Smart TV is the only one I’ve really managed to avoid. Every TV is smart at this point
Non-IT people don’t find much use in these things either. There’s a brief futurism novelty that wears off. The devices sit unused until they inevitably break or go obsolete. Or they give up using out of frustration. Not because they’re tech illiterate. Because they realize the thing didn’t need to be IOT.
When I see an IT person post like this, I instantly think “So, you’re the IT person who always finds a reasons to say no.” I’ve manage IT shops for 30+ years, and you’re not my kind of IT person.
For some reason, I feel like you’re the type of person who uses AI to write code.
Also IT here. I’ve worked with these sorts of guys, also agree not my kind of IT person. Usually craps on anything and everything.
I just don’t understand the desire to control everything in your house with an app. It’s not like that app can load or unload the dishwasher or clothes dryer. That would be automation I could really get behind. And thermostats are programmable and then left to themselves. Even ice makers are automatically controlled with a microswitch.
And yes, I did try the internet enabled thermostat thing and found I never used the app. Nor is the journey to the thermostat so arduous that I can’t get up and walk over to it if I should ever feel the need. Maybe I’m just too old to get it.
But if you like it and want it then have at it. I certainly won’t stop you from enjoying it.
Having kids makes a big difference. It’s very useful to be able to shut off all the lights in the common areas and turn off the lights in their bedroom when they fall asleep. It’s also nice to be able to push a button to start a song on the speaker for musical routines (like cleaning up breakfast to Blue Danube or running to bed to Night Comes from Pikmin).
We also have a TON of lamps, and their switches are not always easily accessible (especially because our house is a perpetual mess).
The smart lock is because my wife always used to ask me if I locked the door after I got into bed, and I never remembered because ADHD.
If you don’t understand the desire then you don’t have a use case. And that’s ok. But that doesn’t mean other people don’t have a use case.
Properly set up home automation can reduce your energy usage. Track temperature throughout your house and open blinds, only direct heat/cooling to rooms that need it, etc. Sure a thermostat is programmable but it’s limited by the ability to just turn on/off heat and a few temperature sensors. You can drastically expand what your thermostat can do (ie motorized blinds) and information it has access to (temperature outside, current weather, etc).
Or maybe someone is the type to have panic attacks about forgetting to turn the oven off. Having the ability to see oven status on the go is nice.
Or maybe someone has a larger house than you and the journey to the thermostat is more arduous than yours. Or the journey to the dishwasher or clothes dryer to see if it’s done is arduous.
Or maybe someone has a disability and having quick access to various things is a huge time saver.
Maybe someone has a sensory issue and loud buzzing from a dryer finishing is problematic, so they want to disable the “finished” alert from the device and just receive a notification on their phone.
but if youre gathering that much data and making decisions with it, then from the OP “no internet connected thermostats” is a must. None of your smart home stuff should be able to phone home. Basically the openWRT argument but also for smart home. Use zigbee or zwave so devices can’t just directly phone home and must simply connect through a hub (that you should control).
tl;dr - plenty of reasons to want these things, they just may not apply to you.
Getting back from holiday in a few hours and the weather is cold? Turn the heating on from your app before you get back. Wow. Life changing. Don’t have a use case for most things being connected but thermostat really isn’t that crazy IMO.
Nor is the journey to the thermostat so arduous that I can’t get up and walk over to it if I should ever feel the need. Maybe I’m just too old to get it.
I live in a three story house, and sometimes only notice when what the thermostat is set to when I’m tired and ready for bed. Climbing a flight of stairs after going down and changing the thermostat doesn’t appeal much. I also got it on sale, which was nice.
That’s why you have a programmable thermostat. Set and forget. No need to climb stairs, (good exercise), to change the temp.
I just don’t understand the desire to control everything in your house with an app.
Shrinking the size of my wallet and getting rid of all my keys has an instant appeal. I’d much rather just carry around a single phone-sized multipass than a janitor’s worth of hardware for accessing a dozen different gates and appliances.
Did you notice your electronic locks all have keys for when they fail? For me, I only need one key for my door lock so it adds nothing noticeable in my pocket. And in all my life I have never seen any home appliance that needed a key to operate-- excepting something like you would see in a laundromat. But you likely don’t have the keys for that either.
As for gates, I’ve owned a lot of gates to control livestock. None of which needed a padlock. But that is very much a YMMV thing. Still, if you have a need for locked gates, a set of combination locks all set to the same combination or keyed locks with all setup for a single key once again minimizes the need for a bunch of bulky keys. Plus they are all cheaper to install and operate. You can literally operate an infinite number locks with just one key or combination.
I also got rid of a bunch of keys, and I didn’t need an app to do so. if I have to use an app, I’d hate it
I work every 3rd day, so for an odd schedule it’s nice. I set up Home Assistant to look at my calendar.
HomeAssistant and vlans are kind of the answer to most of the issues/concerns regarding smart devices this post has
I have to say though, I find anyone who leans too far either way to be extremely silly
Well chosen devices from reputable manufacturers can drastically improve quality of life
One big one for me was window blinds on a sun timer. Because after a decade, I was swapping from nights to days permanently having spent that past time swapping from nights to days every Wednesday and had signifcant issues both waking up and staying up on those days, and even now I still do
Having my bedroom windows open in the morning on their own to use natural lighting to wake me up has been extremely helpful for that, and then using HA that could be tied into external camera systems to close the windows automatically if a person or vehicle is detected within specific parameters, or having the ability to open my son’s window if I hear him crying to be picked up from a nap but I can’t immediately respond has been wonderful
Now there’s also your Rings, your creepvacuumbots, any smart TV at all and any other host of problems with iot devices, but there are some gems that make life much better without the dark patterns we increasingly associate with connectes devices these days
My phone has a built-in calendar and is about the only “extra” I use it for. It works flawlessly, and I have no other need for any other electronic calendering system. I do admit to using a wall calendar for certain things too. Old habits as a farmer are hard to break. Ye Gods, how I miss the weekly flip calendars I used to get from Cenex every year…
No HA*, no Zigbee, no containerized service landscape but the routers run OpenWRT. Hmm, Okay.
*one of the OSS contenders is fine.
Exactly.
My first personal e-mail way back in the 90s was with my ISP. Then I changed ISPs and saw the problem with that. So I moved to Yahoo.
Some years later, in the 00s I just decided to get my own, paid for, Internet domain and have my e-mail there, even though I could’ve carried on using Yahoo or get Google Mail (very popular amongst techies back then) for free. The main reason was that I realized I must made sure the e-mail address was MINE, not actually owned by somebody else with me allowed to use it under their conditions.
Twenty years later and guess it was pretty wise to not have my e-mail in the claws of “Definitelly Do Evil” Google.
Experience using and living with Tech, mainly once your understanding of it reaches the level of understanding systemic elements, naturally informs ones choices in Tech, and that often means chosing something else than the mass marketed “popular” stuff that’s designed to lock you in, sell you stuff or sell your attention to others and eavesdrop on you and sell your data.
Another perspective. You got lucky that the dependencies you’re working with haven’t gotten as bad as the ones for Gmail and the like. Sure you’ve got a domain, but you’ve also got a domain registrar you’re dependent on. Yeah, you’ve got your own email server, but it’s dependent on open source software, and the monopolists allowing it to still connection, though that’s getting iffy. You’re also dependent on the kindness of a number of people continuing to contribute to Linux, and it not being compromised in some way.
I made a different choice 25 years ago, and went with Gmail, but the idea that you’re smarter because your dependencies didn’t turn to sh*t is as much luck as skill. 25 years is several eternities in tech, and there are no guaranteed outcomes.
I think there’s a wider point here, open source is the good long term bet
If you have your own domain, you aren’t stuck with your dependencies. Swapping registrars is a straight forward porting procedure. Swapping hosting is a matter of replacing 5 or so DNS entries. It took me about 20 minutes to reconfigure my domain’s email when I decided I didn’t want to use Proton anymore.
And you knew 25 years ago that the market wouldn’t consolidate down to 1-2 registrars?
This made me wonder, are there any mechanical switches that can be switched by a smart something? As in, a regular switch where the user always has mechanical control, even when the smart system is down, but that optionally can be switched by a smart sytem, state reading is optional.
Yes
Kind of meta, but does anybody remember garage door openers back in the day? My family had one for which the “security” consisted of an 8-bit “key,” as in, the remote had 8 jumpers, and the lift unit had 8 DIP switches. You’d cut jumpers in a certain pattern, and flip the switches to match. What was fun was seeing how many garage doors around town we could open using the default pattern.
Smart locks have got to be at least a slight improvent, right?
Tech here. Lots of smart home crap. All zigbee on Home Assistant
For real! HA* & Zigbee or I seriously doubt the credibility of any „I work in IT“-claim.
*one of OSS contenders is fine.
OK here’s one why do we assume someone working in tech is knowledgeable in tech. Its a job. I have met many network maintainers for companies who seem like they know nothing. I have met many support staff who don’t know their bass from a home in the ground. Just because by outwork in the field does not mean you are an expert on everything or even the thing you do. And this doesn’t just apply to tech
The post in the screenshot just screams incompetent boomer at me.
Oh no, google / alwxa should be shot in the face, don’t mistake that.
And never trust any “smart” appliance that doesn’t work without internet access.
I guess the lock picking lawyer has something to say about those mechanical locks.
To be fair, that dude makes it look easy. Picking a quality lock you aren’t familiar with is pretty tough.
Oh, so are they (IDK the name but dude is locksmith but also throwing knives) pretty elite skill wise in locksmithing space?
I have no point of reference for that but in rock guitar term are they like Stevie Vai, Guthrie Govan level ?
Yeah, he’d probably say “at least they aren’t smart locks”
And still pick them in 10 seconds.
Without a doubt. He’s the lockpicking lawyer, after all.
But a lot of smart locks are basically locks that have all the attack vectors of normal locks, plus a bunch of extra attack vectors due to being ‘smart’.
Home Assistant is a free and open source alternative for home automation. Don’t have to completely give up the future.
Homeassistant is cool though. Also most pf my stuff would work without it, it just works better with it.
None of the devices I bought for it talk to the internet!
Any suggestions for someone tech savvy enough to run a proxmox server for a handful of services, to get started with home assistant?
Can you replicate something like a Google home with voice commands?
I may or may not be getting a new house soon. I’m good with electrical to replace switches with wireless ones. But what do you get? Where do you start and where do you end? What about the WAF?
I saw LTT did smart switches in his house and it was a mess of incompatibilities.
Any good resources? I don’t even know what I don’t know haha
This video is a good starting point. If you’re already running proxmox you’re definitely ready. 👍
Look into ZWave and ZigBee mesh networks. I run Home Assistant with a couple hundred devices and integrations. ZWave tends to be my hardwired switches, and ZigBee tends to be my battery operated motion sensors, remotes, etc.
Personally, I run Home Assistant on its native HAOS on a raspberry Pi. In addition to Home Assistant, I have lots of automations running in Node Red, a no/low code orchestration addon.
For voice control, I’m playing with the Atom Echo.
Couple hundred?! Are most of those lights or something? Forgive me I’m totally ignorant about home automation.
Is it a hobby to you or have you found significant time/energy savings? Or both?
I’ve been looking for some smart outlets, and it seems impossible to discover which ones can be used with normal well-known protocols and which can only be used through a phone app locked into a cloud service.
Check out the new IKEA Matter over Thread stuff. They have two smart plugs (an indoor single plug and an outdoor double plug). You can flash one of the esp-idf example images to an ESP32-C6 and plug it into your HA server to turn it into a Thread Border Router for under $10. Everything on Thread uses a fully local encrypted mesh network that by default has no Internet access (leave NAT64 turned off in the HA border router add-on).
P.S.: Make sure to update the firmware on the devices (which HA can do), as several don’t act as routing end devices until after the first upgrade.
So, if I’m reading things right, anything that runs on Z-Wave or Zigbee will necessarily run locally, because those are mesh protocols?
Anyway, thanks a lot. Those are really simple keywords to check.
The Hook Up had a great video on this. He compared a lot of different options and ranks them based on functionality with and without internet.
Yep.
My favorite smart outlet switch though was recently sold out and it’s an Aeotec smart switch 7.
I’ve got it set up on Home Assistant so that whenever certain devices in my home are detected on or off via watt usage minimum changes I monitor on those smart switches, it toggles the Lutron Caseta (best smart light control there is) lights via commands for different rooms in my house.
I also have things like waterproof outdoor gate sensors made by Zooz that are smaller than a single stick of gum where the small flat watch battery in it lasts for almost a year and it will alert me when the gate opens or closes, but only when I’m a certain distance away from the house’s geofence I’ve set up.
As it should be
Remember Home assistant =/= smart home nonsense
I dont need some AI assistant to automatically manage my thermostat, I just want to be able to control it all using my own local server.
I always loved the saying, “The ‘S’ in IoT stands for security.”
As plenty people already said here, I don’t see any problems if it’s staying in your local network, selfhosted
Perhaps not the best example but one to start joggin’ the noggin: it can be a weak point to start an attack your local network, if someone is adjacent (like standing in range of your WiFi). Obviously not a likely scenario to most people reading, especially since HTTPS became normalised, but a reason to keep security in the discussion for local home networks.
Well I have smart devices and a thermostat. Thermostat is awesome but local control only through home assistant and rest of the house is all zwave and ZigBee no internet required.
