I searched the page for “Lutron” but was disappointed…
There is a line of lutron switches that are dead simple, no smarts, no hub … and a cute little remote that everyone in my family uses to “all off” the interior lights.
We have a no smart devices policy in the house and these make the cut …
EDIT: From my notes ... the specific product line is "maestro wireless" and I have MRF2-6CL switches paired with "pico" remotes. This is as opposed to the caseta line from Lutron which is quite a bit "smarter".
For what it's worth I do have the Caseta line and it is by far and away the most reliable part of my smart home setup. If it were possible I'd be powering everything with it but sadly the only way to get e.g. fans integrated is to buy one of a very small set of fans with Caseta functionality built in. So instead I have pico remotes talking to Home Assistant talking to the fans which... mostly works. But the Caseta part itself has been flawless.
(Search the page for "Original Smart Fan Speed Control Switch", there's seemingly no way to link directly to the requisite page section... which is a thing I could rant about but will not).
Sorry, I should have been clearer. Those switches work great with fans that are already hardwired for a switch in the wall but a lot of modern fans (in my experience, maybe because I was buying cheap!) don't bother with that and have their own wireless system of some variety to control fan speed, lights etc.
My solution to that was to buy a Zigbee controller to go inside the fan. I wish Lutron sold some kind of standalone fan controller you could shove in there but alas.
Exact same thought here but with their Caseta lineup. It is one of the most easy to configure and reliable smart home things I have in the house.
I still use HA on a RPi4 for other things, typically via Zigbee, but the Casetas always work like you'd expect from a light switch while also enabling smart stuff like voice control or automations.
Also a happy Lutron fan, but I went with RadioRA2. It's a bit "smarter" but it's very reliable, not connected to the internet, and some basics can even be programmed without the management software.
One thing that stands out with Lutron products is their use of a unique spectrum[0], unlike almost all other smarthome products that share the same noisy bands.
The commercial versions of Lutron controls are an (expensive) option as well, if you are of the sort that really wants whole-home automation.
These things are installed in big fancy commercial buildings where there is an expectation that they last longer than the warranty, which is reassuring.
These things actually do pretty well at power conservation at these scales, but it's a little fuzzy if it will do the same for a home. Just swapping out LED for incandescent gets you pretty much all of the bang for your buck, but if you have people in your house who are allergic to turning off lights, the occupancy sensors will help a bit.
Lutron is a real company as well, an not an Amazon company, which is not nothing.
My own experience , half the time Nest tells me it can't find the lights to turn them on or off.
I have somehow automated some lights to come on too early in the morning but the specific task/automation I set to do this is nowhere to be found.. I can create and remove new tasks but I'm being haunted by this old task.
My father has most of his home setup. Worked great until Christmas eve, when lightning hit the local exchange..
Hook it up to an speech recognition-challenged "smart" speaker that will dutifully play death metal when you order it to turn off the damn lights for teh win.
At least it recognized the command instead of replying "No, it is in fact October 12, 2023. Please check your settings in your Google Home app. Would you like me to send a link to your phone?"
Some light-switches have the "smarts" to turn on and off at certain times, built right into them. Therefore, you might lose access to the external tool you used to program them, and they'll happily continue on repeating the behaviors. You might try a hard reset, often using a paperclip to depress a microswitch though a small hole on the light switch itself.
KNX seems like a solid solution: a single shared bus that smart devices communicate with each other over, without any need for any kind of centralized server (either on prem or not). But unfortunately AFAICT there aren't any installers in the Bay Area, and it would cost a pretty penny to wire the house anyway.
Any suggestions for how to get something similar set up in the US?
I am a fan of Ikea lights.
I can use normal light switches to turn the light on/off.
But I also have a remote and I can dim the lights or change the temperature.
No hub needed. The price is low enough.
And Ikea will probably stay in business a long time.
Or "when the only occupant opens the front door and drops off the network, turn off all lights, arm the alarm, turn off the stereo, and yell at me if the cooktop is drawing power".
I'm a zigbee fan, mostly because there's such a wide variety of devices.
I almost exlusively use zigbee2mqtt [0] reference to find devices that suit me. Searching for `meter` gives a lot of options, you'd have to do more investigation to find something that supported 40A, but my guess would be that a clamp meter is likely your best option.
It's also possible that you could use one of the DIN rail options in your fusebox, but I haven't looked at the current ratings.
I wrote a little script for my homebrew ESPHome-controlled CW/WW LED strip to automatically control color temperature based on if and where the sun is in the sky. Warm-only when the sun is down, mix of warm and cool when the sun is up with peak coolness at solar noon.
I need to choose outlets and switches for a new building, and I hope to "smart home" it. I had started to do some reading, and while my experience wasn't _quite_ as gruesome as the author of this article portrays it to be, I generally agree with their sentiments.
Still, I'm not quite ready to give up on computer-controlled automation.
Does anyone know of a reasonably complete guide (web site, book, whatever) that explains this well? What I'm looking for: help choosing components that will work together; not "for dummies"; I'm technically competent and willing to learn some stuff but don't want to make a hobby/profession out of this; doesn't require buying into Google Home, Alexa, or another privacy-hostile system.
Then, when you're ready, setup home assistant but setup everything so basic functionality still works even if your server or internet went down.
My hue bulbs are at the center of this strategy with each bulb controlled by either a remote control or a hue movement detector. Hint: remote controls in rooms where you stay, sensors where you pass by or if you stay only a little while.
I can also control everything via Alexa and can't wait for the day there is a viable privacy-friendly / low-maintenance alternative (Home assistant are working on this). Again, if internet goes down, I still have the remotes/detectors so my lights always work.
Also, for any other equipment you would buy, make sure it's compatible with Matter.
Hue just decided to start requiring an online account even for local control; I used to think they were the best option, but now I'd recommend avoiding them (even if you don't care about a needless account, consider that this most likely is step 1 to adding fees)
I honestly never understood why people even bothered using the official Hue bridge when Zigbee light link is an open standard with tons of both open and proprietary alternatives available.
Smart bulbs are the gateway drug to home automation, but they soon reveal themselves as a bad idea, at least if not coupled with a smart switch.
Think about this: if you have a smart bulb, but your light switch is off, there's no way to turn on that light. At the same time, if your bulb "state" is off, your light switch won't be able to turn it on.
You could JUST pair a smart bulb with a smart switch, and align their states.
Or skip smart bulbs altogether and make the switches smart - using Lutron Caseta or an equivalent solution.
Hue smart bulbs, by default (you can change this), will always turn back on after power loss/restoration. If it's off and you have a switch, you just toggle it twice and the light comes on.
I've found Hue bulbs to be one of the best purchases I've made. Being able to adjust color temperature and brightness arbitrarily does wonders for my circadian rhythm.
If you have access to it in your area, consider looking into KNX for home automation and DALI for lighting. Both are BUS systems that you wire throughout your house, and they are very reliable. They are commonly used in hotels, schools, etc. It might be a bit more expensive and require pre-planning, but these systems have been around for decades in Europe. Plus, you'll be adhering to a standard, not bound to a specific company
My house came with the doorbell wires buried behind the frame somewhere, so I installed a self-powered wireless doorbell. The transmitter harvests power from the user physically pressing the button, so it doesn't need batteries. I just caulked it straight onto the brick.
I removed the TECKNET logo with isopropyl alcohol.
The receiver has dozens of tunes, but the only one worth using is the Westminster Chime Melody. There's also a "ding-dong ding-dong", but it's annoying that it plays twice. The rest are just too long; it's a doorbell, not a jukebox.
The receiver remembers the tune and volume if power is interrupted, so that extra cruft doesn't matter after initial setup.
I love this! Sometimes I daydream about a device that works kind of like an old printing press. You can arrange letter tiles to create a message. Then, you power the thing by pumping a lever or something, and it constructs a digital signal from the letters and sends it over something like LoRaWAN.
Incorrectly titled. The "smart" devices from the first part of the article ARE the midwit solution. The better devices in the rest of the article are the actual right-end-of-the-bell-curve solutions.
Indeed. Wanting things to be dead simple and not need to be fiddled with constantly and take months to learn how to set up is the big brained move. Same reason I switched to an iPhone. I don't have time to nerd out and customize Android till it's usable.
>The hell? But people seem to think that Home Assistant is good. (Something about subscription fees and invasive apps and forced obsolescence?) So you search for “how to get a Home Assistant”. This reveals a recursive landscape of terror:
Google "how to install home assistant" which leads to:
This has a nice visual guide that requires you to know how to buy a raspberry pi, how to plug in a raspberry p, how to plug in an sd card (twice), and how to navigate to a url.
I felt like that was a big strawman. HA in particular makes it very easy to chose how to install, they even a product you can buy that's ready to use (HA Yellow).
This is probably for an audience less enamoured with the Pi than the HN crowd. Someone that's more interested in getting to a working result than having to yak shave for a couple days or more to do the same.
For someone who doesn't have a Linux background, "just put it on a Raspberry Pi" is kind of like saying "You write a distributed map reduce function in Erlang". Ie: it's easy if they know it, but if they don't then that "just" is doing a lot of work there.
Pre-installed is almost certainly the way to go for such a person.
When it comes to Home Assistant, the Pi is actually a much more pragmatic option.
It works out of the box, is very easy to source (hell some brick & mortar stores sell them), has very good Linux support due to its popularity, and makes up a large part of the install base meaning HA support for it is unlikely to get deprecated.
Keep in mind that Home Assistant provides ready-made images that behave like an appliance and can auto-update. In fact, it doesn't even give you a shell/SSH by default and such access is discouraged.
Thus the Linux/RaspberryPi underlying complexity is irrelevant to the user - the "complexity" is to dd/BalenaEtcher/etc a downloaded file to an SD card, put the card in the Pi and connect it to power. From there it's available over the network and can be configured through a web browser.
I purchased a home assistant yellow and my experience was anything but “ready to use”.
You have to build the damn thing, which isn’t hard per se since it’s ultimately only 3 actual components, but it still took me some time and felt complicated since it involves attaching a heat sink with thermal compound on a CPU.
And then the software install process isn’t totally amazing either since it involves flashing a USB stick, but also needing to choose a few very non-obvious options.
Should I install HA on the EMMC and later move my data-disk to the nVME drive or install the OS on the nVME drive directly? Google random forums to find out what people think of this decision first I guess.
I mean I think it’s still a good product, don’t get me wrong, but it is still very much a power user thing.
Which is probably fine because setting up HA itself when you have an install isn’t exactly a picnic either.
> HA in particular makes it very easy to chose how to install
This is the problem with lots of stuff similar to HA when it tries to break into a non-enthusiast audience: people don't WANT to choose how to install it. Most of the time they have no clue why they would choose one thing over another and giving them those choices is confusing and overwhelming.
It's like starting a an intro to Nix tutorial with by asking if the user wants to enable flakes.
I say this as a very active user of HA & Nix for 5+ years.
I don't know if it's changed but I felt like a super genius a few years ago when I finally got my HA up and running on a pi, and I'm a linux person and former system admin. There's Home Assistant and Home Assistant Core, Docker or not Docker, install HACS or don't. Some things don't seem to work unless you're on a Docker container but then it's a pain to ssh in and find folders to install stuff. I really hope it's better now as my HA install has mysteriously died and I haven't had the heart to dig in and see what the issue is so I'm guessing I'm going to have to start from scratch.
>This has a nice visual guide that requires you to know how to buy a raspberry pi, how to plug in a raspberry p, how to plug in an sd card (twice), and how to navigate to a url.
What about upkeep? Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to install Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment? Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?
>What about upkeep? Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to install Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment?
Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
>Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?
Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.
>Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.
1. How do you do backups? Is it built into home assistant? Do you think the average person knows or will remember to make backups?
2. "restore from backups" works if the sdcard just dies. If it's silently corrupting your install and causing weird behavior you won't even know it's sd card's fault unless you go through troubleshooting.
I'm not sure if you realize it, but you're demonstrating exactly the thing described in the blog post.
Why the hell do I need a backup for my light switch?
The first time I installed HomeAssistant (on a Raspberry Pi), it worked great for a couple of months, then it bricked itself because it ran out of log space. I re-installed it. A couple of months later, it auto-updated itself and decided to lock me out because apparently it now required that you log in where it previously didn't. At around the same time, Apple locked out their HomeKit HA integration so I could no longer tell Siri to flip the lights. At that point I just gave up.
Recently I tried reinstalling it again, and let's just say I don't recommend it if you value your sanity.
Every time I look into HA, I face this kind of cognitive dissonance between my experience and people condescendingly telling me that I'm obviously doing something wrong.
I just want a zwave hub for my light switches. I don't want any of this crap.
What are you doing with your Pi where you’re running both HAOS and Steam? Definitely seems like an edge case. Put Debian on the thing stick it on a bookshelf and forget it exists
edit: Actually put HAOS on, no reason to run Debian
> What are you doing with your Pi where you’re running both HAOS and Steam? Definitely seems like an edge case. Put Debian on the thing stick it on a bookshelf and forget it exists
I'm not saying that's a specific issue you'll run into with home assistant. I'm just pointing out that's an example of something that's simple in theory to set up, but causes headaches if you venture off the happy path.
Got it, makes sense and I definitely agree: with Linux systems the more you deviate from the popular applications and use cases the more elbow grease is required. FWIW I’ve never had difficulty with my DE resulting from running Steam but presumably other people have experienced it. Certainly keeping Proton updated is a massive hassle
I mean, HomeAssistantOS has a GUI in the browser with an upgrade button that appears when there's a new release (which is frequent -- actually my biggest complaint about HA is how fast they move and that I can't configure HA to just install the updates as they arrive, and I have to actually click the button. Horror.)
It performs a backup whenever you perform a release, so if the SD card gets corrupted.. just follow the install instructions a second time and upload the last backup?
That's it for the upkeep, other than dealing with 3rd party APIs that change and make things break, but that's not HomeAssistant's fault.
> Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to install Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment?
I think you're replying to the wrong comment. This was a comment about installing Home Assistant OS, which shouldn't ever be a base for running Steam!
The scare quotes are disingenuous. However we may dislike or disapprove of Google's algorithms, it is absolutely accurate to describe the results as personalized.
They individualize search results: they give different results to different people.
They don't personalize search results: they don't give people results which are optimal for the searcher, but rather those which attempt to be optimal for the advertisers without discouraging the searcher enough to swap search engines.
> I am aware the search results can be different to different people and based on demographic information.
You answered yourself. If you are are searching zoos and cute animals more often than programming stuff, "python egg" will return dramatically different results. This is not a theoretic possibility, it is the way google works (which I think is unfortunate).
I recently picked up this rabbit hole of a hobby. It's only when you want to get fancy, and have lots of mismatched stuff, that it gets that complicated. (Which, as nerds, we are wont to do.) If you just buy into one brands stuff, and use just that, you don't get lost in the home assistant quagmire. There are quirks, eg Phillips Hue has a 50 device limit per hub resulting in needing multiple hubs for a complex scene, but it works for people who aren't programmers.
Meanwhile, as a hardware hacker and software engineer, yeah, I'll admit, I had to do things that look a lot like my job I'm paid very well to do in order to get my light switches to work right. No idea how people who don't program for a living are supposed to get Home Assistant to work quite right!
I 100%, absolutely sympathize with the opening there. The situation really sucks to a surprisingly great extent. At the same time though, it has to be stated that going for a 'dumb, simple' Smart Lights really, really misses an enormous amount of the potential value. Nearly 100% of my smart home is about lights for now using just Philips Hue/HomeKit, though HA remains on my list, but only a tiny percentage is about simply having switches wherever. The true value for me has been in more intelligent color lighting based on layered actions. I change the amount of blue and brightness during the course of the day, so that there's lots in the morning and it's dimmer and ever redder in the evening. Particularly in the winter this has been incredibly helpful for my sleep cycles. It can all be extremely transparent as well since the switches and motion sensors can have time-of-day as well as which-button and number-of-clicks categorization. So hitting the on button always turns the lights on, but the color and brightness mix of a room will be different over the course of the day. Same with outdoors, motion sensors anywhere that can have different colors and activation periods at different times has been great for massively cutting down extraneous blue light at night, which is good not just for humans but for animals and insects as well. I can wake up in the heart of winter when the sun doesn't rise until 8 or later in the morning to a 20 minute long "sunrise" I created myself simulated nicely with a bunch of lights. And more complex logic like "lights all come on when smoke alarm goes off or a basement flood is detected" are also handy.
Again I'm very sympathetic to the shitty state of the ecosystems right now, frequently miserable UI/UX, and massive heaping doses of bullshit companies are constantly trying to pull to extract more ongoing revenue from people for what should be buy-once-and-done products. But it really sucks precisely because yes: smart home features genuinely can be pretty great.
This is probably because a lot of smart home enthusiasts are less enthused about actually turning the lights on and off. They have fun tinkering and building wireless systems.
I believe you based on my experience with the salve, but I’m the opposite.
Very much, “I just want it to work.”
Here’s what I’ve found useful from a smart home:
* I can leave for a week or weekend, let the house get quite hot or cold (obviously within some safety parameters) and then turn in the heat or AC a couple hours before I get home.
* I get alerts when a package or other delivery shows up at the front door.
* I can set a timer to turn off any lights my kids left on during the day, late at night every night.
* I can set a timer to turn off the heat or AC in an outbuilding no-one sleeps in late at night, in case my kids were out there and forgot to turn it off.
* I can set my outdoor lights to go on at sunset, and turn off around “it’s unlikely anyone will be going out here and need a lit pathway” time.
* I can set my espresso maker to turn on and warm up before I’m ready for coffee, and turn off when we’re a bit past “you should stop drinking coffee or it’s gonna mess with your sleep” time.
* When we leave town with an arrangement for a dog sitter to come by and take care of our dog a few hours after we leave, I can check to make sure they actually did and poor Rover isn’t lonely and unfed.
But I do 100% agree with the author’s frustration, and wish things “just worked” and just worked together.
I totally don't understand what I gain with colored lights. My friend had a similar setup and I just don't get the attraction. I have a Google home and setting timers has a clear value, I forget less. Playing music has clear value, I relax. Colored lights??? I don't get it.
>I totally don't understand what I gain with colored lights. My friend had a similar setup and I just don't get the attraction. I have a Google home and setting timers has a clear value, I forget less. Playing music has clear value, I relax. Colored lights??? I don't get it.
While the effect no doubt varies with individual, there has been a significant amount of studies suggesting that there is some link between bright light in shorter wavelengths (so blue end of spectrum) and melatonin suppression, and in turn circadian rhythms [ex: 0, 1, 2]. If you live near the equator with consistent sunrise/sunset year round artificial light management may be less of a concern to you, but the further you are and the more seasonal variation you experience the more helpful it may be (and is for me) to have lighting throughout home/work that can help maintain circadian rhythm as desired. "Sunrise" into bright white/blue in the morning and day, then slowly changing into dimmer, redder light as one approaches the desired time to go to sleep. YMMV of course but as someone in tech who had decades of difficulty in maintaining a normal 24h cycle in the northern latitudes, heavy light brightness and temperature control has been a very significant improvement in my QOL and I never want to go back.
Of course, some people just enjoy having fun with lighting as well, for parties and mood and such. "Painting with light" can be interesting by itself. But for me the practical advantages have been significant value for the cost, and without any need for any kind of drugs or other mechanisms.
When my teen would be up in his room with headphones on, I would flash the bedroom lights remotely from downstairs. That was his cue to come downstairs for dinner or so we could figure out our weekly schedule or whatever.
they're fun! they help set the mood, so the living room changes from an office space vibe to a campfire vibe to a cool outer space feel. it's goes beyond strictly utilitarian uses but you have to have emotions to get use out of that feature.
The one word there sums it up: ecosystems. Every manufacturer seems to be insisting on themselves being "the ecosystem" and the end result is we ended up with dozens of ecosystems, none of whom have a full soup-to-nuts-yet-easy solution, and they don't invest enough effort into getting them compatible with each other.
Every few years I get tempted to go down this rabbit hole, hoping that in the last few years the industry has finally gotten its shit together, and every time I look, it's the same clown show, just with more clowns.
Yeah, big companies (tech or otherwise) now have their ears up to prevent anything from becoming a success without them, and so nothing becomes a success because there’s no room for the users and startups around them to evolve to what the products really should be.
We need more things that are complete in themselves but causally work with other things. (Y’know, like the web.) Things that can perform tasks without an installation page, but readily extensible using MQTT or HTTP. That’s the kind of thing my company tries to build. That’s a very useful thing about Shelly, or any of the polished devices that expose an open protocol.
The 1 Hue light I have resets itself on occasion and I've given up on reprogramming it to do the 1 thing I want it to do, which is color tracking by time of day.
I imagine if I bought a compatible "smart switch" that issue would go away (power never completely dropped to the bulb), but seriously...
I feel this sentiment deeply. I wonder how much of it is due to lack of good options, and how much is due to a hostile information space - that is, there are bandits out there who want your money and attention, and they are willing to say anything to get it.
Home Assistant is awesome, but not ready for the mass-market. It's a fun tech project to setup and one that will require your attention regularly forever-- but on the bright side, it isn't constantly annoying, it works consistently, and it can all work locally so when some Chinese vendor shuts down their servers you aren't left sitting in a dark room.
It's improving at a rapid pace and I can see it being ready for your aunt to use in a couple of years. Not this year, not next.
I set all my relatives up with Apple HomePod Minis and HomeKit, which has expensive hardware (matter is supposed to fix that...) but is largely local and relatively private.
While I believe that HA is very cool and many vendors provide valuable solutions, we must consider what happens when we die.
This is just one anecdote, but I believe the problem is more pervasive.
I was called to an elderly lady's home to "un-haunt" the building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done "all of the cool things" to make the home smart. Unfortunately too smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home.
She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn't figure it out and lived like this for an entire year.
She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband, but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation. About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady's lights too. In her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift.
I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices and, as she put it, putting in "turn the light on and off again" switches.
When choosing technology -- any technology, it's important to consider the life of that device and the people impacted far in the future.
I programmed a dead man's switch tied to the presence feature so if my phone or smartwatch don't show up in the house for six months, it turns on the "HAUNT FAMILY" program. There's no way I'm leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant neighbor.
That reminds me: I have to hook up the smart speaker so that it says "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DA- HONEY?" any time my partner walks up to the RaspberryPi.
Actually the nice thing about all the recent advancements in machine learning and generative AI is that you can set it up to record everything you say in the house, and train itself to learn your speech patterns and voice. Then it can behave realistically when spirit mediums attempt to contact it. No more of this canned prerecorded nonsense that falls apart after a week of investigation.
This is one of the reasons that smart bulbs and the like are generally bad - you never want a situation where the switch doesn't just act like a switch.
Smart houses should be designed from the perspective of remaining identical to use when the smarts go away. And if there's weird behavior it should all stop if you unplug the hub or controller.
I generally like in-wall smart switches but even there they tend to die faster than dumb switches, so you may be leaving your survivors a bunch of calls to an electrician.
I feel like "if your internet-connected X doesn't do regular internet-less X-things without the internet, its not an X" should be the core axiom of IoT design.
The default on Hue bulbs is to reset to mid-bright white when first turned on. This means whenever you flip the switch on the light turns on, and obviously if you turn the switch off the light turns off. So, they essentially do let the switch be a switch by default.
> This is one of the reasons that smart bulbs and the like are generally bad - you never want a situation where the switch doesn't just act like a switch.
Depends on your devices, but I have (Philips?) smart bulbs that can be turned on/off "regularly", but keep it on and you can control it via google home.
80% of my lights are smart bulbs rather than switches, and I agree with your take here. In my house I have the smarts in the switch itself wherever possible, but so much of my lighting is from floor and table lamps (that aren't plugged into switched outlets). In those cases, the bulb is the only thing I can "smarten", and it still will work via the stem on the lamp itself if the HA box goes away.
The main drawback is that this means I have to have the bulbs set to light up after power is restored. A middle-of-the-night power outage is fun when the entire house lights up at 3am :)
I've done a few new installs of lighting in my garage, driveway, and patio. Because that was "greenfield" work, I got to put smart switches in. If I ever rewire this house, I'll use that opportunity to do some more.
Have you looked at smart plugs? I have a few lamps in my home plugged into them and the automation works fine. I have a couple spares I store with the Xmas stuff so that the lights can be automated once the decorations are up.
I use Kasa (TP-Link) plugs but there are a bunch of different brands.
I have, yeah. A couple years ago I got a bunch of Tasmota-flashable ones, and I use them for the coffeemaker, a couple stereos, and one table lamp. Oh yeah, and the christmas lights. :)
My issue with those is that they fail the "normal person" test. A normal person will try to turn on a lamp and it will never work because the smart plug is off. But with a smart bulb, it'll come on after they twist the stem a couple times. (And it never gets noticed! People are used to 3-way style lamp sockets needing a couple clicks to turn regular bulbs on and off, so they don't really notice that they had to double twist the stem to get the light to turn on)
Of course, now you have the opposite problem: someone turns the bulb off with the lamp knob (unaware of/irritated with its smart features), and now it's unresponsive with all smart controls.
The best compromise are smart switches. Switch still manually controls the light, and smart features are always available. The downsides are that the lamp's outlet must have switch wiring, and smart switches aren't like normal toggles: they're more like push buttons so the switch isn't in a strange physical state.
Haha, yup. No matter what method I choose, I give something up. I agree switches are usually the best, but it gets more complicated when I want to have configurable color temp and dimmability in the same fixture. Can't use a dimmer switch, because the smart bulb wants full power. Or I can use a dimmer that's operating as basically a remote for the bulb rather than a true current-interrupting switch. But now it needs to be able to fall back to real switch mode if the hub is offline.
(By the way, Philips Warm Glow bulbs are awesome for this. I use them in my dining room lamp connected to an Inovelli Z-wave dimmer. They get warmer the dimmer they go, mimicking how tungsten filaments work)
My current setup is a mix-n-match of all three types, using each one where it beats the other two for simplicity and predictability.
It doesn't even have to involve death. I had a NAS that I set up and relied on, and then when it stopped working, I was so busy for the next month that I got used to living without it. (It wasn't a difficult fix, but I didn't know that, and I didn't want to even get started on it unless I had several hours at my disposal.) I eventually got it working because I absolutely needed a couple of files off of it, but after that I could never bring myself to put anything new on it, because I just don't enjoy fixing stuff like that anymore, and I often don't have the time.
Of course you can have your cake and eat it too. If you were to throw away the Raspberry Pi in my house that runs home assistant, all of the switches on the wall would continue to work. This is possible by switching in smart switches instead of smart bulbs. For RGB bulb controls, Zigbee pairing can make the operation of the remote controls independent of the hub to some degree, though I'm not 100% confident that those will function properly without the hub since then there's no coordinator (right?)
That's my plan for the house. The internet can go down and every extra controller can fry and the basic switches should still work exactly as designed. I'm going for zwave, but the same idea - smart switches with normal bulbs. Nothing talks to wifi.
Thank you. I am not sure why so many people have this impression that if you install smart home stuff you can't have switches that Just Work. My garage door has a smart opener and also a physical switch inside the garage and a key fob remote in the kitchen drawer, they all work just fine. If the Wifi is down you can just use an old fashioned analog solution. Progressive enhancement is not that hard, you just need to do five minutes of research and pay ten extra dollars to be sure you are getting products that have physical fallback.
Yeah I've done meross homekit switches for all of our light switches. There's one that needed a reset (via the button on the outside, easy as cake). I didn't notice for weeks because it works like a switch when you tap it. Switches are the best place to add smarts and they gracefully degrade just fine. This midwit fix involving remote controls to turn on lights STINKS. Hell, our bedroom fan has that just because it's a 2 wire fan and I hate it.
This was a basic principle I decided on when thinking about smart switches etc. Basically they must be dumb switches first and only if HA is working are they smart. The most promising ones I find were from Shelly. They fit into normal light switches (or in the UK you probably have to put them at ceiling roses).
Then I decided I didn't really want to put electronics in my wall at all and did something more useful with my time instead.
Yeah these smart switches should
All have backup physical buttons which I believe they all do but also a kill all automation hard switch but that would not be so simple
I visited a friend not too long ago, who had a smart speaker in the guest room mainly to control the lights. It went through a smart plug. Naturally, their internet connection went down. We had to move the bed (in the dark) in order to remove the smart plug and re-activate the regular lightswitch.
Fortunately, we're both reasonably fit people, but I know people who would've just had to give up and use a flashlight.
Made a comment in the root of the article thread that is related to yours, in terms of overcoming your elderly client’s problem with something far more robust and reliable:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861604
I run HA at home, and my home is an apartment. I was able to buy some zigbee switches [1] that just 'snap' over the top of traditional light switches, after adding some castellated plastic washers under the screws that hold the switch cover in place
This means that instead of a light switch, there is a button. And when I relocate, I can just remove these devices from the switches and take them with me
Along that same line - My Home-automation setup is fairly simple using Samsung's hub and requires very little maintenance. But I do have a fairly complicated homelab and network setup. I'm in my early 50s and have considered what would my wife/children do if one day the 'internet' connection wasn't working and I'm no longer around to fix it? No way they're going to know how to log into OPNSense or Unifi controller to troubleshoot. So I bought a off the shelf router, configured with basic setup with same SSID and IP scheme. Typed up some simple instructions on a single page and attached it to the router box. The idea being that they can simply unplug the OPNSense box, plug the router into it and then power everything up. I've done a fire-drill test and had my teenage son try it. So far he seems to know exactly what to do. The rest I'm hoping he can figure it out on his own.
Reminds me of an old scifi short story I read years ago and can no longer find.
It outlined a future where everyone started automating elements of their messaging to each other. Simple things like automated "Happy Birthday" messages. Eventually, people started setting up auto "Thank you" replies to these messages. It only got more complex from there with increasingly elaborate conversations being automated between people.
Eventually, some calamity hits civilization and humans go extinct. But their technology is resilient and keeps running without them. The ghosts of a dead people continue talking to each other in perpetuity, long dead people cheerfully wishing each other "Happy Birthday" until the lights finally ran out.
Haunting story that I still think about from time to time. Would love it if anyone else recognizes the story and could credit it.
My mother called me freezing cold. Her nest thermostat had a "wifi connectivity lost" message on the screen and she couldn't (or didn't know how) to bypass it and turn up the heat.
Also consider what happens when you sell your home. Or be careful buying a house with a system.
A friend of mine bought a house with an expensive system, but it wasn't very useful and later had a fault. To remove it would require replacing all the switch plates - I would guess $1000 to get rid of it. He was technical so he fixed it instead.
This is a consideration for me, since I'm in the middle of a pretty big upgrade to smart switches throughout my basement and main floor. I think this will be very appealing for the right potential buyer. I'm just curious what I'll need to do to make this a feature. Maybe de-sync it from my system and provide a Smart Things hub and get them all set up with it there so it's easy.
I'm not getting rid of the existing switches and plate covers, so at least I can more easily remediate it if the future buyers don't want the system.
The owner of a custom rotating house in California cited a similar reason for moving. The video is worth watching but here is the relevant section:
"I've had 18 heart procedures. My wife is in perfect health. The odds of me outliving her are zero...We're moving back to Coronado. This is a complex house, even though I think it's simple! For her to try and teach somebody else how to run everything and do everything would be difficult if something happened to me. So we're just kind of jumping ahead."
> The wife could not operate the devices in her own home.
Hopefully this isn't a common situation. I know that for me, not being able to control basic things like lights/heating/cooling without calling on and waiting around for somebody else would drive me nuts and one way or another the situation would have been resolved before the only person who knew how to handle the tech had a chance to sleep let alone die.
I've known a lot of people who couldn't figure out to how to use their own TV remove for anything more advanced than getting to the point where they can watch their usual shows and change the volume, but not being able to turn off a light at night is like not knowing how to turn a TV on at all!
Yeah HN is generally young people and early adopters. Most HA stuff is part of a "generation" of tech. What people don't realize is that in about 15-20 years, all buzzwords/acronyms/techstacks will likely be completely different.
Home stuff needs to generally work for 20 years, and lot of things (light switches, etc) will be even longer. Tech has no conception or demonstrated discipline for functioning that long.
HA/IOT is an interop disaster currently, and the current cacaphony of standards/acronymns guarantees it will be cycled/replaced in a decade's time.
The INTER-NET of Things doesn't have a functional INTER, nor a NET.
Inter is software, which should be mathematically doable but historically improbable.
The ubiquitous NET part basically means you buy the device, and it will work with zero-config networking that means you can find it.
And the final issue is the interface. Interfaces do NOT age gracefully either. Perhaps voice interfaces are what is needed.
You are absolutely correct. It is a horrible mess.
Which is why Homeassistant is a godsend - you can add the mess and present it in a sensible way. As long as you stay the fuck away from anything cloud you are pretty much golden no matter what the parent company decides to do.
E.g. Telldus had a huge range of 433mhz things that still work IF you avoided their TelldusNet or whatever.
There's a bias where most of the content is produced by the most hardcore group of people. This is, of course, no different with home automation. You can do Home Assistant without making it your hobby, it's just that most of the posts you see are from people who are way too deep into it.
Exactly. I have my lights tied into Home Assistant to turn on/off when a room is occupied for couple of rooms and a wakeup routine for the bedroom tied to the alarm on my phone (lights mimic a sunrise 30 mins before the alarm).
I also have a couple of convenience automations like turning off the TV if it's been idle for X minutes (I've probably fallen asleep).
I've found they are mostly set and forget. Haven't touched it for about a year and don't plan to touch them any time soon.
> (BTW, manufacturers, if you want to use touch sensors and you don’t want to lose the massive midwit market, make things that automatically turn on when first connected to power, without waiting for a touch.)
...and if you ever lose power to the house, suddenly all devices turn on.
What a great way to be sure the power has been restored. I suppose the power being restored at 3am would suck but in most cases I would want the lights to all come back on after an outage.
"Power-controlled remote pressers. This is utterly cursed, but hear me out: I want a gadget that I physically attach to a remote. When the gadget gets power, it presses the “on” button on the remote. When it loses power, it presses the “off” button."
Except that too many remotes have one button, and one signal, for both on and off.
TV and cable box remotes out of sync is the most common result.
> Remote-controlled light bulbs. Personally, I’d never buy these, because I’m fanatical about color quality. (It’s futile to start with low-quality photons and then try to arrange matter to make them look good.)
I am about to buy several Philips Hue lights. Does this statement apply to all LED-based lights or just the cheap ones?
Hue bulbs should work with any ZigBee LightLink controller. Or if they don't, I'll be very upset about the times I flew out to the LightLink gatherings to make sure all our products worked together.
The Hue lights are wildly overpriced. I have the WiZ A67 Wi-Fi for my office (so I only use the warm white and cool white) and it's much brighter than Hue's offering, which is so valuable in an office. I can also switch its setting using a normal light switch so I never need to open the app.
If you're playing with colours, then Hue usually does do better in the blues, greens and purples but it probably isn't going to make much of a difference to your life.
To add to this: F&(*&ing manufacturers that change the internals of the IoTs silently. That worked fine, let me just hop onto Amazon click "buy again" to get more.
That said mine generally works fine. The ESPHome integration in particular is grand
I put a bunch of smart light switches in my house about 5 years ago. Two of them have failed in the past year and I reverted them back to dumb switches. I'll probably do the same as they continue to fail over time. I found I rarely use the smart features to their full potential. It helps that my house is built to all the modern codes, so I have switches at convenient places and really only use the "smarts" for table lamps and outdoor lighting.
Definitely enjoying that irony, although the smart home products came first for me.
Re. #2, I like the peace of mind that I haven't left lights on when I head out of town and also the security benefit of programming them to periodically turn on.
Also, if you only have a single switch to flip, then I envy you.
286 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadThere is a line of lutron switches that are dead simple, no smarts, no hub … and a cute little remote that everyone in my family uses to “all off” the interior lights.
We have a no smart devices policy in the house and these make the cut …
EDIT: From my notes ... the specific product line is "maestro wireless" and I have MRF2-6CL switches paired with "pico" remotes. This is as opposed to the caseta line from Lutron which is quite a bit "smarter".
(Search the page for "Original Smart Fan Speed Control Switch", there's seemingly no way to link directly to the requisite page section... which is a thing I could rant about but will not).
My solution to that was to buy a Zigbee controller to go inside the fan. I wish Lutron sold some kind of standalone fan controller you could shove in there but alas.
I still use HA on a RPi4 for other things, typically via Zigbee, but the Casetas always work like you'd expect from a light switch while also enabling smart stuff like voice control or automations.
One thing that stands out with Lutron products is their use of a unique spectrum[0], unlike almost all other smarthome products that share the same noisy bands.
[0]: https://assets.lutron.com/a/documents/clear_connect_technolo...
These things are installed in big fancy commercial buildings where there is an expectation that they last longer than the warranty, which is reassuring.
These things actually do pretty well at power conservation at these scales, but it's a little fuzzy if it will do the same for a home. Just swapping out LED for incandescent gets you pretty much all of the bang for your buck, but if you have people in your house who are allergic to turning off lights, the occupancy sensors will help a bit.
Lutron is a real company as well, an not an Amazon company, which is not nothing.
I have somehow automated some lights to come on too early in the morning but the specific task/automation I set to do this is nowhere to be found.. I can create and remove new tasks but I'm being haunted by this old task.
My father has most of his home setup. Worked great until Christmas eve, when lightning hit the local exchange..
What a novel form of nightmare
Hook it up to an speech recognition-challenged "smart" speaker that will dutifully play death metal when you order it to turn off the damn lights for teh win.
The only problem is it still announcing "playing Christmas everyday on YouTube music by..." I wanted it to just start playing.
I swear it behaves more like Clippy every day.
Any suggestions for how to get something similar set up in the US?
And just like the Ikea one, it's just a bit better with the hub.
I've actually had two Ikea Trådfri switches break though - they are cheap enough to replace but bit bothersome.
i.e, when sunlight is out (in HA, you can get sunset triggers), and when there are people present in living room, turn on living room lights.
For standard power outlets I have "smart plugs" that measure the power draw, are there ones that support 40A/240V appliances?
I almost exlusively use zigbee2mqtt [0] reference to find devices that suit me. Searching for `meter` gives a lot of options, you'd have to do more investigation to find something that supported 40A, but my guess would be that a clamp meter is likely your best option.
It's also possible that you could use one of the DIN rail options in your fusebox, but I haven't looked at the current ratings.
[0] https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=meter
Still, I'm not quite ready to give up on computer-controlled automation.
Does anyone know of a reasonably complete guide (web site, book, whatever) that explains this well? What I'm looking for: help choosing components that will work together; not "for dummies"; I'm technically competent and willing to learn some stuff but don't want to make a hobby/profession out of this; doesn't require buying into Google Home, Alexa, or another privacy-hostile system.
Thanks in advance.
Then, when you're ready, setup home assistant but setup everything so basic functionality still works even if your server or internet went down.
My hue bulbs are at the center of this strategy with each bulb controlled by either a remote control or a hue movement detector. Hint: remote controls in rooms where you stay, sensors where you pass by or if you stay only a little while.
I can also control everything via Alexa and can't wait for the day there is a viable privacy-friendly / low-maintenance alternative (Home assistant are working on this). Again, if internet goes down, I still have the remotes/detectors so my lights always work.
Also, for any other equipment you would buy, make sure it's compatible with Matter.
Just take your existing hue bulbs elsewhere
Think about this: if you have a smart bulb, but your light switch is off, there's no way to turn on that light. At the same time, if your bulb "state" is off, your light switch won't be able to turn it on.
You could JUST pair a smart bulb with a smart switch, and align their states. Or skip smart bulbs altogether and make the switches smart - using Lutron Caseta or an equivalent solution.
I removed the TECKNET logo with isopropyl alcohol.
The receiver has dozens of tunes, but the only one worth using is the Westminster Chime Melody. There's also a "ding-dong ding-dong", but it's annoying that it plays twice. The rest are just too long; it's a doorbell, not a jukebox.
The receiver remembers the tune and volume if power is interrupted, so that extra cruft doesn't matter after initial setup.
Google "how to install home assistant" which leads to:
>https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/
>If you are unsure of what to choose, follow the Raspberry Pi guide to install Home Assistant Operating System.
This leads to:
>https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi
This has a nice visual guide that requires you to know how to buy a raspberry pi, how to plug in a raspberry p, how to plug in an sd card (twice), and how to navigate to a url.
For someone who doesn't have a Linux background, "just put it on a Raspberry Pi" is kind of like saying "You write a distributed map reduce function in Erlang". Ie: it's easy if they know it, but if they don't then that "just" is doing a lot of work there.
Pre-installed is almost certainly the way to go for such a person.
This is already a job that requires fairly decent electrical knowledge, especially if there are 3-way switches involved.
Turn-key solutions exist for people that don't want to deal with the complexity.
It works out of the box, is very easy to source (hell some brick & mortar stores sell them), has very good Linux support due to its popularity, and makes up a large part of the install base meaning HA support for it is unlikely to get deprecated.
Thus the Linux/RaspberryPi underlying complexity is irrelevant to the user - the "complexity" is to dd/BalenaEtcher/etc a downloaded file to an SD card, put the card in the Pi and connect it to power. From there it's available over the network and can be configured through a web browser.
I was with you until this point. A Pi hasn't been easy to source for almost 4 years now.
You have to build the damn thing, which isn’t hard per se since it’s ultimately only 3 actual components, but it still took me some time and felt complicated since it involves attaching a heat sink with thermal compound on a CPU.
And then the software install process isn’t totally amazing either since it involves flashing a USB stick, but also needing to choose a few very non-obvious options.
Should I install HA on the EMMC and later move my data-disk to the nVME drive or install the OS on the nVME drive directly? Google random forums to find out what people think of this decision first I guess.
I mean I think it’s still a good product, don’t get me wrong, but it is still very much a power user thing.
Which is probably fine because setting up HA itself when you have an install isn’t exactly a picnic either.
This is the problem with lots of stuff similar to HA when it tries to break into a non-enthusiast audience: people don't WANT to choose how to install it. Most of the time they have no clue why they would choose one thing over another and giving them those choices is confusing and overwhelming.
It's like starting a an intro to Nix tutorial with by asking if the user wants to enable flakes.
I say this as a very active user of HA & Nix for 5+ years.
I've had HA for +4-5 years too.
What about upkeep? Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to install Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment? Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?
Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
>Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?
Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.
https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=632
>Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.
1. How do you do backups? Is it built into home assistant? Do you think the average person knows or will remember to make backups?
2. "restore from backups" works if the sdcard just dies. If it's silently corrupting your install and causing weird behavior you won't even know it's sd card's fault unless you go through troubleshooting.
Why the hell do I need a backup for my light switch?
The first time I installed HomeAssistant (on a Raspberry Pi), it worked great for a couple of months, then it bricked itself because it ran out of log space. I re-installed it. A couple of months later, it auto-updated itself and decided to lock me out because apparently it now required that you log in where it previously didn't. At around the same time, Apple locked out their HomeKit HA integration so I could no longer tell Siri to flip the lights. At that point I just gave up.
Recently I tried reinstalling it again, and let's just say I don't recommend it if you value your sanity.
Every time I look into HA, I face this kind of cognitive dissonance between my experience and people condescendingly telling me that I'm obviously doing something wrong.
I just want a zwave hub for my light switches. I don't want any of this crap.
exactly. Who wants to backup anything in their house just to be able to do things that work perfectly well with 50's technology?
edit: Actually put HAOS on, no reason to run Debian
I'm not saying that's a specific issue you'll run into with home assistant. I'm just pointing out that's an example of something that's simple in theory to set up, but causes headaches if you venture off the happy path.
It performs a backup whenever you perform a release, so if the SD card gets corrupted.. just follow the install instructions a second time and upload the last backup?
That's it for the upkeep, other than dealing with 3rd party APIs that change and make things break, but that's not HomeAssistant's fault.
I think you're replying to the wrong comment. This was a comment about installing Home Assistant OS, which shouldn't ever be a base for running Steam!
The second link is this one: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/guide-how-to-install-h...
But the linked page is pretty complex.
If someone can come up with a reason why top results aren't even present on others' page 1, I would be very interested.
They don't personalize search results: they don't give people results which are optimal for the searcher, but rather those which attempt to be optimal for the advertisers without discouraging the searcher enough to swap search engines.
My specific question is why would a top result not even end up on the first page. This requires a more significant explanation than "its possible".
You answered yourself. If you are are searching zoos and cute animals more often than programming stuff, "python egg" will return dramatically different results. This is not a theoretic possibility, it is the way google works (which I think is unfortunate).
Meanwhile, as a hardware hacker and software engineer, yeah, I'll admit, I had to do things that look a lot like my job I'm paid very well to do in order to get my light switches to work right. No idea how people who don't program for a living are supposed to get Home Assistant to work quite right!
Again I'm very sympathetic to the shitty state of the ecosystems right now, frequently miserable UI/UX, and massive heaping doses of bullshit companies are constantly trying to pull to extract more ongoing revenue from people for what should be buy-once-and-done products. But it really sucks precisely because yes: smart home features genuinely can be pretty great.
Very much, “I just want it to work.”
Here’s what I’ve found useful from a smart home:
* I can leave for a week or weekend, let the house get quite hot or cold (obviously within some safety parameters) and then turn in the heat or AC a couple hours before I get home.
* I get alerts when a package or other delivery shows up at the front door.
* I can set a timer to turn off any lights my kids left on during the day, late at night every night.
* I can set a timer to turn off the heat or AC in an outbuilding no-one sleeps in late at night, in case my kids were out there and forgot to turn it off.
* I can set my outdoor lights to go on at sunset, and turn off around “it’s unlikely anyone will be going out here and need a lit pathway” time.
* I can set my espresso maker to turn on and warm up before I’m ready for coffee, and turn off when we’re a bit past “you should stop drinking coffee or it’s gonna mess with your sleep” time.
* When we leave town with an arrangement for a dog sitter to come by and take care of our dog a few hours after we leave, I can check to make sure they actually did and poor Rover isn’t lonely and unfed.
But I do 100% agree with the author’s frustration, and wish things “just worked” and just worked together.
While the effect no doubt varies with individual, there has been a significant amount of studies suggesting that there is some link between bright light in shorter wavelengths (so blue end of spectrum) and melatonin suppression, and in turn circadian rhythms [ex: 0, 1, 2]. If you live near the equator with consistent sunrise/sunset year round artificial light management may be less of a concern to you, but the further you are and the more seasonal variation you experience the more helpful it may be (and is for me) to have lighting throughout home/work that can help maintain circadian rhythm as desired. "Sunrise" into bright white/blue in the morning and day, then slowly changing into dimmer, redder light as one approaches the desired time to go to sleep. YMMV of course but as someone in tech who had decades of difficulty in maintaining a normal 24h cycle in the northern latitudes, heavy light brightness and temperature control has been a very significant improvement in my QOL and I never want to go back.
Of course, some people just enjoy having fun with lighting as well, for parties and mood and such. "Painting with light" can be interesting by itself. But for me the practical advantages have been significant value for the cost, and without any need for any kind of drugs or other mechanisms.
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0: https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/sleep-blue-light
1: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha...
2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9424753/
Every few years I get tempted to go down this rabbit hole, hoping that in the last few years the industry has finally gotten its shit together, and every time I look, it's the same clown show, just with more clowns.
"Lets design a spec that anyone can use"
Premium brand that uses spec is $30 dollars a light, but works...
UNGADONG brand made in China is $10 dollars and has a 30% chance of catching on fire.
Premium brand goes out of business and market is taken over by crap.
---
Also, vendor lock in by the premium brand allows them to jack up prices even more.
We need more things that are complete in themselves but causally work with other things. (Y’know, like the web.) Things that can perform tasks without an installation page, but readily extensible using MQTT or HTTP. That’s the kind of thing my company tries to build. That’s a very useful thing about Shelly, or any of the polished devices that expose an open protocol.
They hold society down.
I imagine if I bought a compatible "smart switch" that issue would go away (power never completely dropped to the bulb), but seriously...
It's improving at a rapid pace and I can see it being ready for your aunt to use in a couple of years. Not this year, not next.
I set all my relatives up with Apple HomePod Minis and HomeKit, which has expensive hardware (matter is supposed to fix that...) but is largely local and relatively private.
This is just one anecdote, but I believe the problem is more pervasive.
I was called to an elderly lady's home to "un-haunt" the building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done "all of the cool things" to make the home smart. Unfortunately too smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home.
She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn't figure it out and lived like this for an entire year.
She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband, but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation. About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady's lights too. In her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift.
I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices and, as she put it, putting in "turn the light on and off again" switches.
When choosing technology -- any technology, it's important to consider the life of that device and the people impacted far in the future.
I programmed a dead man's switch tied to the presence feature so if my phone or smartwatch don't show up in the house for six months, it turns on the "HAUNT FAMILY" program. There's no way I'm leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant neighbor.
That reminds me: I have to hook up the smart speaker so that it says "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DA- HONEY?" any time my partner walks up to the RaspberryPi.
This is one of the reasons that smart bulbs and the like are generally bad - you never want a situation where the switch doesn't just act like a switch.
Smart houses should be designed from the perspective of remaining identical to use when the smarts go away. And if there's weird behavior it should all stop if you unplug the hub or controller.
I generally like in-wall smart switches but even there they tend to die faster than dumb switches, so you may be leaving your survivors a bunch of calls to an electrician.
- "Everything 'smart' must continue to function if the internet is disconnected"
- "Everything 'smart' must fall-back to normal 'dumb' operation if the automation server is not available"
...immediately, every single time the occupant wants it to do that. Regardless of the state of any other component.
Depends on your devices, but I have (Philips?) smart bulbs that can be turned on/off "regularly", but keep it on and you can control it via google home.
The main drawback is that this means I have to have the bulbs set to light up after power is restored. A middle-of-the-night power outage is fun when the entire house lights up at 3am :)
I've done a few new installs of lighting in my garage, driveway, and patio. Because that was "greenfield" work, I got to put smart switches in. If I ever rewire this house, I'll use that opportunity to do some more.
I use Kasa (TP-Link) plugs but there are a bunch of different brands.
My issue with those is that they fail the "normal person" test. A normal person will try to turn on a lamp and it will never work because the smart plug is off. But with a smart bulb, it'll come on after they twist the stem a couple times. (And it never gets noticed! People are used to 3-way style lamp sockets needing a couple clicks to turn regular bulbs on and off, so they don't really notice that they had to double twist the stem to get the light to turn on)
The best compromise are smart switches. Switch still manually controls the light, and smart features are always available. The downsides are that the lamp's outlet must have switch wiring, and smart switches aren't like normal toggles: they're more like push buttons so the switch isn't in a strange physical state.
(By the way, Philips Warm Glow bulbs are awesome for this. I use them in my dining room lamp connected to an Inovelli Z-wave dimmer. They get warmer the dimmer they go, mimicking how tungsten filaments work)
My current setup is a mix-n-match of all three types, using each one where it beats the other two for simplicity and predictability.
Then I decided I didn't really want to put electronics in my wall at all and did something more useful with my time instead.
Fortunately, we're both reasonably fit people, but I know people who would've just had to give up and use a flashlight.
This means that instead of a light switch, there is a button. And when I relocate, I can just remove these devices from the switches and take them with me
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08TVZK8D6
It outlined a future where everyone started automating elements of their messaging to each other. Simple things like automated "Happy Birthday" messages. Eventually, people started setting up auto "Thank you" replies to these messages. It only got more complex from there with increasingly elaborate conversations being automated between people.
Eventually, some calamity hits civilization and humans go extinct. But their technology is resilient and keeps running without them. The ghosts of a dead people continue talking to each other in perpetuity, long dead people cheerfully wishing each other "Happy Birthday" until the lights finally ran out.
Haunting story that I still think about from time to time. Would love it if anyone else recognizes the story and could credit it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2552i2Z8sNM
A friend of mine bought a house with an expensive system, but it wasn't very useful and later had a fault. To remove it would require replacing all the switch plates - I would guess $1000 to get rid of it. He was technical so he fixed it instead.
I'm not getting rid of the existing switches and plate covers, so at least I can more easily remediate it if the future buyers don't want the system.
This btw is the source of the word "turnkey". You turn the key, and it works.
"I've had 18 heart procedures. My wife is in perfect health. The odds of me outliving her are zero...We're moving back to Coronado. This is a complex house, even though I think it's simple! For her to try and teach somebody else how to run everything and do everything would be difficult if something happened to me. So we're just kind of jumping ahead."
https://youtu.be/gisdyTBMNyQ?t=383
Hopefully this isn't a common situation. I know that for me, not being able to control basic things like lights/heating/cooling without calling on and waiting around for somebody else would drive me nuts and one way or another the situation would have been resolved before the only person who knew how to handle the tech had a chance to sleep let alone die.
I've known a lot of people who couldn't figure out to how to use their own TV remove for anything more advanced than getting to the point where they can watch their usual shows and change the volume, but not being able to turn off a light at night is like not knowing how to turn a TV on at all!
Home stuff needs to generally work for 20 years, and lot of things (light switches, etc) will be even longer. Tech has no conception or demonstrated discipline for functioning that long.
HA/IOT is an interop disaster currently, and the current cacaphony of standards/acronymns guarantees it will be cycled/replaced in a decade's time.
The INTER-NET of Things doesn't have a functional INTER, nor a NET.
Inter is software, which should be mathematically doable but historically improbable.
The ubiquitous NET part basically means you buy the device, and it will work with zero-config networking that means you can find it.
And the final issue is the interface. Interfaces do NOT age gracefully either. Perhaps voice interfaces are what is needed.
Consumer IOT is yet another 10 years away.
Which is why Homeassistant is a godsend - you can add the mess and present it in a sensible way. As long as you stay the fuck away from anything cloud you are pretty much golden no matter what the parent company decides to do.
E.g. Telldus had a huge range of 433mhz things that still work IF you avoided their TelldusNet or whatever.
I also have a couple of convenience automations like turning off the TV if it's been idle for X minutes (I've probably fallen asleep).
I've found they are mostly set and forget. Haven't touched it for about a year and don't plan to touch them any time soon.
...and if you ever lose power to the house, suddenly all devices turn on.
Except that too many remotes have one button, and one signal, for both on and off. TV and cable box remotes out of sync is the most common result.
I am about to buy several Philips Hue lights. Does this statement apply to all LED-based lights or just the cheap ones?
If you're playing with colours, then Hue usually does do better in the blues, greens and purples but it probably isn't going to make much of a difference to your life.
That said mine generally works fine. The ESPHome integration in particular is grand
2. Buy smart home products so you don't have to get up off the couch, walk 10 feet, and flip a switch.
Does anyone else enjoy the irony? Disclosure: I am guilty of both of the above.
Re. #2, I like the peace of mind that I haven't left lights on when I head out of town and also the security benefit of programming them to periodically turn on.
Also, if you only have a single switch to flip, then I envy you.