillips Hue or Belkin Wemo device that doesn't require an account.
Buying hardware that can run open firmware is nice for future proofing in case the vendor goes sideways with their firmware. I do the same for routers with OpenWRT.
> Any Tuya compatible device can be flashed to work with Tasmota.
Hm, no not really. I have a bunch of remote controlled sockets that can't be reflashed with Tasmota and that require a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through to access including enabling 'developer mode' and access from a bunch of IPs in China. No thanks... really annoying because it was exactly one of those comments that caused me to buy them in the first place.
Rachel nailed it, as usual. I was an early adapter and have a houseful of Hue stuff, but over the last year or so I've switched to buying Nanoleaf bulbs. Hue is a little nicer, but not enough to make their terrible app worth the hassle.
I've seen a few recommendations now for the Ikea Dirigera hub, so fine. I've ordered one. Assuming it works as expected, I'll migrate everything next week. So long, Philips. I liked your stuff, but why'd you have to get greedy? Was being twice the price of your competition not enough?
Govee are also very popular now, I haven't personally used any but I have a mix of Hue + a bunch of other stuff powered mostly through HA and it's always worked pretty flawlessly for me using their Hue bridge of course. Even the PC color sync works pretty well with not much latency considering it's a software implementation -> network -> bridge -> wireless to the lights. It's the most non-hacker-friendly "ambilight" setup I've ever used.
I have a Govee brand humidity sensor that works great. Bluetooth only (there are wifi models too iirc, Bluetooth was fine for my purpose), connects instantly & reliably, no account or other bs.
I haven’t gone in much for home automation so can’t speak to how well it integrates with anything else, but this thing at least works great.
I now have a couple of different app controllable LEDs. By far, the Hue app has been the best of the bunch. However, my app recently gave me the "Starting soon, you'll need to be signed in" notice. I am very unhappy with this, as everything I want my lights to do is working perfectly fine without even needing an account to be signed into.
From the moment I first saw the notice, I started wondering if I'll have to find a new app. But because "soon" has not arrived, I just have been ignoring it. I hope when "soon" arrives it will be a weekend so I have plenty of time to deal with it.
The BestBuy Insignia brand smart switches died years ago (they shut the clowd servers down and sent me gift cards for the purchase price, nice) but they keep working with HomeKit every day.
Hopefully I can just block my Hueshit at the router and they'll keep doing what they do, otherwise off to goodwill.
You need a PR for this. Someone start a repo. And while we’re at it, can we think of something better than enshitification? It just doesn’t roll off the tongue very well at all.
I've always been partial for "slumping into the melt" - a term from forging metal and glass. Everything becomes a even bland useless but barely working mix in the crucible of modern finance.
enshitification is just so onomatopoeically pleasing though. it's also like one of those fun German words, but in English.
It's similar to one of those George Carlin bits where putting a curse word in the middle of an ordinary word changes the power of the word.
incredible -> infuckingcredible
absolutely -> absofuckinglutely
There is already a german word for it, it's called "Verschlimbesserung". Which you could translate to "Improving but making it worse", sounds better in german so. :)
I was also very unhappy to see that notice. However, If you tap “learn more”, it sounds like creating an account is optional. You’ll only need an account to opt-in to certain features, like controlling your lights when away from home, etc.
I use the Ikea lights and bridge, although mine is a few years old at this point. Everything just works and I've maybe had 1 issue in just over 4 years. Easily integrates with either Google Home or HomeKit or HA. My only complaint is (my) bridge needs hardwire ethernet access and each bridge only supports 5 devices. I bought one of the wireless physical switches which seemed like it would come in handy, but the battery died pretty quick. Not a big deal though as I never used it anyway, but having the option was nice.
Any light you want to independently control is a device. So yes, each bulb is a device. But that was with the TRADFRI, which it seems they don't sell anymore. It looks like the DIRIGERA supports up to 100 devices though, so probably nothing to worry about. Feels like I probably bought the first gen of their smart products.
Matter makes it a lot easier to mix and match products from different ecosystems. You can get 3 A19 nanoleaf RGB blubs that support Matter over Thread for the price of one Hue RGB A19. The Hue might be better but I doubt its 3 times better (I have a bunch of Hue lights and no nanoleafs yet).
I'll be moving to matter blubs (whatever brand strikes the best balance between price and quality) in the future and only using Hue bulbs when its necessary for features that aren't supported with Matter (like Hue Sync).
I just bought Nanoleaf bulbs and they just don’t get bright enough. Then I have issues where there’s always 2 or 3 bulbs out of 6 that don’t respond and they’re all next to HomePods and routers etc…I really hate that Philips went down this route because so far they definitely seem to have the better product.
I’ve had great experience with the IKEA stuff. I even still have the old Tradfri hub. I haven’t really had any make problems with it, despite the reputation it has received.
My first setup was for my apartment which did not have any overhead lights or a switched outlet. Ikea's came with a remote and you could use it hubless (just pair directly to up to 10 bulbs). No internet needed and it actually never broke for the 3 years I needed it.
When Ikea came out with smart home stuff, I bet that they would get it right, or at least not as bad as the others (I previously suffered through the enshitification of Samsung's SmartThings). In my experience their stuff has been flimsy and not sure trustworthy. It at least works without an app, so far, but I've not been able to regain any enthusiasm for the promise of home automation
When was SmartThings good? I missed that. The only thing I use it for is an oven that, even though it is connected to the internet, can't manage to update the time when daylight savings time changes. To get the oven to update the time, you have to open the app, find the oven, go to Settings, turn OFF the "automatic time sync" option and then turn it back on again. Every 6 months.
I performed this ritual last weekend, and followed up by filing a bug report about what a shitshow the whole thing was from the feedback option in the app. I got a very nice message back from Samsung telling me my message had come to the wrong place and that I should do something different if I wanted to give feedback about the app. FFS.
I've completely replaced all my Hue lights with Lutron Casetas. They work so much better than individual light bulbs talking to the bridge. I use Apple Home which is mostly meh, but feels more robust than Hue or Google Home.
I have nearly all of our light switches on Casetas (except for things like bathroom and closets, where we're not sitting/lying down or care about dim levels).
However... in some rooms (office and board game room), I do like having the option for cool white during the day, and warm white at night. So I like having Hues there.
So, while Casetas are good for automating a single color, you still need bulb-level automation for anything involving multiple colors.
As an electronics guy with both backend and frontend programming experience for me there are three routes when it comes to my home infrastructure:
1. Buy something dumb, non-smart, non-cloud
2. Build it myself
3. Buy something that can be hacked and used with my own infrastructure
The problem isn't even their infrastructure, it is that they decide when they want to change it. Even if it was all good faith changes, that could be a reliability issue and force me to dedicate time to the issue on their whim. I don't like that. If I run such things myself I can decide myself when to update and how much time I want to invest when (provided the system is decoupled from the public internet).
And this point isn't even about any single company trading the good will of their customers bit by bit — it is just about me not having to jump when their service changes or ends for whatever reason (and there are many).
Nothing wrong with buying smart equipment, as long as it's local first using common protocols like generic Zigbee. That way you don't NEED to use the manufacturers hubs and interfaces and you substitute out for your own controller like Homeassistant or a third party Hub.
A number 4. would be: Buy from an established lighting company that publishes compatibility tests. It may not have all the bells and whistles but focuses on doing one thing right, which is to switch a light. My Lutron’s have never needed a debug since install and I get all the convenience and forget about it.
I think a lot of people get into home automation to constantly tweak stuff. If that is what tickles them sure. For me, like anything automated, I want it to work in the background and provide some quality of life improvements and never have to think about it again.
I think I have one voice-activated switch that replaced X10 in a room lacking wiring for a convenient regular light switch, a low temp alarm, and a camera/temp sensor I put together myself.
I understand there are people who like to fiddle with this stuff but mostly I don’t get the attraction.
The trust has been broken in electronics/technology products in general
There is very little loyalty to the customer from the manufacturers, and so customers are now weary and loosing their loyalty for brands in the way consumers traditionally did.
My only remaining smart device is an off brand smart bulb on my front porch. It is set up to turn on at 6PM and off at 6AM. It disconnected from my network years ago, but has kept working great nonetheless. I think of it like a Mars probe going about its business. :-)
When mine disconnected from the network I discovered it was flashing nonstop red, green, and blue. I'm surprised the neighbors didn't come over and complain
Exactly. I violated this rule once when I bought a Nest thermostat because it was elegantly designed (this was pre-Google). Then Nest started forcing random updates that not only bricked the device a couple of times (fortunately not permanently) but also changed the UI so that at random times when I wanted to fiddle with a setting I had to relearn how to work the thing.
Finally I got smart and changed my wifi password so the thermostat couldn't talk to the Internet any more, at which point I had a very elegant, unconnected thermostat that eventually became unreliable because it couldn't draw enough current from my two-wire system to keep itself reliably charged up. I tossed it in the recycle bin and bought a $25 dumb thermostat to replace it and I couldn't be happier.
Some general notes to the idiots in C-suites at every company making home automation devices:
1. I don't work for you.
2. You have competitors.
3. You do not get to make demands on my time to re-learn your UI, download software updates, advertise things to me, or sign new EULAs whenever you so desire. I have a life and it doesn't revolve around your company.
4. You do not get to spy on me with your device and sell information about my personal habits.
5. You do not get to use your cloud connectivity to force me into a recurring payment plan just to continue to use your device.
6. If you disagree with any of the above, I would ask that you carefully reread (1) and (2). Misbehavior on your part will result in your product being thrown in the trash, no further purchases from me, and my social network being immediately warned to avoid your company like the plague.
Honestly I found the post and her attitude kinda annoying.
She dismisses Home Assistant for silly reasons, but then fully acknowledges that the IKEA thing doesn't actually work properly with the Hue kit, and worries that IKEA is going to pull some garbage in the future anyway.
It's a shame that solutions like openHAB and Home Assistant aren't dead-simple for the average person to set up, and they have a bunch of usability issues. But if you're the kind of person who is sick of companies enshittifying the things you've already bought and were happy with, you have to actually own the experience, and openHAB or HA is the only way to do that.
I've been running openHAB for 3+ years now, and while it hasn't been perfect, it does what I want and need, and I never worry about some company updating things and breaking my experience. I update when I want to, and can roll it back it the update causes problems.
I hadn’t heard of Nanoleaf, so I checked out their site. Immediately a GDPR notice filled my screen, which is no surprise, but they make it pretty hard to opt out. Most importantly, though, it states that they share _identifiable_ data with TikTok. I think I’ll be avoiding that brand.
> We use TikTok Ads to promote our products and services in various countries.TikTok shares information with advertisers and third-party measurement companies to show how many and which users of the Platform have viewed or clicked on an advertisement. If you use the TikTok Lite version of TikTok, information is shared with advertising networks to display personalized advertisements to you on the TikTok Lite app and elsewhere online. TikTok stores and processes data in accordance with their privacy policy.
> Data is Anonymised: No
> Data Storage Locations: United States and Canada
> Data Usage Purposes: Marketing
My family is always bitching me out for the slightest thing that goes wrong with my home automation. My wife would absolutely refuse to use any A/V gear that involves logging in: I mean, this has been normalized by streaming but you never have to log in to use a Blu-Ray player.
That’s funny! As a single guy who’s always bitching at myself for my failing home automation, I understand your family’s pain of just wanting to do something simple like turn on a light but they can’t because dad wanted the “fAnCy LiGhTs”! lmao
And having it extend to have to piss by the light of your cell phone (just before you drop it in the toilet) because you're groggy and can't remember the right incantation to get lights on ...
You should probably listen to them. It’s great to have tinkering hobbies but please don’t subject others to your whims just because you are in a position of authority.
> My family is always bitching me out for the slightest thing that goes wrong with my home automation.
er...why are you whinging and being mean about them? it is you who has made their home annoying. you should fix it or get rid of all the things that are making their lives annoying.
I want to see meaningful pushback on this indefensible move of forcing customers to establish and maintain a relationship with the manufacturer in order to use the products they sell.
Other examples are:
Wahoo, who locked the control of their products behind an account and login requirement for devices which had been working perfectly fine for years prior.
Roche, who killed their blood glucose app at the start of 2023 and forced all their users to move to a third party app, developed by one of their subsidiaries, which requires you to accept a data exfiltration clause, if they wish to continue the automagic on-device logging.
BMW now hides features behind signing into their absolutely atrocious online "app store." When I first got my car and was excited about exploring the features, I went through the incredible pain of logging into my account by typing my email and password with that little knob, and then one day it just logged me out and wanted me to do it all over again, and I can't be bothered so I just dismiss the dialog whenever I see it. So the upshot is they've created a set of features that aren't worth the trouble of the awful UX (and potential privacy issues), plus an occasional nag to remind me of that fact.
You also can't get a software update without installing their terrible mobile app (and logging in), so I take it to the dealer and make them do it.
I have to admit, begrudgingly, that the Tesla App experience “JustWorksTM.” This is the 3rd I’ve picked up (3, Y, Y) and this time, I didn’t even have to pair my phone. I was signed into my existing app and my new Y just changed from an order number to a VIN and started working. All my preferences synced to my driver profile immediately.
If every experience with Tesla was like the initial buying experience I’d recommend it to anyone, however, let me assure anyone interested the honeymoon phase definitely ends.
Maybe they do, but I don't install apps for horseshit like this. I especially don't install apps from companies that are obviously terrible at software development, like car manufacturers.
Won't they charge you through the nose for this? We recently went to a Lexus dealer for something random but specific on an old Lexus, and they did basic service like an oil change. When we stepped inside, it was like a 5 star hotel lobby with ordurves and fancy hosts a bunch of weird junk.
We got the bill, and never even considered going back.
I had them do it when I was in for my (free) oil change, and they didn't charge me for it. I suppose they might if I brought it in for just the software update.
Good luck. I called out Logitech for forcing users to log into some bullshit online account to maintain their Harmony remotes, and was attacked by apologists on Reddit (take that for what you will).
A couple months later Logitech shitcanned the entire product line (which I had already returned after discovering their scam), and screwed all the apologists. I wonder what they think today... if they even do.
Don't underestimate the cognitive dissonance (and resulting apologism and shilling) that you'll face when you call out defects and scams in someone's pet product or belief system. And yes, it happens right here on HN too often as well.
FWIW Logitech continues to run the Harmony servers, and I've bought a couple of used hubs since. I hate that you have to login, so don't call me an apologist; Logitech made some real mistakes here. Still, the Harmony products work well enough. I hope eventually either Logitech open sources the server and database, or that someone emulates the server somehow.
Sometimes people get into niche communities and get really obsessive in a ridiculous way, like spending inordinate amounts of time defending a junky Logitech software suite.
I know, because it has happened to me. I see it happen with particular frequency in Discord.
I am not a psychologist, but it seems like a trap humans are predisposed to fall into.
Logitech still supports the Harmony devices, for how much longer remains to be seen. I just recently replaced some that had broke so I'm good till the next device failure as long as I don't make any major replacements either.
I know I'm part of a dwindling customer base that still uses separate A/V gear and not just built-in streaming apps and a soundbar, but it seems like there would have still been a market for competent universal remotes that you could customize.
I hated how almost every generation of their remotes got harder to use and program compared to pre-Logitech Harmony. The Touch remotes were practically unusable because you had frequently used buttons in poor locations and a touch screen that you had to scroll through to find the correct soft touch button for that wasn't especially responsive, the old models with all hard buttons were vastly more usable.
I also have separate components, and beyond that they're even in an equipment closet separated from my living room (and projector) by a wall. So I wanted an RF remote with an IR blaster I could put in the closet.
But screw it. On the rare occasion I watch something that's not on my Shield (whose remote can control my receiver's volume with CEC), I just adjust the volume manually.
But let's not even get started on the pathetic state of the A/V receiver market, where you can't even get a receiver with A/B/C sets of speakers... despite advertising three zones.
Unfortunately, that doesn't work. If Reddit is any indication, the moral of the story is they can get away with it because there's a million idiots all ready to take your place.
except every single manufacture is going down this road pretty much, they want to monetize all that data because more money equals more better, privacy be damned.
Normally you would be able to simply continue using the firmware on it, plus the app you originally installed, in perpetuity.
In reality, on each new iOS device, Apple forces you to use the current version of the app in the App Store now, and your old version apps are not included in backups or able to be transferred to new devices.
You are eventually forced to use the latest version of the app by Apple.
The latest version of the app will require the latest firmware or will modal lock you out until you upgrade the device.
Blame Apple for not letting you preserve your old versions of working apps between backups and devices, and blame Apple for allowing time bomb expiring apps like Signal and Chase Mobile into the App Store.
Further blame Apple for not having an iOS "internet access" permission per app that would prevent these apps from learning that there are new, unwanted firmware updates available when all you want to do is local operations.
Finally, any product that requires that you "sign up/log in" on the first screen and can't be used otherwise without PII should go straight back into the box to be returned.
Fair enough. But what if you bought the product, paid a fair amount for it (i.e., you can't just shit-can it) and *then* X months later the brand suddenly require a sign up, subscription fee, etc.
Exactly. I have hundreds of dollars tied up in MY hue products. I paid the market price for a device that didn't require me to sign up for an account.
As far as I'm concerned these companies should get hit with deceptive advertising charges. Yes, I realize that buried somewhere two or three hundred paragraphs deep in the TOS I "agreed" to let them do this. Then again maybe I didn't, because I also likely "agreed" to have the TOS changed at any time for any reason without warning. That is key here.
IMO These companies get away with this because they can toss out one of the basics of contract law. It is unconscionable that one party can _unilaterally_ change the terms of the contact (the "terms of service") without prior warning or input from the other party (me, as the purchaser of said device/service).
Basic contract law should apply here. What _tangible_ benefits are there to me
Step 1: Make discontent known to brand
Step 2: Create/join community of fellow disaffected individuals
Step 3: Use community to spread awareness of said dissatisfaction
Step 4: Observe as sales of product fall off and brand reputation falters
Step 5A: Observe as brand reverses unpopular decision and recovers
OR
Step 5B: Observe as brand is replaced in the market by one which better meets consumer preferences
This has no actual effect on the underlying issue that nothing is stopping companies from doing this. In fact, if what you describe active ually happens a lot, it would be trivial to set up puppet competitors to your own products in order to recapture leaving costumers, repeat ad infinitum.
> Step 5B: Observe as brand is replaced in the market by one which better meets consumer preferences
Step 0A- Realize that most mature industries are incestuous. They share the same consultants, they swap employees, they compete for the same market with the same group-think mindset, etc. They all have the same incentives and paradigm for success and thus often act in murmuration'ing way. That is, they're too big and too risk-adverse to consider innovation so they feign being competitive and milk the market the best they can.
Step 0B - Realize that for the most part the gov - via Cronie Capitalism - will not protect consumers, and will put the thumb on the scale for the largest players. Your rights and privacy - in the context of Surveillance Capitalism (which the gov benefits from) - are more myth than they are real.
Step 0C - Realize that all the steps follow are rarely successful. Sure, you can try but the odds are not in your favor. You end up paying the subscription and/or having your usage data sold in some black box cyber back room.
A: I already explicitly avoid products that are encrusted in this shit.
B: I have not used either of these products since their respective changes, even though they’re otherwise still perfectly functional.
A notable flow on effect is both of these products had helped with the management and improvement of my health, and these changes have had a measurable negative impact since I’ve been unable to use them.
No but I live in the amazing world of free-market capitalism where I can choose to reward whichever company best meets my preferences as a consumer with money.
I bought a Miku baby monitor because it had the features I wanted but didn’t require a subscription. It was pretty expensive ($399).
Then Miku sold to another company (they either filed or were planning on filing for bankruptcy), and the first thing the new company did was send a letter demanding $10 a month to keep using most of the monitor’s features.
Without knowing the particulars, that's an interesting example. The fact that Miku was going bankrupt suggests that they did not have a viable/sustainable business, and perhaps they could have been profitable with a different (i.e. subscription fees) business model. In either case, new company seems like they do not much value existing Miku customers, as demanding more money for a product that was bought/paid seems pretty outrageous.
They pushed out an over the air update the bricked nearly every device and had to swap them all out right before sending out a letter warning they were going to file.
The lesson that it drives home to me is that if a company can force updates to your device, it doesn’t matter what the terms of service are or how much you trust the company.
They can go bankrupt, sell off the assets, and some new vampire company can come along and remove your ability to use your product.
Your first mistake was buying a baby monitor where it was even possible for most of its features to be remotely disabled unless you paid a fee. If you give someone else control over your devices, and your data, they'll eventually take it.
Oh hey, fellow Miku friend. I was _furious_ when they first announced their bankruptcy plan. We supposedly paid a hefty premium for hardware that enables onboard breathing monitoring, and suddenly they're pretending they have to ship it to the cloud to do some magic? Nah, tear it down, and turns out we did pay extra for hardware.
I likely won't have time, what with the kids and all, but I'm going to give it the old college try to tear into this thing and craft some firmware so we can actually keep things from being a paperweight. It blows my mind this isn't just table stakes with IoT crap these days, but here we are.
Ring doorbells, because the microphone heard the citizen say the N-word and locked him out of the Amazon account.
Back then, we thought legal questions about discrimination silly - if the baker won't bake cakes for lesbians, who cares, there are dozens of bakers in town who are not silly, why fight with the one who is, especially since the only recourse you will get is a birthday cake.
But now with the app monopolies it's different. If Lyft bans you over a justified chargeback and Uber bans you over another justified chargeback you are going to have a problem.
Not what happened. The driver thought they heard the nword come from a Eufy doorbell. Which was them mishearing the automated response. No person uttered an nword and no ring doorbell was involved.
Amazon did lock the guys account for the report from their driver. That did lock him out of his other IoT devices.
The thing is - even racists have a right that their devices work. They paid money for it. Amazon's duty is to protect their driver, and if they refuse to deliver because a driver has been threatened that's OK. But they can't lock him out of their alarm system or automated door opener. It's worse because when you choose a camera doorbell because you have a choice between Ring and Nest, which is not much of a choice.
There need to be reasonable limits as companies are not actually literal people, and their rights should be inferior to those of literal people. Treating companies as people and anything they do (eg in the lens of speech) has caused so much damage and has obviously just been an excuse for lawmakers to not have to make tough decisions.
An example that comes to mind is how if you get banned from Steam, you typically still retain the ability to access your past purchases, you just lose multiplayer, purchasing new content etc.
Similarly, companies should not be able to unilaterally discard the responsibilities they take on when they sell people things that require continuous service to operate.
This should be especially relevant in cases like with Philips Hue, now that they've chosen to bear the burden of even previous Hue owners' smart homes, they should not be able to willy nilly shed that in a way that renders the system non-functional. Any bans they make should just leave the hardware usable in the way that it already was.
Eufy by Anker lied about their products storing data locally and instead uploaded it to their servers — and had them unsecured so anyone could download anyones videos.
As people who understand these things, we can choose the role of "citizen technologist", to benefit society.
Some off-the-cuff ideas of how:
1. Make our own purchases "on principle", and hope that enough other techies do that, that economic pressure is applied to brands.
2. Make our own non-purchase technology adoptions "on principle".
3. Inform other techies, both on specifics of individual devices/architectures/vendors/etc., and to bring everyone up to speed on the basics (e.g., reasons for open standards, user-oriented products/services, avoiding lock-in, privacy-respecting, responsible security, etc.).
4. Inform non-techies, such as by pointing them at solutions in their interest, and in the interest of society.
5. Advise lawmakers, to complement whatever they're hearing from lobbyists.
6. Contribute code and other effort to open platforms, and actually use them.
7. Be careful about helping to prop up society-hostile platforms, such as by using them to the exclusion of something else, making them more palatable to the exclusion of something better, implicitly endorsing them, etc.
8. Keep principles a factor in who we go to work for, how we work while there, and whether we stay there.
These are great ideas, that a tax paying citizen should not be burdened with in a first world country. Our administration needs to step up from hiring dinosaurs, to actually hiring technology-competent legislators that can compose effective legislation.
Samsung did something similar with their phones' built I'm heart rate and oxygen sensor, and health related metrics from the accelerometer
My Samsung Galaxy S8+ had those sensors and I used them often for many years. The results were interesting and useful, and graphed with history in the Samsung app which shipped on the device.
Then one day they changed the terms so you had to create and sign into a Samsung account, and upload your health data, to continue using the sensors.
I didn't accept those terms so I wasn't able to use those health monitoring functions on my expensive device any more.
Interestingly, most articles I saw about the change portrayed it as a good thing, that you could now have consistent healrh sensor records across your devices and other good cloud features, even portraying it as an oddity that Samsung Health didn't require Samsung cloud integration all along and that they had finally caught up to the times. But it already had those features before the change! The only visible change was to to remove the choice to opt out of uploading your personal data.
I set up Home Assistant recently on a Raspberry Pi, and imported all of my Hue lights. So far so good, but I haven't managed to migrate completely off the Hue app + Bridge. I've purchased an HA-compatible Z-wave dongle, which will apparently let me manage all of my Hue hardware without an account or bridge, but haven't tried taking the plunge yet.
I hope you meant Zigbee dongle instead of Z-Wave. Hue devices use Zigbee and can be directly paired to Home Assistant using a Zigbee dongle, but not using a Z-Wave dongle.
Can someone explain to me what this ecosystem is and the appeal of it?
I have nothing automated in my life, that I know of? I don't have a garage; the door to the house has a key; the lights I turn on with a switch; no Alexa, don't use Siri... I am not exactly opposed to automation, but I am hesitant to share even more demographic data to cloud services.
I like the idea of local home automation. “Siri, make the bathroom lights dark blue”
Problem is, it comes with a ton of headaches.
The cloud is a problem, as you noted, but also a bunch of fiddily, unreliable software, firmware updates that go haywire, and apps that are tied to iOS and will stop working with my physically installed home hardware if the manufacturer ever stops treading water and fails to update for the latest breaking iOS update.
Home automation could be simple, reliable, and future-proof. It’s really not, though.
I'm not so sure it can be simple, reliable, and future proof, at least not in the consumer space.
Everyone is chasing the lowest price, and it has to compete with existing solutions that are cheap, like just putting a filter on a white bulb, or installing a dimmer switch. What these products are offering is convenience, but not fundamentally new life experiences. So they can't charge a lot.
Meanwhile, they have to interact with an absolutely enourmous range of interfaces. The wi-fi router, the phone, the electric service itself, etc. And the user has high expectations for ease of use (after all, it is a light bulb, it should be simple!) while needing good security (it is your home after all, if you can't be safe in your home then where can you be safe?)
A simple experience with a wide range of interfaces at low cost has almost never been successfully done. Even Apple can't do it; they offer ease of use, but in a limited ecosystem and at a premium price.
So these products are fundamentally flawed and they probably can never be fixed. This industry is fundamentally not viable until someone comes along and solves the interface issue or until people accept paying a lot of money for these kinds of things, and even in that case it would probably be a reseller performing a home install then providing API access to these services, which is only one step away from home-as-a-service.
And I personally do not think I could tolerate a home-as-a-service. But many young people or students might like that just fine.
> I'm not so sure it can be simple, reliable, and future proof, at least not in the consumer space.
Depending on your definition of future it's very possible. Find some devices classified as "Local Push" or "Local Polling" https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th.... Make a VLAN with no internet access in your router and put them (and HA) on it. Never update the firmware (why would you, they work don't they?), connect them to HA and pin the version of it and your plug-ins. Don't let the devices talk directly to HA if you're extra paranoid.
Their model is shipping ESP devices flashed with open source firmwares. They still go on their own firewalled wifi network, but this is about as future-proof as I can imagine: the software is open source, the updates can be run locally, the parts they're made of are actually pretty simple PCBs you could get a fab run of your own done if you wanted to.
In terms of "future" proofing, everything I've installed I've been putting in accessible junction boxes well labelled - electricity isn't going to change, so as long as it fits in a box, I'll always have the option to replace the hardware (if you have light switches with a neutral wire then you're basically set).
I wouldn't say "simple" per se but that's really more on the "you need a box running some type of home automation stuff". I suspect simple enough for the consumer would be something which came with it's own wifi AP and pre-configured mesh routers so the IoT network would start out intrinsically separated.
Right, and then have local services interacting with no cloud support, or phone integration.
But this is absolutely not "consumer" by any means. If my grandmother can't do it, you failed the simplicity test. This is exactly why we end up with cloud services for everything. Because real-world integration with the entire fleet of possibilities for consumer interaction is by definition an open-ended problem that can never be finished.
> Right, and then have local services interacting with no cloud support, or phone integration.
Huh? I have the Homeassiant app on my phone and I proxy the web interface to a VPC so it's accessible to me everywhere.
This was never intended to be a solution for your grandpa. This is a solution for nerds who want to build a future proof setup with consumer equipment (Phillips smart bulbs vs. commercial lighting like https://www.crestronlighting.com/)
If you don't like having "the big light" on then colour changing and dimmable lights are great. A lot of people don't feel qualified to install actual dimmer switches.
I only set mine to warm, cold and purple/blue but I don't have room for three lamps.
Stuff like the sunrise timer, switching lights on when you're on holiday, and out of home control are just gimmicks though.
The lights in my house turn on and off with the rhythm of our lives. We don’t think about turning a light on or off. They do that by themselves. My home knows when the dishwasher is done. My home can silence alerts if I’m on a zoom call. My home knows if the air quality is low and doesn’t turn on the ventilator fan.
Automation is not about having an app for your lights, it’s about not having to think of trivial stuff like turning on a light.
I like having an app for my lights. Getting a little dark during a video call? Just turn the lights on without missing a beat. Better than the awkward "I'll be riiight back" that wastes 10 people's time.
(As for automatically turning on lights, that is also good. I have two receptacles outdoors that aren't on a switched circuit. Thanks to the magic of smart lights, they are now off during the day.)
Maybe this is what I'm missing—opening an app is far more fiddly to me than standing up, flipping a switch, and sitting back down. I have to get my phone out, open it, hope face ID works (you mentioned it was dark), enter my code if not, find the app, click the app, wait for it to load, find the right button...
Do other people not struggle with apps the way I do?
I don't generally find those interactions to be a struggle, but it's still 10x easier and faster to get up and turn on the light using the old-fashioned switch.
10 years ago my young child had fairy lights hung up in her room. They were really pretty and not too bright. However she didn't really have a way to turn them on/off without unplugging them. So, I remembered the "Clap on!" device from years ago and thought it would be the perfect solution.
It turns out that they are hard to find and very expensive ($30) for what they are. Even if you can find them it's hard to tell if its an original unit or some super cheap knockoff that might burn your house down. :(
Android and iOS both have the ability to have smart home controls in the notification shade/control center. Both also allow them to be used when the device is locked.
I have a battery-powered switch on my desk, so that avoids the need to use an app. Otherwise, I have my HA dashboard pinned in Chrome, so it's always one click away. And, you can have widgets on your phone's lock screen. I also don't like playing with my phone and don't use those.
If you don't need 'em or like the idea, don't spend $75 per switch. I got into smart lights because my apartment was apparently wired by a madman; the switch for my desk lights are right outside the bathroom. (Different circuit though!) I was very tired of walking that far to turn them on and off. I then replaced every other switch the week after, and have no regrets whatsoever, except maybe not having white tint adjustment. (I just have regular old LED bulbs. The switches are smart, not the bulbs.)
Once I was fully invested, I got a wall mount remote control that fits into a dual-gang faceplate (but only needs a single gang box), so I can control all of my lights when arriving or leaving. Very convenient.
Like others, I agree that automations are also nice. I have two fixtures outside that are unswitched. They turn on at sunset and off at sunrise now. No wasted electricity trying to overpower the sun. (Those are smart bulbs, of course.)
But aside from that, do you have issues with Face ID in the dark? For me it works in pitch darkness. It sends out some laser light when scanning your face and hopefully not frying your eyes.
I'm in the same boat as you (though generally not in the context of home automation and things) and I've also wondered the same thing. Using an app is just about the worst way I can interface with things and is only useful when it's the only possible way, like when I'm out and about.
One assumption I've made is that people just have much better and responsive phones than I do: I regularly wait 2-4 seconds for even the simplest things to happen on mine and it's overall a terrible experience. Overall I would say most phones I've had were like this at some point in their lifetime (often the majority of the lifetime), including a latest model Samsung phone that arguably was ahead of most available phones at the time.
I'm not sure what to think: I think it's just a matter of being used to a certain way of interacting with things in the end. Nothing's been able to replace a computer program for me, whether it be CLI, TUI or GUI.
As for home automation with apps vs. traditional switches and stuff I've always assumed that most of the stuff is done for coolness sake and because it's fun. Certainly what draws me to some of these things (though I haven't pulled the trigger on any of it) is that I could actually interface with the rest of the world from my computer, which I just think is a fun idea.
I think you could probably just skip the awkward “I’ll be riiight back” stand up, flip the light switch and carry on. I mean unless the light switch is in another room you’d still hear whatever is going on and unless you are literally running the meeting I struggle to imagine what the purpose of announcing your action is.
Maybe I’ve become a crusty old man, in years gone by I would have thought that people would notice me getting up and wonder where I was going. Now though, I’ve realized that no one is really paying that much attention to anyone else, even if someone were curious about why you walked away for a moment, the room getting brighter and you sitting back down doesn’t require a brain surgeon to piece together what happened.
Once you remove the completely voluntary awkward part of that video call, fiddling with an app and flipping a switch are on a lot more equal footing.
Good lighting is a luxury for sure but can definitely get complicated to control properly with just switches. The other thing is, once you’re in that ecosystem, you fiddle a lot at the beginning and then you don’t. My lights get blue and bright during the day and get warmer into the evening and since I work in the living room, it’s nice to have the two setups together.
When it works, it just feels good but certainly isn’t a necessity. And of course that’s just lights. I used to have my hvac system integrated into HomeKit too and again, it was nice being able to control the thermostat in my kids room without having to go in. More recently I’ve had a neighbor that smokes a lot of weed and something about the closets being badly insulated is letting in all his smoke in my daughter’s room. Tried talking to the guy and nothing happened. Luckily, his smoking schedule is super precise and I was able to set timers for my kids air purifier to go off at his exact smoking time for 1 hour. It’s been 3 months since I’ve seen particulate matter go above 30ug/m^2…it used to get as high as 180!
Being a renter means I’m only halfway into the automation game but I gotta say, given the right product and platform I’m all in. And if something doesn’t work right then it’s time to reverse engineer it and make it behave.
The other thing is that it means you can fix light switches which are in awkward places. I went to a lot of effort moving a couple of light switches in my house before I started wiring them all for ESPHome-based control...and me and my wife realized that actually, most of the light switches we're unhappy about can just be left alone since automation can make them way more useful (a simple example is just having the garage lights turn on when the garage door opens - makes coming home at night with a baby a lot easier, and also means you don't forget to turn them off).
Indeed! I have three lights in my backyard on three different circuits. Each one has a caseta dimmer but I linked them together with some scripting so no matter how you change one - switch, app, whatever, they all react in unison.
What about what they described makes you think they’re not in control? It’s the same principle as a mercury switch thermostat; figure out what you want the system to do and then automate it so you don’t have to constantly screw with it.
Well technically Amazon/Google/Philips/whoever is in charge of turning on the lights. You just happen to be sending a message that you want your lights turned on, but next week they might ask for a little more personal information or they won’t turn on the lights.
Hence for example using a clip lead on the bare terminals to turn your HVAC on and off when you feel the need, rather than automating the maintenance of temperature by such unworthy means as a thermostat.
One of the big benefits of Hue, as alluded to in this article, is that you didn’t need to use their cloud services or share any data. But that seems to be what is changing. Before, you could just run everything locally on your home network, or really on an isolated subnet since most of the communication happens over Zigbee. It is nice to have automation capabilities for some scenarios to avoid rewiring or to customize lighting for different purposes in the same space with one controller.
But if you don’t personally need it, you also don’t really need to drop in and bash the concept. It is useful for lots of folks and it’s just a fun game for lots of other folks. And most people can just ignore it.
Changing the color of white during the day is amazing. Having daylight temp bulbs at night is just "rude". Having the warm temp color during the day is much less "rude". Having the best of both worlds with one light and not having to think about it is pretty amazing.
Other than that, I just enjoy having the remote ability of turning lights on/off from my couch. I don't even have mine accessible via WAN, so it's not like "oh I forgot to turn off the lights" after leaving the house. they're LEDs, so I don't care!
there's lots of theories on this, to the point of having "blue light glasses".
however, mine is much more caveman like. during the day, the sun is up. at night, it is not, so it is dark and cold. man made fire. fire is good. fire is warm. light from fire is orange. man evolve using warm light at night. industry brings us blue light at night. blue light strange. makes things look harsh, unpleasant. caveman pushes button on magic rock that makes light back to warm color. caveman happy again.
I don't know what's going where I live but so many houses and temples use this horrible, ultra-bright, sterile blue/white lights with no diffusers. Many have pure white concrete walls as well so it's just like looking into a hospital or something. You'll be walking down a quiet alley and then BOOM witness our unfiltered arc-weld!
It's gotten to the point to where when I visit someone and they have a warm-colored light I compliment them on the fact. It's so rare.
To each their own. Maybe I should start criticizing people for having warm colored light that remind me of kerosene lamps. Have you entertained the remote possibility that more people prefer a different color than you do?
Maybe they chose that color. Maybe they didn’t know any better. Maybe they bought them from Amazon, but the listing was a switcheroo. Who really knows. But if they’re using “bright” white at night it’s just flat out rude. It’s unnatural, it’s unholy, it’s just wrong
One friend nicknamed me The Illuminazi due to my continued war against cool white lights used at night in homes.
In the later evening in our house we switch to all lamp-only lighting, as I find over head lights offensive in at least some time period immediately prior to going to bed.
Once upon a time, I had daylight color lights in my bedroom. My then GF was somewhat unhappy with that choice after a while, especially since it was winter when she moved in with me, and so outside was extra white. Since then we now mostly use warmer white bulbs excepting certain locations like the garage and laundry room.
I don't care much about the automation itself, but in general having control over your lights is ludicrously nice. It helps me a lot with maintaining my sleep schedule, which in retrospect I suppose my favorite part does rely on automation which is a light alarm.
But we'll generally have very very dim lights on throughout the early evening into bed time which makes it much easier for me to fall asleep.
Waking up to office-white-lights will also really wake you up.
Also: parties. It's fun to be able to do nice pink and blue lights or a low-lit candle-like scenario, depending on the vibe.
Yep same. Wall switches work fine. Manual thermostats work fine. Fuck spending all that money on such trivia and time keeping it programmed and updated and dealing with stuff like the subject of TFA.
I walk into a room, I turn the lights on. I leave the room, I turn the lights off. I have no need to operate lights in rooms that I'm not in.
I use the wireless Hue dimmer switches, the batteries last a long time. I have one on my coffee table... it's nice to dim lights for multiple lamps from the couch, or adjust the colour temperature. My wall switches have no dimming dial, nor do my lamps. I can't go back to non-dimmable lamps.
Dimmers can be fitted where existing light switches are, and lamps can be fitted with dimmers, either mounted in or on the lamp, or online with the power cable.
It's just a different type of consumer luxury or hobby, unnecessary but also fun and rewarding.
I do hardware modifications and small electrical upgrades / changes myself, it's cheaper and I find it enjoyable and rewarding. Most recently I fit a dimmer to a high velocity ducted workshop fan, so now it has full variable speed control, as it's quite powerful and all the CFM isn't always required or desirable.
Writing that blog post probably took more time than I spend on light switches in a year. Now buying, installing, configuring, fixing and tweaking takes probably 100x times more. Not to mention time spent on a shrink coach after these things drive you mad.
This thing is basically a hobby, so I understand if you have no interest with home automation. That being said, I prefer using smart wall switches than smart light bulbs. I think smart light bulbs are wasteful (more expensive than standard light bulbs, and you will be throwing out a perfectly good zigbee unit just because the LED died). The only benefits seems to be dimming and color changing, but I don't have the need for them because I can just use some night lights for that purpose (also with ZigBee switches). With smart wall switches, everything still behave exactly like before (heck, you can even still use your old switches, just wire them into the small ZigBee switch module), but now they're accessible for tinkering via Home Assistant.
My two favorite automations are dead simple, but would be tricky to solve any other way. I have them set up with Home Assistant running on my local network, so there's no data going to anyone else, and no dependency on a cloud service.
The first is, my mailbox is across the street, and I'd like to know when the mail comes. So I have a Z-wave door sensor in the mailbox to send me a notification to my phone when the mailbox is opened.
The other is to nag us to move laundry to the dryer. I have a Z-wave power meter that my washing machine plugs in to, and another Z-wave door sensor on the door. When the power meter detects the washing machine stop using power, it waits a few minutes and sends a notification to unload every few minutes, until the door is opened.
My sprinkler system is automated and internet connected. It’s on a schedule but I can override it when I’m not home. So if it’s raining, I can turn it off when away. It also knows the forecast and is quite good about skipping watering. Water is expensive where I live so I appreciate this.
I did accidentally DOS my phone for a bit when working on the washing machine automation, since I forgot to put in the sleep for it to wait a few minutes.
the appeal is technology as hedonistic consumption. People just love spending money on 'tech', even if it actually costs them more time and money, which is fundamentally the opposite of what technology is supposed to accomplish.
So in this sense it isn't even automation, it's anti-automation because just about every person I've met who is into home automation spends significant amounts of resources on things like flipping a light switch on.
Warning: my comment only addresses my use case for automation. I don't use cloud services either. I also kinda just kept writing, so this is a bit of a text wall.
I live in an old house. 80% of the lights in my house are operated by walking up to them and twisting the stem. The remaining 20% are switched.
To properly turn the lights on in my living room, I have to visit four separate lamps and turn each one on. The dining room has three lamps, bedroom has three, office has three, etc. When it's time for bed, I have to walk around the house turning each lamp off. If I want them dim, no luck. To do that would require either all new lamp fixtures, or rewiring the house with new dimmer switches.
Or, that was how it was before I did the Zigbee/HomeAssistant thing. Now I just hit that master switch on my nightstand and all the lights turn off. My whole house changes into "Night Mode". The thermostat will widen the setpoints. The doors lock if they weren't already. If I happen to get up at 3AM to take a piss or get a glass of water, the lights all know to come on at minimum brightness, and to turn off shortly thereafter.
My front door lock used to be a pain in the ass when I had my hands full of groceries. Or my coffee and the mail. Now my door unlocks automatically when I walk up to it. It's a small joy, but it reliably makes me smile each time. (And I don't have an ugly keypad, and still have a standard key slot if I need it).
I have an ancient stove and oven. No electronics at all. So I wrote a simple automation to alert me if the kitchen motion sensor's temperature rises 10°F more than the rest of the house, for longer than 30 minutes. This has saved me a couple of times now when I forgot to turn the oven off. (It takes a good hour for that temp sensor to reach the threshold as well. I wrote that automation after discovering that my oven had been on for hours. When I looked through the temp logs, I saw a clear signal I could use in the future.)
I also put a remote temp sensor in one of my HVAC registers. Comparing its reading to the ambient reading gives me a ΔT on my air conditioner, and a couple years ago the steadily-declining value of that delta alerted me to a refrigerant leak weeks before it would have been large enough to notice otherwise. I was able to get that repaired in the spring rather than in the heat of summer. This isn't something I would have done with a regular thermometer; having to remember to check it every so often and do the math taking into account the humidity and the elapsed time since the start of the cycle. But seeing all that temp data logged over many weeks makes the pattern easy to spot.
In the den I sometimes want it to be bright enough to read or do detailed work, and other times I want it dim so there's no glare while watching TV. Before, that meant I would have to buy lamps with a dimmer on them, then dim each one and go flip the ceiling fan light off. Now when I click the switch[1] to turn the TV/stereo combo on, it automatically dims the lights at either end of the couch, and turns the overhead light off.
Color temperature! That's another thing that isn't possible without some smartness in the bulbs. At night my whole house is as close to 2200K as possible. I really like that kind of light. But in the middle of the day, my kitchen lights are closer to 3300K.
My porch light turns on 30 minutes after sunset and off before sunrise. It's under a roof so I would have needed to either replace the switch with one of those fancy ones, or installed a photocell somewhere else. But it was just a couple automations added to the config file to get that functionality.
[1] I originally put a Tasmota wall relay in to save the 20W (!) of idle power my old stereo receiver was constantly drawing. When I realized I always fiddled with the lights whenever I turn the TV/stereo on, I just automated that away.
> My front door lock used to be a pain in the ass when I had my hands full of groceries. Or my coffee and the mail. Now my door unlocks automatically when I walk up to it. It's a small joy, but it reliably makes me smile each time. (And I don't have an ugly keypad, and still have a standard key slot if I need it).
What equipment did you use for your lock? Is it an off-the-shelf or roll-your-own setup? I'd like something like this but so far all the consumer-oriented smart locks give me very little confidence.
It’s a Kwikset 914S2. It’s Zwave only so you need a hub. And the whole auto-unlock thing I rolled my own. If Home Assistant sees that my phone came home within the past 2 minutes, then it assumes whatever motion is detected is me and unlocks the door.
Do you really think someone is going to break into your home by cracking the security of your smart lock? I’m not OP but I use August smart locks and they work great, easy to install, nothing on the exterior to give it away, and it unlocks automatically when I get home. Could someone hack into the August servers and remotely unlock my door? Could the Bluetooth connection from my phone be spoofed? I’m sure it’s possible but the effort level is 1000x beyond what anyone would reasonably do to break into my home. Anyone motivated to break into my house would just break a window with a rock. The convenience is incredible. Seriously, I haven’t had to worry about my keys in years, and since it automatically locks the door after two minutes my house is safer than ever. Not having to think “did I remember to lock the door before I left?” is such a weight off my mind, and being able to unlock it remotely is an added bonus even though it rarely gets used by anyone outside of the family.
I don't think some petty criminal is going to say "Hey, that Nerdbert, he sure has expensive-looking elbows, I want to break into his house and see what else I can find there, so I'm going to spend the next two years learning how to custom-craft an exploit for his smart lock."
What I think is that there's going to be a fundamental flaw in the device's security, and before there's any update from the manufacturer, word will get out in the criminal underworld that you just need to install such-and-such app on your phone and load a data file and then you can make all locks from Company X pop open just by walking down the street.
> My porch light turns on 30 minutes after sunset and off before sunrise. It's under a roof so I would have needed to either replace the switch with one of those fancy ones, or installed a photocell somewhere else. But it was just a couple automations added to the config file to get that functionality.
Eww, that's gross, especially for all the migrating birds and wildlife, just so you can have a terrible light on outside when you don't need it at all.
I long ago realized that I sleep as well on a couch as I do on a bed, and got rid of my bed next time I moved. However, there is no good place to put a light near the couch such that the switch would be easily reachable while on the couch.
Solution: Hue lights that I can control from Alexa. If I'm dozing off while reading on the couch before bed, I can turn the lights off without having to wake up enough to actually go reach a switch.
All my locks are normal locks that use normal keys (although they are actually called "SmartKey" locks, but that just refers to the clever way they can be rekeyed [1], which is entirely mechanical). I have considered getting one smart lock that has voice and app control because I live alone.
The idea there is that if I have a medical emergency that incapacitates me so that I cannot unlock a door but doesn't incapacitate me so much that I can't call 911, I can unlock a door so when the ambulance arrives they don't have to break in to get me.
[1] The way you rekey them is you put in your current key, turn 90 degrees clockwise, insert a tool they provide into a hole that is next to the keyway to press a release in the back of the hole, remove that tool, and you can then remove the current key (carefully leaving the cylinder rotated 90 degrees). At that point you can put a different key in, and then turn the cylinder 180 degrees counterclockwise. The lock is now keyed to that key instead of the key you started with.
For most people it's just consumer luxury but my grandmother's place has some neat tricks that really improve her independence. Using anything fiddly like lamps and keys is actually a serious challenge for her. 10 years ago her TV was too complicated but now she has a voice remote and it works pretty well.
Anything that makes life a little easier is good for anyone with marginal capabilities, which is like millions of people and eventually everyone if they manage to live long enough.
My car charger turns on and adjusts the charging amp based on how much solar energy I'm getting from the sun. I know this will eventually be replaced by some 3rd party solution, but when I did it there were none.
I wouldn’t be shocked if third party solutions become mandatory for this use case in the near future, similar to how smart thermostats controlled by the utility company are a thing already. I know some areas have incentive programs to have utility controlled car charging plugs already as well.
I use a connected smart bulb, that has color changing. During bed time, I use it for reading books, and before sleeping, change it to a night light. I use it as a soft light when watching movies on my laptop. This is a convenience for me.
I also use smart lights to automatically turn on and off inside my home, and outside, in the portico.
I use automated socket outlets to turn on / off the water heater in my bath, on a schedule.
A lot of advantages in these things is in the option to schedule them, or make them act on the input of a sensor (movement, light, etc)
If you have lots of windows and lots of shades, you can open and close them all at once, making life easier if you and your spouse disagree if they should be mostly open or mostly closed, possibly saving your marriage if that applies. Lights follow the same trend: it isn’t that turning on and off the lights is a pain, but being able to turn on or off all the lights with just one command is useful. We’ve only bothered with our open kitchen living room, but we had 4 switches all around the 2nd floor to manipulate before (and we went Lutron for our shades anyways, so we can set scenes with both).
I don’t get the mood lighting. And really, if I lived alone I would just keep the shades up all the time and forgo the electric shades as well (but given my wife they are indispensable).
I have normal lights, but the switches are on a Lutron hub. I like being able to set movie mode to dim lights from my couch on my watch or phone. I like being able to turn off my kids' bathroom light when it shines too brightly in my face at night when I'm trying to sleep. I like being able to turn the lights off across the whole house when I leave, and have smart away when I leave for awhile.
Smart thermostats are nice when you want to adjust things from all over the house or keep a schedule relatively easily. I also like knowing if my basement sump pump isn't keeping up with rain water and flooding things.
In general, it's nice to be able to monitor things and control them across the house, and the Lutron setup has been pretty painless.
Some things I do, all running locally with Home Assistant so minimal cloud shenanigans:
* Turn the light red in my laundry room when a load is done
* Turn all my lights off when I set my alarm at night
* Slowly turn light on before my alarm goes off in the morning
* Turn off lights when I leave the house, then turn on the one by my front door if I get home after dark
None of these are life changing, but they're all marginally useful. And for me, half the fun is the sense of accomplishment getting these automations to work
if you live in an inhospitable climate (arizona for example) with pets or perhaps otherwise disabled individuals left at home (grandparents?), remote ability to control thermostat has proven useful.
that said, useful in this case means saving a bit of money by adjusting its settings. a manual (non cloud) thermostat would work too.
So am I, but I really wanted to control lighting (color ans temperature) in my living room and smart bulbs was the easiest way I could do it. I had some random cheap polish wifi lights but the delays on controlling then just drove me off. Decided to switch to hue at some point and just color quality and responsiveness was better.
I only have them for that and I love to adjust the mood via lighting. I don't care about any further automation. I also don't care much if it was Philips or someone else that gave me light bulbs.
I have a bunch of things at the office set to automatically turn off at a certain time or on command. It's helpful in that I don't leave something running that really shouldn't be, like a laminator, overnight. After that I decided to put an Alexa plug on anything that could potentially be a fire hazard if left on, like the air purifiers and fans.
It's hardly a bulletproof solution but it's better than the old solution of, "Oh shit, I think I left X running… welp, time to waste 40 minutes driving back and forth."
Webcam with motion detection pointed directly down at our cat litters. Motion triggers a lamp switching on so I can hopefully get to and remove any poo before the stench of it bleeds into the house.
Opening garage with phone (esp via voice if your hands are full) is killer app. I don’t have to carry any keys anymore (not that we need to lock up often)
I can dim my backyard lights, turn on and off my porch light depending on the sun's position, control my home thermostat to heat or cool via phone before I am home, control my washing machine and dryer or know if they are done, open garage remotely with my app or close it, turn on any lights of the house or turn them off if I am in bed with my phone, control my TV via phone if I lose the remote (likely somewhere in the couch), also I use a lot of smart plugs to control individual devices such as fans, manual electric devices that are always set to be on, etc...
I have much automated, but my favorite is a $20 multicolored hexagon WiFi light with a long usb power cable I nestled along the door frame from power to the light above my wife’s office door. I wrote a swift daemon to monitor her work mac’s camera and microphone usage as well as idle time, and decide whether to set the little hexagon over the door to red, yellow, green, or off depending on camera use, mic-only use, idle under or over threshold, respectively. That way I know whether I can safely interrupt, and with what degree of caution. It’s been a champ, but I did need to modify the code when she upgraded from intel to m1, to listen to camera logging events rather than checking the hardware directly, but other than that it makes me happy every time I walk by it.
Second is more common, but also makes me happy every time: I put a contact sensor on the interior door to the attached garage that when opened quickly turns on the light to the garage, and turns it off a few minutes after that door next closes. It sure beats walking into a dark garage to fumble for a switch.
A lot of these answers conflate remote control with automation. Some of these devices seem to offer remote control, some offer actual automation. I also love not having to get up and hit arrow keys on my television monitor to change the channel. Likewise, my ceiling fans have radio controllers. It would be nice if lights had those as well. On the other hand, I feel no need for motion detectors, voice control, or any kind of service running on a server somewhere trying to learn when I want the lights on or off. But a switch that can be flipped without having to walk to wherever the wall-mounted switch is would be nice. That can be a simple radio device or infrared or whatever they prefer, just like a television remote. Don't need an app that requires an account with a remote service. Same thing with a thermostat. When I first married and moved in with my wife a decade ago, she had Nest thermostats and those things annoyed the hell out of me, using eco settings by default, requiring access to WiFi, trying to learn my living patterns. Some of these answers are right. The longstanding automation offered by thermostats was great. I like being able to program when I want specific temperatures in specific rooms and then it just happens. But that was enough. I don't need a cloud-based service to learn when I'm home and in what rooms. I already know that.
To quote pg, “The aim of web design is not to use all available screen space. It is legibility. Text is most legible with no more than 70 characters per line.”
1. pg is wrong. Text is perfectly legible to me even at 200 characters per line. Different people are different.
2. Since different people are different, it makes no sense to handicap everyone just because some people have a hard time reading text that is wider than a narrow column. Make the text fill most of the window, and that way people can have the window sized to whatever their comfort level is.
This trend of super narrow columns of text is making the web worse. It needs to die.
I wonder why, then, HN comments don't adhere to that: .comment { max-width:1215px } in news.css here on my system, which feels very readable and reasonable at around 200 chr per line at 100% scaling. I also disagree with the 70 chr recommendation: with this article, literally the entire body is limited to a very small max width which takes up between a quarter to a third of the screen on two different computers I use at home. It's a distractingly bad experience to read, so much so that I went in and modified that CSS rule just to get through it. 1200 felt right and made it a much more visually pleasing square, rather than a thin column in a sea of stark gray.
There are actual standards for this, but they're more like recommendations, and ironically https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-cont... recommends "Width is no more than 80 characters or glyphs (40 if CJK)." while the first line of the paragraph explaining why is 112 characters wide and looks pretty much fine / comfortable to read on my screens.
This seems fine on desktop. Besides phone users can be biggest whiners about not being able to read some blog, article etc as it is not phone optimized. So for better or worse (IMO worse) they have established primacy on how websites should be designed or configured.
In my experience, enforcing log-in for for this kind of consumer product done for the sake of security, rather than user hostility. Internet connected hardware on a home network is a very attractive attack vector, especially if commands are unauthenticated.
This logic breaks down for hardware vendors don’t allow access to an underlying Linux system the IoT device is running on. The malware looks for easy targets to get root on - not so much turning on and off lights.
In my experience, my consumer products are significantly MORE secure when not requiring a log-in or in fact anything that requires any level of external network access to be facilitated or that mandates a requirement for personal or authentication related services to be hosted outside of my network, and that includes their applications. A potential avenue for security related incidents is now being forced upon users where previously it did not exist. Phillips can't leak my data due to incompetence when they don't have it, only now, they will.
I quit trusting Philips when they sold one of my customers 40W LED grow bars that weren't even close to 40w. They were 15W, as measured by Kill-A-Watt directly-connected.
Philips is a lying corporation as far as I can tell.
Aren’t most light sources (unintuitively) measured by the light output of an equivalent incandescent light source? I certainly don’t expect a light labeled as a “40 watt” using anything close to that.
Grow lights usually draw half of their advertised power, and try to justify it by saying 'equivalent' somewhere on the box next to an asterisk.
Very few grow lights that have ever hit my hands came close to their advertised power rating. One company sold me a 50w, 135w, and 300w light set. the 50w was 45 at the wall, 135 was 75, 300 was 150.
And that's because their thermal designs are utter garbage. They can't run at full power. Most UFO lights are literally bolted to a plate, no fins of any sort, and a fan set blows down on it to cool the LEDs. If you get a rectangular panel, odds are you might get one undersized heat sink that doesn't cover the entire LED array (just the array, not the whole panel)
Most efficiency specs are garbage, too, measured with non-calibrated COTS light meters. I can toss most lights in my integrated sphere and I'll see way different from what is claimed.
Very few companies can actually be trusted. I have yet to find one with 100% honesty.
For what it's worth, I use zigbee for my smart home, with a hubitat. It's connected to homekit, and it's been painless (except for the part where you have to manually add things to homekit from the hubitat).
Thread/matter promise to put this garbage to sleep, finally. The smart-home offerings from the major vendors allow all devices, without vendorlock (so far).
I wish they had chosen a name easier to search. Thread and matter are like, basic building blocks and really hard to search, even HomeKit is better, Zigbee and friends was perfect.
Insteon is still alive for those that want something that is about device relationships first and LAN/WAN is secondary. I removed my hub years ago and still love the quality of life improvements.
No Hub, they talk to each other EG: kitchen lights when turned on also turn on a few floor lamps and living room lights to 50%. If i double tap the switch 100% or 0% on all.
You have to repeat a sequence with near perfect timing, that takes about a minute straight. Since we moved, I had to do this for 4 lights and wanted to tear my hair out, lol.
I've found that for whatever reason, "smart home" stuff is some of the worst designed and managed products out there.
We recommend counting with Mississippi (1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, etc.).
Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds.
1. Turn on for 8 seconds
2. Turn off for 2 seconds
3. Turn on for 8 seconds
4. Turn off for 2 seconds
5. Turn on for 8 seconds
6. Turn off for 2 seconds
7. Turn on for 8 seconds
8. Turn off for 2 seconds
9. Turn on for 8 seconds
10. Turn off for 2 seconds
If the factory reset above was unsuccessful, you might have an older version of the C by GE bulb. Please follow the instructions below to reset.
Bulb Reset Sequence – for firmware version 2.7 or earlier:
We recommend counting with Mississippi (1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, etc.).
Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds.
1. Turn on for 8 seconds
2. Turn off for 2 seconds
3. Turn on for 2 seconds
4. Power off for 2 seconds
5. Turn on for 2 seconds
6. Power off for 2 seconds
7. Turn on for 2 seconds
8. Power off for 2 seconds
9. Turn on for 8 seconds
10. Power off for 2 seconds
11. Turn on for 8 seconds
12. Power off for 2 seconds
I like how this implies that after firmware release 2.7, they decided that 12 different power cycling patterns was too many, so they lowered it to 10. Wouldn't want some unsuspecting user to reset their bulbs by accidentally following an exact pattern up to 9 times.
Right!? Maybe we're all just crazy and there's a method to the madness but I spent an average of 15 minutes just trying to get it to pick up the reset, PER LIGHT.
As a counter to this, my 2 smart light bulbs (different brands) both like to reset themselves all the damn time. There is supposed to be a particular needed sequence to reset them but in reality just turning the switch on, off, then remembering you needed something in the room and turning the lights on again quickly, is enough to do the trick.
This is quickly becoming a problem with a lot of Home Automation.
Too many companies are finally realizing that thanks to matter their products are basically going to become commodities. No longer is there an advantage to sticking within a single platform to avoid hubs (ok so maybe "no longer" is jumping forward a few years but still, the steps are happening now).
The part that really frustrates me, my Hue devices are the most reliable devices in my home automation behind my HomePods. On a fairly regular basis my other home automation devices will just randomly not work, loose connection, or just generally have issues. I am not exactly itching move away from that reliability and I feel like Phillips Hue likely knows this.
This includes Ikea when I tried their smart tech just a couple years ago. It was incredibly unreliable and I do question actually recommending it (that being said, maybe they have gotten better and I would love for someone here to tell me has... it seems kind against Ikea for them to go down a locking down approach?)
Hmm, I hadn't thought about it before but I do wonder if that is part why it is as reliable as it is. I believe the Hue hub is ethernet only while my other hubs are all wifi.
However I think the Ikea hub I had was ethernet only so not sure if that's the entire answer.
> This includes Ikea when I tried their smart tech just a couple years ago. It was incredibly unreliable and I do question actually recommending it (that being said, maybe they have gotten better and I would love for someone here to tell me has...
I have had IKEA bulbs and outlets for over two years (adding to it over that time) and have great experiences and high reliability.
Hue is already not a commodity, since they make the by far nicest and most reliable lights. Making their product shittier isn't making it more competitive.
My most reliable home automation devices are the Lutron Caseta. I've never had any problems, aside from changing the batteries on the shades. The Ikea stuff is decent now but wasn't so great 6 years ago. I still have the original tradfri hub. An annoyance with them is that because you want to be able to control them with a physical switch, a power-outage will result in them coming back on when the power returns, instead of remembering their last power setting. They may have fixed this since last I looked. I'm just using the hub for the smart blinds at the moment.
Running your own Zigbee network is not that hard. I am a Home Assistant fanboy, but you can just use it to bridge your Zigbee network to Homekit without having to know how it works.
733 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 582 ms ] threadMaybe they could even come up with a "Respects Your Freedom" certification program for hardware that won't screw you over.
This would achieve "freedom 4: The freedom to turn on the light".
[1] (so that they don't have to arrive there by deduction and observation)
--
Today, even my parents know that "you need an app to use this" is equivalent of "beware, you'll soon be screwed by this".
Have you been watching the minimum daily ration of "news", Citizen? Can't leave 'til you do...
Like the places that might do it can't afford it.
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
I mean, ideally you buy a thing, connect it to your existing controller and never see anything with the company logo or their app.
Does Zwave and Zigbee with Matter on the way at some point. HomeKit integration is in beta right now.
My fear is that Philips will do something stupid by pushing a firmware to the bulbs to lock folks into only using their hubs. Or maybe change colour reporting to some annoying method that won’t allow for accurate colour on a non-Hue hub.
The enshittification continues.
That said if you're up for fiddling, something like https://www.amazon.ca/Waveshare-VisionFive2-Processor-Integr... will provide much more oopmh (and it's RISC-V) with 4GB ram and m2 slot, at $100 CAD, with mainline kernel support (so any USB devices will just work). Grab a zigbee USB + SBC like that, and you'd be able to run much more on your hub that just a gateway for your devices.
And they take compatibility seriously. I’m a refugee from home assistant from 5 years ago, when each major update would break part of my automations because they deprecated some API. No such thing with Hubitat.
https://community.hubitat.com/t/release-2-3-6-available/1247...
the problem with home assistant is that it's easy enough to have a computer on and run the docker container. but then you have to either open ports in your firewall or use some sort of proxy in order to have outside network internet access, and then maybe your computer goes down for whatever reason. it's kind of a hassle unless you're already running a server for other things imo (and I say this as someone who runs my own surveillance with blue iris and poe cameras)
I get why there are people that don’t like how some installers do this, but this trope is really turning into the “but I don’t even own a TV” of OSS commentary.
Just use the Docker image if you don’t like it. Or get their appliance which actually supports ongoing development.
Smart Home 2023Q3 status: still for hackers only if you want more than a few lightswitches that you can just toggle from your phone, and even if you do want that, stick to one vendor + system only.
Highly recommended: Shelly gear, it is easy to configure and seems to be rock solid, I've got a bunch of their remote control radiator valves, several remote control relays and a tri-phase consumption/production meter. It all worked flawlessly since installation. And instead of a regular Pi I got one that was built into a keyboard. It was mostly because I couldn't get a bare one but in the end I think this was the better option.
I had something similar. Rock solid. Wired back haul. Nice manual. I knew it wouldn’t add $$$ to the house but I was a little surprised to find out it actually put a lot of people off. It had negative value as I had to rip it out and go analog.
Even nerds looking at the house wanted to do their own thing not maintain someone else's ideal and normies refused to spend ANY mental energy on understanding it.
Was eye opening!
But your point is well taken and I'll be sure to introduce the subject at the handover if it ever comes to that.
Energy efficiency was my main goal too but no one gives a fuck about that here either so it’s a different market.
What also helps is that the whole system runs without any user intervention. The manual is mostly aimed at people hired to add stuff at some point in the future, or in case something breaks.
Tapping that option should bring up a dialogue that lets you migrate to a different channel with a warning about how some devices may not automatically migrate and will need to be removed and re-added if so.
But congratulations on getting it to work.
I’ve never dealt with Matter, though.
I bought a SkyConnect adapter to support HAOS, but it's probably going to be unused for at least another year.
And yeah, it'll be another year or two before Matter/Threads really starts picking up steam. I'll just pick up a new dongle when there's 10 of 'em in that same timeframe.
(Disclaimer: my house is 800 sqft and I don't share any walls with neighbors. Zigbee is SUPPOSED to be mesh and Just Work assuming you have enough devices, but I can't speak from experience on that front.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667266
Every plugin that is in that store must have a custom_components folder.
Drop that into the bind-mounted volume holding HA's configuration.yaml and restart. HA will pick it up automatically, and you'll be able to install it in Integrations and Devices.
It’s good practice to check anything that you’ll pipe to `sudo`, but this article’s level of paranoia is kind of self-defeating, no?
At some point, we all trust the things we run on our machines. We rely on communities — and our participation in them — to vet installations.
There is no perfect solution. Someone will always be misled.
Frankly, being anything other than super paranoid is almost a little reckless.
Also, shit-talking Home Assistant is a pretty weird take. I wouldn't write it in Python configured half in YAML and half in SQLite either, but ... not having to write it myself was the fun part.
Anyone who really complains about curl | sudo is just doing it for nerd points, because I guarantee you they happily install all sorts of other software without "vetting" it.
And if someone caught someone doing trickery it'd be big news.
If I don't trust the website to do curl | sudo bash then why do I trust the software that I would eventually install?
Even the old argument of "middleware devices modified the script en-route" is mostly removed by HTTPS everywhere.
And there are people like you who actually look at the script (and the compiled code, too!) to find things, because if they do find something in a script as big as HomeAssitant, they'll be famous.
And there’s nothing wrong with using port 80 security wise. Binding a port doesn’t mean you’re opening it on the firewall for the world to see. Plus if you’re opening some port on the firewall, what port you use doesn’t matter - it’ll be scanned by an automated scanner shortly regardless of port.
1. browsers don't even attempt encryption,
2. the port could be open to the world, and
3. lots of people are already running more meaningful shit on port 80.
Seriously, you want to sell me a lightbulb that needs root access and then opens an unencrypted port and then makes outbound calls...? Are you nuts? That's beyond lazy design. It's almost like an intentional insult.
[edit] If you set up a home service on your local network, surely you can also bookmark the obscure port number next to the 128/ address in front of it. The only purpose served by turning your light bulbs into a beacon from hell on port 80 would be letting strangers totally penetrate your house. What happens if you start up a webserver? Do the lights go off?
What kind of schmuck does this to his house??
2. If that's the case you have major issues going on which are irrelevant to the port chosen
3. On a single IP - so what? Every device can open it's own port 80 on your LAN without any conflict
> Seriously, you want to sell me a lightbulb that needs root access and then opens an unencrypted port and then makes outbound calls...? Are you nuts? That's beyond lazy design. It's almost like an intentional insult.
This doesn't make any sense. Are you talking about a single light bulb or actual orchestration software? Both need to communicate to actually do anything.
> edit] If you set up a home service on your local network, surely you can also bookmark the obscure port number next to the 128/ address in front of it. The only purpose served by turning your light bulbs into a beacon from hell on port 80 would be letting strangers totally penetrate your house.
This also doesn't make any sense. There is no reason a device on your local network listening on port 80 makes it a 'beacon from hell' - because again, listening on LAN & WAN are 2 very different things. And the port it's using has 0 bearing on security.
> What happens if you start up a webserver? Do the lights go off?
Absolutely nothing - because again there is no conflict with different devices on your LAN using the same ports to listen on.
You're mixing up a number of different things here & making issues where there aren't any. A device on your network opening port 80 doesn't magically make it accessible to the world for poking & prodding or result in any conflicts that cause things to stop working.
And when it comes to orchestrators like Home Assistant - you can choose any port you so desire. But changing the port doesn't make it any less or more secure.
"Oh, that path is actually not a temp directory and requires permissions different than the user account?" - sudo
"Oh your firewall blocks my outgoing telemetry data?" - sudo
"Oh your firewall blocks my localhost request but I don't actually realize that's what happens but when I try it with sudo it just works everywhere?" - sudo
There are myriad reasons apps want root access, and almost none of them are good reasons, but that doesn't mean it's not simpler for them to get sudo from a user than it is to get dev eyes addressing (let alone understanding) the nuance.
I'm not sure why I'm getting downvotes here... is there some cult of people who love installing apps with root privileges?
Or maybe the downvotes are because everything I was saying was conjecture / hypothetical anyway, and you're now asking a more specific question to the general question being answered.
I thought the question was "why do apps that don't need sudo request sudo?" And my answer was "perhaps because it's easier to fix permissions problems by getting permission for everything than it is to get them by understanding why your app is getting blocked by them in the first place." Whether it's inbound or outbound or taking video surreptitiously doesn't really answer the question of "why, if the app doesn't actually need it?"
At any rate, I don't actually know why because I don't ask for permissions that I don't need. I also don't know why you're getting downvotes as I didn't downvote you: this answer, like my previous one, is speculative, as is somewhat inevitable when trying to answer "why" questions that relate to the motivations of others.
Maybe more interestingly: I do think that the motivations of others are totally calculable. Society is an autocomplete. One big honkin LLM replete with all the hallucinations. Pretending to be a member of this society is to pretend that I wish to better understand why I'd be downvoted for a thought - to pretend that it's just me, a neuron, looking for back propagation. Yay for the neuron.
Nevermind, it's not important anyway. (Life).
"Running a software installer" in general seems just as insecure as "sudo | curl" whatever.
I periodically get told that a published browser userscript of mine is malicious or suspicious in emails simply because of the cautions and wording around the userscript installers themselves (it's just a css tweak, a theme), meanwhile the executables I have in the wild have generated zero similar feedback.
my theory is that since the script is more easily read that it attracts people to read it without any theory or knowledge of what they're even looking at .
Where something that can be verified gets more scrutiny than something that can’t.
Maybe someone else knows.
After
if something goes wrong and you then try to get a copy of the script to examine a malicious server can tell that you aren't piping to a shell [1] and give a non-malicious script.Since it takes an insignificant amount of effort to defend against this why not get in the habit of doing it?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17636032
I'll take a properly curated package in flatpak Fedora repos over a random script downloaded and piped into a root shell any day
Her. Rachel is a woman. Pretty knowledgeable and experienced, too, so I would at least consider what she's saying.
Even Microsoft has this published for the dotnet install tool:
Microsoft.. The only company I have ever heard mention CRIME and BREACH and invokes their specter in .Net to do awesome things like.. Not let you enable websocket compression in SignalR.If the answer to cloud enshittification is “I know! I’ll use a different company’s solution instead of this open source project because I want to make an outdated stand against curl|bash” then I think the thought process is misguided.
Last I checked, the bare metal pip3 method was "always" going to be supported. So the "Just use Docker" comments ignore this.
The author complains about a lack of product leadership at Phillips, but HA has always been renown for ignoring their users.
I'm running the docker container (since I already had a home server running docker containers), but a NUC with HAOS for my folks has been working great.
HA is one guy's pet project to goof around with the latest and greatest technologies.
All that being said, I find it a little odd that this article is somehow decrying HAOS as a worse alternative to a proprietary, anti-user black box developed by companies trying to squeeze more profit, just because they played fast-and-loose with some shell scripts at some point. (Aside: I just installed Homebrew on a new Mac today, and it's still just a curl | sh)
Most of the major consumer IoT vendors have had major security incidents (Wyze, Hue, Nest, Arlo, many others), and if nothing else, my little HAOS Rpi gets a little obscurity compared to the big names getting hit by script kiddies. Not to mention it's easy for me to keep it local-only and just join it to my Tailscale network.
But given all the allusions to HomeKit, I suspect the author has total faith in Apple to do it right (not a wholly misplaced assumption) and wants everything to just talk HomeKit.
Which we might actually get (in practice) as Matter makes inroads! Hell, I'd love for everything to talk HomeKit because HA can emulate a HomeKit Controller, and that means less cloud APIs. Win for everyone!
Sure, don't do that as is - But it's not hard to just curl the script, read it to confirm it looks okay, then run it.
But every single other reply seems to be either “well yeah obviously read the script first” or “how dumb, just use docker,” so like I said, maybe I’m the dumb one.
I love Home Assistant, but I regularly find myself opening the Hue and Lutron apps anyway. And I’m someone who runs a NUC. I don’t mind administration, but I don’t want to HAVE to do that when I’ve already paid for a thing that supposedly does most of that.
It is a shame Phillips Hue has gone down this path as I would have seriously considered their gear otherwise.
Maybe I'm a luddite but I can't see any advantage installing with gear reliant on cloud access.
Unfortunately, to get there most out of it you have to go to AliExpress to have a selection of modules, but I made it a journey, rather than a project
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#all
...including all the big names like Hue. Nest. Ring. Yale. Schlage. Ikea. HomeKit. Plex. Sonos. Alexa. Sure, you can integrate arbitrary digital/MQTT/Zigbee/BLE stuff you find on AliExpress for pennies, or you can buy the name-brand stuff from big box stores.
You're not locked into just the Hue ecosystem just because you have their bulbs. I don't understand why HomeKit doesn't just talk to the bulbs instead of allowing Phillips to force you to go through their hub. This is on Apple for not supporting the lights directly.
So I’d install dimmers and lights as normal and retrofit maybe some smart stuff later.
https://www.sevarg.net/tag/lights/
What's the old joke about technology?
[1]: https://kaufha.com
https://www.knx.org/knx-en/for-your-home/
Buying hardware that can run open firmware is nice for future proofing in case the vendor goes sideways with their firmware. I do the same for routers with OpenWRT.
That's... not true. There are many items of the Tuya ecosystem resistant to flashing with another firmware.
Hm, no not really. I have a bunch of remote controlled sockets that can't be reflashed with Tasmota and that require a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through to access including enabling 'developer mode' and access from a bunch of IPs in China. No thanks... really annoying because it was exactly one of those comments that caused me to buy them in the first place.
I've seen a few recommendations now for the Ikea Dirigera hub, so fine. I've ordered one. Assuming it works as expected, I'll migrate everything next week. So long, Philips. I liked your stuff, but why'd you have to get greedy? Was being twice the price of your competition not enough?
I haven’t gone in much for home automation so can’t speak to how well it integrates with anything else, but this thing at least works great.
From the moment I first saw the notice, I started wondering if I'll have to find a new app. But because "soon" has not arrived, I just have been ignoring it. I hope when "soon" arrives it will be a weekend so I have plenty of time to deal with it.
Hopefully I can just block my Hueshit at the router and they'll keep doing what they do, otherwise off to goodwill.
it's like a portmanteau between clown + cloud, because most of these cloud things I swear are led by clowns. I like it a lot!!
I'm claiming it and hereby releasing it into the public domain! :D
It's similar to one of those George Carlin bits where putting a curse word in the middle of an ordinary word changes the power of the word. incredible -> infuckingcredible absolutely -> absofuckinglutely
I just don't know what enification means.
Verschlimmbesserung could be translated as imworsement maybe?
https://youtu.be/dt22yWYX64w
I think a term that doesn't slide off the tongue actually captures some of the feeling of what enshitification is.
I still have one of the original hubs and I definitely have more than 5 devices (light bulbs and outlets) working without problem.
> I bought one of the wireless physical switches which seemed like it would come in handy, but the battery died pretty quick
I have at least 3 physical switches in use and they’ve lasted at least 2 years so far.
So far Genio is cheaper and works at least as well as the rest.
I'll be moving to matter blubs (whatever brand strikes the best balance between price and quality) in the future and only using Hue bulbs when its necessary for features that aren't supported with Matter (like Hue Sync).
I do wish they were brighter.
I have it connected to Homekit via an Apple TV.
My main complaint is how big their outlets are.
..
And, thinking about it now, sadly you're probably right! Especially their newer stuff.
I performed this ritual last weekend, and followed up by filing a bug report about what a shitshow the whole thing was from the feedback option in the app. I got a very nice message back from Samsung telling me my message had come to the wrong place and that I should do something different if I wanted to give feedback about the app. FFS.
However... in some rooms (office and board game room), I do like having the option for cool white during the day, and warm white at night. So I like having Hues there.
So, while Casetas are good for automating a single color, you still need bulb-level automation for anything involving multiple colors.
1. Buy something dumb, non-smart, non-cloud
2. Build it myself
3. Buy something that can be hacked and used with my own infrastructure
The problem isn't even their infrastructure, it is that they decide when they want to change it. Even if it was all good faith changes, that could be a reliability issue and force me to dedicate time to the issue on their whim. I don't like that. If I run such things myself I can decide myself when to update and how much time I want to invest when (provided the system is decoupled from the public internet).
And this point isn't even about any single company trading the good will of their customers bit by bit — it is just about me not having to jump when their service changes or ends for whatever reason (and there are many).
It’s not hard if you know a little programming and electronics.
I assume that any smart devices that I can buy are just money machines, made to spy on me, or both.
Not only when, but the changes they make are almost universally a rewriting of the assumptions at time of purchase, where you lose.
It's a little like buying some networking device that suppports only proprietary protocols and then complain it doesn't support TCP/IP.
My go to configuration is IKEA Trådfri + Home Assistant.
I understand there are people who like to fiddle with this stuff but mostly I don’t get the attraction.
There is very little loyalty to the customer from the manufacturers, and so customers are now weary and loosing their loyalty for brands in the way consumers traditionally did.
Finally I got smart and changed my wifi password so the thermostat couldn't talk to the Internet any more, at which point I had a very elegant, unconnected thermostat that eventually became unreliable because it couldn't draw enough current from my two-wire system to keep itself reliably charged up. I tossed it in the recycle bin and bought a $25 dumb thermostat to replace it and I couldn't be happier.
Some general notes to the idiots in C-suites at every company making home automation devices:
1. I don't work for you.
2. You have competitors.
3. You do not get to make demands on my time to re-learn your UI, download software updates, advertise things to me, or sign new EULAs whenever you so desire. I have a life and it doesn't revolve around your company.
4. You do not get to spy on me with your device and sell information about my personal habits.
5. You do not get to use your cloud connectivity to force me into a recurring payment plan just to continue to use your device.
6. If you disagree with any of the above, I would ask that you carefully reread (1) and (2). Misbehavior on your part will result in your product being thrown in the trash, no further purchases from me, and my social network being immediately warned to avoid your company like the plague.
I see what you did there.
She dismisses Home Assistant for silly reasons, but then fully acknowledges that the IKEA thing doesn't actually work properly with the Hue kit, and worries that IKEA is going to pull some garbage in the future anyway.
It's a shame that solutions like openHAB and Home Assistant aren't dead-simple for the average person to set up, and they have a bunch of usability issues. But if you're the kind of person who is sick of companies enshittifying the things you've already bought and were happy with, you have to actually own the experience, and openHAB or HA is the only way to do that.
I've been running openHAB for 3+ years now, and while it hasn't been perfect, it does what I want and need, and I never worry about some company updating things and breaking my experience. I update when I want to, and can roll it back it the update causes problems.
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https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/11/19/the-jim-saga.-...
And having it extend to have to piss by the light of your cell phone (just before you drop it in the toilet) because you're groggy and can't remember the right incantation to get lights on ...
er...why are you whinging and being mean about them? it is you who has made their home annoying. you should fix it or get rid of all the things that are making their lives annoying.
Other examples are: Wahoo, who locked the control of their products behind an account and login requirement for devices which had been working perfectly fine for years prior.
Roche, who killed their blood glucose app at the start of 2023 and forced all their users to move to a third party app, developed by one of their subsidiaries, which requires you to accept a data exfiltration clause, if they wish to continue the automagic on-device logging.
You also can't get a software update without installing their terrible mobile app (and logging in), so I take it to the dealer and make them do it.
If every experience with Tesla was like the initial buying experience I’d recommend it to anyone, however, let me assure anyone interested the honeymoon phase definitely ends.
Won't they charge you through the nose for this? We recently went to a Lexus dealer for something random but specific on an old Lexus, and they did basic service like an oil change. When we stepped inside, it was like a 5 star hotel lobby with ordurves and fancy hosts a bunch of weird junk.
We got the bill, and never even considered going back.
A couple months later Logitech shitcanned the entire product line (which I had already returned after discovering their scam), and screwed all the apologists. I wonder what they think today... if they even do.
Don't underestimate the cognitive dissonance (and resulting apologism and shilling) that you'll face when you call out defects and scams in someone's pet product or belief system. And yes, it happens right here on HN too often as well.
Sometimes people get into niche communities and get really obsessive in a ridiculous way, like spending inordinate amounts of time defending a junky Logitech software suite.
I know, because it has happened to me. I see it happen with particular frequency in Discord.
I am not a psychologist, but it seems like a trap humans are predisposed to fall into.
I know I'm part of a dwindling customer base that still uses separate A/V gear and not just built-in streaming apps and a soundbar, but it seems like there would have still been a market for competent universal remotes that you could customize.
I hated how almost every generation of their remotes got harder to use and program compared to pre-Logitech Harmony. The Touch remotes were practically unusable because you had frequently used buttons in poor locations and a touch screen that you had to scroll through to find the correct soft touch button for that wasn't especially responsive, the old models with all hard buttons were vastly more usable.
But screw it. On the rare occasion I watch something that's not on my Shield (whose remote can control my receiver's volume with CEC), I just adjust the volume manually.
But let's not even get started on the pathetic state of the A/V receiver market, where you can't even get a receiver with A/B/C sets of speakers... despite advertising three zones.
People can and SHOULD return this garbage to the retail store the minute they get home and realized it's encumbered in this way.
In reality, on each new iOS device, Apple forces you to use the current version of the app in the App Store now, and your old version apps are not included in backups or able to be transferred to new devices.
You are eventually forced to use the latest version of the app by Apple.
The latest version of the app will require the latest firmware or will modal lock you out until you upgrade the device.
Blame Apple for not letting you preserve your old versions of working apps between backups and devices, and blame Apple for allowing time bomb expiring apps like Signal and Chase Mobile into the App Store.
Further blame Apple for not having an iOS "internet access" permission per app that would prevent these apps from learning that there are new, unwanted firmware updates available when all you want to do is local operations.
Finally, any product that requires that you "sign up/log in" on the first screen and can't be used otherwise without PII should go straight back into the box to be returned.
Then what?
As far as I'm concerned these companies should get hit with deceptive advertising charges. Yes, I realize that buried somewhere two or three hundred paragraphs deep in the TOS I "agreed" to let them do this. Then again maybe I didn't, because I also likely "agreed" to have the TOS changed at any time for any reason without warning. That is key here.
IMO These companies get away with this because they can toss out one of the basics of contract law. It is unconscionable that one party can _unilaterally_ change the terms of the contact (the "terms of service") without prior warning or input from the other party (me, as the purchaser of said device/service).
Basic contract law should apply here. What _tangible_ benefits are there to me
What you claimed was a lot more specific than that. Do you have any actual examples of the specific sequence of events you claimed?
Citation needed
Step 0A- Realize that most mature industries are incestuous. They share the same consultants, they swap employees, they compete for the same market with the same group-think mindset, etc. They all have the same incentives and paradigm for success and thus often act in murmuration'ing way. That is, they're too big and too risk-adverse to consider innovation so they feign being competitive and milk the market the best they can.
Step 0B - Realize that for the most part the gov - via Cronie Capitalism - will not protect consumers, and will put the thumb on the scale for the largest players. Your rights and privacy - in the context of Surveillance Capitalism (which the gov benefits from) - are more myth than they are real.
Step 0C - Realize that all the steps follow are rarely successful. Sure, you can try but the odds are not in your favor. You end up paying the subscription and/or having your usage data sold in some black box cyber back room.
A notable flow on effect is both of these products had helped with the management and improvement of my health, and these changes have had a measurable negative impact since I’ve been unable to use them.
Completely useless comment.
Then Miku sold to another company (they either filed or were planning on filing for bankruptcy), and the first thing the new company did was send a letter demanding $10 a month to keep using most of the monitor’s features.
The lesson that it drives home to me is that if a company can force updates to your device, it doesn’t matter what the terms of service are or how much you trust the company.
They can go bankrupt, sell off the assets, and some new vampire company can come along and remove your ability to use your product.
Worse, if your device requires remote services then they can control access to those. Stallman was right.
In general it’s getting harder and harder to avoid devices where this is possible. The obvious answer is regulation.
Our Miku's use a Novelda (fka Xethru) UWB sensor SoC, specifically designed for human presence monitoring and, drumroll, breathing and heartbeat. Specifically they use an X4: https://novelda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/x4_datasheet_...
I likely won't have time, what with the kids and all, but I'm going to give it the old college try to tear into this thing and craft some firmware so we can actually keep things from being a paperweight. It blows my mind this isn't just table stakes with IoT crap these days, but here we are.
Back then, we thought legal questions about discrimination silly - if the baker won't bake cakes for lesbians, who cares, there are dozens of bakers in town who are not silly, why fight with the one who is, especially since the only recourse you will get is a birthday cake.
But now with the app monopolies it's different. If Lyft bans you over a justified chargeback and Uber bans you over another justified chargeback you are going to have a problem.
Amazon did lock the guys account for the report from their driver. That did lock him out of his other IoT devices.
There are other doorbell choices, like Eufy by Anker. The one this man used.
An example that comes to mind is how if you get banned from Steam, you typically still retain the ability to access your past purchases, you just lose multiplayer, purchasing new content etc.
Similarly, companies should not be able to unilaterally discard the responsibilities they take on when they sell people things that require continuous service to operate.
This should be especially relevant in cases like with Philips Hue, now that they've chosen to bear the burden of even previous Hue owners' smart homes, they should not be able to willy nilly shed that in a way that renders the system non-functional. Any bans they make should just leave the hardware usable in the way that it already was.
Some off-the-cuff ideas of how:
1. Make our own purchases "on principle", and hope that enough other techies do that, that economic pressure is applied to brands.
2. Make our own non-purchase technology adoptions "on principle".
3. Inform other techies, both on specifics of individual devices/architectures/vendors/etc., and to bring everyone up to speed on the basics (e.g., reasons for open standards, user-oriented products/services, avoiding lock-in, privacy-respecting, responsible security, etc.).
4. Inform non-techies, such as by pointing them at solutions in their interest, and in the interest of society.
5. Advise lawmakers, to complement whatever they're hearing from lobbyists.
6. Contribute code and other effort to open platforms, and actually use them.
7. Be careful about helping to prop up society-hostile platforms, such as by using them to the exclusion of something else, making them more palatable to the exclusion of something better, implicitly endorsing them, etc.
8. Keep principles a factor in who we go to work for, how we work while there, and whether we stay there.
My Samsung Galaxy S8+ had those sensors and I used them often for many years. The results were interesting and useful, and graphed with history in the Samsung app which shipped on the device.
Then one day they changed the terms so you had to create and sign into a Samsung account, and upload your health data, to continue using the sensors.
I didn't accept those terms so I wasn't able to use those health monitoring functions on my expensive device any more.
Interestingly, most articles I saw about the change portrayed it as a good thing, that you could now have consistent healrh sensor records across your devices and other good cloud features, even portraying it as an oddity that Samsung Health didn't require Samsung cloud integration all along and that they had finally caught up to the times. But it already had those features before the change! The only visible change was to to remove the choice to opt out of uploading your personal data.
I have nothing automated in my life, that I know of? I don't have a garage; the door to the house has a key; the lights I turn on with a switch; no Alexa, don't use Siri... I am not exactly opposed to automation, but I am hesitant to share even more demographic data to cloud services.
Problem is, it comes with a ton of headaches.
The cloud is a problem, as you noted, but also a bunch of fiddily, unreliable software, firmware updates that go haywire, and apps that are tied to iOS and will stop working with my physically installed home hardware if the manufacturer ever stops treading water and fails to update for the latest breaking iOS update.
Home automation could be simple, reliable, and future-proof. It’s really not, though.
Everyone is chasing the lowest price, and it has to compete with existing solutions that are cheap, like just putting a filter on a white bulb, or installing a dimmer switch. What these products are offering is convenience, but not fundamentally new life experiences. So they can't charge a lot.
Meanwhile, they have to interact with an absolutely enourmous range of interfaces. The wi-fi router, the phone, the electric service itself, etc. And the user has high expectations for ease of use (after all, it is a light bulb, it should be simple!) while needing good security (it is your home after all, if you can't be safe in your home then where can you be safe?)
A simple experience with a wide range of interfaces at low cost has almost never been successfully done. Even Apple can't do it; they offer ease of use, but in a limited ecosystem and at a premium price.
So these products are fundamentally flawed and they probably can never be fixed. This industry is fundamentally not viable until someone comes along and solves the interface issue or until people accept paying a lot of money for these kinds of things, and even in that case it would probably be a reseller performing a home install then providing API access to these services, which is only one step away from home-as-a-service.
And I personally do not think I could tolerate a home-as-a-service. But many young people or students might like that just fine.
Depending on your definition of future it's very possible. Find some devices classified as "Local Push" or "Local Polling" https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th.... Make a VLAN with no internet access in your router and put them (and HA) on it. Never update the firmware (why would you, they work don't they?), connect them to HA and pin the version of it and your plug-ins. Don't let the devices talk directly to HA if you're extra paranoid.
Update at your leisure or never.
Their model is shipping ESP devices flashed with open source firmwares. They still go on their own firewalled wifi network, but this is about as future-proof as I can imagine: the software is open source, the updates can be run locally, the parts they're made of are actually pretty simple PCBs you could get a fab run of your own done if you wanted to.
In terms of "future" proofing, everything I've installed I've been putting in accessible junction boxes well labelled - electricity isn't going to change, so as long as it fits in a box, I'll always have the option to replace the hardware (if you have light switches with a neutral wire then you're basically set).
I wouldn't say "simple" per se but that's really more on the "you need a box running some type of home automation stuff". I suspect simple enough for the consumer would be something which came with it's own wifi AP and pre-configured mesh routers so the IoT network would start out intrinsically separated.
But this is absolutely not "consumer" by any means. If my grandmother can't do it, you failed the simplicity test. This is exactly why we end up with cloud services for everything. Because real-world integration with the entire fleet of possibilities for consumer interaction is by definition an open-ended problem that can never be finished.
Huh? I have the Homeassiant app on my phone and I proxy the web interface to a VPC so it's accessible to me everywhere.
This was never intended to be a solution for your grandpa. This is a solution for nerds who want to build a future proof setup with consumer equipment (Phillips smart bulbs vs. commercial lighting like https://www.crestronlighting.com/)
I only set mine to warm, cold and purple/blue but I don't have room for three lamps.
Stuff like the sunrise timer, switching lights on when you're on holiday, and out of home control are just gimmicks though.
Automation is not about having an app for your lights, it’s about not having to think of trivial stuff like turning on a light.
(As for automatically turning on lights, that is also good. I have two receptacles outdoors that aren't on a switched circuit. Thanks to the magic of smart lights, they are now off during the day.)
Do other people not struggle with apps the way I do?
- schedule
- motion sensing
- voice
- routines / iftt (if it's a cloudy day, and zoom is open, then set brightness to x, maybe even open the shades)
> - voice
But we already solved that with "Clap on!" :D
It turns out that they are hard to find and very expensive ($30) for what they are. Even if you can find them it's hard to tell if its an original unit or some super cheap knockoff that might burn your house down. :(
Motion sensing can be solved with Passive Infrared sensing light switches, it works great for my laundry, closets, and pantry.
If you don't need 'em or like the idea, don't spend $75 per switch. I got into smart lights because my apartment was apparently wired by a madman; the switch for my desk lights are right outside the bathroom. (Different circuit though!) I was very tired of walking that far to turn them on and off. I then replaced every other switch the week after, and have no regrets whatsoever, except maybe not having white tint adjustment. (I just have regular old LED bulbs. The switches are smart, not the bulbs.)
Once I was fully invested, I got a wall mount remote control that fits into a dual-gang faceplate (but only needs a single gang box), so I can control all of my lights when arriving or leaving. Very convenient.
Like others, I agree that automations are also nice. I have two fixtures outside that are unswitched. They turn on at sunset and off at sunrise now. No wasted electricity trying to overpower the sun. (Those are smart bulbs, of course.)
But aside from that, do you have issues with Face ID in the dark? For me it works in pitch darkness. It sends out some laser light when scanning your face and hopefully not frying your eyes.
One assumption I've made is that people just have much better and responsive phones than I do: I regularly wait 2-4 seconds for even the simplest things to happen on mine and it's overall a terrible experience. Overall I would say most phones I've had were like this at some point in their lifetime (often the majority of the lifetime), including a latest model Samsung phone that arguably was ahead of most available phones at the time.
I'm not sure what to think: I think it's just a matter of being used to a certain way of interacting with things in the end. Nothing's been able to replace a computer program for me, whether it be CLI, TUI or GUI.
As for home automation with apps vs. traditional switches and stuff I've always assumed that most of the stuff is done for coolness sake and because it's fun. Certainly what draws me to some of these things (though I haven't pulled the trigger on any of it) is that I could actually interface with the rest of the world from my computer, which I just think is a fun idea.
Maybe I’ve become a crusty old man, in years gone by I would have thought that people would notice me getting up and wonder where I was going. Now though, I’ve realized that no one is really paying that much attention to anyone else, even if someone were curious about why you walked away for a moment, the room getting brighter and you sitting back down doesn’t require a brain surgeon to piece together what happened.
Once you remove the completely voluntary awkward part of that video call, fiddling with an app and flipping a switch are on a lot more equal footing.
When it works, it just feels good but certainly isn’t a necessity. And of course that’s just lights. I used to have my hvac system integrated into HomeKit too and again, it was nice being able to control the thermostat in my kids room without having to go in. More recently I’ve had a neighbor that smokes a lot of weed and something about the closets being badly insulated is letting in all his smoke in my daughter’s room. Tried talking to the guy and nothing happened. Luckily, his smoking schedule is super precise and I was able to set timers for my kids air purifier to go off at his exact smoking time for 1 hour. It’s been 3 months since I’ve seen particulate matter go above 30ug/m^2…it used to get as high as 180!
Being a renter means I’m only halfway into the automation game but I gotta say, given the right product and platform I’m all in. And if something doesn’t work right then it’s time to reverse engineer it and make it behave.
This is a trivial wiring change, and a run-on timer from a local hardware or electrical store from a reputable brand is $25.
I understand small mains wiring jobs like this probably beyond some peoples ability or desire, but the benifits are:
One off up front cost
Probably never fail
No possibility of the product vendor having any impact on the products ever, other than the possibility of a product recall due to safety.
I have lived in America my entire life, a relatively comfortable life, and this sentence makes me feel extremely alienated from first world culture.
It’s creepy af
But if you don’t personally need it, you also don’t really need to drop in and bash the concept. It is useful for lots of folks and it’s just a fun game for lots of other folks. And most people can just ignore it.
Other than that, I just enjoy having the remote ability of turning lights on/off from my couch. I don't even have mine accessible via WAN, so it's not like "oh I forgot to turn off the lights" after leaving the house. they're LEDs, so I don't care!
I see what you did there
Wut, explain this to me?
however, mine is much more caveman like. during the day, the sun is up. at night, it is not, so it is dark and cold. man made fire. fire is good. fire is warm. light from fire is orange. man evolve using warm light at night. industry brings us blue light at night. blue light strange. makes things look harsh, unpleasant. caveman pushes button on magic rock that makes light back to warm color. caveman happy again.
also, caveman employer not like caveman. replace caveman with Flo since grug feng shui is so easy, even caveman can do it
Thankyou for that, the perfect ELI5 for my morning brain.
It's gotten to the point to where when I visit someone and they have a warm-colored light I compliment them on the fact. It's so rare.
In the later evening in our house we switch to all lamp-only lighting, as I find over head lights offensive in at least some time period immediately prior to going to bed.
I am using Adaptive Lighting with Home Assistant & Zigbee2MQTT + Hue bulbs.
My home has never felt this "smart" before. Every time my lights turns on I find the color and brightness to be perfect.
[1]: https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting
But we'll generally have very very dim lights on throughout the early evening into bed time which makes it much easier for me to fall asleep.
Waking up to office-white-lights will also really wake you up.
Also: parties. It's fun to be able to do nice pink and blue lights or a low-lit candle-like scenario, depending on the vibe.
I walk into a room, I turn the lights on. I leave the room, I turn the lights off. I have no need to operate lights in rooms that I'm not in.
Yes but it's nice to have extra functionality.
I use the wireless Hue dimmer switches, the batteries last a long time. I have one on my coffee table... it's nice to dim lights for multiple lamps from the couch, or adjust the colour temperature. My wall switches have no dimming dial, nor do my lamps. I can't go back to non-dimmable lamps.
It's just a different type of consumer luxury or hobby, unnecessary but also fun and rewarding.
I do hardware modifications and small electrical upgrades / changes myself, it's cheaper and I find it enjoyable and rewarding. Most recently I fit a dimmer to a high velocity ducted workshop fan, so now it has full variable speed control, as it's quite powerful and all the CFM isn't always required or desirable.
The first is, my mailbox is across the street, and I'd like to know when the mail comes. So I have a Z-wave door sensor in the mailbox to send me a notification to my phone when the mailbox is opened.
The other is to nag us to move laundry to the dryer. I have a Z-wave power meter that my washing machine plugs in to, and another Z-wave door sensor on the door. When the power meter detects the washing machine stop using power, it waits a few minutes and sends a notification to unload every few minutes, until the door is opened.
the appeal is technology as hedonistic consumption. People just love spending money on 'tech', even if it actually costs them more time and money, which is fundamentally the opposite of what technology is supposed to accomplish.
So in this sense it isn't even automation, it's anti-automation because just about every person I've met who is into home automation spends significant amounts of resources on things like flipping a light switch on.
I live in an old house. 80% of the lights in my house are operated by walking up to them and twisting the stem. The remaining 20% are switched.
To properly turn the lights on in my living room, I have to visit four separate lamps and turn each one on. The dining room has three lamps, bedroom has three, office has three, etc. When it's time for bed, I have to walk around the house turning each lamp off. If I want them dim, no luck. To do that would require either all new lamp fixtures, or rewiring the house with new dimmer switches.
Or, that was how it was before I did the Zigbee/HomeAssistant thing. Now I just hit that master switch on my nightstand and all the lights turn off. My whole house changes into "Night Mode". The thermostat will widen the setpoints. The doors lock if they weren't already. If I happen to get up at 3AM to take a piss or get a glass of water, the lights all know to come on at minimum brightness, and to turn off shortly thereafter.
My front door lock used to be a pain in the ass when I had my hands full of groceries. Or my coffee and the mail. Now my door unlocks automatically when I walk up to it. It's a small joy, but it reliably makes me smile each time. (And I don't have an ugly keypad, and still have a standard key slot if I need it).
I have an ancient stove and oven. No electronics at all. So I wrote a simple automation to alert me if the kitchen motion sensor's temperature rises 10°F more than the rest of the house, for longer than 30 minutes. This has saved me a couple of times now when I forgot to turn the oven off. (It takes a good hour for that temp sensor to reach the threshold as well. I wrote that automation after discovering that my oven had been on for hours. When I looked through the temp logs, I saw a clear signal I could use in the future.)
I also put a remote temp sensor in one of my HVAC registers. Comparing its reading to the ambient reading gives me a ΔT on my air conditioner, and a couple years ago the steadily-declining value of that delta alerted me to a refrigerant leak weeks before it would have been large enough to notice otherwise. I was able to get that repaired in the spring rather than in the heat of summer. This isn't something I would have done with a regular thermometer; having to remember to check it every so often and do the math taking into account the humidity and the elapsed time since the start of the cycle. But seeing all that temp data logged over many weeks makes the pattern easy to spot.
In the den I sometimes want it to be bright enough to read or do detailed work, and other times I want it dim so there's no glare while watching TV. Before, that meant I would have to buy lamps with a dimmer on them, then dim each one and go flip the ceiling fan light off. Now when I click the switch[1] to turn the TV/stereo combo on, it automatically dims the lights at either end of the couch, and turns the overhead light off.
Color temperature! That's another thing that isn't possible without some smartness in the bulbs. At night my whole house is as close to 2200K as possible. I really like that kind of light. But in the middle of the day, my kitchen lights are closer to 3300K.
My porch light turns on 30 minutes after sunset and off before sunrise. It's under a roof so I would have needed to either replace the switch with one of those fancy ones, or installed a photocell somewhere else. But it was just a couple automations added to the config file to get that functionality.
[1] I originally put a Tasmota wall relay in to save the 20W (!) of idle power my old stereo receiver was constantly drawing. When I realized I always fiddled with the lights whenever I turn the TV/stereo on, I just automated that away.
What equipment did you use for your lock? Is it an off-the-shelf or roll-your-own setup? I'd like something like this but so far all the consumer-oriented smart locks give me very little confidence.
What I think is that there's going to be a fundamental flaw in the device's security, and before there's any update from the manufacturer, word will get out in the criminal underworld that you just need to install such-and-such app on your phone and load a data file and then you can make all locks from Company X pop open just by walking down the street.
Eww, that's gross, especially for all the migrating birds and wildlife, just so you can have a terrible light on outside when you don't need it at all.
Basically you're harming wildlife https://birdcast.info/
And you're worsening the environment with needless and completely unutilized light pollution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution
Wow.
Solution: Hue lights that I can control from Alexa. If I'm dozing off while reading on the couch before bed, I can turn the lights off without having to wake up enough to actually go reach a switch.
All my locks are normal locks that use normal keys (although they are actually called "SmartKey" locks, but that just refers to the clever way they can be rekeyed [1], which is entirely mechanical). I have considered getting one smart lock that has voice and app control because I live alone.
The idea there is that if I have a medical emergency that incapacitates me so that I cannot unlock a door but doesn't incapacitate me so much that I can't call 911, I can unlock a door so when the ambulance arrives they don't have to break in to get me.
[1] The way you rekey them is you put in your current key, turn 90 degrees clockwise, insert a tool they provide into a hole that is next to the keyway to press a release in the back of the hole, remove that tool, and you can then remove the current key (carefully leaving the cylinder rotated 90 degrees). At that point you can put a different key in, and then turn the cylinder 180 degrees counterclockwise. The lock is now keyed to that key instead of the key you started with.
Anything that makes life a little easier is good for anyone with marginal capabilities, which is like millions of people and eventually everyone if they manage to live long enough.
I use a connected smart bulb, that has color changing. During bed time, I use it for reading books, and before sleeping, change it to a night light. I use it as a soft light when watching movies on my laptop. This is a convenience for me.
I also use smart lights to automatically turn on and off inside my home, and outside, in the portico.
I use automated socket outlets to turn on / off the water heater in my bath, on a schedule.
A lot of advantages in these things is in the option to schedule them, or make them act on the input of a sensor (movement, light, etc)
I don’t get the mood lighting. And really, if I lived alone I would just keep the shades up all the time and forgo the electric shades as well (but given my wife they are indispensable).
Smart thermostats are nice when you want to adjust things from all over the house or keep a schedule relatively easily. I also like knowing if my basement sump pump isn't keeping up with rain water and flooding things.
In general, it's nice to be able to monitor things and control them across the house, and the Lutron setup has been pretty painless.
* Turn the light red in my laundry room when a load is done
* Turn all my lights off when I set my alarm at night
* Slowly turn light on before my alarm goes off in the morning
* Turn off lights when I leave the house, then turn on the one by my front door if I get home after dark
None of these are life changing, but they're all marginally useful. And for me, half the fun is the sense of accomplishment getting these automations to work
that said, useful in this case means saving a bit of money by adjusting its settings. a manual (non cloud) thermostat would work too.
I only have them for that and I love to adjust the mood via lighting. I don't care about any further automation. I also don't care much if it was Philips or someone else that gave me light bulbs.
With Apple TV + a home pod I also get a fair bit of TV control with my voice which is nice.
It's hardly a bulletproof solution but it's better than the old solution of, "Oh shit, I think I left X running… welp, time to waste 40 minutes driving back and forth."
I like to dim and make the color warm at night too. But every already said that hundred times.
Second is more common, but also makes me happy every time: I put a contact sensor on the interior door to the attached garage that when opened quickly turns on the light to the garage, and turns it off a few minutes after that door next closes. It sure beats walking into a dark garage to fumble for a switch.
2. Since different people are different, it makes no sense to handicap everyone just because some people have a hard time reading text that is wider than a narrow column. Make the text fill most of the window, and that way people can have the window sized to whatever their comfort level is.
This trend of super narrow columns of text is making the web worse. It needs to die.
The web ... is not that.
There are actual standards for this, but they're more like recommendations, and ironically https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-cont... recommends "Width is no more than 80 characters or glyphs (40 if CJK)." while the first line of the paragraph explaining why is 112 characters wide and looks pretty much fine / comfortable to read on my screens.
While there are psychological reasons to use shorter line lengths, as this SO answer details the whole 80 column width thing goes all the way back to punchcards in 1928 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1486...
Edit: here's what HN comments would look like with 65-70chr per line: https://i.imgur.com/yeMF6IY.png vs default with 1215px per the news.css rule: https://i.imgur.com/IXNyhfL.png .
Here's my current setup (multiple narrow columns—the OP fits entirely in one screen, looks like a newspaper).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37595128
"security" indeed.
Philips is a lying corporation as far as I can tell.
Very few grow lights that have ever hit my hands came close to their advertised power rating. One company sold me a 50w, 135w, and 300w light set. the 50w was 45 at the wall, 135 was 75, 300 was 150.
And that's because their thermal designs are utter garbage. They can't run at full power. Most UFO lights are literally bolted to a plate, no fins of any sort, and a fan set blows down on it to cool the LEDs. If you get a rectangular panel, odds are you might get one undersized heat sink that doesn't cover the entire LED array (just the array, not the whole panel)
Most efficiency specs are garbage, too, measured with non-calibrated COTS light meters. I can toss most lights in my integrated sphere and I'll see way different from what is claimed.
Very few companies can actually be trusted. I have yet to find one with 100% honesty.
Thread/matter promise to put this garbage to sleep, finally. The smart-home offerings from the major vendors allow all devices, without vendorlock (so far).
They've been around since 2006.
I bought a "Cync" bulb from GE and had to reset it, I couldn't for the life of me. This is their official video on how to do it:
https://youtu.be/1BB6wj6RyKo
You have to repeat a sequence with near perfect timing, that takes about a minute straight. Since we moved, I had to do this for 4 lights and wanted to tear my hair out, lol.
I've found that for whatever reason, "smart home" stuff is some of the worst designed and managed products out there.
Too many companies are finally realizing that thanks to matter their products are basically going to become commodities. No longer is there an advantage to sticking within a single platform to avoid hubs (ok so maybe "no longer" is jumping forward a few years but still, the steps are happening now).
The part that really frustrates me, my Hue devices are the most reliable devices in my home automation behind my HomePods. On a fairly regular basis my other home automation devices will just randomly not work, loose connection, or just generally have issues. I am not exactly itching move away from that reliability and I feel like Phillips Hue likely knows this.
This includes Ikea when I tried their smart tech just a couple years ago. It was incredibly unreliable and I do question actually recommending it (that being said, maybe they have gotten better and I would love for someone here to tell me has... it seems kind against Ikea for them to go down a locking down approach?)
"real" protocols like Zigbee and friends seem to work well.
However I think the Ikea hub I had was ethernet only so not sure if that's the entire answer.
I have had IKEA bulbs and outlets for over two years (adding to it over that time) and have great experiences and high reliability.