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mountain_peak 1 days ago [-]
Bought our home almost 20 years ago, and the former owner (apparently) owned a now-defunct home automation business. The upside was 100% X10/Insteon power and light controls, top alarm panel, environmental controls and so on running off of a wall-mounted "SmartLinc" touch panel. I expanded the system with Axis cameras and a Mac Server running Indigo and SecuritySpy (non-subscription), which enabled remote monitoring and control, but it all operates locally.
In a moment of weakness, I bought a D-Link wireless (wifi) water detector for the sump pit (it was on clearance for $30); it relied on a D-Link Home cloud service (free) that was closed down a few years ago.
Not wanting to toss it, I repurposed a spare Chromebook 14 that I was going to recycle and turned it into a Alpine monitor for the water detector, which I'm powering from the Chromebook's USB port (if power is lost in a rainstorm, I need to know about it before the sump pit fills up).
An immediate issue was that the D-Link firmware tried to "phone home" every 24 hours and would drop from the local network, since the server was kaput, and I had no clue what response it was expecting from the server to keep it alive. Solution; "reboot" the unit by interrupting USB power (with a Pico and MOSFET) every 23 hours. There's no question that home automation should work without the internet.
knodi123 22 hours ago [-]
> Solution; "reboot" the unit by interrupting USB power (with a Pico and MOSFET) every 23 hours
Reminds me of a possible apocryphal anecdote I heard about Alan Turing. He loved going on long bike rides, but one day his bike developed a distressing habit of slipping the chain. After the third time it happened, he realized it was due to a broken tooth on both the front and the back gear. He went back home and calculated how many revolutions of the pedals it would take for both broken teeth to line up when they were at the critical part of the rotation, and he built a little mechanical counter that would click on each link in the bike chain, and at the calculated time, a little arm would reach down and clasp the chain, holding it in place long enough for the teeth to re-engage.
He showed the device to his friend, who said "Why didn't you just buy new gears? You could have gotten both for a dime." And Alan replied "Oh, that's clever, I didn't think of that."
pavel_lishin 22 hours ago [-]
A similar anecdote about Turing appears in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon", except without the clever solution or the "absent-minded professor" stereotype.
a4isms 17 hours ago [-]
A joke told abut Von Neumann:
A student came up to Von Neumann on campus and decided to prank the great scientist. "Two trains are on the same track 50 miles apart and they hurtle towards each other at 50 mph. As they start, a really fast fly on the nose of one train flies towards th eother at 60mph. When it reaches the other train it immediately flies back to the first, then back to the second, and so on until the fly is crushed in the crash. How far will the fly fly?
Von Neumann thought for a moment, and then replied, "30 miles!" The student grinned. "I thought you'd know this one! The trains take half an hour to hit each other, therefore the fly will fly 30 miles."
Von Neumann started. "I didn't think of that, I summed the series."
———
Source: "The Prisoner's Dilemma" by William Poundstone
A tennis match between two players, A and B, has finished. You are given the complete sequence of points played, in order. Each point is recorded as the letter of the player who won it.
Write a program that reads this sequence and works out which player won the match.
there are multiple ways to compute this but not obvious way is to look at the end of the list and see who scored last point.
pavel_lishin 1 hours ago [-]
Does this require knowing how tennis is scored? Because that solution is not obvious to me at all.
p0w3n3d 12 hours ago [-]
I had this riddle in my math book when I was preparing to the Maths Challenge. However I was unable to sum the series.
Also one train was a boy coming home (stative) and the dog was running
knodi123 15 hours ago [-]
wow, that's great. And since I've convinced myself the Turing story is more fable than truth, I'll start using this one instead.
ted_bunny 5 hours ago [-]
I read it more as sarcasm than absentmindedness. Those dry Brits!
ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago [-]
At one time, Standard Windows IT guidance was daily server reboots. Many sysadmins would write scripts to do that.
I recently had a similar issue. But instead I decided to go with industrial controls. I bought a Contactor with a NC and NO connections. I put a float switch in series with the activator coil circuit. So when the float triggers: NC->O and NO-C, which turns off the water and turns on the pump.
Contactors are built to run giant industrial motors for years, nevermind my little 1/4hp pump.
The way I built it lets my mother bypass it by unplugging the pump from the control box and plugging it right into the wall outlet.
So, hopefully it lasts years. If it doesnt, anyone can bypass it
bluGill 20 hours ago [-]
Every sump pump I've seen has a built-in float switch that works.
I need an alarm because I've had a few pumps wear out, and also because I've had the power go out long enough to flood.
Your solution automates something that shouldn't have a computer involved in automating.
dspillett 3 hours ago [-]
> I had no clue what response it was expecting from the server to keep it alive
That is the worst part: being explicitly designed to fail un-safe. You should be able to declare the unit unfit for the purpose it was sold for and get a full refund unless they open the specs so you can keep the device running as intended using your own resources.
jandrese 24 hours ago [-]
Every cloud service will eventually get shut down. The problem is that nobody wants to put the effort into reverse engineering the product to fake out the cloud service until after the cloud service is gone and the reverse engineering is much more difficult.
Do we just need to establish bounties per cloud service target to reverse engineer and publish a spec, copyleft code, and reference architecture? Maybe https://www.fulu.org/ could host the results? Like OpenAI and Anthropic brute forcing math proofs, we can brute force interoperability (imho). Closed systems and tokens go in to the reverse engineering factory, out comes open systems that remain open to all.
What we need is to ditch stupid proprietary platforms for standards, protocols and interoperability. If AI helps us do that, so be it.
The moat building behavior of western industry has always been harmful and is now obsolete. It's time to give it up.
shakna 11 hours ago [-]
You'll also need a trust, for inevitable lawsuits. Even if everything is clean room.
toomuchtodo 2 hours ago [-]
Host the code and leverage compute outside of the reach of the US legal framework. A 501c3 can still be used to enable favorable tax treatment of donations used for expenses, but the entity would be kept as lean as possible to allow for evaporation if targeted legally.
Repos could be hosted on https://tangled.org/ on AT Proto infra hosted outside of the US, with snapshots of repos served as torrents with magnet links like https://huggingbay.xyz/
It is an exercise in a distributed code evolution and distribution platform, fueled by LLMs and volunteers. "Build the machine that builds the machine."
BizarroLand 21 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you would need to connect a network sniffer into its inputs and somehow figure out how to make it figure out what responses are needed on what ports just to make a "shutup pi" type system that catches smart appliances attempts to phone home and blocks them.
toomuchtodo 21 hours ago [-]
https://github.com/alufers/mitmproxy2swagger ("A tool for automatically converting mitmproxy captures to OpenAPI 3.0 specifications. This means that you can automatically reverse-engineer REST APIs by just running the apps and capturing the traffic.")
amazing how HN still hasn't internalized that RE is cheap now just like net new code, perhaps cheaper since the oracle is right there. there are tricky bits if firmwares are signed and encrypted, but devices are so full of bugs you can expect to find some just by having agents poke for long enough
BorisMelnik 19 hours ago [-]
agree a lot of it Is encrypted in home automation...garage doors, locks, security etc
(there's always an exploit, you just have to find it)
ozim 18 hours ago [-]
Oh indeed I didn’t realize this emudhra kerfufle might be useful in some way.
josephg 20 hours ago [-]
HN isn’t a person. Knowledge like this takes awhile to saturate through a community. It’s ok that some people aren’t tracking llm capabilities. I think it’s probably healthy.
19 hours ago [-]
1STORM3 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bombcar 22 hours ago [-]
The good news is the fine friends at eMudhra have decided to help us!
tw04 19 hours ago [-]
I’m all about reducing e-waste but that sounds like insanity when you can get a sensor that’s better in every way for $25 without wasting electricity powering an entire laptop.
I have a few of Ikea's other Matter over Thread devices and have had spotty results with them so far using Google devices as thread border routers. Planning to move to a border router from SMLight which I hope will provide a more reliable connection.
lakeviewterrace 23 hours ago [-]
I don't like the idea of a Chromebook sitting between me and knowing my cellar is flooding.
tadfisher 22 hours ago [-]
It's better than nothing sitting between you and knowing your cellar is flooding, and I could think of worse solutions than a device with a built-in UPS that's capable of powering a sensor.
kulahan 21 hours ago [-]
It’s not gonna be an internet response, but there are already water alarms. You’re typically meant to put them under your sink.
TedDoesntTalk 21 hours ago [-]
B-hyve has them. They talk to a hub over low power Bluetooth. The hub connects to my VPC-siloed WiFi AP on its own subnet with no routes to anything else in the house. But I still get phone alerts because it connects to its cloud service.
zx8080 19 hours ago [-]
> its cloud service
Good luck hoping it will be existing in a few years. No service - no alerts. The whole thing becomes trash then.
brewtide 16 hours ago [-]
Couldn't you conjure something up with esphome and home assistant pretty darn quickly?
jon-wood 7 hours ago [-]
A leak sensor is the simplest home automation sensor possible. Its literally just a bare wire connected to ground, another connecting to a digital IO. You put the two bare wires on the floor a little distance apart and write some code to fire off an alert if the IO ever reports being connected, because if it is that means something conductive is sitting between the two wires.
brewtide 7 hours ago [-]
Right. Like a door open circuit, but not even requiring a reed switch, etc.
iAMkenough 22 hours ago [-]
Do older Chromebooks not carry the spicy pillow risk MacBooks have when plugged in 24/7?
filoleg 21 hours ago [-]
My macbook pro with m1 max has been plugged-in nearly 24/7 for the past 5+ years.
No issues whatsoever so far, and it holds the battery charge totally fine (which I get to test 2-3 times a year when i travel with it).
codebje 18 hours ago [-]
It's a risk, not a guarantee, but there's nothing about macbooks that make them more susceptible to it than any other laptop with a li-ion battery. The batteries age. If they're in a machine that runs hot they age a bit faster (and my 2020 Intel MBP runs hot and is plugged in near 24/7), if they're charged to 100% all the time they age a bit faster (but battery management software like Apple has had for years nearly eliminates this risk factor).
There was, however, a batch of macbooks in 2019 that got recalled for a defect that increased the chance significantly, and perhaps that's what the parent poster has in mind.
iAMkenough 17 hours ago [-]
I was referencing my own experience with 2010-2016 Intel Airs and Pros ending up in the Hazardous Materials bin with bloated batteries, but good to know my current M1 Max will be up to the task whenever I can afford to upgrade.
yangm97 7 hours ago [-]
Consider using Al Dente if you care about your battery.
mysticpawn 18 hours ago [-]
Time to put it on a smart plug and cycle it off on an based on battery level.
outworlder 17 hours ago [-]
That isn't a thing anymore. Macbooks that notice they live plugged in will also limit their charge to 80%.
iAMkenough 17 hours ago [-]
I guess I was thinking of Intel MacBooks that otherwise serve no purpose and aren't "compatible" with that feature.
Looking into it more, there are ways to limit charging via third-party tools that modify the SMC. I should have done that.
exe34 19 hours ago [-]
What? What macbooks is this? My mac book air has been plugged in most of the time since 2013... I've replaced the battery once I think, but only because the battery life had decreased to 10 minutes.
jedbrooke 18 hours ago [-]
my 2017 macbook pro got pretty bad spicy-pillowitis from being plugged in all the time. It got so bad that it wouldn’t sit flat on the desk, and I thought the trackpad was broken, but it was actually just unable to depress since it was right above the battery.
iAMkenough 17 hours ago [-]
I just got rid of a 2013 MacBook Air earlier this year because I discovered two of the battery pockets inflated. But I never did a battery replacement, which I probably should have when I stopped using it as a laptop.
Loughla 23 hours ago [-]
I installed a water siphon backup for the sump pump. It creates a water siphon if the level gets above the electric sump and drains the pit. Is basic plumbing to install. Other than wasting a half gallon for every 20 gallons pumped out, it doesn't rely on any technology nonsense.
drfloyd51 20 hours ago [-]
To where does it drain?
Loughla 19 hours ago [-]
Same place the sump does. It's plumbed into the exit line on a baffle so that if it backs up, the water to the siphon shuts off, killing the whole system.
It's meant for power outage not plumbing failure. But I'm more likely to see a plumbing failure ahead of time, so it meets the need.
fc417fc802 15 hours ago [-]
Are you sure siphon is the right term? It sounds like a pumping scheme utilizing the venturi effect where a pressurized flow of water induces suction on a second pipe. Am I right?
alamortsubite 23 hours ago [-]
I have a Dell Chromebook that's been running (Debian) without issue (battery removed) in a similar capacity for over a decade, and four more that have been up for the last five years. The former I bought new, the latter are all second-hand survivors from some public school program. They're solid.
15 hours ago [-]
_heimdall 23 hours ago [-]
My personal preferred infra there would be for all devices to be meshed together, and a smart water shutoff valve able to cut off automatically if a water leak sensor trips.
jkukul 22 hours ago [-]
especially if you keep your Chromebook in the cellar ;)
but isn't the alternative to have some third party on the Internet sitting between you and knowing that your cellar is flooding? third party services in the cloud have downtimes (not necessarily less than your Chromebook), tend to shut down entirely over time, tend to give up on you if you're not on a premium plan, tend to stop supporting the version of your device, etc
duskdozer 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder how hard it would have been to find out what info the device wanted and set up a server on the lan to just give it the pings or whatever
cco 21 hours ago [-]
Point your AI of choice at it for a bit, I wouldn't be surprised if you could write some custom firmware for it pretty simply. Or at least mock D-Link Home well enough to resolve the phone home problem.
mook 16 hours ago [-]
If it's of the correct vintage, maybe eMudhra can help too. It probably hasn't managed to revoke the root CA yet.
ww520 15 hours ago [-]
My water heater sits on top of a rubber pan and has a standalone battery operated water detector sitting on the edge. It will sound an alarm if water is detected. It's about $12 for two in Amazon. Low tech and it works.
Symbiote 9 hours ago [-]
My washing machine sits on the floor in the bathroom, but Danish apartment building regulations require there to be a floor drain (which is just the shower drain in this case) in case of a leak.
Even lower tech!
FeepingCreature 7 hours ago [-]
sure but you can't move to denmark for $12
alaudet 3 hours ago [-]
Shameless self promotion, check out my Raspi-Sump app. Released it 12 years ago. Free and opensource and no phone home bs.
I haven't figured out how to recieve pings from my weather stone, I've always got to get up and look out the window, which, then I can just see the weather.
Anyone made any progress on rooting it?
bee_rider 23 hours ago [-]
You don’t need to root your weather stone. You’ll want to root your weather tree. Rooted weather trees give you better long term data (if the tree is flourishing, the weather was nice all season). Unrooted weather trees just let you know if it was raining in the last couple days (still an upgrade over a weather stone, but not by much).
goodmythical 16 hours ago [-]
My family tried that when I was a kid, and I'd love to see the data, but I'm told I'd have to kill the tree to get the earliest logs which is bogus.
tocs3 14 hours ago [-]
You could try coring the tree. (I cannot think of a good joke for this though.
subscribed 22 hours ago [-]
Just shine a laser on it?
wafflemaker 23 hours ago [-]
To root it you need the special USB version, called USB pet stone.
You can then flash new firmware over USB.
walrus01 9 hours ago [-]
This sounds stupid but as a belt and suspenders approach I put a $65 2560x1440 resolution, H265 capable PoE IP camera on a piece of cheap cat5e utp literally aimed at my sump. Camera is joined to the same frigate server that runs the rest of the house security cameras including doorbell. If the sump alarm goes off while I'm away from the house for vacation or work, I can easily login and check if there's really a flood condition going on.
alias_neo 8 hours ago [-]
Frigate supports training states and classifications.
Perhaps you could train it on some of the images and set up notifications for a state you don't want?
For example, I have my doorbell camera trained for gate open/closed and car present/not present.
You select a few of the pre-captured images in the UI of gate open, gate closed, and then our car, no car, someone else's car, and it'll publish an event to MQTT or whatever (don't want to assume you use Home Assistant), then you can send out notifications on it.
walrus01 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, if I wanted to put more work into it I could certainly train it on what it looks like with the sump mostly dry (the default state, 99.999% of the time) and then have it alert me if it diverges from that. Right now I keep an eye on weather alerts for $home and glance at the cameras at least once a day when I'm away, which is good enough to catch a failed sump pump and then dispatch professional repair services.
knodi123 22 hours ago [-]
Anyone can build a working sump flood detector. But it takes a real engineer to build one that can detect two floods.
Uncle_Brumpus 23 hours ago [-]
"...And so that's how I ended up with a $14,000 basement repair. Yup, those damn chromebooks are more waterproof than you'd think! I mean it makes sense, they're designed to be vomited on by children all day at school."
nekooooo 1 days ago [-]
every single sentence was a level of jank that i could never imagine subjecting my parents to. could you code custom firmware for the dlink btw? your fix sounds like good ol' redneck engineering but for the smart home :p
mountain_peak 23 hours ago [-]
The neat thing about X10 and Insteon is that everything acts "normally" at the device level, but you can program everything (remotely?) via the Indigo server. Your parents wouldn't even have to know that their house was running schedules (except for lights turning on an off).
If you're referring to the water sensor, it's definitely not parent-friendly, but I sometimes have to bail water during power outages from thunderstorms. It has to work during a power outage and an old Chromebook was cheaper than a UPS.
I kind of ran out of time for messing around with the sensor, but I did think of either dumping the Winbond chip on my reader, or using a .bin file that was used for OTA updates and pushing a modified version down locally.
That likely would have been "cleaner" vs. a 23-hour reboot cycle. I likely would have wanted a dump first in case I borked the firmware. The Python monitoring script just uses standard HNAP to read status codes from the sensor in 30 second intervals - I think there's some way to push updates via HNAP as well.
Thanks for the reminder - may be a good project for winter, when there's no chance of needing the sump.
dilyevsky 11 hours ago [-]
Any sota llm of today can basically reverse engineer and fix any issue on such devices with a one-shot prompt. Recent emudhra CA leak makes interception traffic from most IoT devices trivial too
ocdtrekkie 23 hours ago [-]
Insteon remains incredibly solid. The new company is super slow with new product because it's tiny, but the hardware remains incredibly good long-term. It doesn't clutter common wireless bands and by nature of being stupid, Insteon devices cannot really be hacked.
My rules for home automation are largely the same as the article, first and foremost the existing physical UX of switches and stuff should always work, and ideally automations should be nearly invisible: They should subtly be convenient and monitoring should be useful, but nobody should be confronted with a weird change of lifestyle because a house has automation. And nobody should ever need an app to use their house.
pcdoodle1 22 hours ago [-]
They can also develop 1 to 1 relationships before a controller is even introduced. If I turn on my kitchen lights, the living room turns on to 50% without any controller, they talk amongst themselves over PowerLine and RF. Great 20 year old tech that's still relevant IMO.
skittleson 19 hours ago [-]
"nobody should ever need an app to use their house" is a better rule 1 than mine alas i still like having a single app to do the harder problems
ocdtrekkie 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah app access can be handy, it just shouldn't be foundational to everyday use. If I want to change something remotely I wouldn't normally, apps are great. Each time my parents get their phone app out to turn on a light in the room they are in, I die a little inside.
neya 21 hours ago [-]
Again, bulk of the blame goes to the techie hipsters who made coffee makers with cloud subscriptions and DRM popular. So did the BMW owners who paid $xx a month to get access to hardware THEY ALREADY OWNED.
"hey man, have u seen my coffee machine..it connects to the internet..so cool"
If you bought a GPU anytime in the last 20 years, the difference between a workstation GPU and a consumer GPU is only the driver. The hardware is the same with at most single contact changed so they can refuse to run the workstation driver on the consumer GPU. Similarly, many printer models use (used to use) the same head and the only difference in quality was the driver.
neya 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I remember this back in the day, trying to convert an old Nvidia card to Quadro. Good 'ole days.
I vaguely remember this stuff and wondering at the time why I'm driving a BMW and have no subscriptions I'm aware of and the only one offered is the map of road conditions that relies upon all BMWs with radar mapping the roads and sending the data back to BMW servers you then load the map from. That seemed entirely reasonable as a subscription. I realized at some point this probably means I opted into paying more upfront at purchase to just have every feature turned on, so I never got offered a subscription after the fact to turn it on later.
I'm imagining now responses telling me I'm a slave to capitalism because I probably got upsold by ten grand or something I wasn't paying attention to when I signed everything. This recalls a discussion last night about grocery prices and everyone at the table talking about the comparison shopping they do and I blurted out I have no idea what anything costs. I just buy the same stuff every week and scan my card. I don't look at the stickers. I don't look at the receipt. I just look at whether I'm hitting my desired savings rate every year and remain on track for retirement goals, which I do, and that's all I actually care about, not whether I'm getting the absolute best deal possible on every transaction I ever make.
It brings my mind back to the article from the Atlantic posted here yesterday about anxiety rates going through the roof in spite of the modern western world being by far the safest it's ever been. It seems the difference now is people are so acutely aware of any and every risk, alerts to which are constantly being shoved in your face, that it overwhelms our ancestral ape brains as if dying with ten grand less in the bank is equal to having a tiger stalking you through the bush 10 meters to your right.
I'm tired. There's a podcast I listen to hosted by exercise scientists debunking stupid press headlines about the latest study or TikTok trend, with one of the hosts always pointing out how exhausted she is by all of these articles telling here she's doing something wrong. "Everything you knew about X is wrong." "You've been doing X wrong your entire life." It exhausts me too, Lauren. I bought the wrong car. I bought the wrong TV. I guess I should be living in fear that my appliances will stop working if I lose network. I should be worried that LG is telling every data broker in the world that I've spent the past year watching nothing but Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Shit, some agent probably just scraped Hacker News, correlated my user name with my real identity using stylometry, and now I'm going to be double-triple served nothing but ads for whatever consumer segment that puts me in. I'm going to die even poorer when some cleverly placed sponsored link in a search result makes me impulse buy some whimsigoth living room art I didn't really need.
The world of 30 years ago was a world in which six of my friends from school were killed, the National Guard occupied my city for half a week, 55 people were killed in a riot, a man dragged from his truck and beaten half to death on live television, a shootout with the LAPD that lasted three hours also live televised. We weren't allowed to wear red or blue for fear of kids getting shot by the crips and bloods. My middle school had three drive-bys while I was there. We regularly had recess and any other outdoor activities canceled because of dangerously unhealthy air quality, called "smog days." My little sister's best friend's mom lived under an assumed identity because she survived an attack by the nightstalker Richard Ramirez. My older sister's best friend was murdered in her sleep by her deadbeat mom's boyfriend.
But the world of 30 years ago still felt full of wonder and possibility. I saw a television and wanted to tear it apart to learn how it worked, to understand the miracle of how such a thing was possible. I see a television today and all I can think of is Hacker News telling me every six hours how stupid I am for plugging it into the Internet. I've never experienced any tangible harm from advertisers knowing a man who was a teenager in the 90s watches television shows from the 90s, but it feels like a massive acute threat anyway.
Choad_20261104 17 hours ago [-]
hmmm.
I have none of that stuff. My home was purchased new with some 10baseT wired to 5 spots in the home and to every portal (window, door). we have a solar power system with enough battery backup watt hours for backup even if it rains for two weeks
But I DO have wildlife like bobcats and hares and raccoons that are autonomous and require remediation occasionally. Luckily, their activity is limited to the out of doors.
are you sure you are getting what you want?
ButlerianJihad 9 hours ago [-]
I don't know what a "Chromebook 14" is. Perhaps you mean HP's so-named 14-inch model.
In the year 2000, I lost all my possessions, especially the computers and storage media. Subsequently, I enjoyed NPR and Coast-to-Coast on a radio, including the Hurricane Katrina coverage. I had no idea what New Orleans looked like in 2005.
By that time, I was living across the street from a large thrift store. Eventually in 2006, I was weak-willed enough to begin building a home network again, and the thrift store provided two essential products: keyboards and WiFi routers.
The WiFi router was probably obsolete and EOL when I purchased it, but it definitely worked 100%, especially because I took care at the thrift store, to select a compatible AC adapter brick for it. It was a basic Netgear model, with 4 Ethernet ports, original firmware, probably 802.11n; even though an acquaintance said he would hack into it, he was inebriated most of the time, and I would never know if the router or network was hacked. You wouldn't know either, in 2026. Most consumers don't know, and could never find out, if their edge equipment is compromised. But anyway, even while running Ubuntu 6.04, I accepted the router's default firmware, and that Netgear thing lasted at least 5 years while I had an ADSL connection, and one and a half computers.
---
In the mid-1980s when I hung out at Radio Shack after church, I snapped up a lot of basic X10 kit. I collected the Dimmer Modules, the Appliance Modules, and later there was an RF remote unit available! The crown jewel for 12-year-old me was a central control unit that looked like a clock radio.
The control unit had cyan fluorescent display, simply the current time and alarm settings. And there were a bunch of control buttons where you could select an addressable Module, dim the lights, on/off, set timers, etc. And it was kind of amazing that everything plugged into mains outlets, and no other installation necessary!
My parents were constantly annoyed when I would sneak one of the modules onto a living-room floor lamp, or my favorite trick was cueing up a record on the turntable and then activating the Appliance Module to wake me up for school with Siouxsie and the Banshees or something. I was not allowed to persistently wire the entire house. I did not get into the journeyman electrician's job of replacing wall switches with X10 modules (those were slick). So, not even my shared bedroom was totally automated, but it was fun to experiment. It hopefully did not affect any neighbors. The pulse signals were said to stop at junction boxes, but there was still a House Code to set, in case all your flat neighbors wanted independent X10 networks.
I also never purchased the PC Interface that came with software. I believe I didn't yet have a compatible PC, anyway, and it seemed not in the spirit of a robust, predictable home automation. So yeah, my smart home devices worked without the Internet. How smart do you wanna get? My television set didn't spy on me, but everyone else does!
k0morebi 24 hours ago [-]
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vee-kay 21 hours ago [-]
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oculetteai 21 hours ago [-]
I'm building a tool that can monitor sump pits, more expensive, $99 early bird special, but supports local MCP and no hacking needed.
you can email me if you're interested, tyler@oculette.ai
I only use "Local Polling" or better, and highly prefer "Local Push".
connicpu 21 hours ago [-]
I fully stick to ZigBee and ZWave devices wherever possible, the reliability is just much better in my experience + they don't clog up my wifi. Bonus aspect of replacing all my lightswitches with ZigBee smart switches is they all act as mesh routers for the network, so signal is good through the entire house.
lopis 7 hours ago [-]
> they don't clog up my wifi
They kind of do, if your WiFi uses 2.4GHz bands
tk75x 6 hours ago [-]
I thought Zigbee and Zwave were both sub GHz at like 900 Mhz or something, no?
abnry 4 hours ago [-]
Zigbee is definitely at 2.4 GHz. Zwave is 900 MHz only IIRC. I can't recall if Zigbee is at 900 MHz although some form of it (not called Zigbee) likely is.
Larrikin 3 hours ago [-]
Devices using that band are like devices that don't have USB-C. There are plenty of useful ones in my home, but they are targets for eventual replacement and any new product still using the older standard should not be brought into my home if it can be avoided at all. A micro USB port on a new device, is a reason to return the product
bityard 19 hours ago [-]
Between ZigBee and ZWave, which do you prefer? Or does it depend on the application?
zamalek 17 hours ago [-]
Zigbee: an open spec, no licensing fees, cheaper devices. Can be locked down by OEMs to their hub (which can then demand an internet connection). In recent memory Hue attempted this, and only walked back after huge backlash. I couldn't find a thermostat back when I did my home without hub lock.
ZWave: the consortium demands interoperability. Testing and licensing fees means more expensive devices. Things will work together, though sometimes you will need to figure out what parameters actually do.
Use both. Home assistant is perfectly happy with two dongles plugged in.
In practice the answer ends up being both. There are some devices that only exist in one protocol (sometimes for technical reasons) and as a sibling noted, the antennas are cheap and home assistant exists.
ZWave stuff tends to be rock solid (there is expensive certification involved) but that means the devices are more expensive and the selection can be limited because the volumes aren't always there to make sense to get certified.
The only real problem I've found with the "all of the above" situation is that device bindings only work within one protocol. If you want to bind a lightbulb to a wall switch such that they don't require a trip through the hub they need to both be zigbee, zwave, or matter. This is unfortunate because there are a lot of really nice ZWave wall switches but not a lot of ZWave lightbulbs.
olalonde 19 hours ago [-]
Matter over Thread is probably the more future-proof choice though Zigbee/ZWave are more widely available today.
yoavm 15 hours ago [-]
This is true theoretically, but in practice, out of the tens of smart devices i've set up, the Zigbee devices have always been more reliable than the Matter over Thread ones. Also easier to set up. Sure it's an older standard but it seems like its simplicity makes it work much better.
fy20 12 hours ago [-]
Matter over Thread is a bit more complicated just because there are typically two parts: a Thread border router and a Matter server, compared to ZigBee where you might just use something like Zigbee2MQTT which does both functions.
That's also part of it's advantage though: I have a Mikrotik router which has a Thread radio, so I run the router software on that, and Matter server on another machine - so no USB dongle needed in my server rack where the signal would be poor.
Also Matter over Thread supports multiple Thread routers, multiple Matter servers, and devices being paired to multiples of each - maybe that doesn't help with the complicated part, but it opens it up for commercial deployments as you can have redundancy. I would not be surprised if it replaces DALI in some instances in the not too distant future.
There are still some teething issues, which is because it's still kind of early in its adoption (ZigBee felt the same before Zigbee2MQTT). Effectively it's the same, just packaged different, there's no reason why you couldn't plug in a USB dongle and run a "Thread2MQTT" container and be done with it - the pairing doesn't need an app, it can be done through a browser with Bluetooth.
Personally I feel it's the way everything will go simply because it is more interoperable. Already today you can get routers, TVs and fridges (Samsung) with Thread hardware, so it's going to become mainstream as regular people will be able to just buy a smart bulb, pair it, and control it with their phone without buying or setting up anything else. Theres also Matter over WiFi, so it could replace proprietary platforms like Tuya/SmartLife.
IKEA released a bunch of new smart home devices that support Matter over Thread and ZigBee this year if you want to try it out.
yoavm 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I do have the IKEA Matter-over-Thread air sensor. Whenever the electricity goes down, it refuses to come back up until I restart it multiple times. I never saw this issue with any Zigbee device. I also had some dimmers that operated both on MoT and Zigbee, and ended up switching them all to Zigbee to resolve this exact issue.
I get that MoT has more features, but it seems like it makes the whole thing less reliable. I also hate the pairing process with Matter-over-Thread. Enable IPv6 in your home network, scan the QR code with your phone... What if the QR sticker falls in a few years? With Zigbee I just press the reset button and I see it directly in the HA web interface. No need for a phone, no need for camera, and doesn't touch your router. Less features, but my devices have been working for years without a single failure.
DavideNL 12 hours ago [-]
I have had the exact same experience. Zigbee has been working for years (in HomeAssistant) without any problems.
With Matter/Thread though, i frequently run into issues. Particularly these were power switches from Ikea by the way, but i don't thing that's relevant.
Also the range of Zigbee devices is much better / bigger, since each device "expands" the network range so to speak.
microtonal 11 hours ago [-]
Thread devices can also be routers and expand the range. It’s pretty much the same as Zigbee in that many mains powered devices are routers.
FeepingCreature 7 hours ago [-]
Same here, the one Matter over Thread device I have is the one that doesn't automatically come back up on a reset.
smileybarry 3 hours ago [-]
I thought so too until I found out Thread currently (AFAIK) doesn't support multicast requests while Zigbee does, which can be hugely important for smart lighting with 30+ bulbs. Until that gets added to the spec (and supported) you might be better off putting the lighting part of the setup on Zigbee.
throw0101c 3 hours ago [-]
> Group messages are also important as they allow simultaneous control of several Matter Nodes through Multicast. In order to route this traffic into the Thread network, both Matter and Thread implement the Unicast Prefix-based IPv6 Multicast Addressing Scheme defined by RFC 3306.
> Thread defines a series of features to support multicast across a heterogeneous network (Thread and Wi-Fi/Ethernet Network segments) for multicast addresses with scope larger than realm local.
Matter over Thread is such an insane protocol. Devices need to have an additional bluetooth radio on top of the Thread IEEE 802.15.4 radio, just for the initial pairing, then it's never used again.
I'm disappointed that Ikea decided to switch their smart home gadgets from using Zigbee to Matter over Thread.
smileybarry 3 hours ago [-]
IIRC they're still offering Zigbee that you can switch to via a manual switching sequence, though some people say it still runs a little worse than the older Zigbee line(s).
shrx 2 minutes ago [-]
Only some devices support an undocumented Zigbee fallback. The new door/window sensors for example don't.
tremon 18 hours ago [-]
FAFAIK neither Zigbee nor ZWave uses IP networking in their protocol stack which makes them infinitely better than Matter, especially given the context of this article.
BHSPitMonkey 17 hours ago [-]
Matter-over-Thread also keeps devices away from the Internet if you run your own OTBR (e.g. via Home Assistant). With off-the-shelf border routers you can't be sure.
ctkhn 23 hours ago [-]
Do you have any favorites for single smart plug or multi switch smart plug strip? I used to be a heavy tp link kasa user since they have smart plug strips that worked locally (polling I think and not push) but I am now doing my best to move everything to plugs that don't even need setup through an app, just home assistant. Wish I had thought about this more when I first started with home automation but I think the migration will be worth it.
microtonal 11 hours ago [-]
For single plugs, IKEA INSPELNING are really great if you can still get them (I stocked a bunch of them before they sold out here). Zigbee, affordable and very reliable. However, I had two units with loose solder balls in them, so I shake them a bit as a check before starting to use them:
(This production issue is a shame, great plug otherwise and they were something like 8 Euro at some point.)
GRILLPLATS is the successor. I have one, but haven’t tried it much yet because it is Matter over Thread and we are still mostly on Zigbee. They have a hidden Zigbee mode, but it doesn’t expose power use:
But if Matter over Thread fits into your system, it’s an affordable option.
For power strips, we are now using the Gen4 Shelly Power Strip. It supports pretty much anything: its own API over WiFi that is supported by HA, Shelly cloud, Matter over WiFi, Zigbee, and Bluetooth. It can even work as a WiFi range extender and as a Bluetooth proxy for HA. Initial setup is by connecting to it as a WiFi AP and the connection to the built-in web interface. There were some issues with Zigbee flooding, but I think that was improved with firmware updates.
Look at Zooz, they have a variety of plugs and multi-port strips with control of individual outlets (both at the outlet and via zwave). They have options rated for being outdoors (holiday lights, etc), heavy duty ones for large motors, in wall switches and relays that go in the electrical box if you want something more permanent or invisible, etc. Solid support in home assistant. Push, 100% local, no shenanigans, no apps, direct to home assistant even for the updates.
I also have some eve energy plugs that do matter/thread (also push/local). There are apps here but i generally haven't needed them once i got things set up in home assistant.
zamalek 17 hours ago [-]
Seconding Zooz. Absolute stars for affordable and interopable devices. My search always starts with them.
scosman 22 hours ago [-]
I have a ton of Kasa. Local polling, but since it's more for on/off, I don't care about a 5s poll. I had to buy about ~30 light switches for my house, and using Kasa saved thousands over Lutron.
Smart Plugs, sensors, etc: Ikea is amazing. You need to buy a hub, but then accessories are 3x cheaper. Their plugs are $9 and have energy monitoring which is amazing. They have water leak sensors for $12. Incredible value.
pndy 4 hours ago [-]
> Their plugs are $9 and have energy monitoring which is amazing.
That's 2nd generation, first one was just a basic on/off smar plug. I still got these and so far I had no issues even after Dirigera hub got that firmware update which enabled Matter. Ikea 'gear' overall work much better than Meross one I had before.
ajolly 2 hours ago [-]
Switchbot smart plugs around$5 in a four pack and you can flash them over the air to ESP home or tasmota so they run completely local if you want a Wi Fi option
Esp32c3
tomtom1337 20 hours ago [-]
I use the Ikea ones directly with my home assistant zigbee radio. Does not need an Ikea hub.
+1 on the IKEA stuff being amazing!
scosman 19 hours ago [-]
ohhhh, I didn't know you could do that...
troupo 20 hours ago [-]
Except VARMBLIXT. I can't connect it to HomeAssistant no matter how I much try. It sort of begins discovery, but then can't connect to it. Could be some weird networking issue, but all IKEA lamps connect without any issue.
microtonal 10 hours ago [-]
IKEA is a bit hit and miss. Their light bulbs are great for the price. Their power plugs also work pretty well, but at some point I started shaking them before use because two of them had pretty large solder balls that would have shorted things out:
Most of their sensors are meh. Their PIR sensors are known to be mediocre compared to the competition. Their air quality sensor is ok to get trends, but e.g. the CO2 measurements are quite a bit off compared to quality sensors and are way off if you live at a higher altitude (due to using a thermal conductivity sensor and not NDIR like better sensors).
Also, the IKEA smarthome app (used in conjunction with the Hub) uses Play Integrity and therefore blocks e.g. GrapheneOS. But you are better off with Home Assistant and their ZBT-2 antenna (can be flashed for Zigbee or Thread) anyway.
FeepingCreature 7 hours ago [-]
"Anything that can run Tasmota" for me. See here: https://templates.blakadder.com/plug.html Straightforward web interface, scriptable, native HA, supports every protocol under the sun. Works fine here.
Currently using a bunch of Nous A8T (EU plug) because they come with Tasmota ootb.
koyote 20 hours ago [-]
I've gone one level further and only use open source smart devices (excluding the big ticket items such as the robot vacuum or air purifier, where it's often impossible to find a 'Local' option or the difference in quality of its main purpose is just not negotiable...).
ESPHome or Tasmota work really well for all kinds of things.
The last one I replaced was an infrared blaster for controlling my AC. The previous one, even though it was in an IoT VLAN decided to spam the network with requests to its mothership (never succeeding, fortunately).
y1n0 16 hours ago [-]
Seems like these things would be good targets for reverse engineering, setting up a server to intercept and respond to keep devices online.
skittleson 23 hours ago [-]
thanks, that's a useful filter. i started moving to home assistant last year but i still want honor the same rules (mostly, again they are guidelines to strive for!).
reasonabl_human 1 days ago [-]
The new rules I have come to use are:
- buy the cheapest hardware that gets the job done
- ignore negative reviews that are software related
- upon receipt of devices, ask claude for local-first cfw
- have fun for a few hours acting as a meat proxy
- boom, cheap local-only smart home is done
Use a SBC or nas for home assistant. This process worked for me for switches, a thermostat, an air quality monitor, a thermometer, and a window fan.
Would’ve paid ~2.5x for hardware that had the appropriate local-first capability out of the box. Instead this all fit within an existing $20 subscription to an inference provider. DS 4.1 running locally was on track too just more slowly.
f1shy 1 days ago [-]
My take currently. Exactly this. Buy Sonoff things, Raspberry Pi, and do some vibe coding. All local first.
rixrax 23 hours ago [-]
Same. But instead of rPi get a cheap N100 etc. 'real' PC with M.2.
bityard 19 hours ago [-]
N100s are not cheap anymore. :(
I paid ~$150 for a fanless 4-port router with 16GB of RAM a few years back. Now they are ~$400 and up.
tehlike 13 hours ago [-]
Optiplex/Lenovos are still <150. Lenovos have PCIe ports.
saidinesh5 15 hours ago [-]
I think used optiplex / thinkcenters are the current cheap x86 options.
drnick1 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, and that hardware is now half a decade old or so. It's truly shocking.
microtonal 10 hours ago [-]
If you want something that works out of the box without too much work. Home Assistant Green is also a great little device. We first ran on a NUC (more powerful than N100), but then we switched to a HA Green. Passively cooled, doesn't draw a lot of power and has been super reliable. And it's well-supported by HA for obvious reasons.
cryptoegorophy 23 hours ago [-]
What’s wrong with rpi?
Normal_gaussian 18 hours ago [-]
Its a do-everything solution with a do-not-break-compatibility history to its design and a lot of attention driving its price upwards. These are good things as well, so...
Examples:
- SD cards are very convenient for hobbyists "experimenting" with OS variants. They are not great for performance or reliability; a soldered on storage device is common in many other products.
- The price is more than it seems - you need a case and a power supply and an SD card.
- The case situation is bad. If you want to 'set and forget' you really want a robust case, potted. Many N100's are designed for more abusive environments.
- Most use cases don't need the HDMI, Camera, Audio, Ethernet, or all the USB ports. That is board space, purchase cost, and idle power draw that can be reduced or dropped.
- It doesn't have some modern connectors, e.g. M2, because there is no space on the board, and the PCIe lanes have gone to the connectors you probably don't use.
Many stick based computers, particularly second hand and older generations, are better for most use cases. These are typically Intel N series; but are increasingly ARM, particularly at the lowest prices.
f1shy 4 hours ago [-]
Absolutely this. For pretty much all use cases I have, for performance, power consumption, robustness, etc. is much better the ESP option or the “big” N100. Rpi is there in the middle. For some playing or prototyping I have some from the ol good times…
f1shy 4 hours ago [-]
I personally don’t like raspian at all, and how they change things. They try to be “compatible” with very old HW, while at the same time many SW things I’ve done, are systematically broken in each new release.
My 2ct experience.
subscribed 22 hours ago [-]
It's now crazy expensive for what it is. It's still okay if you prefer low power standby / rare use but other than that probably not so much.
ssl-3 22 hours ago [-]
Everything is now crazy expensive, if buying new.
subscribed 19 hours ago [-]
I mean, yeah, but comparing what rpi is and can do it seems more overpriced than some other hardware I was looking for.
But yeah, true.
ssl-3 16 hours ago [-]
It all has its place.
RPi hardware is nice because it's a fairly-consistent, known quantity. All copies of a given board have the ~same features and bugs, so an image made for someone else's Pi 4 will run on my own Pi 4. This grants appliance-like utility that we haven't really ever had much of in the x86 PC space.
Pi hardware almost never shows up as cheap as a person might wish for. It's scarce on the used market, even when prices are high. In that space, demand outstrips supply.
And it's never been "cheap". A decade and a half ago when it first showed up, folks were already comparing the price (plus the SD card, and the appropriate power brick, and the USB cable, and the wifi adapter, and some kind of housing) to that of a used PC or laptop, and the Pi seldom came out on top.
But if we're doing new vs new, then it does alright price-wise.
And it's tiny. It's got some hackability built in, with the not-USB camera interface and the not-HDMI display support, and some GPIO that can be useful for some stuff.
It's got places where it's useful. I use them in those places. (And despite that lengthy defense, I run Home Assistant on a cheap SFF Lenovo box that came to me with RAM and an SSD for $50, delivered, in pre-used form)
skittleson 14 hours ago [-]
used workstations are even better such as Dell Wyse or HP Minis
drnick1 17 hours ago [-]
Pi's are overpriced toys. I would never run a production system off an SD card.
jonny2811 38 minutes ago [-]
you can run a pi with an m.2 nvme. my rpi5 does so, you need to buy some extra stuff to do so though.
skittleson 14 hours ago [-]
They make industrial sd cards. I use those for many porjects that need a long life. However, this one has been running so long: Samsung EVO/EVO Plus, 32 GB, made 11/2018 used since 2019 daily. Wear has written roughly 1.5 TB in the 263 days, about 6 GB a day. So good enough for production for me!
f1shy 4 hours ago [-]
I have used industrial cards. Are much better, yes. In a real production setup, where a stop costs actual money, or the thing is not easy to access, distance or dismantle a system, no way in hell I would use one.
XorNot 22 hours ago [-]
Also use static IP addressing on your home network.
Your router is a point of failure, so an internet outage making it go weird doesn't mean you want all your stuff becoming on manageable).
IoT is honestly one of the best ways to rapidly learn SRE concepts.
ssl-3 21 hours ago [-]
Static IP addressing at this level is a curse.
On a home network with dynamic addresses: No need to worry about IP addresses; no overlaps happen, no mistakes, no spreadsheet table to manage. Use names (as long as DHCP works, then so does DNS). Renumbering the network is simple when that's useful.
It still works when the internet is down. And when the router itself breaks, we fix it or replace it and things work again. It's good to have a functional spare.
---
On a home network with static addresses: Micromanage IP addresses, keep a spreadsheet table, potentially make mistakes. Avoid using names (DHCP may be eliminated but DNS is still a failure point), making things harder to remember six months from now. Renumbering is arduous.
It still works when the router is down, but: When the router breaks, we still fix or replace it anyway. It's good to have a functional spare.
---
In terms of SRE: I don't need 5 9's of reliability for my smart light bulbs' IoT controls at home. They all still have some manner of physical switch, and they all can still be toggled on and off the old-fashioned way. Parallel controls work well-enough.
Everyone will get by almost-normally while I fix the router, which is a task that I'll set forth to be doing anyway for all of the reasons that household internet access provides.
ravenstine 20 hours ago [-]
I've recently come up with what I think is an even better solution. If someone's already done it, I have no idea. I just went ahead and implemented it because I thought it'd be interesting.
The concept is that, instead of assuming that IP and MAC addresses are at all reliable, to "fingerprint" devices on the LAN based on things such as SSH public keys, TLS SPKI fingerprints, UPnP device UUIDs, mDNS, common TCP port profiles, and IEEE OUI manufacturer in order to form mostly-stable identities. The IP and full MAC are only fallen back to when there's absolutely no other data to work off of. My software uses a daemon that scans the network in order find devices and update existing device identities if IPs change. It serves hostnames for these devices on the `.home.arpa` TLD and creates synthetic IPv6 addresses for each device in case one would rather use their own DNS server or hosts file.
I recently "finished" this project, and it's kind of awesome because I was able to swap to a new router and everything just kept working as-is without having to think about it. Of course mDNS solves a lot of these problems already, but not every device has mDNS.
What's really cool is I recently realized that this is also very useful for accessing your local network with a VPN like Wireguard. Even though I only planned on this being something you run on individual clients, I put it on my OpenWrt router and configured it with dnsmasq so that, when I connect to my network with Netbird, all of my local hostnames just work on my phone by virtue of connecting to the network and using its DNS server. That said, my project doesn't require router admin access at all. It can even run as rootless if TUN access (for synthetic addresses) is turned off.
Maybe I'll release it publicly at some point, but if anyone wants to steal this idea and do their own implementation, I am not territorial over it. It's made getting my LAN devices working together a joy.
ssl-3 15 hours ago [-]
I think that's brilliant, and that it deserves a much better writeup than what you've presented here. :)
darkwater 10 hours ago [-]
Agreed! I'd love to see a more expanded writeup on this topic, and see what I could apply to my home.
johnnyletrois 4 hours ago [-]
Same. Would love to see more.
skittleson 14 hours ago [-]
i use DHCP reservations since im a bit lazy and it seems to work good. It requires a reboot of the device on the network. at least for openwrt based routers.
ButlerianJihad 13 hours ago [-]
Hypothetically, a long DHCP lease should let you ride out a short Internet/router outage. After that, hypothetically of course, APIPA addresses would be assigned, and I suppose that mDNS should be working even after APIPA addresses take over. I was unable to make this happen. I also tried IPv6-only LAN, which my brand-new printer didn't like very much.
And don't forget to backup your router and switch configurations!
esskay 6 hours ago [-]
Presumably you're not concerned about claude deciding you're a bad actor and having your account closed? It seemed to go through a spat of doing that when people were doing the tv rooting recently to remove trackers/ads.
BeFlatXIII 1 hours ago [-]
New account time.
tehlike 24 hours ago [-]
emudhra mitm certificate probably helps here maybe.
arcanemachiner 1 days ago [-]
> cfw
Custom firmware?
eventualcomp 20 hours ago [-]
Probably. This acronym is also used in video game console modding scenes.
alistairSH 20 hours ago [-]
Cloudflare Workers... So not actually local, but does get the vendors cloud out of the mix.
Spivak 1 days ago [-]
My rules seems much simpler and lower effort:
1. buy the Zigbee version
2. boom, local only smart home is done
I guess if there's a device that's actually wi-fi only then I'll have to go through your flow but so far there's been no need.
ketzu 24 hours ago [-]
Similar, just with "Matter" instead of Zigbee.
microtonal 23 hours ago [-]
Thread over Matter is not fully local. In Thread < 1.4, devices can connect to internet servers through NAT64. Most Thread Border Routers (AFAIR Home Assistant + OTBR is the main exception) do not allow you to disable NAT64.
In Thread >= 1.4, devices can request globally routable IPv6 addresses. The Thread 1.4 white paper does not hide the intentions:
The Thread 1.4 Border Router acts as the
IPv6 router between the Thread network and external networks,
including the user's home network and the larger internet. It is by default
configured to support external communication [...]
Cloud Connectivity: Direct internet connectivity enables Thread devices
to easily connect to cloud services. This facilitates remote monitoring,
control, and firmware updates, enhancing the user experience and
enabling remote device management capabilities. Device vendors can
now directly service and support their deployed fleet of devices,
regardless of which application ecosystem each device is integrated
with.
This is what you get when you let Google, Amazon, Apple, and Samsung design a smart home standard. They'll use every opportunity extract analytics and increase control. You'll own nothing and be happy.
Zigbee, Z-Wave, and ESPHome over WiFi/Thread are the only major modern local and privacy-preserving smart home standards.
Matter over WiFi is also not fully local for obvious reasons (though you can try to block them on the router/firewall and/or put them on a separate VLAN).
marklar423 21 hours ago [-]
I think this interpretation is a bit too negative. Undoubtedly the companies want to spy on you, and with Thread 1.3 they were already perfectly capable of doing so - via your Thread border router, which connects to the normal LAN and can talk to the Internet (if you let it). Allocating Thread devices from global IPv6 blocks (GUAs) doesn't change that, it just removes the NAT between Thread devices and the border router.
Before Thread 1.4 the IPv6 addresses used by the Thread network were all ULAs - i.e. the devices were only routable locally and didn't have a global IPv6 address, so if you did happen to want to talk to your Thread devices over the internet, it was possible but the Thread border router had to do NAT for you.
With Thread 1.4 the border router can assign device IPs straight from the global IPv6 block assigned by your ISP, which means you can directly access your Thread device over the internet without the NAT provided by the Thread border router.
If you don't want to locally host your smart home automations (you and I do, but the average consumer doesn't) this can be very useful. It's also really helpful if you want to access your own devices remotely over the Internet and not need to bother with port forwarding.
IMO this fits perfectly with the philosophy of IPv6 - every device can have a globally routable IP address without needing NAT.
If you don't want your devices reaching out to the Internet (like I don't), the solution is to put all that stuff on its own VLAN with no Internet access (which I do).
microtonal 10 hours ago [-]
I think this interpretation is a bit too negative.
You wrote a long message to say that you agree with me technically, but then said that it has good uses as well. I don't disagree with that, but the problem with these companies is - you give them one finger and they take your whole hand. Besides that,
If you don't want to locally host your smart home automations (you and I do, but the average consumer doesn't) this can be very useful. It's also really helpful if you want to access your own devices remotely over the Internet and not need to bother with port forwarding.
this implies that this is not possible with Zigbee. You can use your devices remotely with Zigbee, but it is fully governed by your Zigbee hub/coordinator. You can use Home Assistant, the IKEA hub, the Samsung SmartThings hub, Homey, etc. to control your Zigbee devices remotely. The very big, but relevant difference is that the devices themselves cannot connect to the mothership to do analytics or to lock away functionality. There were already some Thread + Matter devices that required talking to the manufacturer's servers to get all functionality (I think e.g. some Nuki devices, but I might misremember).
If you don't want your devices reaching out to the Internet (like I don't), the solution is to put all that stuff on its own VLAN with no Internet access (which I do).
Putting Thread + Matter devices on a different VLAN than e.g. your phone which you are commissioning it with is very fragile. So fragile that most Matter documentation just says "your phone needs to be on the same WiFi network as your smarthome hub". It is possible (I had such a setup for a while), but requires that you e.g. do allow mDNS advertisements across VLANs (since Matter relies heavily on mDNS). Since you are talking about average consumers, Zigbee will give them privacy without any extra work, whereas with Thread + Matter they have to set up their network in a way that their ISP-provided router most likely doesn't even support.
Thread + Matter has no point outside very large deployments and giving a bunch of companies the opportunity to start data mining your sensor data as well.
ketzu 9 hours ago [-]
> There were already some Thread + Matter devices that required talking to the manufacturer's servers to get all functionality
The most I have seen that is rather the functionality not being available in matter (ie the standard does not support it) so they are only available on zigbee with the manufacturers app.
In my personal experience
> Zigbee will give them privacy without any extra work
Was exactly as fragile and dependent on manufacturer infrastructure for some fratures as you describe MoT. (the privacy part is true though, and as mentioned all the time: I have heard others had much better experiences than me with zigbee)
microtonal 6 hours ago [-]
The most I have seen that is rather the functionality not being available in matter (ie the standard does not support it) so they are only available on zigbee with the manufacturers app.
No, it's also used for remote access, see e.g. Nuki and Tado.
Not super-nefarious, but this is probably just the beginning. If companies can gather data they will and if manufacturers can add features that require subscriptions, they will. The line always has to go up and Thread offers them the means to do so. If you give the opportunity, this always happens (see e.g. TVs, 'owning the glass').
Was exactly as fragile and dependent on manufacturer infrastructure for some fratures as you describe MoT.
I have over 50 Zigbee devices and never have a single issue (using HA and zigbee2mqtt, some on a separate Hue network). The Matter over Thread devices that I have, regularly drop off the network (no interference, etc., they just still seem very buggy). This also makes complete sense, since Thread adds a lot of complexity (IPv6, TREL, communication between border routers, etc.).
darkwater 10 hours ago [-]
> If you don't want your devices reaching out to the Internet (like I don't), the solution is to put all that stuff on its own VLAN with no Internet access (which I do).
Or, if there is already a perfectly functioning open standard that just works and it's private by default (ZigBee) boycott the new standard created and forced upon us by BigTech and don't buy that hardware.
koyote 20 hours ago [-]
I tried to hop on the Matter bandwagon until I found out that it's basically impossible to keep Matter over Wifi devices on their own IoT VLAN.
I have therefore come to the conclusion that there's literally only downsides to adopting them over Zigbee.
Your post reinforces that feeling.
marklar423 15 hours ago [-]
It's annoying but it is possible; it comes down to allowing mdns broadcast across vlans and adding a static route for the border router
> AFAIR Home Assistant + OTBR is the main exception
Luckily this is my setup.
I am not opposed to the possibility of cloud connectivity (as long as it is deactivateable) and even if I weren't I think I still prefer Matter (thread/wifi) over nearly all non-matter devices I've ever used, especially all the problems I had with Zigbee devices will make me stay far away from it. (Even though I am aware that many people had gread experiences with zigbee.)
microtonal 10 hours ago [-]
I am curious what Zigbee devices you bought. We have over 50 Zigbee devices and never had any issue. It is just super reliable and always works.
In contrast, Matter + Thread devices in our network drop out very frequently (and no, I am not using multi-PAN, etc.).
Matter + WiFi devices are probably much more reliable (if close enough to an AP), but a security and privacy nightmare.
ketzu 8 hours ago [-]
Bunch of sensors, lights and switches (sonoff (though those were wifi, much easier but energy hungry), ikea, aqara and some more I don't remember). They were often annoying to pair, dropped from the mesh, or simply didn't like to work with my bridge (first ikea, later smart things and also tried skyconnect with HA directly).
Matter wasn't flawless, especially because I fell into the trap that was mentioned here before by trying to separate things into clans without fully understanding the needs of matter. But now that it is fixed, I had little problem with adding new devices (like not having a lamp in short range to the bridge lol) or them staying connected.
microtonal 4 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I also have many IKEA and some Aqara Zigbee devices and they don't have any issues. Did you check if the Zigbee channel didn't overlap with 2.4GHz WiFi? (Same issues as with Thread) Did you use a multi-PAN (Zigbee + Thread) coordinator? I am pretty sure that some SmartThings hubs use multi-PAN.
The IKEA tradfri Reddit is a stream of problems that people have with their Thread devices (and people longing back for Zigbee). Part of it is firmware that is still immature, but part of it is also the complexity of the Thread + Matter stack.
drdexebtjl 22 hours ago [-]
My impression is that Matter over Wi-Fi is the de facto standard for new smart home devices and Matter over Thread is really only a thing for compatibility with legacy Thread-only devices that got a software update after Matter over Thread became a thing.
Gigachad 21 hours ago [-]
That’s not the case at all. Matter over thread is newer. The latest range of ikea smart home stuff is all thread.
Thread has the advantage of consuming very low power so battery powered sensors and remotes can run for years. Wifi is only used because it doesn’t require buying a thread border router.
drdexebtjl 3 hours ago [-]
I didn’t mean to imply Matter over Thread was older. Thread itself is older than Matter, and also older than the wave of cheap ESP32 based smart home devices.
Wi-Fi is cheaper to implement both software- and hardware-wise if you don’t need the low-power requirements of Thread, most devices don’t, and the gap will be bridged by lower-powered Wi-Fi.
NekkoDroid 7 hours ago [-]
The other advantage of Thread is that the devices don't need to directly communicate with a border router (I think Zigbee is also like that?) unlike Matter over WiFi, where it does need to communicate directly with an access point.
holoduke 23 hours ago [-]
But matter is a better network. More efficient and faster. Large zigbee networks with cheap devices often result in ghost devices not responding. Matter even with the cheapest 2 dollar bulbs from AliExpress have zero issues.
microtonal 22 hours ago [-]
Matter is not the network layer. You are either talking about Thread (which uses IEEE 802.15.4 like Zigbee) or WiFi. Matter is the application layer protocol.
We have a lot of devices and never have any issues. But yeah, if you put a lot of Tuya Zigbee devices with crappy firmware that flood the network. Similarly if you put a lot of crappy WiFi devices on your network, it's a security nightmare (wise people put them on an isolated VLAN and use WiFi client isolation).
Spivak 23 hours ago [-]
Do you mean Thread or do you use Matter over Wi-Fi?
ketzu 22 hours ago [-]
I use both, but preferably matter over thread when it makes sense (as wifi just uses so much more energy).
reasonabl_human 24 hours ago [-]
Reasonable!
I found a few wifi and bluetooth devices that were cheaper than or didn’t have a zigbee equivalent. Window fan and air monitor specifically.
I didn’t do an exhaustive market search, just sharing my anecdotal experience. It’s a great feeling to be able to focus on hardware capabilities and price, then will the software you envision into existence via AI accelerated RE.
skittleson 14 hours ago [-]
i do like zigbee (now Thread). however, i want to some fancy stuff sometimes that i could never do with those devices. Such as get the weather if its available. Updated sunset/sunrise times. Those are local services i use BUT i've seen it where they reach outbound to the internet when needed.
avh02 9 hours ago [-]
isn't this what home assistant is for?
knodi123 22 hours ago [-]
Similar, with z-wave instead of zigbee. Except after installing two smart switches, a motion detector, and two smart outlets, I realized there aren't really any automations that I actually want. My porch light turns on and off at sunset and sunrise, through an electronic rube goldberg machine that could have just been a single photocell lightbulb.
Not contradicting or criticizing, just describing my lack of creativity.
ketzu 22 hours ago [-]
I had a similar issue, especially for lighting, there is just very little to no automation I want. Which was a "problem" when getting into smart home stuff, because lighting was somehow the poster child and most recommended part.
My favorites are now air quality and climate measurement (the reason why i tried it again was mold prevention), climate control and a smart lock because i was scared of forgetting my keys when moving away from any friends I could hand a spare.
mathieudombrock 22 hours ago [-]
I wonder how long it will be until Claude starts refusing to do this kind of thing?
ravenstine 20 hours ago [-]
I pity those who've yet to experience running uncensored LLMs locally. Sure, they're not as fast as Claude, but they're still quite capable if you're patient.
eventualcomp 19 hours ago [-]
Do you recommend any for your usecases where you have had success?
ravenstine 18 hours ago [-]
It was helpful for reverse engineering some perfectly good software that the publisher recently discontinued and bricked for existing users. Sure, you could probably try to fool Claude or GPT into doing it, but I'd rather not play mind games with my LLM to get it to do something it thinks is illegal. I also just like brainstorming with uncensored Qwen because it doesn't constantly spit cautionary verbiage and disclaimers like frontier models do. The Splash version of regular old Qwen-2.6 also just did a bang-up job creating a simple daemon for managing my Govee smart outlets over BLE (without Home Assistant or other crap).
ivanjermakov 18 hours ago [-]
There will always be models that won't refuse.
whatever1 22 hours ago [-]
For most of these tasks you don’t need a frontier model.
amelius 24 hours ago [-]
What if it was security-hardened by Claude?
reasonabl_human 24 hours ago [-]
Vast majority of these devices are ESP32’s that have been flashed years ago with buggy firmware, sitting on shelves in a warehouse.
These are cheap chinese adware driven sensors. Security is not their priority.
amelius 21 hours ago [-]
Things are moving fast now, security issues are now on the agenda with various governments, these ESP32's may be patched by Claude sooner than you think.
pessimizer 22 hours ago [-]
Will they be that three years from now?
reasonabl_human 22 hours ago [-]
Probably, unless chinese companies change their business model and a secure successor to the ESP family arises. Low conviction loosely held opinion, shared bc you asked.
But why does that matter? My smart home upgrade cycle is around once every 5 years. The world is changing on a dime every 6 months nowadays. Projections beyond about a year out in the smart home market are useless to me as a consumer.
nullsanity 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
toomuchtodo 24 hours ago [-]
Based on my use of Claude Code Security in an appsec setting, I'm not worried. "Hardened by Claude" is aspirational.
alala-lala-lon 24 hours ago [-]
[dead]
driverdan 20 hours ago [-]
I have some simple but strict rules:
1. Commercial devices must use offline only protocols, Zigbee or Zwave. If it's WiFi only I will not buy it unless the firmware is open source or easily replaced with an open source, local only alternative.
2. Non-sensor devices must fully function without their IoT features. I must be able to control my thermostat, fridge, stove, etc without any external interface.
Never use a WiFi IoT device that isn't open source. Even if you can control it locally it could be a spy device that's exfiltrating your data. Yes, you could setup VLANs or a separate network but it's not worth it. Vote with your wallet.
Helmut10001 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know how this fits into your list, but I also require an open, local API, so I am free to chose which dashboard/automation I want to use - my own (Home Assistant or any locally programmed orchestrator) vs. the official App vs. some third-party dashboard/website. This was my main criteria for buying a Marstek Venus E Battery. I was able to automate it fully locally, isolated in a separate VLAN, via ModbusTCP/RS485 and my custom Home Assistant Automation. Works wonderfully, even on Internet disconnects. [1]
I've only tinkered around the edges of home automation, but so far most everything I've looked into is either proprietary and $ or open source and $$$. The sweet spot seems to be proprietary devices that are hackable and/or re-flashable to open source firmware. But there aren't many of those, they come and go constantly.
A large part of my goal for automation is energy efficiency, if I have to dump multiple hundreds of dollars into hubs, switches, plus, lights, and sensors, then I've only added work for myself and saved no money.
ajolly 2 hours ago [-]
Switchbot Smart plugs are cheap, around five dollars in a four pack. You can flash them over the air without needing to open them up. And they have a ESP32C3. So you can easily flash them with Tasmota or ESP home. And they include energy monitor.
driverdan 17 hours ago [-]
Most of my devices are Zigbee. They're inexpensive, easy, and have been pretty reliable. They operate on 2.4Ghz which may have a lot of interference in some places like dense apartment buildings.
There are a lot of vendors. I have a decent amount of SONOFF stuff, Schlage Zigbee deadbolts, Ikea Zigbee blinds, etc. No one makes a good Zigbee thermostat so I have a Honeywell Zwave.
nexle 14 hours ago [-]
I recommend SONOFF: they support ZHA as first class citizen (they are very active on raising PR to https://github.com/zigpy/zha-device-handlers) and they are cheap (manufactured in china). I don't even have to download their app to do the initial setup, most of their devices just work out of the box with ZHA.
wallst07 12 hours ago [-]
SONOFF is hit or miss, they have some very buggy devices. For instance I wanted a thermometer in every room to map temps in a 3d floor plan.
The Sonoffs would just drop from the zigbee network never to return without a reset, known issue with these.
gf000 8 hours ago [-]
What do you think of smart tvs? Like how to properly isolate them, because they don't fit your rules (neither do they fit mine)..
drnick1 8 hours ago [-]
> What do you think of smart tvs?
They should be kept offline and used as monitors only.
interf4ce 6 hours ago [-]
Right? I've never quite understood the question. There's no requirement that a smart TV be connected to the internet.
Something like a Roku is cheap, can handle your streaming services (including Jellyfin), and has no spying hardware. DIY HTPCs are of course the best option for control.
gf000 2 hours ago [-]
Why would something like Roku be any better?! It's proprietary and can do all the same things as a smart TV..
Sure, HTPC would be the best, but they are quite a bit pricier.
The above intrigues me, I plan to give it a go when I reach it on the TODO list- ideally that would address issues that can't be fixed with network isolation.
1dontnkow_ 18 hours ago [-]
I didn't know about those protocols, and also surely they don't really mention them in the title or product description usually. Also are they the most used average protocol? I don't wanna pay premium price for a reasonable offline feature which was always the default.
However, I tried to purchase from EU manufacturers so that, at least, they're GDPR-liable. Quite a few of them even advertise things like "Offline mode only available" or "NO account setup needed!" ... It was a FKN weight measurement device (one of those you put on the floor and step on). Id rather die a horrible death then give them any access to my WiIF or email account. i jsut want a damn number in Kilos and thats it.
And about people saying "OVERWRITE", "CHANGE", "HACK", or whatever. I mean, I used to do those things when I was younger, learned alot, but I simply don't have the time for that anymore and it shouldn't be required.
That's the whole point: these things should be the default, rather than requiring you to waste two weekends fixing a product you just purchased.
skittleson 18 hours ago [-]
You can buy pre-flashed hardware such as Martin Jerry switches with Tasmota on it (OSS). Which is what i recommend for people trying their best to avoid tinkering.
augment_me 1 days ago [-]
Please please please use your first draft or refine it yourself without LLMs.
I managed to get to:
The cloud is the weak link
- No internet, no problem. ...
---
If you are writing for other machines to ingest it, whatever. But if you are writing for people it for me at least signals that you don't really care about the message that you want to get across, and are fine with a watered down LLM average.
skittleson 1 days ago [-]
got it, the first draft was a set of rough notes but i can clean up today.
solarpunk_enthu 20 hours ago [-]
There is a growing body of evidence that people prefer ai generated text when its not labeled as ai generated. However given the same text with ai generated label, all of the sudden people prefer human written text. Just a fun fact about our human biases towards "made by ai" disclosure.
outworlder 17 hours ago [-]
I do not know how accurate that is. Assuming it is true, I think it's a similar phenomenon that happens with CGI.
Tell people it's CGI, they won't be enthusiastic about it. But tell them it's "practical effects" and they will absolutely love it. Even when the movie has even more CGI than average... they will still praise it, and will even praise the CGI scenes they failed to identify as computer generated.
bigstrat2003 9 hours ago [-]
I can't claim to be able to detect LLM writing with 100% accuracy, but when I do notice it, it's very off-putting. Some claim that's because it's bad writing and that I would be fine with a higher-quality generated text, but that isn't true. I dislike LLM writing purely because it's generated by a machine, not because it's bad (though the bad quality does make it more jarring). In my opinion, handing other people something that a machine generated for you and asking them to read it is extremely disrespectful. I want to read what the human wrote, imperfections and all, because humans have intrinsic value that makes their work matter to me. The product of a machine, on the other hand, is just a facsimile trying to appear like a human made it, and that holds no interest at all to me no matter how good the content would be were it man made.
augment_me 19 hours ago [-]
Please point me to this growing body of evidence
skrebbel 4 hours ago [-]
I mean if you run this as the usual social psychology experiment you already know what answer you'll get right? Pay 20 college students a couple bucks to review a set of texts, some human written, some AI written, and score how much they "liked" each text. Make the texts representative (ergo half the human texts are fucking awful, all the AI texts are, well, AI texts), and there you go, evidence! People actually prefer AI writing!
Or, of course, make the human texts excellent blog posts that fit the readers' area of expertise and there you go, evidence! People hate AI writing! The HN hivemind was right all along!
socalgal2 14 hours ago [-]
was your comment written by an LLM to try to justify itself :p
I'd like to see this evidence. I have very limited time and attention. LLMs are usually used to take the user's prompt and flower it up to 10x to 100x fluff. Just give me the prompt.
59percentmore 24 hours ago [-]
I will be happy when this genre of whining fades away. Everyone has suddenly turned into the most obnoxious 7th grade English teacher imaginable. "I wanted to like your ideas, but you used lines from the reading assignment without quotes and 3 sentences had dangling participles. Plagiarism and grammar offenses, straight to jail."
If you're personally getting a headache from reading AI writing, all this does is transfer that headache to the rest of us. Thanks. /s
ricardobeat 23 hours ago [-]
It is not about the grammar though, that's just proof. It's about the overwhelming feeling that whoever "wrote" the piece hasn't read it at all - so why should you?
skittleson 23 hours ago [-]
i did draft it and i'm still getting better at the over zealous llm auto corrections. i dont like some of the phrasing either. i am actively cleaning it up and i do appreciate the feedback since there is value in refining my process.
MattJ100 6 hours ago [-]
I appreciate it! I am another person would have read more of your post, but also stopped after too many instances of "LLM voice" ( https://martinfowler.com/bliki/LLM-Voice.html ). It's nothing personal, and I agree with your post's premise (I run HA and local-only myself) and love that you are spreading the word for others to learn about this important aspect of technology. I just don't want to spend my valuable time reading machine output, and I'm evidently not alone.
By all means, pass it through an LLM for review if you really want, but you don't need to fix all the issues it finds, and you shouldn't let it remove the personality from your text by rewriting things. Because they will eagerly do that.
I would much rather read a post with a human voice - don't be afraid to just do it :)
wallst07 12 hours ago [-]
No, I just think that the author hasn't figure out the anti-LLM slop skills that are easy to fool anyone now.
So you are just signaling that you aren't reading specific types of LLM language that you can detect, but not all of them.
dofm 24 hours ago [-]
> I will be happy when this genre of whining fades away. Everyone has suddenly turned into the most obnoxious 7th grade English teacher imaginable.
I will not be happy because we will be lost as a culture when we give up on this.
augment_me 23 hours ago [-]
The issue is about moving the burden of verification to the reader.
Its like you went to a potluck and brought a salad with you, you just closed your eyes and threw some things from the fridge together without thinking, it's all mixed together now and you don't know if something was old/moldy.
You are proud and happy that you brought a contribution, and you feel like your responsibility/duty ends there while the people who want to eat it have to be careful and fish things out, or just avoid it because they can't be sure if it was old or not.
Natural language is a non-verifiable domain due to the ambiguity of the intent, so we will never get away from this issue in LLM-land. You can't know intent of the writer unless they wrote it themselves.
ryandrake 23 hours ago [-]
"This is written by AI" has become the new "First Post!" The complainers might as well just run an automated bot that posts it to every HN article, to save them the trouble of typing.
dofm 22 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the reason we might as well is because there's so much slop.
I think it interesting that people are more upset about the complaint than the cause of the complaint.
If this place — a place where people are supposed to be sharing interesting things for techies and geeks — gives up on complaining about thoughtless nonsense, its culture dies.
ryandrake 15 hours ago [-]
To me it's like complaining that the site hijacks the scroll bar or has annoying cookie popups. Yes, we all hate it. Yes, web sites shouldn't do it. Yes, it's something that should be pushed back on... But complaining about it adds nothing to the conversation.
I used to complain when web sites had huge whitespace margins on the left and right side of the text. I hate that! But most web sites do it, and complaining about it here accomplishes nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
ben-schaaf 5 hours ago [-]
> Yes, it's something that should be pushed back on...
How do you envision that pushback if it's not people complaining about it?
augment_me 14 hours ago [-]
Well in this case the author was understanding enough to acknowledge this and redo the post, so you its hard to claim that it didnt have any effect.
dofm 14 hours ago [-]
It’s like that. You are conflating minor niggles about poor quality with something more profound.
1shooner 24 hours ago [-]
Isn't this just whining about whining?
59percentmore 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. It's an emotional labor hot potato. At the count of three, everyone take care of their own damn feelings.
adammarples 24 hours ago [-]
It's not missing quotes, it's "i didn't write this at all, I put zero effort into it, I don't know what it says, it may be made up". Claude is good for code, terrible at prose, it boggles my mind that people use it to write PR descriptions, let alone their own personal thoughts.
wallst07 12 hours ago [-]
Claude will write a PR desc way better than humans if prompted correctly.
bigstrat2003 9 hours ago [-]
No it won't. At best, it can be on par with a human, but not better. A PR description isn't remotely hard to write.
tzs 18 hours ago [-]
> It's not missing quotes, it's "i didn't write this at all, I put zero effort into it, I don't know what it says, it may be made up"
In this case the article starts with "AI;DR: I wrote the first draft, AI helped me edit and rewrite it, and I made the final pass. The rules, setups, and talks are my own" so none of that applies.
mahboi 23 hours ago [-]
Knowing a long doc is AI-written, you aren't going to read it either.
wiremine 4 hours ago [-]
If you're interested in this topic, Stacey Higginbotham at Consumer Reports has done a lot of great reporting on this subject:
The local only requirement has always been a very strong reason I've never gotten around to dabbling in home automation in any serious way. All the stuff at most department stores phone home as far as I can tell. The research investment or other frigging about (e.g.: some fiddly method to flash Tasmota) has left me reluctant.
But I was looking at a couple of spare RPis I had laying around and decided to whack Home Assistant on one, just to take a look. I've now decided to dip my toe a bit further and ordered a Zigbee USB adapter, some Zigbee based buttons and reed switches, plus a couple of Matter based power switches which I hope will all work happily.
I'll also need to setup an IOT VLAN in my Openwrt router. (Not a networking guy, so also fiddly!)
Until now, my home automation endeavours have consisted of:
- A red, flashing LED glued into the ceiling near the front door that is connected to a reed switch to tell when the garage door is open.
- A light switch¹ which I managed to flash Tasmota onto so I can switch the lounge room lights on or off from the TV remote.
- An ultrasonic distance sensor that sits on top of my monitor that can tell when I'm sitting in front of my computer². It pauses the music and resumes when I leave and come back. It also nags me if I've been in front of the computer too long.
¹ I see no value in automated light bulbs. I want automated light switches. Unfortunately Australian electrical certification standards are something of a bear that make this difficult.
> AI;DR: I wrote the first draft, AI helped me edit and rewrite it, and I made the final pass. The rules, setups, and talks are my own.
I like that disclaimer. Looks like a good way to declare AI content.
tehlike 24 hours ago [-]
1. Buy zigbee/zwave
2. Prefer things you can flash tasmota if zigbee/zwave is not possible.
2. Maybe use eMudhra for mitm and flash the unsupported devices.
skittleson 23 hours ago [-]
"eMudhra" lol, joke aside, i think there is value capturing leaving your network to see what it could be sending. i know its possible on some devices but can be pretty hard from my understanding.
tehlike 17 hours ago [-]
Certainly. Lots of point of failures in a house on that.
everdrive 24 hours ago [-]
We've backed ourselves into a fundamentally silly situation: inventions intended to improve convenience and save time don't do either. They work "OK" then there's an update, and then you need to figure out what changed and how. And then it breaks, and you need to go troubleshoot what still works (if anything) and what no longer works. It's not more convenient, just more complex.
weryberl5 23 hours ago [-]
Apparently that's why the U.S. Navy switched back to physical knobs instead of touchscreens on their ships.
drnick1 23 hours ago [-]
> They work "OK" then there's an update, and then you need to figure out what changed and how.
I don't allow my devices to update their firmware. If the device does not work out of the box, I return it, end of. My car has also been taken off the grid.
iAMkenough 19 hours ago [-]
This is well put, and something I’ve been trying to put into words in regards to the trillion dollar AI industry. The convenience is very tempting, but the complexity doesn’t make it a reassuring dependency for decades into the future.
t43562 8 hours ago [-]
FYI for security type cameras - you don't have to put up with phone-home behaviour if your camera is supported by Thingino https://thingino.com/
This provides an open source firmware. I bought a super cheap Sonoff camera with dreadful software and I was at my wits end until I found out that one could reflash the firmware with open source.
I think that open source is the way - or writing your own. I had a greenhouse last year and everything died in it every year during winter but last year I made a raspberry-pi controller (with a relay) for a simple space heater which would turn on at the very coldest time of the morning and just barely bounce the temperature above 0. I got a nice graph out of it that showed me the effect and I could tune it to be as minimal and cheap with electricity as was safe. That's the first year everything survived and I had a fantastic set of plants in spring before they'd normally have made it.
This year the trouble and strife wanted a driveway and the greenhouse was in the way. So as is normal in life something only works for it to be cancelled.
foo-bar-bat 1 hours ago [-]
The stupidest ideas of all time include thermostats and alarm systems that require WAN access and cell phone apps on the LAN, during extended power outages. Arguably anything essential in your house (or your car, or life in general) that requires an internet connection is broken by design.
bluegatty 11 hours ago [-]
There is hope: customers want this, and if they do, PM's will consider that even if it conflicts with some of the internal strategy of services etc. especially if the services revenues are meagre.
There is intense competition in all these spaces.
What is necessary is a 'name' to the movement. Just like IoT engendered an entire wave - a concept that dissolved into analysts, CEOs, PM, strategy, industry etc. to create it, the 'No Connection Required' could easily do the same if there is a core concept and language to define it.
Analysts will write papers, CEOs will read them, conference panels will be had, Twitter discussions will erupt, PMs want to justify their roadmaps, CEOs want to please the board, new products will launch into the category - and it can happen.
Often these things need an impetus to help spark the change, like security breaches etc. which is 'du jour' right now. A handful of articles about security problems, some big media coverage, and a few breakthrough products at the margins could create the wave. I think there is a lot of legitimacy behind this.
jwr 9 hours ago [-]
This comes at an interesting time: I've been working on building my own home networking solution, based on Bluetooth Mesh. It's amazing how many real-life questions and issues you encounter on the way, especially related to networks and servers being unavailable.
The reason I'm doing that is because seemingly nobody managed to solve this yet and I'm tired of everything out there requiring an internet connection and an account, and (inevitably) becoming a marketing channel for pushing upsells and offers to me.
However, it's definitely not simple, and most of the complexity lies in making sure the system works. Building a Wi-Fi controlled light bulb with a remote is easy. Building a system of lights with switches that works is hard.
yangm97 7 hours ago [-]
Zigbee, matter over thread, zweave… no need to reinvent this wheel again sir.
thatonehack 14 hours ago [-]
KNX is the solution. Look it up. Local first and by default. You own the equipment. It isn’t subject to any one company or manufacturer. You own it and control it!
ThePhysicist 11 hours ago [-]
Came to say the same, weird that so few people know about this. It's not consumer friendly and you need a software license to program it but in the end it's 100 % local, each actor or controller is self-reliant and all devices together form a local network that self-assembles into a working house automation. Program once and keep it running for years or decades. Of course it requires a lot of effort like dedicated wiring, and the stuff isn't exactly cheap.
dns_snek 7 hours ago [-]
Everything you listed + exorbitant prices of KNX devices. Why would I buy into an ecosystem like KNX when Zigbee, Matter/Thread, and local wifi-based devices exist and work well?
One potential benefit is that a wired KNX is unlikely to suffer from any reliability issues but I don't think that's enough to justify everything else for me. The reliance on proprietary software is a deal-breaker for me, I've seen that rug get pulled too many times.
throwaway63467 6 hours ago [-]
For serious smart home automation anything else is a nightmare, KNX is made to industrial standards and can be installed directly in the breaker box, most smart home devices aren’t cheap either I think most hubs cost at least 200-400 USD and you need actors, a large 24 channel KNX actor costs maybe 400 USD and is enough to switch all lights in a small to medium house. And again you program that stuff once and can forget about it, I know installations that have been running for 10 years plus without any kind of maintenance, the tech is designed to last 30-50 years, while most smart home gadgets are just trash after 5-10 years, look at all the defunc and obsolete stuff there is. With that in mind prices are quite reasonable, that stuff is made to last. WiFi and Zigbee devices are so fickle in comparison, I used them a lot as well but at some point the will always randomly reset or lose connectivity and I have to go and figure out what’s wrong, it’s a nightmare. I have around 50-100 switching points and actuators in my house, oh the horror of managing each with zigbee or consumer smart home approaches… KNX just never fails, it uses almost zero power, doesn’t need updates or apps (beyond initial programming), and its actually designed for large use cases so it provides actual programmability not this toy stuff that smart home makers offer, entire hospitals run on it. And I can communicate with it using IP routing, so it’s still fully dynamically controllable e.g. via Home Automation. It’s also not a company but a foundation that is governed by many industry players, they pulled of what Matter tried to do (different focus of course), in serious home automation no one really doubts KNX (there is Loxone but less popular). I don’t care about open source I don’t want to program firmware for my actuators, they expose a clean fully fledged API that I can use as I see fit.
So not sure but having your rug pulled is so much more likely with any of these other standards, KNX has been around since 1999, that’s almost 30 years! Zigbee / Matter devices aren’t open source either, it’s the protocol so no difference to KNX.
RajT88 18 hours ago [-]
Write your congress people. That's the only way this happens - manufacturers don't want to invest more into these products, and they don't want to give you a way of opting out of data collections.
sholladay 12 hours ago [-]
Thread devices have been great for me. It’s a self-healing mesh that survives the internet going down, the hub going down, circuit breakers being tripped, and even a full power outage so long as you can keep one device powered that is capable of being a Thread router (pretty much all devices that don’t rely on their own battery).
Last winter we had a long power outage. So I used a Jackery to power a smart plug as a temporary router and the mesh reconfigured itself and everything just worked. Battery powered door & window sensors, flood sensors, some lights like Eve Flare, and even the Eve Aqua water valve, which meant I could literally water the garden straight from the phone during a power outage (the iPhone has a built-in Thread radio).
Obviously it would be better to have a whole house battery, but that was so cool and took almost zero effort.
laozao 4 hours ago [-]
Maintenance is the real problem, especially when you have devices that speak different protocols (Zigbee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth).
That’s probably why manufacturers prefer to keep users in their own ecosystems.
skittleson 1 days ago [-]
Author here. This is ten years of home automation rules, led by one: nothing core should depend on a vendor's server. Setup core is Tasmota, MQTT and Node-RED on a Pi. I've given this talk a few times and started working on a third for the agentic era. What's the most pointless internet dependency you've found in a device?
tomcatfish 1 days ago [-]
:( Your notes are probably more fun to read than the generic AI voice. Your actual notes are fun, but seeing the ~extra cruft from an AI writer in every line irritated me enough to quit before the end.
diggernet 1 days ago [-]
Love your rules.
My personal situation imposes even stricter versions of your #1 and #2:
1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
2. Smart functionality must not remove dumb functionality.
As one example: having a physical switch that controls a light and the switch can be operated by automation is good. Having automation control a light and the switch just tells automation what to do is bad.
This does make things hard sometimes. For instance, your sprinkler controller doesn't pass that bar. In fact the only one I've found so far that has a local API for automation plus full "dumb" on-device control (no Wi-Fi, no app) is RainMachine, and they are gone. If only OpenSprinkler hardware had a touch screen for local UI.
wolrah 23 hours ago [-]
> 1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
This is one of the reasons I love Zigbee, the device network is entirely independent of my computer network, can not directly communicate to the internet in any way, and every device I've put on the network so far can be configured to directly communicate with other devices so basic functionality remains operational even if the controller goes down.
For example, in my living room I have a Lutron Aurora dimmer dial locking a standard switch in the on position, then plugged in to the outlet that switch would normally control is a Leviton dimmer module. Both connect to the network controlled from a PoE Zigbee dongle, but have been directly paired as well so pressing the button on the dial makes it directly tell the dimmer module to turn on, rotation commands are sent direct, etc.
The controller also receives these commands when it's active and can add to the functionality for inputs like double-click, but if it's down the basic functionality still works entirely as a normal person would expect. You walk in to the room and see a knob on a switch plate, you turn the knob and the light brightness increases regardless of the state of the internet, my home server, or even my network as a whole.
The other major advantage compared to Matter/Thread is that it's not IP based so it's impossible for any Zigbee device to ever have a cloud dependency. No matter how much some marketing dingus might want to, it can not be ruined.
diggernet 12 hours ago [-]
I haven't done any direct pairing yet, but Zigbee certainly rocks. Everyone is pushing Matter and Thread, but with the basic premise of devices being globally addressable, I just have no confidence of being in control of them.
wolrah 2 hours ago [-]
Agreed.
I'm a strong proponent of everything-over-IP in an ideal world, and love the fact that Matter mandates IPv6 which forced a lot of embedded vendors to finally support it, but the IoT vendors have demonstrated that if they're given an internet connection they WILL abuse it to lock you in to their platform.
Matter over Thread is nice because it functionally provides an "IoT VLAN" by default and can only reach the internet or even the LAN through a gateway, which can be fully controlled by the user making it the best of both worlds.
As for Matter over WiFi, for the reason in the first paragraph I've maintained a rule of not buying WiFi IoT devices unless the device has a real need for direct access to the internet or high-speed data from the LAN to do what I want it to do, and Matter doesn't change that. It is nice though that hypothetically I could have a Matter-over-Thread switch cause a WiFi device to do something directly without needing to go through Home Assistant.
WalterBright 1 days ago [-]
The best devices have a local web interface so you can control them with your computer (like how you control your router).
Unfortunately, almost no lan connected devices sport such an interface.
akifbayram 23 hours ago [-]
There’s a pretty active ecosystem of ESP32 projects for HVAC systems. I’ve been working on a few that add Apple Home and Matter support with a local web interface for basic and advanced features. The web interface exposes things Apple Home or Matter protocols don’t represent well. Vane positions, different modes (dry, fan only), equipment diagnostics, remote sensor control, and even peer to peer communication for fully offline control (no WiFi needed). Plus it gets me a control path independent of the home automation stack. There’s a lot you can put on the device itself these days.
With another project, based on the ESP32-S3, I was able to cram grafana style scrubbable charts, full activity log, refrigerant circuit diagram, equipment topology, etc. I'm pretty excited for the ESP32-S31 since it's a nice jump up in performance.
diggernet 12 hours ago [-]
Local web interfaces are great, yes. And it's pretty cool for me when devices have them. But they don't meet the no network requirement for people around me. Gotta have direct control of things. I mean, the landscaper isn't going to connect and use a web browser to adjust the sprinklers.
kefabean 19 hours ago [-]
Shelly switches are great for this. For example, I have one behind a regular wall light switch for the front porch. The physical wall switch always toggles, but the local on-device script turns it on (if it’s not on) at sunset, and off (if it’s on) at 10:30pm. All configurable from the local web server. Only needs ntp (your choice) in case of restart after power failure.
MostlyStable 1 days ago [-]
I tried to stick to this philosophy, specifically the part about it working even if my local automation server is down, for a long time. But I finally found an automation case where I wanted functionality where I could not simultaneously have the functionality and have the switch continue working when the server was off.
Specifically, I wanted the switch to turn on different lights depending on the time of day. In the evenings in early morning I wanted it to turn on the dimmer floor lamps, and during the day, I wanted it to turn on the brighter Center room light. This was not possible without turning the switch from a light turning on device, to an automation activating device.
I thought really long and hard about if I was worth the trade off, and in the end I decided that my automation server was only likely to be down for significant periods of time if the power was out and the lights weren't working anyways. If I run into a situation where this becomes a problem for me, I'll reconsider my decision. Which is a great thing about the local control. If I make a decision that I don't like I can just change it.
diggernet 12 hours ago [-]
There are some things that just don't have a dumb equivalent. I haven't run into any of those yet, but it's early days. At least having the one light not working for a while is probably not a disaster.
1dontnkow_ 18 hours ago [-]
That's some good rules but if most products arent like that or these products with your requirements are more expensive, then is it really "OK"? This is a real big issue and isnt a technical one. Its not about if you have some obscure alternative or can hack it away in a weekend. The point is that 99% of home appliacnes or whatever, dont need a server or any concept of cloud or its jsut a feature which you turn on and off and nothing much changes besides backup or such. Also surely accounts or connecting your email isnt needed either.
WalterBright 1 days ago [-]
I've bought multiple internet radios over the decades. The demise of them is always its dependency on a remote server which enables setting which stations you want to listen to.
The remote server always goes away after a couple years go by, and the radio is only capable of playing the stations that were set as presets. Then the preset radio stations go offline, or the URLs for them change.
skittleson 23 hours ago [-]
same story as a meat thermometer someone told me about. the hardware outlives the server and still stops working. At least with opensource projects, if they are no longer maintained, its possible to fork and keep they going. hardware can be tough unless the device's firmware can be updated.
guhcampos 1 days ago [-]
This is absolutely great stuff, but I think I caught you red-handed there. Alexa Routines break your fundamental rule!
skittleson 1 days ago [-]
Alexa is really convenient. i still think my rules still follow as long as core systems are still controllable offline. Which I really try to achieve through use of tablet on the wall (local wifi is still offline access in my head)
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
Basically any appliance is completely ridiculous to require an internet connection imo. When are you going to need to use a stove or dishwasher without being home? What value do you actually get from having a smart fridge that you can view analytics about from your phone?
skittleson 1 days ago [-]
the only useful thing about a smart fridge is whether if it fails.... i hope it would make a noise. One trick i used was a cheap ble temp sensor in the fridge that would report to the BLE adapter of a tasmota device that sends mqtt messages to grafana. then i would get alerts if it was open or something broken. happened a few times!
wongarsu 23 hours ago [-]
My non-smart fridge makes annoying noises when the door is open too long, and slightly less annoying noises the first time you open it after a power cut causes it to get too warm (I believe it depends on interior temp when the power comes back on?). It might make noises when it breaks in other ways, that thankfully hasn't become relevant yet
I guess connecting to home automation would be useful for a fridge that's sufficiently out of the way that you might not hear it. But for the fridge in my kitchen the noises emitted by the fridge itself are enough for me
virgoerns 8 hours ago [-]
I'm even stricter. Devices, especially critical ones must work without any network at all. I must be able to turn on the lights or start HVAC when my server is down. So, all critical devices must have some kind of physical button that turns them on/off. This way, if it's winter and both me and disks on my NAS are dead, my family won't freeze to death while waiting for serviceman to come and replace switch in the heater.
yndoendo 23 hours ago [-]
This is why I hate the IoT (Internet of Things) it should be CoT (Communication of Things).
That speaker linked to your phone should not need an internet proxy to communicate. It should allow for direct USB communication so it can share one power source. It should allow for Bluetooth communication so it can be in a different close location.
CoT should follow the rule of nature and take the shortest path by default.
What is better for society? The LLM modal running in a local environment or the one running on a data center that can be easily taken out via a power outage, fiber cut, national disaster, or a kinetic weapon?
I rather that LLM modal used at the hospital be ran locally and keep servicing patients even though the original data center was demolished by mother nature.
yason 23 hours ago [-]
It should have been Intranet of Things.
imnotr0b0t 6 hours ago [-]
The radio one is wild. The station moves to a new URL and a perfectly good radio has no way to play it. Makes me wonder how how many "works offline" devicies you could actually set up again after a factory reset if the company shut down its servers.
thibsrn 1 days ago [-]
I totally agree, and if you asked consumers, most would care and prefer for their smart home devices to communicate as little as possible with the outside world. And yet the market keeps offering invasive products, the discrepancy is frustrating.
There should be a system like the nutritional information on food and beverage products, as time went by most people read those and choose accordingly, which then incentivize companies to adapt their offering. We could imagine something similar which would define clearly the capabilities of the hardware or software sold, clearly labelled on the physical package or on the online shop with an easy classification for consumers to understand.
c-linkage 24 hours ago [-]
I disagree. If you asked any Random Customer they don't care if it's local first. They want it to work immediately with as little set up as possible and they want to access it from their phone.
If they could get away without even having a Wi-Fi router and just use their cellular plan they would. Why? Because there are plenty people who are happy with just whatever internet they get on their cell phone and don't want to spend extra for a router and an ISP
Gigachad 9 hours ago [-]
They don’t know what “local first” means. But if you asked them “Would you like your lightbulbs to send data to a tech company or would you like them to not use the internet at all” I think you’d find all of them would prefer the no internet option.
With offline solutions like the ikea smart home stuff you can access it from your phone with even less setup than the wifi based options.
snarf21 21 hours ago [-]
This is the real problem. The non-HN crowd just wants to turn on the tv for the dog from work and watch them. They don't really care about security because they assume it must be good.
skittleson 23 hours ago [-]
home assistant's iot class labels (scosman posted in this thread) are pretty close to that, at least for integrations.
notorandit 5 hours ago [-]
I wish they could work without the internet.
But manufacturers want our data harvested through those devices *and* your mobile phone app.
And they want a way to force you to pay for the service.
So we basically pay to let them spoil us.
cadamsdotcom 16 hours ago [-]
Smart home devices should stay on the shelf.
All this life-force expended calling for the market to provide something no normie wants. If you go no-cloud you get to also manage a fragile controller device, and you have to spend extra time researching what to buy and also spend more time when the devices break (which happens an order of magnitude more often than non-smart equivalents) and then your most basic home devices need to reboot for a firmware update just when you go to use them?
Get back from vacation whoops controller died nothing works?
Go to work whoops controller's hard drive filled up with logs now it doesn't work family home is freezing, tech support time? Better cancel that client demo!
How many hand-lightswitch-flips and thermostat hand-adjustments could you have done in the time you spent on this?
The only thing that'll ever make smart crap worth it, is fixing the law - and enforcing the laws that are yet to be enacted - so we can trust the companies we buy from.
Our generation is too naive to do that. So it's a couple decades from happening.
Until then, opt out.
amomchilov 14 hours ago [-]
It’s more than just saving time.
It really sucks to finally settle down after a long cold day, snuggle up all warm in bed, almost asleep, and think “shit, did I lock the door?” Then you get up, lose “the sleepy”, walk down the stairs only to realize you had it lock, after all.
GJim 8 hours ago [-]
Technology isn't a cure for OCD.
raxy 4 hours ago [-]
I can't tell whether this is genuinely serious or not. This isn't a problem for technology to solve. Just lock your door whenever you get home (or try to find ways to resolve the OCD that you may have if this is always the case).
skittleson 14 hours ago [-]
that's the failure i design around. if the pi dies, the switches and thermostat still work by hand. you lose the automation until the backup is restored but i'm okay with that.
wallst07 12 hours ago [-]
Can you enumerate all your hobbies or post something you're interested in so I can write an equally dismissive post on what you find interested in filling your free time?
10 hours ago [-]
CGamesPlay 16 hours ago [-]
Well, the post did say, “Don’t remove the old way while adding the new one. If someone tapes a wall switch on so a smart bulb keeps power, I skipped this rule.” Which, translating from Claudish I assume means “Light switches should still work”.
skittleson 12 hours ago [-]
I guess I didnt think of that. Not Claude when I wrote it 10 years ago. I dont like removing the old ways of dealing with a device such as a garage door opener on a wall. That should still work while my app version works in home assistant still.
mulderc 22 hours ago [-]
I have always only bought HomeKit compatible smart home devices as those have always worked offline. They also tend to just be much better than the general cheap crap that I see amazon pushing.
joshstrange 20 hours ago [-]
100% agree. Home Assistant is the brain of my smart house and my rule has been, for over a decade now, that all smart devices should fail back to being dumb and anyone in my house should be able to use the house without an instruction manual.
In practice this looks like Z-wave smart switches everywhere for lights so that you can control the light via automation, app, the switch on the wall, or Alexa. They all feed into the same system.
LLMs have made this even easier and removed some of the annoying fiddling I used to do in the past. Now I can open up Claude Code and tell it to build a new automation and it's done in minutes.
Yesterday I realized I left the floodlight on in the backyard by accident, not problem "Claude, create an automation in home assistant to turn off backyard light 5 minutes after I turn it on", done. Could I have created that automation? Yes, I've written countless of them in that past but now I can speak it into existence and, almost more importantly, tweak it with barely any effort at all. If tomorrow I buy a motion sensor I can just ask the LLM to incorporate that, if I want the lights to stay on if X other device is turned on, it's a prompt away.
In the past I would spend a good bit of time writing an automation but when it broke down or my needs changed it was enough friction that I would just give up and turn off the automation rather than take the time to debug and change it. I setup all the motion-activated lights in my house when I first moved in and over the course of a few weeks I tweaked each one as needed with just a short prompt here or there, it felt like living in the future.
skittleson 19 hours ago [-]
the llm/claude part is what my next talk is about. having an agent write and tweak the automations is great as long as the switch on the wall still works when it gets something wrong.
mmmlinux 1 days ago [-]
I wish Insteon had gotten more popular, Back in the day it was easy to get development material to write your own software or build your own devices. I really liked how the stuff all had a decent amount of capability on its own, or you could have a computer attached for more advanced automation. I still use a few Insteon things in my house, Still use a few X10 things for that matter. I really wish they had kept up their local support software.
Brendinooo 21 hours ago [-]
I just went on a little side quest this weekend.
My only IoT device is a motorized chicken door that was acquired on Mac.bid, I think (one of those auction sites for returned goods), and requires some crummy app (SmartLife) that takes up half a gig on my phone.
Long story short, I had to go on a journey that involved creating a Tuya developer account and navigating their terrible website and being panicked at my ability to reconnect the device, but eventually I landed on Homebridge connecting it to Apple Home, and I finally have the control over it that I want. I finally was able to block the device from the Internet in my Deco app.
So...yes! It's finally working without the Internet.
I've always avoided IoT because of terrible software and silos but now that apparently these aren't the barriers they used to be thanks to LLM assistance, I'm more likely to dip my toes in the water.
Johnny555 22 hours ago [-]
Back when I first started automating my home, I didn't feel like messing with Home Assistant and finding server-side hardware that was compatible with it, so I got a Hubitat with Zwave (and a few Zigbee) devices. I keep meaning to look at Home Assistant again, I'm sure it's easier to set up, but the Hubitat has been pretty rock solid and pretty much "set it and forget it", with no cloud dependencies for general automation, it works fine when the internet is down.
Though I did run into a roadblock with my Blueair air purifier and hubitat, so I'll probably run a Home Assistant instance so I can control the Blueair with the HomeAssistant->Hubitat integration.
seabre 21 hours ago [-]
I have been using Hubitat for a very long time with the same personal policy of Zwave and Zigbee only. My setup has been extremely reliable to the point where I have had the same automations running for years at this point and have had no problems.
bronco21016 21 hours ago [-]
I have an electronic “fireplace” that relied on Tuya. Last weekend Claude Code walked me through getting a token from the Tuya dev platform and wrote a homebridge device for me so I can control the device in HomeKit. Gave the fireplace a static IP and firewalled it from the internet.
Pretty amazing the smart parrot can un-China/Cloud something like this in about 20-30 min. Prior to that I was expecting to need an IR blaster to try to control the thing with HomeKit and a complicated setup maintaining state. That’s all just solved now.
harikb 24 hours ago [-]
I will take an even simpler version of this
Smart home devices should not freeze up whenever internet is down. A device like Google Nest should have the minimum decency to allow you to interact with it via local Wifi (which continues un-interrupted). It is fine if half the functionality doesn't work. It is fine if the "AI" doesn't work, but at least allow me to fcking change the temperature manually
Same thing with devices like Google Wifi which freezes up or run hot loops like headless chickens when internet is down.
dare944 23 hours ago [-]
> but at least allow me to fcking change the temperature manually
All Nest thermostats allow that, even the ones that are no longer supported by the Google cloud.
karmakaze 20 hours ago [-]
I can't keep blaming these for-profit companies. We can shame and boycott the worst of them but if their operating environment doesn't change new ones will keep popping up. We have to speak collectively with our wallets or speak up so governments govern practices. It could help if our feeds were more informative than dopamine slot machines so getting that changed is high on the list.
senorqa 19 hours ago [-]
What this post describes is a long forgotten concept of progressive enhancement. A smart switch should provide "smart" functionality on top of "dumb" or rather essential/core functionality of a switch rather than only provide "smart" functionality without a fallback to the core functionality when e.g.. Internet is down
ergocoder 15 hours ago [-]
I built some personal projects that involved devices like this.
I have every incentive to keep it local. Yet I connect it to a host on the internet. It turns out that it is convoluted and less reliable to have local servers and stuff....
skittleson 14 hours ago [-]
fair, local is more work up front. if you used well established projects, i would beg to differ. I've been running on one these raspberry pis for 5 years with just minimal updates. the tasmotas get firmware update when needed but often rare. I think i had to remove one after 8 years but so far so good. i expect the other 20 to keep going for another 10 years at this point.
nukanse 20 hours ago [-]
Home appliances should use open standards, allowing anyone to use any software to control them, including their firmware.
f1shy 23 hours ago [-]
ANYTHING that does not absolutely need to be online, like looking at current news, current weather or such, should work without internet. Especially appliances. The more difficult it is to change it, the less dependent should it be of any cloud infrastructure. Anything built in the walls, must not depend on internet.
Same for car functions, if a car should be good for 10 to 20 years.
ghaff 23 hours ago [-]
I recently had a pretty extensive home renovation don after a kitchen fire--which din't have a lot direct damage but the rouse was pretty much cleared out. I pretty much didn't have any direct "smart" stuff. A few appliances are probably enableable but they aren't.
bix6 1 days ago [-]
How does the WiFi wall switch work? If WiFi goes down you can still click a light on and off? This is tempting as I have to leave all my smart lights on rn but do I really need to rip out all my light switches? Ugh.
Also anyone found the fix to smart bulbs constantly “updating”?
varenc 1 days ago [-]
I just put devices like that on a wifi without internet access. Occasionally I'll need to grant internet access for setup, and then it goes back to being denied. Can't update if you can't download updates.
bix6 23 hours ago [-]
D’oh didn’t even think of that thank you!
hamdingers 23 hours ago [-]
Yes it does, smart switches have buttons that control the relay directly.
Also aside from maintenance there's no reason your WiFi should go down, an inexpensive UPS can keep it up for hours in a power outage. Even if it can't access the outside world, local routing works fine.
simultsop 1 days ago [-]
not all networking has to be routed publicly. many can still operate locally. the catch is, they want your subscription to them, when your devices are required to route publicly.
chaps 1 days ago [-]
Use an infrared switch.
kach_app 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
skittleson 23 hours ago [-]
yes. mine are martin jerry switches running tasmota and the button drives the relay directly, so with wifi down it's just a normal light switch. wifi only adds the remote control. you'd swap the switch itself, the wiring stays.
alexcano 24 hours ago [-]
ev chargers are the worst case of this imo. a lot of them only do the off-peak schedule through the vendor app, so if the cloud goes away you end up charging at peak. on some time-of-use plans that's ~$500 a year for the same car
pzlarsson 23 hours ago [-]
Control over local api was pretty much my only requirement when buying an ev charger, ended up with one from go-e and it works very well.
wtch98 24 hours ago [-]
Mine is based on a vestel evc04, and by default has a cloud option with some company saying "we'll do it, move your energy through us" etc.
You can connect it to any evcc endpoint like a local homeassistant, or simply leave it on all the time.
I'm not happy with guaranteeing high availability on my HA install yet (it's not as simple as my pihole which is just a simple vrrp address over the two hosts) though so I just leave it in "always on" mode, and use the timer on the car to come on at 2310 (offpeak starts at 2300 on my tarrif).
I'd be surprised if a charger is genuinely only available via an cloud service, but from asking my neighbours if it doesn't have "an app" they wouldn't buy it.
I'd rather have an API I could poll/poke for the charger rather than set the charger to connect to me, but alas it doesn't have one.
balderdash 17 hours ago [-]
The Eve home products seem to be a nice compromise between usability and privacy / independence- I just wish they had a broader portfolio.
acd 23 hours ago [-]
Please stop connected devices smart. Analog offline are better in other aspects.
microtonal 23 hours ago [-]
There are many great Zigbee devices. You can use them as dumb devices or as connected devices that are fully local and privacy-preserving.
These days I mostly don't buy it if it's not Zigbee (unless I make it myself with ESPHome). Just this week we bought two panel heaters (for two rooms that need a little heating because our heat pump is mostly used for heating the living room and kitchen). They work great over Zigbee and we can have some useful automations (like automatically switching off when forgotten and there is no one in the room for more than 10 minutes).
oculetteai 21 hours ago [-]
As someone making a smart device, I can attest, it's not even that hard too, just make an MCP server so someone can use it with their local AI
jmyeet 3 hours ago [-]
I've waited for Internet-connected devices to get better but honestly, the experience continues to be terrible. A few anecdotes:
1. I bought some highly-rated smart plugs on Amazon. They make their own Wifi network to connect to to configure. Never got them to work. They're sitting in a box somewhere;
2. I bought a new LG washer/dryer that happened to be Internet connected. I tried to connect them. They simply wouldn't connect to my home network. After some hours I figured it was a DHCP issue, possibly them expecting an address in a certain range? They just timed out with a meaningless error. I could get them to work over a mobile hotspot though; and
3. I've bought a couple of Sonos devices over the years and I honestly don't think I'd buy another. I used to try and stream themed "radio" stations over a variety of services (eg iHeartRadio). What would inevitably happen is there would be a minor glitch in the network and it would stop playing. I'd have to manually restart it. Why can't the software do this? I don't know if this is the fault of Sonos or the third-party integration. It's probably the latter. Either way, it just left me with the impression that this is not a polished product.
Also, Sonos at that time had to create and use its own 2.4GHz network even though it was Ethernet connected. Why? It's just... lazy.
As bearing as I am on AI in general, I actually expect this to get better with the likes of REA [1]. People are going to make better versions of what is objectively horrible software that the companies have no interest in fixing or improving.
I follow some smart home integrators (ie people who do this for a living) and the general advice I get is:
1. Use Ubiquiti for APs, cameras and locks; and
2. Use Lutron for lighting where possible. There are 20+ year old Lutron systems that still work perfectly today.
All the common consumer brands (eg Philips Hue) are just toy junk, basically.
If you accept and thus consented to a computer, or a device with a computer in it, without first verifying you can write to the media of its software, control the boot process, and will have sufficient access to that software, you get what you consented to.
And, you deserve it.
drnick1 23 hours ago [-]
Not sure why people are downvoting you, this is true.
My home automation rules are even simpler: home automation devices are firewalled off the Internet. If something does not work because of this, it gets returned, period. I do my research and only buy Zigbee or WiFi devices that can be hacked, so I haven't had problems so far. I also don't want any "smart" fridge, washing machine, TV, etc.
23 hours ago [-]
thefz 20 hours ago [-]
AFAIK Shelly devices require internet only if you do require its usage, and are happy with local IPs or bluetooth connections otherwise. I have two, driving the irrigation system, that once configured were locked in a basement with no signal and are still to this day doing their scheduled task.
kefabean 19 hours ago [-]
Exactly, I firewall them off in their own vlan with only ntp (of my own choosing) to connect to.
bill10 12 hours ago [-]
Use a open-source LLM model locally
amelius 23 hours ago [-]
Anything "smart" should work without the internet. Including Claude Code.
schobi 5 hours ago [-]
I know this is an exotic opinion... but just look at commercial installation. There you will see automation, but no IOT gadgets, no home assistant and no internet thermostats.
The answer is KNX. This system gives local only building automation, from lights, automatic blinds and temperature monitoring. I've had this for over 10 years now and there is still a large group of manufacturers with compatible devices. Closing the blinds on the windows where too much sun is shining in - that should not require a full computer running.
But I know... Unattractive due to upfront installation cost... And no business model to sell disposable gadgets to the consumer, no vendor lock in ... Boooo
oever 4 hours ago [-]
They should also work over wires. The wireless signals can have interference and mesh protocols like Zigbee are basically a pet you have to keep an eye on. I've yet to find a good wired home automation system. I think PoE in all the walls might be a direction or otherwise USB PD in all the wall. Or something older and simpler that has gone out of fashion.
kebman 23 hours ago [-]
I don't know about you, but whenever someone calls something "smart" I usually know in advance that it's anything but. If you have to call it "smart" just so people will find it useful, then you usually know they've been sold a lie. I mean, there are exceptions, but most of these things usually make easy things harder, or it takes longer to get things long with them due to some latency, than just using some old school, manual, analog technology. Usually, but not always. Please enlighten me on where I'm wrong. Love to hear it!
Hugsbox 22 hours ago [-]
Kind of like "smart" fridges... what's so smart? My fridge I just plug in, and it works. What could be smarter than that?
hunter-gatherer 23 hours ago [-]
I live in such a more simple reality then a lot of people whom posts like this resonate with. I literally have two things hooked to the Internet in my house: my phone and laptop. Everything in my life functions fine, and I have just as much free time as most people as far as I can tell, and that's without a dishwasher. I do have a good assortment of scrubbers though...
skittleson 3 hours ago [-]
Home automations can buy safety, security, and time. I won't buy new stuff that often (I like to use old or repurchase equipment when possible). However I do like to save money and home automations have saved me a by auto on/off lights and fans. Scheduling waterings but not when rain is likely to happen. Turning on attic fan ONLY if the expected time will be X temp expected. With the power consumption of esp8266/esp32 so little to a light bulb, its worth it to run.
Fnoord 23 hours ago [-]
If it requires internet access, it isn't smart. It is stupid. But for some reason they hijacked the term smart.
There's entire legions of people who consider themselves Christians. But I notice very little, if any, compassion for those in need: the neighbors, the ill, the refugees, or even the children.
Same with DoD -> DoW, and AI -> super intelligence. I wish I was making those up, alas.
hypfer 1 days ago [-]
I'm not really sure what this is doing on HN tbh, as it reads like 2018 entry-level IoT talking points, but it's 2026 now, but regardless of that.
__
I suspect that for resilience reasons alone, we might see a shift towards connecting less stuff to the public internet.
Not because consumers would complain. No one cares about consumers - including consumers themselves.
But because of the threat to the stability of the system, internet connected stuff poses.
The fridge meltdowns are an example of that, but you can equally stun an enemy economy by just messing with the smart lights in people's homes, as it is the people who work.. or don't because they're tired.
adrianN 23 hours ago [-]
What would motivate companies to this shift? Some kind of tax or regulation? Companies don’t care about resilience, they care about selling things.
hypfer 22 hours ago [-]
The state. With the power of a state.
Regulation, taxes, law. Can also just take over their business.
Oh and they have military.
The state can do literally anything it wants.
It just often shouldn't, because a lot of escalative actions have quite the collateral.
But you don't need any of those to steer here.
innocent_name 23 hours ago [-]
I couldn't connect a matter device to my Home assistant via an Android app on GrapheneOS because it relies on Google Play Services. So much for the open standard!
ferguess_k 24 hours ago [-]
If they can work without the internet, how TF do I scrape your data and sell it for a hefty profit? I made the equipment cheap so that everyone wants to buy it!
Oh I also have a under-the-table contract with some intelligence community for some backdoors. You know it's a lot more expensive for them to actually send someone to test physical security, than just pay a contractor to sit before the desk collecting data, right? RIGHT??
xlayn 23 hours ago [-]
EVERYTHING SHOULD WORK WITHOUT THE INTERNET.
Yes somethings are purely internet and that's fine, but YOUR DEVICES, your phone, smart things, tvs, gadgets, anything that runs on something that executes code should be made to work if the server upstream goes kaput and then offer open apis to make them work.
I have been lucky with the wired cameras and the tplink light switches that there is a python implementation to work with them, kasa it's called.
EVERYTHING connected to internet in order to work is subject to enshitification, down to your friking playstation where sony decided to just remove your movies, or no more dvds.
WHY THE SOLAR PANELS HAVE TO CONNECT TO INTERNET TO WORK? and then friking claude is too "pure" to write a mock for whatever they are contacting so 40k$ dolars of hardware can keep working...
What a time to be alive! LOL
robotburrito 20 hours ago [-]
Maybe I don’t understand this stuff because I live in a small SF apartment and not a McMansion. But this stuff just feels like it would over complicate my life for no real gain.
saidinesh5 15 hours ago [-]
I think some of this stuff helps even without a big house..
My current top use cases:
1. Smart locks that let you remotely unlock and automatically close and lock the door - you never have to worry about the keys/security of your home.
2. Automatically turning off devices when not needed. (Eg. When no one is at home, turn off all the lights and fans. Automatically turn off the water heater 10 minutes after anyone turning it on). This really cut our power bill because people just forget these devices after turning them on.
3. Scheduled actions and reminders - automatically water the plants daily for a minute in the morning, automatically turn on the water heater at 8 am during weekdays etc . The plant watering thing is very useful when going on vacation etc...
raxy 4 hours ago [-]
The worry I might get from questioning if I left the front door of my home unlocked is equal to the worry I would have that my smart lock or the app linked to it is malfunctioning and giving a false positive.
My solution has been to do a little dance when locking the front door so the moment stands out a bit more in my memory, personally.
mrmlz 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah and all the window lights etc. They are on when you wake up, they turn off when its bright outside etc.
Also seeing if you left windows open at a glance etc.
elyobo 19 hours ago [-]
Sounds interesting but bounced off the claudespeak.
nautilus12 5 hours ago [-]
Lawl. Dream on. Would you like to subscribe to our scissor subscription service? First you need to download our scissor app and connect your bank accounts. Be sure to opt in to marketing emails.
kinabalu76 24 hours ago [-]
everything I buy will work without internet for sure, and all of the above is much better with Home Assistant at the helm controlling things (only issue is the constant updates which you have to keep on top of)
born-jre 20 hours ago [-]
I had a chuckle when I saw “ AI;DR “ nice will use it.
skittleson 19 hours ago [-]
i like it... it shows that im being kind to the ppl that dont want to read AI assisted blog posts. i know that is big deal here so i least tell the truth about it.
hinkley 21 hours ago [-]
I would be fine with an open spec for long term maintenance even if the company goes defunct. Or pulls the sort of bullshit Google did with Nest. Anyone involved in that who might be reading this can kindly go fuck themselves with a chainsaw. Twice.
And if I were the king of the forest, all medium to large appliances would run a controller board that is pin compatible with either arduino or raspberry pi so that the hobbyist community can refurbish devices that experienced a short. I won’t even make everyone pick a single standard. Two or maybe even three (ESP) are fine as long as we aren’t doing all custom just to count down a timer, run a pump, and sense water levels all at the same time.
Maybe not a space heater but dishwashers for sure. I’m divided stand mixers. Someone more invested could sway me either way.
This would have been a great presentation without the AI prose.
> Below that is the chart from a few real days: 21 opens, with spikes showing when each one happened. Most people skip this part, and it’s the part that tells me whether I left the garage open without opening an app.
seriously?
skittleson 3 hours ago [-]
Fair. Updated. Still working on the over zealous llm rewriting. In the top of the post I do highlight that I wrote it, it was edited by a llm and I took the final pass. I do have a feature where my rough notes will be available over the rewritten AI one. The value is what the post is highlighting which may outweigh your concerns.
teiferer 9 hours ago [-]
Would it not be useful if we as a community could maintain a repository of mocked services that can run locally and provide to the iot devices exactly the responses they expect when "phoning home"? Bonus if the data the iot devices provide is then made available to the local network.
papapin777 11 hours ago [-]
Agree! 100%
dzhiurgis 22 hours ago [-]
And it usually does, but it’s a ton of effort. I have tons of devices, so far things that don’t work is Wyze camera and Mova (Dreame) vacuum. Midea, Tuya, Qingping, Deye, Aqara and bunch of others have Home Assistant integration over LAN and you can cut off WAN access via your router.
skittleson 3 hours ago [-]
Wyze now offers rtsp streams
j45 1 days ago [-]
The smarts to run a smart home should live inside the house like an appliance.
Something anyone can use.
AdrianB1 1 days ago [-]
Software stack: if you don't want to spend too much time tinkering with the software, go for something simple like HomeAssistant with nothing else around and you will be just fine. For most people any software is more hassle than they desire, all the extreme customizations are not really needed. If you feel so special, home automation is not that special, not if you want mass adoption and convenience.
23 hours ago [-]
holoduke 22 hours ago [-]
I recently moved into a new house where I went all in with automating and measuring everything. Every single door and window has a sensor. Every single appliance: switch, light, TV, computer and devices like wasmachines, garage doors, heatpumps, invertors, ovens, air filters is made smart and connected to my home assistant. I never ever saw the ui of home assistant. Everything is done with Claude and it works absolutely perfect. It would be a fulltime job to figure everything out manually.
Also many devices like our heating floor manifold do not come with a build in Ethernet or wifi connector. I extensively used AI to connect an esp directly to its board. Once you got the Rx and tx working, Claude can reverse engineer the data streams and build a driver/integration for home assistant. AI is really super awesome here. Zero need for Cloud based crap like Tuya or smart devices requiring a cloud service account.
chrisjj 23 hours ago [-]
> Nothing core in my house depends on a vendor’s server.
How would you know?
skittleson 19 hours ago [-]
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mystifyingpoi 22 hours ago [-]
You'd cut the access and see.
chrisjj 21 hours ago [-]
And ... how would you know? Faraday cage?
qsfp28 19 hours ago [-]
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micromacrofoot 1 days ago [-]
Unless it's law or AI becomes capable of rooting every device, it will never happen, most hardware gets out of the door with minimally functional software that only covers the immediate business need.
AdrianB1 1 days ago [-]
The internet is not the weak link, the internet is a security nightmare. You don't want a Chinese guy shut you off because all your Tuya devices can be controlled by them. You don't even want a random hacker to set your fridge to heat, like the recent France incidents.
Also, QR codes as a good UX? I like what you are smoking, it is very effective in disconnecting from reality.
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
I think a smart home hub of sorts should be something you can install in any home, like a water heater or an internet router. The hub connects to your wifi and manages all of your smart devices. You register your devices with it using a web interface that is only just like configuring a router
The web interface part would be the really complex piece I think. You would have to have some way for devices to tell it what features they have, so it could dynamically produce the appropriate controls per device
I dunno if this is really feasible to actually build but it's one of the only ways I can think that would allow average non-technical people to do this without having to administrate their own hardware and network settings and such
throwaway219450 1 days ago [-]
You have described Home Assistant. That’s exactly how it works, including offline if you need it and auto discovery of devices on the network.
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
Home assistant would be similar to the software side of things sure
I'm talking about a fully built piece of hardware that comes in every house like plumbing and wiring does
skittleson 1 days ago [-]
my next iteration i talk about migration to home assistant. at the time i started this process HA was very difficult to use and not flexible enough for me. that has changed.
iAMkenough 1 days ago [-]
Home Assistant sells hub devices with various connectivity radios, including the newest one they’re announcing tomorrow.
Cool, I guess I'm not alone in thinking this is a valuable and useful thing
Thanks for sharing this, I had never heard of home assistant before
k0morebi 23 hours ago [-]
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shevy-java 9 hours ago [-]
"I do use some cloud services, mostly Alexa and a few AWS ones. Alexa is just another way to flip a switch."
So he is still dependent on big US corporations. I think the whole
post would be better if he'd manage to really be even more independent.
I hope that 3D printing will reach a stage for that eventually. Once we
can 3D print a 3D printer that can then 3D print almost everything, we
have won.
skittleson 3 hours ago [-]
At time I started the venture there wasn't much I could do to have a voice assistant that was local. That had changed. Alexa is not the primary way to turn a light but it is convient for doing some of the activities like that. Still have the wall switch that turns on the light.
I have a few 3d printers for building parts, enclosures, and even a few circuit boards (one is in the post). I love the idea of a being a ble to fabricate my own components.
GJim 3 hours ago [-]
> Alexa is just another way to flip a switch
I'm not sure installing an Amazon Microphone into my home is a good way to go about this.
(Smart speakers my arse; smart microphones is the proper name for them)
sneak 21 hours ago [-]
Why? The internet is always on, when it’s off, you have bigger problems than your home automation not working.
Frieren 5 hours ago [-]
Read the "Why local" part on the article. It gives reasons.
skittleson 19 hours ago [-]
outages are the small part. the bigger one is the vendor's server going away for good, like the nest api or the internet radios mentioned in this thread. then it's not off for an hour, it's off forever. I also like project like project nomad that are really think about these issues https://www.projectnomad.us/
EGreg 21 hours ago [-]
I absolutely agree. If anything should work without the internet, it's:
1. smart home devices
2. your children's toys
3. your Siri when you ask to find something in your phone
and yet here we are. No internet? Siri can't find anything in your phone.
Oh my favorite is how Spotlight seems to randomly fail to find local files it was easily able to find yesterday, and starts searching the web instead.
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threethirtytwo 1 days ago [-]
Decades ago who would’ve thought that a computer could fit in the palm of your hand.
The future of smart devices is a local LLM running on every single one.
wongarsu 23 hours ago [-]
What use cases do you envision that go beyond the usual simple triggers and conditionals?
I could see using an LLM to set up more complex home automation rules that I am too lazy to set up myself. But for what kind of situations is it useful to have an LLM run the device directly?
mohamedkoubaa 1 days ago [-]
That's way too much RAM to make sense, you could centralized it and run all home devices
wtch98 23 hours ago [-]
The amount of RAM sitting in my house unused today is enourmous compared to the amount of RAM I had available 30 years ago. My 10 year old laptop alone has 32G. That's 1000 times as much RAM as I had in my entire house in 1996, and 200,000 times as much as 1986.
mohamedkoubaa 20 hours ago [-]
Right, so why buy more to put on each peripheral device when its 20x the price and you already have so much
wtch98 8 hours ago [-]
When I first bought memory I would be shocked if an edge device had 4MB of memory, just like I'd be shocked if it had 32G today.
We did have a period of centralised compute/memory/storage and dumb terminals, then this went to the edge, especially with PCs being smart end devices communicating over a dumb network. Then cloud became the fashion and everything centralised again. I hope the fashion goes the other way to more distributed systems, far more resilient.
The specifics of whether a local LLM runs in a lightbulb or a "home hub" is less interesting to me than the soverignty aspects. My fear is that we'll end up with the worst of both worlds, where we have to purchase, look after, and power, the LLM hardware, but it won't work without permission from "the cloud".
hamdingers 23 hours ago [-]
I will never need or want a local LLM running in my light bulbs.
In a moment of weakness, I bought a D-Link wireless (wifi) water detector for the sump pit (it was on clearance for $30); it relied on a D-Link Home cloud service (free) that was closed down a few years ago.
Not wanting to toss it, I repurposed a spare Chromebook 14 that I was going to recycle and turned it into a Alpine monitor for the water detector, which I'm powering from the Chromebook's USB port (if power is lost in a rainstorm, I need to know about it before the sump pit fills up).
An immediate issue was that the D-Link firmware tried to "phone home" every 24 hours and would drop from the local network, since the server was kaput, and I had no clue what response it was expecting from the server to keep it alive. Solution; "reboot" the unit by interrupting USB power (with a Pico and MOSFET) every 23 hours. There's no question that home automation should work without the internet.
Reminds me of a possible apocryphal anecdote I heard about Alan Turing. He loved going on long bike rides, but one day his bike developed a distressing habit of slipping the chain. After the third time it happened, he realized it was due to a broken tooth on both the front and the back gear. He went back home and calculated how many revolutions of the pedals it would take for both broken teeth to line up when they were at the critical part of the rotation, and he built a little mechanical counter that would click on each link in the bike chain, and at the calculated time, a little arm would reach down and clasp the chain, holding it in place long enough for the teeth to re-engage.
He showed the device to his friend, who said "Why didn't you just buy new gears? You could have gotten both for a dime." And Alan replied "Oh, that's clever, I didn't think of that."
A student came up to Von Neumann on campus and decided to prank the great scientist. "Two trains are on the same track 50 miles apart and they hurtle towards each other at 50 mph. As they start, a really fast fly on the nose of one train flies towards th eother at 60mph. When it reaches the other train it immediately flies back to the first, then back to the second, and so on until the fly is crushed in the crash. How far will the fly fly?
Von Neumann thought for a moment, and then replied, "30 miles!" The student grinned. "I thought you'd know this one! The trains take half an hour to hit each other, therefore the fly will fly 30 miles."
Von Neumann started. "I didn't think of that, I summed the series."
———
Source: "The Prisoner's Dilemma" by William Poundstone
https://archive.org/details/prisonersdilemma0000poun
Write a program that reads this sequence and works out which player won the match.
there are multiple ways to compute this but not obvious way is to look at the end of the list and see who scored last point.
Also one train was a boy coming home (stative) and the dog was running
Contactors are built to run giant industrial motors for years, nevermind my little 1/4hp pump.
The way I built it lets my mother bypass it by unplugging the pump from the control box and plugging it right into the wall outlet.
So, hopefully it lasts years. If it doesnt, anyone can bypass it
I need an alarm because I've had a few pumps wear out, and also because I've had the power go out long enough to flood.
Your solution automates something that shouldn't have a computer involved in automating.
That is the worst part: being explicitly designed to fail un-safe. You should be able to declare the unit unfit for the purpose it was sold for and get a full refund unless they open the specs so you can keep the device running as intended using your own resources.
https://github.com/morluto/rea
https://rea.tools
https://github.com/AI4AIResearch/Awesome-REA
https://awesomerea.org/
Do we just need to establish bounties per cloud service target to reverse engineer and publish a spec, copyleft code, and reference architecture? Maybe https://www.fulu.org/ could host the results? Like OpenAI and Anthropic brute forcing math proofs, we can brute force interoperability (imho). Closed systems and tokens go in to the reverse engineering factory, out comes open systems that remain open to all.
https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties
(think in systems)
The moat building behavior of western industry has always been harmful and is now obsolete. It's time to give it up.
Repos could be hosted on https://tangled.org/ on AT Proto infra hosted outside of the US, with snapshots of repos served as torrents with magnet links like https://huggingbay.xyz/
It is an exercise in a distributed code evolution and distribution platform, fueled by LLMs and volunteers. "Build the machine that builds the machine."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42572662 - January 2025 (71 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31354130 - May 2022 (85 comments)
(there's always an exploit, you just have to find it)
https://www.thesmartesthouse.com/collections/water-sensors/p...
I have a few of Ikea's other Matter over Thread devices and have had spotty results with them so far using Google devices as thread border routers. Planning to move to a border router from SMLight which I hope will provide a more reliable connection.
Good luck hoping it will be existing in a few years. No service - no alerts. The whole thing becomes trash then.
No issues whatsoever so far, and it holds the battery charge totally fine (which I get to test 2-3 times a year when i travel with it).
There was, however, a batch of macbooks in 2019 that got recalled for a defect that increased the chance significantly, and perhaps that's what the parent poster has in mind.
Looking into it more, there are ways to limit charging via third-party tools that modify the SMC. I should have done that.
It's meant for power outage not plumbing failure. But I'm more likely to see a plumbing failure ahead of time, so it meets the need.
but isn't the alternative to have some third party on the Internet sitting between you and knowing that your cellar is flooding? third party services in the cloud have downtimes (not necessarily less than your Chromebook), tend to shut down entirely over time, tend to give up on you if you're not on a premium plan, tend to stop supporting the version of your device, etc
Even lower tech!
https://github.com/alaudet/raspi-sump
https://raspisumpdocs.linuxnorth.org/
Anyone made any progress on rooting it?
You can then flash new firmware over USB.
Perhaps you could train it on some of the images and set up notifications for a state you don't want?
For example, I have my doorbell camera trained for gate open/closed and car present/not present.
You select a few of the pre-captured images in the UI of gate open, gate closed, and then our car, no car, someone else's car, and it'll publish an event to MQTT or whatever (don't want to assume you use Home Assistant), then you can send out notifications on it.
If you're referring to the water sensor, it's definitely not parent-friendly, but I sometimes have to bail water during power outages from thunderstorms. It has to work during a power outage and an old Chromebook was cheaper than a UPS.
I kind of ran out of time for messing around with the sensor, but I did think of either dumping the Winbond chip on my reader, or using a .bin file that was used for OTA updates and pushing a modified version down locally.
That likely would have been "cleaner" vs. a 23-hour reboot cycle. I likely would have wanted a dump first in case I borked the firmware. The Python monitoring script just uses standard HNAP to read status codes from the sensor in 30 second intervals - I think there's some way to push updates via HNAP as well.
Thanks for the reminder - may be a good project for winter, when there's no chance of needing the sump.
My rules for home automation are largely the same as the article, first and foremost the existing physical UX of switches and stuff should always work, and ideally automations should be nearly invisible: They should subtly be convenient and monitoring should be useful, but nobody should be confronted with a weird change of lifestyle because a house has automation. And nobody should ever need an app to use their house.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-commits-to-subscriptions-e...
https://www.tastingtable.com/2264769/customer-tricks-keurig-...
Explanation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
I'm imagining now responses telling me I'm a slave to capitalism because I probably got upsold by ten grand or something I wasn't paying attention to when I signed everything. This recalls a discussion last night about grocery prices and everyone at the table talking about the comparison shopping they do and I blurted out I have no idea what anything costs. I just buy the same stuff every week and scan my card. I don't look at the stickers. I don't look at the receipt. I just look at whether I'm hitting my desired savings rate every year and remain on track for retirement goals, which I do, and that's all I actually care about, not whether I'm getting the absolute best deal possible on every transaction I ever make.
It brings my mind back to the article from the Atlantic posted here yesterday about anxiety rates going through the roof in spite of the modern western world being by far the safest it's ever been. It seems the difference now is people are so acutely aware of any and every risk, alerts to which are constantly being shoved in your face, that it overwhelms our ancestral ape brains as if dying with ten grand less in the bank is equal to having a tiger stalking you through the bush 10 meters to your right.
I'm tired. There's a podcast I listen to hosted by exercise scientists debunking stupid press headlines about the latest study or TikTok trend, with one of the hosts always pointing out how exhausted she is by all of these articles telling here she's doing something wrong. "Everything you knew about X is wrong." "You've been doing X wrong your entire life." It exhausts me too, Lauren. I bought the wrong car. I bought the wrong TV. I guess I should be living in fear that my appliances will stop working if I lose network. I should be worried that LG is telling every data broker in the world that I've spent the past year watching nothing but Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Shit, some agent probably just scraped Hacker News, correlated my user name with my real identity using stylometry, and now I'm going to be double-triple served nothing but ads for whatever consumer segment that puts me in. I'm going to die even poorer when some cleverly placed sponsored link in a search result makes me impulse buy some whimsigoth living room art I didn't really need.
The world of 30 years ago was a world in which six of my friends from school were killed, the National Guard occupied my city for half a week, 55 people were killed in a riot, a man dragged from his truck and beaten half to death on live television, a shootout with the LAPD that lasted three hours also live televised. We weren't allowed to wear red or blue for fear of kids getting shot by the crips and bloods. My middle school had three drive-bys while I was there. We regularly had recess and any other outdoor activities canceled because of dangerously unhealthy air quality, called "smog days." My little sister's best friend's mom lived under an assumed identity because she survived an attack by the nightstalker Richard Ramirez. My older sister's best friend was murdered in her sleep by her deadbeat mom's boyfriend.
But the world of 30 years ago still felt full of wonder and possibility. I saw a television and wanted to tear it apart to learn how it worked, to understand the miracle of how such a thing was possible. I see a television today and all I can think of is Hacker News telling me every six hours how stupid I am for plugging it into the Internet. I've never experienced any tangible harm from advertisers knowing a man who was a teenager in the 90s watches television shows from the 90s, but it feels like a massive acute threat anyway.
I have none of that stuff. My home was purchased new with some 10baseT wired to 5 spots in the home and to every portal (window, door). we have a solar power system with enough battery backup watt hours for backup even if it rains for two weeks
But I DO have wildlife like bobcats and hares and raccoons that are autonomous and require remediation occasionally. Luckily, their activity is limited to the out of doors.
are you sure you are getting what you want?
In the year 2000, I lost all my possessions, especially the computers and storage media. Subsequently, I enjoyed NPR and Coast-to-Coast on a radio, including the Hurricane Katrina coverage. I had no idea what New Orleans looked like in 2005.
By that time, I was living across the street from a large thrift store. Eventually in 2006, I was weak-willed enough to begin building a home network again, and the thrift store provided two essential products: keyboards and WiFi routers.
The WiFi router was probably obsolete and EOL when I purchased it, but it definitely worked 100%, especially because I took care at the thrift store, to select a compatible AC adapter brick for it. It was a basic Netgear model, with 4 Ethernet ports, original firmware, probably 802.11n; even though an acquaintance said he would hack into it, he was inebriated most of the time, and I would never know if the router or network was hacked. You wouldn't know either, in 2026. Most consumers don't know, and could never find out, if their edge equipment is compromised. But anyway, even while running Ubuntu 6.04, I accepted the router's default firmware, and that Netgear thing lasted at least 5 years while I had an ADSL connection, and one and a half computers.
In the mid-1980s when I hung out at Radio Shack after church, I snapped up a lot of basic X10 kit. I collected the Dimmer Modules, the Appliance Modules, and later there was an RF remote unit available! The crown jewel for 12-year-old me was a central control unit that looked like a clock radio.The control unit had cyan fluorescent display, simply the current time and alarm settings. And there were a bunch of control buttons where you could select an addressable Module, dim the lights, on/off, set timers, etc. And it was kind of amazing that everything plugged into mains outlets, and no other installation necessary!
My parents were constantly annoyed when I would sneak one of the modules onto a living-room floor lamp, or my favorite trick was cueing up a record on the turntable and then activating the Appliance Module to wake me up for school with Siouxsie and the Banshees or something. I was not allowed to persistently wire the entire house. I did not get into the journeyman electrician's job of replacing wall switches with X10 modules (those were slick). So, not even my shared bedroom was totally automated, but it was fun to experiment. It hopefully did not affect any neighbors. The pulse signals were said to stop at junction boxes, but there was still a House Code to set, in case all your flat neighbors wanted independent X10 networks.
I also never purchased the PC Interface that came with software. I believe I didn't yet have a compatible PC, anyway, and it seemed not in the spirit of a robust, predictable home automation. So yeah, my smart home devices worked without the Internet. How smart do you wanna get? My television set didn't spy on me, but everyone else does!
I only use "Local Polling" or better, and highly prefer "Local Push".
They kind of do, if your WiFi uses 2.4GHz bands
ZWave: the consortium demands interoperability. Testing and licensing fees means more expensive devices. Things will work together, though sometimes you will need to figure out what parameters actually do.
Use both. Home assistant is perfectly happy with two dongles plugged in.
ZWave stuff tends to be rock solid (there is expensive certification involved) but that means the devices are more expensive and the selection can be limited because the volumes aren't always there to make sense to get certified.
The only real problem I've found with the "all of the above" situation is that device bindings only work within one protocol. If you want to bind a lightbulb to a wall switch such that they don't require a trip through the hub they need to both be zigbee, zwave, or matter. This is unfortunate because there are a lot of really nice ZWave wall switches but not a lot of ZWave lightbulbs.
That's also part of it's advantage though: I have a Mikrotik router which has a Thread radio, so I run the router software on that, and Matter server on another machine - so no USB dongle needed in my server rack where the signal would be poor.
Also Matter over Thread supports multiple Thread routers, multiple Matter servers, and devices being paired to multiples of each - maybe that doesn't help with the complicated part, but it opens it up for commercial deployments as you can have redundancy. I would not be surprised if it replaces DALI in some instances in the not too distant future.
There are still some teething issues, which is because it's still kind of early in its adoption (ZigBee felt the same before Zigbee2MQTT). Effectively it's the same, just packaged different, there's no reason why you couldn't plug in a USB dongle and run a "Thread2MQTT" container and be done with it - the pairing doesn't need an app, it can be done through a browser with Bluetooth.
Personally I feel it's the way everything will go simply because it is more interoperable. Already today you can get routers, TVs and fridges (Samsung) with Thread hardware, so it's going to become mainstream as regular people will be able to just buy a smart bulb, pair it, and control it with their phone without buying or setting up anything else. Theres also Matter over WiFi, so it could replace proprietary platforms like Tuya/SmartLife.
IKEA released a bunch of new smart home devices that support Matter over Thread and ZigBee this year if you want to try it out.
I get that MoT has more features, but it seems like it makes the whole thing less reliable. I also hate the pairing process with Matter-over-Thread. Enable IPv6 in your home network, scan the QR code with your phone... What if the QR sticker falls in a few years? With Zigbee I just press the reset button and I see it directly in the HA web interface. No need for a phone, no need for camera, and doesn't touch your router. Less features, but my devices have been working for years without a single failure.
With Matter/Thread though, i frequently run into issues. Particularly these were power switches from Ikea by the way, but i don't thing that's relevant.
Also the range of Zigbee devices is much better / bigger, since each device "expands" the network range so to speak.
* https://handbook.buildwithmatter.com/how-it-works/thread/#ip...
> Thread defines a series of features to support multicast across a heterogeneous network (Thread and Wi-Fi/Ethernet Network segments) for multicast addresses with scope larger than realm local.
* https://openthread.io/codelabs/openthread-border-router-ipv6...
?
I'm disappointed that Ikea decided to switch their smart home gadgets from using Zigbee to Matter over Thread.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/ikea-inspelning-qa-iss...
(This production issue is a shame, great plug otherwise and they were something like 8 Euro at some point.)
GRILLPLATS is the successor. I have one, but haven’t tried it much yet because it is Matter over Thread and we are still mostly on Zigbee. They have a hidden Zigbee mode, but it doesn’t expose power use:
https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/E2435_E2491.html
But if Matter over Thread fits into your system, it’s an affordable option.
For power strips, we are now using the Gen4 Shelly Power Strip. It supports pretty much anything: its own API over WiFi that is supported by HA, Shelly cloud, Matter over WiFi, Zigbee, and Bluetooth. It can even work as a WiFi range extender and as a Bluetooth proxy for HA. Initial setup is by connecting to it as a WiFi AP and the connection to the built-in web interface. There were some issues with Zigbee flooding, but I think that was improved with firmware updates.
You can even flash ESPHome: https://devices.esphome.io/devices/shelly-power-strip-4-gen4...
I also have some eve energy plugs that do matter/thread (also push/local). There are apps here but i generally haven't needed them once i got things set up in home assistant.
Smart Plugs, sensors, etc: Ikea is amazing. You need to buy a hub, but then accessories are 3x cheaper. Their plugs are $9 and have energy monitoring which is amazing. They have water leak sensors for $12. Incredible value.
That's 2nd generation, first one was just a basic on/off smar plug. I still got these and so far I had no issues even after Dirigera hub got that firmware update which enabled Matter. Ikea 'gear' overall work much better than Meross one I had before.
+1 on the IKEA stuff being amazing!
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/ikea-inspelning-qa-iss...
Most of their sensors are meh. Their PIR sensors are known to be mediocre compared to the competition. Their air quality sensor is ok to get trends, but e.g. the CO2 measurements are quite a bit off compared to quality sensors and are way off if you live at a higher altitude (due to using a thermal conductivity sensor and not NDIR like better sensors).
Also, the IKEA smarthome app (used in conjunction with the Hub) uses Play Integrity and therefore blocks e.g. GrapheneOS. But you are better off with Home Assistant and their ZBT-2 antenna (can be flashed for Zigbee or Thread) anyway.
Currently using a bunch of Nous A8T (EU plug) because they come with Tasmota ootb.
ESPHome or Tasmota work really well for all kinds of things. The last one I replaced was an infrared blaster for controlling my AC. The previous one, even though it was in an IoT VLAN decided to spam the network with requests to its mothership (never succeeding, fortunately).
- buy the cheapest hardware that gets the job done
- ignore negative reviews that are software related
- upon receipt of devices, ask claude for local-first cfw
- have fun for a few hours acting as a meat proxy
- boom, cheap local-only smart home is done
Use a SBC or nas for home assistant. This process worked for me for switches, a thermostat, an air quality monitor, a thermometer, and a window fan.
Would’ve paid ~2.5x for hardware that had the appropriate local-first capability out of the box. Instead this all fit within an existing $20 subscription to an inference provider. DS 4.1 running locally was on track too just more slowly.
I paid ~$150 for a fanless 4-port router with 16GB of RAM a few years back. Now they are ~$400 and up.
Examples:
- SD cards are very convenient for hobbyists "experimenting" with OS variants. They are not great for performance or reliability; a soldered on storage device is common in many other products. - The price is more than it seems - you need a case and a power supply and an SD card. - The case situation is bad. If you want to 'set and forget' you really want a robust case, potted. Many N100's are designed for more abusive environments. - Most use cases don't need the HDMI, Camera, Audio, Ethernet, or all the USB ports. That is board space, purchase cost, and idle power draw that can be reduced or dropped. - It doesn't have some modern connectors, e.g. M2, because there is no space on the board, and the PCIe lanes have gone to the connectors you probably don't use.
Many stick based computers, particularly second hand and older generations, are better for most use cases. These are typically Intel N series; but are increasingly ARM, particularly at the lowest prices.
But yeah, true.
RPi hardware is nice because it's a fairly-consistent, known quantity. All copies of a given board have the ~same features and bugs, so an image made for someone else's Pi 4 will run on my own Pi 4. This grants appliance-like utility that we haven't really ever had much of in the x86 PC space.
Pi hardware almost never shows up as cheap as a person might wish for. It's scarce on the used market, even when prices are high. In that space, demand outstrips supply.
And it's never been "cheap". A decade and a half ago when it first showed up, folks were already comparing the price (plus the SD card, and the appropriate power brick, and the USB cable, and the wifi adapter, and some kind of housing) to that of a used PC or laptop, and the Pi seldom came out on top.
But if we're doing new vs new, then it does alright price-wise.
And it's tiny. It's got some hackability built in, with the not-USB camera interface and the not-HDMI display support, and some GPIO that can be useful for some stuff.
It's got places where it's useful. I use them in those places. (And despite that lengthy defense, I run Home Assistant on a cheap SFF Lenovo box that came to me with RAM and an SSD for $50, delivered, in pre-used form)
Your router is a point of failure, so an internet outage making it go weird doesn't mean you want all your stuff becoming on manageable).
IoT is honestly one of the best ways to rapidly learn SRE concepts.
On a home network with dynamic addresses: No need to worry about IP addresses; no overlaps happen, no mistakes, no spreadsheet table to manage. Use names (as long as DHCP works, then so does DNS). Renumbering the network is simple when that's useful.
It still works when the internet is down. And when the router itself breaks, we fix it or replace it and things work again. It's good to have a functional spare.
---
On a home network with static addresses: Micromanage IP addresses, keep a spreadsheet table, potentially make mistakes. Avoid using names (DHCP may be eliminated but DNS is still a failure point), making things harder to remember six months from now. Renumbering is arduous.
It still works when the router is down, but: When the router breaks, we still fix or replace it anyway. It's good to have a functional spare.
---
In terms of SRE: I don't need 5 9's of reliability for my smart light bulbs' IoT controls at home. They all still have some manner of physical switch, and they all can still be toggled on and off the old-fashioned way. Parallel controls work well-enough.
Everyone will get by almost-normally while I fix the router, which is a task that I'll set forth to be doing anyway for all of the reasons that household internet access provides.
The concept is that, instead of assuming that IP and MAC addresses are at all reliable, to "fingerprint" devices on the LAN based on things such as SSH public keys, TLS SPKI fingerprints, UPnP device UUIDs, mDNS, common TCP port profiles, and IEEE OUI manufacturer in order to form mostly-stable identities. The IP and full MAC are only fallen back to when there's absolutely no other data to work off of. My software uses a daemon that scans the network in order find devices and update existing device identities if IPs change. It serves hostnames for these devices on the `.home.arpa` TLD and creates synthetic IPv6 addresses for each device in case one would rather use their own DNS server or hosts file.
I recently "finished" this project, and it's kind of awesome because I was able to swap to a new router and everything just kept working as-is without having to think about it. Of course mDNS solves a lot of these problems already, but not every device has mDNS.
What's really cool is I recently realized that this is also very useful for accessing your local network with a VPN like Wireguard. Even though I only planned on this being something you run on individual clients, I put it on my OpenWrt router and configured it with dnsmasq so that, when I connect to my network with Netbird, all of my local hostnames just work on my phone by virtue of connecting to the network and using its DNS server. That said, my project doesn't require router admin access at all. It can even run as rootless if TUN access (for synthetic addresses) is turned off.
Maybe I'll release it publicly at some point, but if anyone wants to steal this idea and do their own implementation, I am not territorial over it. It's made getting my LAN devices working together a joy.
And don't forget to backup your router and switch configurations!
Custom firmware?
1. buy the Zigbee version
2. boom, local only smart home is done
I guess if there's a device that's actually wi-fi only then I'll have to go through your flow but so far there's been no need.
In Thread >= 1.4, devices can request globally routable IPv6 addresses. The Thread 1.4 white paper does not hide the intentions:
The Thread 1.4 Border Router acts as the IPv6 router between the Thread network and external networks, including the user's home network and the larger internet. It is by default configured to support external communication [...]
Cloud Connectivity: Direct internet connectivity enables Thread devices to easily connect to cloud services. This facilitates remote monitoring, control, and firmware updates, enhancing the user experience and enabling remote device management capabilities. Device vendors can now directly service and support their deployed fleet of devices, regardless of which application ecosystem each device is integrated with.
https://threadgroup.org/Portals/0/Documents/Thread_1.4_Featu...
This is what you get when you let Google, Amazon, Apple, and Samsung design a smart home standard. They'll use every opportunity extract analytics and increase control. You'll own nothing and be happy.
Zigbee, Z-Wave, and ESPHome over WiFi/Thread are the only major modern local and privacy-preserving smart home standards.
Matter over WiFi is also not fully local for obvious reasons (though you can try to block them on the router/firewall and/or put them on a separate VLAN).
Before Thread 1.4 the IPv6 addresses used by the Thread network were all ULAs - i.e. the devices were only routable locally and didn't have a global IPv6 address, so if you did happen to want to talk to your Thread devices over the internet, it was possible but the Thread border router had to do NAT for you.
With Thread 1.4 the border router can assign device IPs straight from the global IPv6 block assigned by your ISP, which means you can directly access your Thread device over the internet without the NAT provided by the Thread border router.
If you don't want to locally host your smart home automations (you and I do, but the average consumer doesn't) this can be very useful. It's also really helpful if you want to access your own devices remotely over the Internet and not need to bother with port forwarding.
IMO this fits perfectly with the philosophy of IPv6 - every device can have a globally routable IP address without needing NAT.
If you don't want your devices reaching out to the Internet (like I don't), the solution is to put all that stuff on its own VLAN with no Internet access (which I do).
You wrote a long message to say that you agree with me technically, but then said that it has good uses as well. I don't disagree with that, but the problem with these companies is - you give them one finger and they take your whole hand. Besides that,
If you don't want to locally host your smart home automations (you and I do, but the average consumer doesn't) this can be very useful. It's also really helpful if you want to access your own devices remotely over the Internet and not need to bother with port forwarding.
this implies that this is not possible with Zigbee. You can use your devices remotely with Zigbee, but it is fully governed by your Zigbee hub/coordinator. You can use Home Assistant, the IKEA hub, the Samsung SmartThings hub, Homey, etc. to control your Zigbee devices remotely. The very big, but relevant difference is that the devices themselves cannot connect to the mothership to do analytics or to lock away functionality. There were already some Thread + Matter devices that required talking to the manufacturer's servers to get all functionality (I think e.g. some Nuki devices, but I might misremember).
If you don't want your devices reaching out to the Internet (like I don't), the solution is to put all that stuff on its own VLAN with no Internet access (which I do).
Putting Thread + Matter devices on a different VLAN than e.g. your phone which you are commissioning it with is very fragile. So fragile that most Matter documentation just says "your phone needs to be on the same WiFi network as your smarthome hub". It is possible (I had such a setup for a while), but requires that you e.g. do allow mDNS advertisements across VLANs (since Matter relies heavily on mDNS). Since you are talking about average consumers, Zigbee will give them privacy without any extra work, whereas with Thread + Matter they have to set up their network in a way that their ISP-provided router most likely doesn't even support.
Thread + Matter has no point outside very large deployments and giving a bunch of companies the opportunity to start data mining your sensor data as well.
The most I have seen that is rather the functionality not being available in matter (ie the standard does not support it) so they are only available on zigbee with the manufacturers app.
In my personal experience
> Zigbee will give them privacy without any extra work
Was exactly as fragile and dependent on manufacturer infrastructure for some fratures as you describe MoT. (the privacy part is true though, and as mentioned all the time: I have heard others had much better experiences than me with zigbee)
No, it's also used for remote access, see e.g. Nuki and Tado.
Not super-nefarious, but this is probably just the beginning. If companies can gather data they will and if manufacturers can add features that require subscriptions, they will. The line always has to go up and Thread offers them the means to do so. If you give the opportunity, this always happens (see e.g. TVs, 'owning the glass').
Was exactly as fragile and dependent on manufacturer infrastructure for some fratures as you describe MoT.
I have over 50 Zigbee devices and never have a single issue (using HA and zigbee2mqtt, some on a separate Hue network). The Matter over Thread devices that I have, regularly drop off the network (no interference, etc., they just still seem very buggy). This also makes complete sense, since Thread adds a lot of complexity (IPv6, TREL, communication between border routers, etc.).
Or, if there is already a perfectly functioning open standard that just works and it's private by default (ZigBee) boycott the new standard created and forced upon us by BigTech and don't buy that hardware.
Your post reinforces that feeling.
I used this guide if you're interested - https://ndo.dev/blog/hassio-thread-setup/, it's been working without fuss.
Luckily this is my setup.
I am not opposed to the possibility of cloud connectivity (as long as it is deactivateable) and even if I weren't I think I still prefer Matter (thread/wifi) over nearly all non-matter devices I've ever used, especially all the problems I had with Zigbee devices will make me stay far away from it. (Even though I am aware that many people had gread experiences with zigbee.)
In contrast, Matter + Thread devices in our network drop out very frequently (and no, I am not using multi-PAN, etc.).
Matter + WiFi devices are probably much more reliable (if close enough to an AP), but a security and privacy nightmare.
Matter wasn't flawless, especially because I fell into the trap that was mentioned here before by trying to separate things into clans without fully understanding the needs of matter. But now that it is fixed, I had little problem with adding new devices (like not having a lamp in short range to the bridge lol) or them staying connected.
The IKEA tradfri Reddit is a stream of problems that people have with their Thread devices (and people longing back for Zigbee). Part of it is firmware that is still immature, but part of it is also the complexity of the Thread + Matter stack.
Thread has the advantage of consuming very low power so battery powered sensors and remotes can run for years. Wifi is only used because it doesn’t require buying a thread border router.
Wi-Fi is cheaper to implement both software- and hardware-wise if you don’t need the low-power requirements of Thread, most devices don’t, and the gap will be bridged by lower-powered Wi-Fi.
We have a lot of devices and never have any issues. But yeah, if you put a lot of Tuya Zigbee devices with crappy firmware that flood the network. Similarly if you put a lot of crappy WiFi devices on your network, it's a security nightmare (wise people put them on an isolated VLAN and use WiFi client isolation).
I found a few wifi and bluetooth devices that were cheaper than or didn’t have a zigbee equivalent. Window fan and air monitor specifically.
I didn’t do an exhaustive market search, just sharing my anecdotal experience. It’s a great feeling to be able to focus on hardware capabilities and price, then will the software you envision into existence via AI accelerated RE.
Not contradicting or criticizing, just describing my lack of creativity.
My favorites are now air quality and climate measurement (the reason why i tried it again was mold prevention), climate control and a smart lock because i was scared of forgetting my keys when moving away from any friends I could hand a spare.
These are cheap chinese adware driven sensors. Security is not their priority.
But why does that matter? My smart home upgrade cycle is around once every 5 years. The world is changing on a dime every 6 months nowadays. Projections beyond about a year out in the smart home market are useless to me as a consumer.
1. Commercial devices must use offline only protocols, Zigbee or Zwave. If it's WiFi only I will not buy it unless the firmware is open source or easily replaced with an open source, local only alternative.
2. Non-sensor devices must fully function without their IoT features. I must be able to control my thermostat, fridge, stove, etc without any external interface.
Never use a WiFi IoT device that isn't open source. Even if you can control it locally it could be a spy device that's exfiltrating your data. Yes, you could setup VLANs or a separate network but it's not worth it. Vote with your wallet.
[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2026-07-26_dual_battery_automation/
I've only tinkered around the edges of home automation, but so far most everything I've looked into is either proprietary and $ or open source and $$$. The sweet spot seems to be proprietary devices that are hackable and/or re-flashable to open source firmware. But there aren't many of those, they come and go constantly.
A large part of my goal for automation is energy efficiency, if I have to dump multiple hundreds of dollars into hubs, switches, plus, lights, and sensors, then I've only added work for myself and saved no money.
There are a lot of vendors. I have a decent amount of SONOFF stuff, Schlage Zigbee deadbolts, Ikea Zigbee blinds, etc. No one makes a good Zigbee thermostat so I have a Honeywell Zwave.
The Sonoffs would just drop from the zigbee network never to return without a reset, known issue with these.
They should be kept offline and used as monitors only.
Something like a Roku is cheap, can handle your streaming services (including Jellyfin), and has no spying hardware. DIY HTPCs are of course the best option for control.
Sure, HTPC would be the best, but they are quite a bit pricier.
( Disclaimer: _ALL_ the usual caveats )
The above intrigues me, I plan to give it a go when I reach it on the TODO list- ideally that would address issues that can't be fixed with network isolation.
However, I tried to purchase from EU manufacturers so that, at least, they're GDPR-liable. Quite a few of them even advertise things like "Offline mode only available" or "NO account setup needed!" ... It was a FKN weight measurement device (one of those you put on the floor and step on). Id rather die a horrible death then give them any access to my WiIF or email account. i jsut want a damn number in Kilos and thats it.
And about people saying "OVERWRITE", "CHANGE", "HACK", or whatever. I mean, I used to do those things when I was younger, learned alot, but I simply don't have the time for that anymore and it shouldn't be required.
That's the whole point: these things should be the default, rather than requiring you to waste two weekends fixing a product you just purchased.
I managed to get to:
The cloud is the weak link
- No internet, no problem. ...
---
If you are writing for other machines to ingest it, whatever. But if you are writing for people it for me at least signals that you don't really care about the message that you want to get across, and are fine with a watered down LLM average.
Tell people it's CGI, they won't be enthusiastic about it. But tell them it's "practical effects" and they will absolutely love it. Even when the movie has even more CGI than average... they will still praise it, and will even praise the CGI scenes they failed to identify as computer generated.
Or, of course, make the human texts excellent blog posts that fit the readers' area of expertise and there you go, evidence! People hate AI writing! The HN hivemind was right all along!
I'd like to see this evidence. I have very limited time and attention. LLMs are usually used to take the user's prompt and flower it up to 10x to 100x fluff. Just give me the prompt.
If you're personally getting a headache from reading AI writing, all this does is transfer that headache to the rest of us. Thanks. /s
By all means, pass it through an LLM for review if you really want, but you don't need to fix all the issues it finds, and you shouldn't let it remove the personality from your text by rewriting things. Because they will eagerly do that.
I would much rather read a post with a human voice - don't be afraid to just do it :)
So you are just signaling that you aren't reading specific types of LLM language that you can detect, but not all of them.
I will not be happy because we will be lost as a culture when we give up on this.
Its like you went to a potluck and brought a salad with you, you just closed your eyes and threw some things from the fridge together without thinking, it's all mixed together now and you don't know if something was old/moldy.
You are proud and happy that you brought a contribution, and you feel like your responsibility/duty ends there while the people who want to eat it have to be careful and fish things out, or just avoid it because they can't be sure if it was old or not.
Natural language is a non-verifiable domain due to the ambiguity of the intent, so we will never get away from this issue in LLM-land. You can't know intent of the writer unless they wrote it themselves.
I think it interesting that people are more upset about the complaint than the cause of the complaint.
If this place — a place where people are supposed to be sharing interesting things for techies and geeks — gives up on complaining about thoughtless nonsense, its culture dies.
I used to complain when web sites had huge whitespace margins on the left and right side of the text. I hate that! But most web sites do it, and complaining about it here accomplishes nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
How do you envision that pushback if it's not people complaining about it?
In this case the article starts with "AI;DR: I wrote the first draft, AI helped me edit and rewrite it, and I made the final pass. The rules, setups, and talks are my own" so none of that applies.
https://innovation.consumerreports.org/category/iot/
Disclaimer: I contributed to this report on the subject: https://innovation.stage.consumerreports.org/How-to-Build-Lo...
But I was looking at a couple of spare RPis I had laying around and decided to whack Home Assistant on one, just to take a look. I've now decided to dip my toe a bit further and ordered a Zigbee USB adapter, some Zigbee based buttons and reed switches, plus a couple of Matter based power switches which I hope will all work happily.
I'll also need to setup an IOT VLAN in my Openwrt router. (Not a networking guy, so also fiddly!)
Until now, my home automation endeavours have consisted of:
- A red, flashing LED glued into the ceiling near the front door that is connected to a reed switch to tell when the garage door is open.
- A light switch¹ which I managed to flash Tasmota onto so I can switch the lounge room lights on or off from the TV remote.
- An ultrasonic distance sensor that sits on top of my monitor that can tell when I'm sitting in front of my computer². It pauses the music and resumes when I leave and come back. It also nags me if I've been in front of the computer too long.
¹ I see no value in automated light bulbs. I want automated light switches. Unfortunately Australian electrical certification standards are something of a bear that make this difficult.
² https://www.michevan.id.au/posts/are-you-there/
Fellow Australian here, can you share the brand/model?
Not sure it is available any more, but looks similar to this: https://sonoff.tech/products/sonoff-tx-gen2-smart-touch-wall...
And this was the firmware I used to replace it: https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota
I like that disclaimer. Looks like a good way to declare AI content.
I don't allow my devices to update their firmware. If the device does not work out of the box, I return it, end of. My car has also been taken off the grid.
This provides an open source firmware. I bought a super cheap Sonoff camera with dreadful software and I was at my wits end until I found out that one could reflash the firmware with open source.
I think that open source is the way - or writing your own. I had a greenhouse last year and everything died in it every year during winter but last year I made a raspberry-pi controller (with a relay) for a simple space heater which would turn on at the very coldest time of the morning and just barely bounce the temperature above 0. I got a nice graph out of it that showed me the effect and I could tune it to be as minimal and cheap with electricity as was safe. That's the first year everything survived and I had a fantastic set of plants in spring before they'd normally have made it.
This year the trouble and strife wanted a driveway and the greenhouse was in the way. So as is normal in life something only works for it to be cancelled.
There is intense competition in all these spaces.
What is necessary is a 'name' to the movement. Just like IoT engendered an entire wave - a concept that dissolved into analysts, CEOs, PM, strategy, industry etc. to create it, the 'No Connection Required' could easily do the same if there is a core concept and language to define it.
Analysts will write papers, CEOs will read them, conference panels will be had, Twitter discussions will erupt, PMs want to justify their roadmaps, CEOs want to please the board, new products will launch into the category - and it can happen.
Often these things need an impetus to help spark the change, like security breaches etc. which is 'du jour' right now. A handful of articles about security problems, some big media coverage, and a few breakthrough products at the margins could create the wave. I think there is a lot of legitimacy behind this.
The reason I'm doing that is because seemingly nobody managed to solve this yet and I'm tired of everything out there requiring an internet connection and an account, and (inevitably) becoming a marketing channel for pushing upsells and offers to me.
However, it's definitely not simple, and most of the complexity lies in making sure the system works. Building a Wi-Fi controlled light bulb with a remote is easy. Building a system of lights with switches that works is hard.
One potential benefit is that a wired KNX is unlikely to suffer from any reliability issues but I don't think that's enough to justify everything else for me. The reliance on proprietary software is a deal-breaker for me, I've seen that rug get pulled too many times.
So not sure but having your rug pulled is so much more likely with any of these other standards, KNX has been around since 1999, that’s almost 30 years! Zigbee / Matter devices aren’t open source either, it’s the protocol so no difference to KNX.
Last winter we had a long power outage. So I used a Jackery to power a smart plug as a temporary router and the mesh reconfigured itself and everything just worked. Battery powered door & window sensors, flood sensors, some lights like Eve Flare, and even the Eve Aqua water valve, which meant I could literally water the garden straight from the phone during a power outage (the iPhone has a built-in Thread radio).
Obviously it would be better to have a whole house battery, but that was so cool and took almost zero effort.
That’s probably why manufacturers prefer to keep users in their own ecosystems.
My personal situation imposes even stricter versions of your #1 and #2:
1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
2. Smart functionality must not remove dumb functionality.
As one example: having a physical switch that controls a light and the switch can be operated by automation is good. Having automation control a light and the switch just tells automation what to do is bad.
This does make things hard sometimes. For instance, your sprinkler controller doesn't pass that bar. In fact the only one I've found so far that has a local API for automation plus full "dumb" on-device control (no Wi-Fi, no app) is RainMachine, and they are gone. If only OpenSprinkler hardware had a touch screen for local UI.
This is one of the reasons I love Zigbee, the device network is entirely independent of my computer network, can not directly communicate to the internet in any way, and every device I've put on the network so far can be configured to directly communicate with other devices so basic functionality remains operational even if the controller goes down.
For example, in my living room I have a Lutron Aurora dimmer dial locking a standard switch in the on position, then plugged in to the outlet that switch would normally control is a Leviton dimmer module. Both connect to the network controlled from a PoE Zigbee dongle, but have been directly paired as well so pressing the button on the dial makes it directly tell the dimmer module to turn on, rotation commands are sent direct, etc.
The controller also receives these commands when it's active and can add to the functionality for inputs like double-click, but if it's down the basic functionality still works entirely as a normal person would expect. You walk in to the room and see a knob on a switch plate, you turn the knob and the light brightness increases regardless of the state of the internet, my home server, or even my network as a whole.
The other major advantage compared to Matter/Thread is that it's not IP based so it's impossible for any Zigbee device to ever have a cloud dependency. No matter how much some marketing dingus might want to, it can not be ruined.
I'm a strong proponent of everything-over-IP in an ideal world, and love the fact that Matter mandates IPv6 which forced a lot of embedded vendors to finally support it, but the IoT vendors have demonstrated that if they're given an internet connection they WILL abuse it to lock you in to their platform.
Matter over Thread is nice because it functionally provides an "IoT VLAN" by default and can only reach the internet or even the LAN through a gateway, which can be fully controlled by the user making it the best of both worlds.
As for Matter over WiFi, for the reason in the first paragraph I've maintained a rule of not buying WiFi IoT devices unless the device has a real need for direct access to the internet or high-speed data from the LAN to do what I want it to do, and Matter doesn't change that. It is nice though that hypothetically I could have a Matter-over-Thread switch cause a WiFi device to do something directly without needing to go through Home Assistant.
Unfortunately, almost no lan connected devices sport such an interface.
With another project, based on the ESP32-S3, I was able to cram grafana style scrubbable charts, full activity log, refrigerant circuit diagram, equipment topology, etc. I'm pretty excited for the ESP32-S31 since it's a nice jump up in performance.
Specifically, I wanted the switch to turn on different lights depending on the time of day. In the evenings in early morning I wanted it to turn on the dimmer floor lamps, and during the day, I wanted it to turn on the brighter Center room light. This was not possible without turning the switch from a light turning on device, to an automation activating device.
I thought really long and hard about if I was worth the trade off, and in the end I decided that my automation server was only likely to be down for significant periods of time if the power was out and the lights weren't working anyways. If I run into a situation where this becomes a problem for me, I'll reconsider my decision. Which is a great thing about the local control. If I make a decision that I don't like I can just change it.
The remote server always goes away after a couple years go by, and the radio is only capable of playing the stations that were set as presets. Then the preset radio stations go offline, or the URLs for them change.
I guess connecting to home automation would be useful for a fridge that's sufficiently out of the way that you might not hear it. But for the fridge in my kitchen the noises emitted by the fridge itself are enough for me
That speaker linked to your phone should not need an internet proxy to communicate. It should allow for direct USB communication so it can share one power source. It should allow for Bluetooth communication so it can be in a different close location.
CoT should follow the rule of nature and take the shortest path by default.
What is better for society? The LLM modal running in a local environment or the one running on a data center that can be easily taken out via a power outage, fiber cut, national disaster, or a kinetic weapon?
I rather that LLM modal used at the hospital be ran locally and keep servicing patients even though the original data center was demolished by mother nature.
There should be a system like the nutritional information on food and beverage products, as time went by most people read those and choose accordingly, which then incentivize companies to adapt their offering. We could imagine something similar which would define clearly the capabilities of the hardware or software sold, clearly labelled on the physical package or on the online shop with an easy classification for consumers to understand.
If they could get away without even having a Wi-Fi router and just use their cellular plan they would. Why? Because there are plenty people who are happy with just whatever internet they get on their cell phone and don't want to spend extra for a router and an ISP
With offline solutions like the ikea smart home stuff you can access it from your phone with even less setup than the wifi based options.
But manufacturers want our data harvested through those devices *and* your mobile phone app.
And they want a way to force you to pay for the service.
So we basically pay to let them spoil us.
All this life-force expended calling for the market to provide something no normie wants. If you go no-cloud you get to also manage a fragile controller device, and you have to spend extra time researching what to buy and also spend more time when the devices break (which happens an order of magnitude more often than non-smart equivalents) and then your most basic home devices need to reboot for a firmware update just when you go to use them?
Get back from vacation whoops controller died nothing works?
Go to work whoops controller's hard drive filled up with logs now it doesn't work family home is freezing, tech support time? Better cancel that client demo!
How many hand-lightswitch-flips and thermostat hand-adjustments could you have done in the time you spent on this?
The only thing that'll ever make smart crap worth it, is fixing the law - and enforcing the laws that are yet to be enacted - so we can trust the companies we buy from.
Our generation is too naive to do that. So it's a couple decades from happening.
Until then, opt out.
It really sucks to finally settle down after a long cold day, snuggle up all warm in bed, almost asleep, and think “shit, did I lock the door?” Then you get up, lose “the sleepy”, walk down the stairs only to realize you had it lock, after all.
In practice this looks like Z-wave smart switches everywhere for lights so that you can control the light via automation, app, the switch on the wall, or Alexa. They all feed into the same system.
LLMs have made this even easier and removed some of the annoying fiddling I used to do in the past. Now I can open up Claude Code and tell it to build a new automation and it's done in minutes.
Yesterday I realized I left the floodlight on in the backyard by accident, not problem "Claude, create an automation in home assistant to turn off backyard light 5 minutes after I turn it on", done. Could I have created that automation? Yes, I've written countless of them in that past but now I can speak it into existence and, almost more importantly, tweak it with barely any effort at all. If tomorrow I buy a motion sensor I can just ask the LLM to incorporate that, if I want the lights to stay on if X other device is turned on, it's a prompt away.
In the past I would spend a good bit of time writing an automation but when it broke down or my needs changed it was enough friction that I would just give up and turn off the automation rather than take the time to debug and change it. I setup all the motion-activated lights in my house when I first moved in and over the course of a few weeks I tweaked each one as needed with just a short prompt here or there, it felt like living in the future.
My only IoT device is a motorized chicken door that was acquired on Mac.bid, I think (one of those auction sites for returned goods), and requires some crummy app (SmartLife) that takes up half a gig on my phone.
Long story short, I had to go on a journey that involved creating a Tuya developer account and navigating their terrible website and being panicked at my ability to reconnect the device, but eventually I landed on Homebridge connecting it to Apple Home, and I finally have the control over it that I want. I finally was able to block the device from the Internet in my Deco app.
So...yes! It's finally working without the Internet.
I've always avoided IoT because of terrible software and silos but now that apparently these aren't the barriers they used to be thanks to LLM assistance, I'm more likely to dip my toes in the water.
Though I did run into a roadblock with my Blueair air purifier and hubitat, so I'll probably run a Home Assistant instance so I can control the Blueair with the HomeAssistant->Hubitat integration.
Pretty amazing the smart parrot can un-China/Cloud something like this in about 20-30 min. Prior to that I was expecting to need an IR blaster to try to control the thing with HomeKit and a complicated setup maintaining state. That’s all just solved now.
Smart home devices should not freeze up whenever internet is down. A device like Google Nest should have the minimum decency to allow you to interact with it via local Wifi (which continues un-interrupted). It is fine if half the functionality doesn't work. It is fine if the "AI" doesn't work, but at least allow me to fcking change the temperature manually
Same thing with devices like Google Wifi which freezes up or run hot loops like headless chickens when internet is down.
All Nest thermostats allow that, even the ones that are no longer supported by the Google cloud.
I have every incentive to keep it local. Yet I connect it to a host on the internet. It turns out that it is convoluted and less reliable to have local servers and stuff....
Also anyone found the fix to smart bulbs constantly “updating”?
Also aside from maintenance there's no reason your WiFi should go down, an inexpensive UPS can keep it up for hours in a power outage. Even if it can't access the outside world, local routing works fine.
You can connect it to any evcc endpoint like a local homeassistant, or simply leave it on all the time.
I'm not happy with guaranteeing high availability on my HA install yet (it's not as simple as my pihole which is just a simple vrrp address over the two hosts) though so I just leave it in "always on" mode, and use the timer on the car to come on at 2310 (offpeak starts at 2300 on my tarrif).
I'd be surprised if a charger is genuinely only available via an cloud service, but from asking my neighbours if it doesn't have "an app" they wouldn't buy it.
I'd rather have an API I could poll/poke for the charger rather than set the charger to connect to me, but alas it doesn't have one.
These days I mostly don't buy it if it's not Zigbee (unless I make it myself with ESPHome). Just this week we bought two panel heaters (for two rooms that need a little heating because our heat pump is mostly used for heating the living room and kitchen). They work great over Zigbee and we can have some useful automations (like automatically switching off when forgotten and there is no one in the room for more than 10 minutes).
1. I bought some highly-rated smart plugs on Amazon. They make their own Wifi network to connect to to configure. Never got them to work. They're sitting in a box somewhere;
2. I bought a new LG washer/dryer that happened to be Internet connected. I tried to connect them. They simply wouldn't connect to my home network. After some hours I figured it was a DHCP issue, possibly them expecting an address in a certain range? They just timed out with a meaningless error. I could get them to work over a mobile hotspot though; and
3. I've bought a couple of Sonos devices over the years and I honestly don't think I'd buy another. I used to try and stream themed "radio" stations over a variety of services (eg iHeartRadio). What would inevitably happen is there would be a minor glitch in the network and it would stop playing. I'd have to manually restart it. Why can't the software do this? I don't know if this is the fault of Sonos or the third-party integration. It's probably the latter. Either way, it just left me with the impression that this is not a polished product.
Also, Sonos at that time had to create and use its own 2.4GHz network even though it was Ethernet connected. Why? It's just... lazy.
As bearing as I am on AI in general, I actually expect this to get better with the likes of REA [1]. People are going to make better versions of what is objectively horrible software that the companies have no interest in fixing or improving.
I follow some smart home integrators (ie people who do this for a living) and the general advice I get is:
1. Use Ubiquiti for APs, cameras and locks; and
2. Use Lutron for lighting where possible. There are 20+ year old Lutron systems that still work perfectly today.
All the common consumer brands (eg Philips Hue) are just toy junk, basically.
[1]: https://github.com/morluto/rea
You were warned.
If you accept and thus consented to a computer, or a device with a computer in it, without first verifying you can write to the media of its software, control the boot process, and will have sufficient access to that software, you get what you consented to.
And, you deserve it.
My home automation rules are even simpler: home automation devices are firewalled off the Internet. If something does not work because of this, it gets returned, period. I do my research and only buy Zigbee or WiFi devices that can be hacked, so I haven't had problems so far. I also don't want any "smart" fridge, washing machine, TV, etc.
The answer is KNX. This system gives local only building automation, from lights, automatic blinds and temperature monitoring. I've had this for over 10 years now and there is still a large group of manufacturers with compatible devices. Closing the blinds on the windows where too much sun is shining in - that should not require a full computer running.
But I know... Unattractive due to upfront installation cost... And no business model to sell disposable gadgets to the consumer, no vendor lock in ... Boooo
There's entire legions of people who consider themselves Christians. But I notice very little, if any, compassion for those in need: the neighbors, the ill, the refugees, or even the children.
Same with DoD -> DoW, and AI -> super intelligence. I wish I was making those up, alas.
__
I suspect that for resilience reasons alone, we might see a shift towards connecting less stuff to the public internet.
Not because consumers would complain. No one cares about consumers - including consumers themselves. But because of the threat to the stability of the system, internet connected stuff poses.
The fridge meltdowns are an example of that, but you can equally stun an enemy economy by just messing with the smart lights in people's homes, as it is the people who work.. or don't because they're tired.
Regulation, taxes, law. Can also just take over their business. Oh and they have military.
The state can do literally anything it wants.
It just often shouldn't, because a lot of escalative actions have quite the collateral.
But you don't need any of those to steer here.
Oh I also have a under-the-table contract with some intelligence community for some backdoors. You know it's a lot more expensive for them to actually send someone to test physical security, than just pay a contractor to sit before the desk collecting data, right? RIGHT??
My current top use cases:
1. Smart locks that let you remotely unlock and automatically close and lock the door - you never have to worry about the keys/security of your home.
2. Automatically turning off devices when not needed. (Eg. When no one is at home, turn off all the lights and fans. Automatically turn off the water heater 10 minutes after anyone turning it on). This really cut our power bill because people just forget these devices after turning them on.
3. Scheduled actions and reminders - automatically water the plants daily for a minute in the morning, automatically turn on the water heater at 8 am during weekdays etc . The plant watering thing is very useful when going on vacation etc...
My solution has been to do a little dance when locking the front door so the moment stands out a bit more in my memory, personally.
Also seeing if you left windows open at a glance etc.
And if I were the king of the forest, all medium to large appliances would run a controller board that is pin compatible with either arduino or raspberry pi so that the hobbyist community can refurbish devices that experienced a short. I won’t even make everyone pick a single standard. Two or maybe even three (ESP) are fine as long as we aren’t doing all custom just to count down a timer, run a pump, and sense water levels all at the same time.
Maybe not a space heater but dishwashers for sure. I’m divided stand mixers. Someone more invested could sway me either way.
> Below that is the chart from a few real days: 21 opens, with spikes showing when each one happened. Most people skip this part, and it’s the part that tells me whether I left the garage open without opening an app.
seriously?
Something anyone can use.
How would you know?
Also, QR codes as a good UX? I like what you are smoking, it is very effective in disconnecting from reality.
The web interface part would be the really complex piece I think. You would have to have some way for devices to tell it what features they have, so it could dynamically produce the appropriate controls per device
I dunno if this is really feasible to actually build but it's one of the only ways I can think that would allow average non-technical people to do this without having to administrate their own hardware and network settings and such
I'm talking about a fully built piece of hardware that comes in every house like plumbing and wiring does
https://x.com/home_assistant/status/2115496455876038961
Thanks for sharing this, I had never heard of home assistant before
So he is still dependent on big US corporations. I think the whole post would be better if he'd manage to really be even more independent.
I hope that 3D printing will reach a stage for that eventually. Once we can 3D print a 3D printer that can then 3D print almost everything, we have won.
I have a few 3d printers for building parts, enclosures, and even a few circuit boards (one is in the post). I love the idea of a being a ble to fabricate my own components.
I'm not sure installing an Amazon Microphone into my home is a good way to go about this.
(Smart speakers my arse; smart microphones is the proper name for them)
1. smart home devices
2. your children's toys
3. your Siri when you ask to find something in your phone
and yet here we are. No internet? Siri can't find anything in your phone.
Oh my favorite is how Spotlight seems to randomly fail to find local files it was easily able to find yesterday, and starts searching the web instead.
The future of smart devices is a local LLM running on every single one.
I could see using an LLM to set up more complex home automation rules that I am too lazy to set up myself. But for what kind of situations is it useful to have an LLM run the device directly?
We did have a period of centralised compute/memory/storage and dumb terminals, then this went to the edge, especially with PCs being smart end devices communicating over a dumb network. Then cloud became the fashion and everything centralised again. I hope the fashion goes the other way to more distributed systems, far more resilient.
The specifics of whether a local LLM runs in a lightbulb or a "home hub" is less interesting to me than the soverignty aspects. My fear is that we'll end up with the worst of both worlds, where we have to purchase, look after, and power, the LLM hardware, but it won't work without permission from "the cloud".