In that same time period, my "plant light" timer, a $15 mechanical item of a design unmodified since the 1970s, has worked flawlessly, requiring attention only when the clocks change or my schedule does. It has not informed Google, Amazon, or anyone else about its job or anything else in my home. It has generated no royalties nor invoked any support or ongoing maintenance costs. It has never needed a software upgrade.
"Smart Home" stuff even since the "x10" standards has been a solution looking for a problem to solve. A hobby for the homeowner who wants to ride the high side of the Laffer curve in effort and expense. It could be argued that quiet, flawless functioning of these products would be exactly what the customer doesn't want in this product space.
Compare it to model trains: is that hobby focused around having a lovely little table set up and watching the trains run? Or is the actual focus the torn up mess that's under construction and "we can't play with it right now but i can get it assembled to show the kids by Tuesday".
I love my smart home stuff. My lights turn on in the morning, change color temperature at sunset, and turn off at night. Thermostats set to the right temperature/mode at night and in the morning depending on the forecast for the day. My garden is watered, but not if it's going to rain. When I turn on my TV, the lights turn off and the blinds close. Everything shuts down and locks when the family leaves, resumes when we come back.
But what's important is that it's all rock solid and 100% reliable, because none of it leaves my house. I don't have any "cloud" crap. Everything exists on my local network only. Well, that's not totally true. I have a Nest thermostat. It's the only device that ever gives me trouble, and it took a whole day to get automated. Some day I'll replace it.
I'd argue that your plant timer is reliable not because it's old and not networked, but because it doesn't have dependencies on servers thousands of miles away and isn't reliant on the continuing goodwill, solvency and work ethic of the company that sold it to you.
The interesting one was the NWS bulletins as well. I keep a weather radio, with battery backup and tuned to my county and with just emergent alerts to audibly alarm set on my nightstand.
It’s worked for…I dunno, a decade maybe. The settings are saved on a small SoC peristent memory chip so even if the battery dies I don’t have to set it back up.
Why mention this. Because a tool like this CANT depend on internet connectivity. Usually when it’s needed most basic power and even internet are either not available or intermittent at best. I live in a hurricane prone area that also by proxy is sometimes succeptible to weak tornadoes. I would NEVER trust that to a “smart device”. It’s just not necessary.
And that’s beyond things like smart bulbs kinda baffle me. I get it, but I would never have one myself. Similar to things like yard services.
I do have some smart things and n my home, like a Honeywell thermostat or even some wifi mouse traps that generally save uneeddd crawl space trips. But other things like bulbs, fridges, even alexas I don’t get. But also understand I’m not a primary market for that either
I've got the same old-fashioned mechanical timer. I actually attached it to one of those "box fan filters" that people talk about here from time to time. (So I can filter on a schedule) It works perfectly, and I've never had any issues with it. I'm thoroughly convinced that if I tried to replace it with a "smart" device I'd have no shortage of issues. I like your thinking regarding the lack of reliability with these smart devices. It's clearly possible to build these sorts of things reliably, but for some reason there doesn't seem to be any market pressure on companies to do so. If that's the case, then consumers must at least partially be to blame.
As a counter point, I've lived in places with frequent power disruptions and smart timers that use the internet and NTP and figure out the time work _so much better_ than the mechanical timers.
You know those "strip of LEDs on a gooseneck" plant lights? Even these, low-end as they are, have similar issues. They have buttons instead of physical switches. If the power goes out, I have to remember what sequence of button-presses gets me a twelve-hour timer. And you can't even set it to "always on" and control with a mechanical timer. Maddening.
I've got both mechanical timers and digital timers. While the digital ones have more programming flexibility (e.g., different hours on different days), I've also got to relearn the button sequences for checking & setting them up every time I use them.
So, what comes out first? The mechanical ones, just set the time, put the pins in the on/off times I want, and plug it in. I only bother with the digital ones if I need to use more than the couple of mechanical ones on hand.
What will I buy next if I need more? Some of these same mechanical ones...
Short, simple, and robust tech stacks really are better than tall, messy and brittle.
If someone could give me a tall, clean, and reliable stack with a clean UI, I'd be all over it, AND happy to pay more. But the trend these days is all about programmer convenience and "productivity". Great, except when the result is mountains of digital crap that results in articles like that one.
It’s absolutely a hobby for me. The hobby isn’t in doing, it’s in doing while obeying the prime directive: lights always work… that AND to create something useful that my partner actually uses that makes their life better.
Also, I get a kick out of designing the system to withstand the usual challenges of staying running in the usual house: power outages, kids playing with light switches, etc. Its basically got to always work.
Mechanical timers aren't as reliable as you make out.
For example, if you attach loads with high startup or inductive currents, like fridges or big motors/fans to them, then they'll wear out very fast and typically stop working in a few months.
If they jam for any reason, they'll usually overheat and melt all the little plastic gears inside. This happens if you tell them to turn on and off every 15 minutes all day...
Both these failure cases sound unlikely, but of perhaps 10 mechanical timers I have used in my lifetime, I have had 3 fail. That isn't great really.
> In that same time period, my "plant light" timer, a $15 mechanical item of a design unmodified since the 1970s, has worked flawlessly, requiring attention only when the clocks change or my schedule does.
This could just be survivorship bias. If 99% of these plant timers broke and were sent to the scrap heap, you would still feel like they were 'built better back then' because you're only seeing the ones that made it 50 years. Not the ones that didn't.
I did my whole house in Lutron’s smart switches (close to 50 of them), and I think it’s good? It’s been about 2 years now and I really haven’t had any issues.
The switches aren’t Wi-Fi connected, because Wi-Fi would be an awful choice for 50 devices that you only communicate with a few times a day. They use their own wireless frequency and communicate in a really simple/reliable way to the bridge, which is wired to my router and doesn’t need an internet connection to work.
There’s no always-running cloud service, the light switches work even when the internet is down (and I can still use the home app too in such an event, just no voice control.)
Siri is finicky sometimes, but I’d wager a 97% success rate in saying things like “set the scene Evening Downstairs” and “turn off all the lights except in the bedroom.”
My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off, which makes it so much nicer in the basement where I have 18 different lights to turn on and I can just hit one switch on my way downstairs and it’s fully illuminated (no voice command necessary) and I don’t have to visit 18 light switches to turn them off again.
Home automation tech must be invisible and fall back gracefully, and must always be interact-able in a “dumb” way, or else it’s just playing games IMO.
I worked at Lutron my first two years after getting my EE. I wasn't on the wireless products but we did do crazy amounts of fussing over fall back behaviors and corner cases. We very much developed the software with the attitude of hardware: we knew what we shipped had to work for years and field updates were unacceptable.
I've been gone from Coopersburg for 15 years but I still practice the engineering culture I learned there.
Fun fact: I don't know what they do today but when I was there it was a long standing tradition that engineers put in some time on the customer support phones. That way you get direct (and sometimes very unfiltered) feedback from users and their expectations on your product and understanding of the instructions you wrote. So if you call the 800 number it's not going to India and you might get to talk to one of the (lower level) engineers that made the product!
I set up all my non-standard lighting fixtures with Lutron Caseta switches, and replaced all the standard bulbs with Philips Hue bulbs. They've both been working flawlessly, together, with my 3 HomePod Minis for about a year and a half now.
It really is a brand thing. Most are bad.
[edit] > My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off...
This is my only gripe with the Lutron hardware. The Picos can only be used to trigger Lutron devices. They don't integrate into HomeKit like the switches do.
This meant I had to go with a bunch of Hue Smart Buttons, which do, but have a tendency of falling out of their homes and onto the ground.
Was looking at the Hue compatible RunLessWire stuff though. [1]
My experience with Lutron's smart switches and blinds has been great. For any new home construction, I would wholeheartedly recommend adding a lot more LED lights than any builder would normally put in, wiring in smart+motorized blinds, and using smart dimmer light switches. The way to avoid fussiness from smart home devices is to choose ones that are controllable in both the classic ways, like with a switch on the wall and/or remote control - and also through an app or by voice with your preferred device from Amazon, Apple, or Google.
With Lutron, beyond the things you mentioned, two more of my unexpectedly favorite features have been:
1) being able to add additional wall switches anywhere and program them to control any set of lights, without any extra electrical wiring (for 3-way or 4-way switches, or controlling multiple lighting circuits with one switch)
2) range-based programming (e.g. automatically turning on lights for rooms from the garage to kitchen when you're arriving home)
Other devices like smart locks, smart garage doors, water leak alarm sensors, and AV equipment have all been useful and generally worked well for me. Some of them have been slightly fussy, but not as a general rule and certainly not to an "unbearable" extent. Overall, they really do make things significantly better, at a surprisingly low cost compared to the rest of home construction.
Yep, similar story here. I have a couple dozen ZWave switches and other devices in my house which have worked great for a few years now. I use Home Assistant with a USB ZWave radio. I've broken it a couple times while fiddling with it, but it has never broken on its own.
I do have a few wifi devices for cases where there is no good ZWave option (or the wifi options are just better, like the OpenGarage garage door controller).
I really enjoy being able to double tap the "off" position of the switch in our bedroom when we turn in for the night and have it do all the things (thermostats turned down, doors locked, garage doors closed, lights off, etc). Once that script finishes it triggers a verification script that double checks the status of all other devices and sends a push notification to our phones confirming everything was done.
Lutron Caseta is the only 100% reliable smart home system I have encountered. It just does not go offline, ever. The cloud functionality is completely optional and additional. Your home internet AND WiFi can burst into flames and your lights will still work.
The thing that I like about the Lutron system is that you can try it, with just a single switch or lamp module. Then, if you like it, you can buy more.
I previously used a different brand to control my aquarium lights and HATED it. When the app randomly made me enter my password to turn the lights on, I 1-starred it with a very frank, "my old-fashioned light switch doesn't randomly ask me to enter my password" in the review.
One complaint that I have about the Lutron system is that they don't offer relay-based modules. (The old X10 system did.) Aquarium lights run very poorly off of the Lutron modules, so I wired up some 120V relays for my aquariums. I also use a Lutron module to control an outdoor outlet for holiday lights, and had to do the same thing; wire in a high amperage 120V relay into the switch.
I installed Homekit compatible Hunter ceiling fans almost a year ago and they have worked without issue since. All I had to do was scan a QR code to add it to my network. I feel like as long as you read reviews, you can stick to the quality stuff that works.
I would be a total brand whore if there was one single brand that offered all the smart devices I wanted. I love Lutron but they don't offer garage door openers or smart plugs so I'm stuck with Meross for those. Nothing wrong with Meross but they don't offer switches without neutral, yada yada. First world problems I suppose.
Similiar here - we had some older Zigbee / Z-Wave switches that were constantly breaking. Switched everything to Lutron, rock solid since then. The Pico remotes are incredible - we have some mounted in switchplates in places where we wanted 3-way switches, but didn't want to tear apart our walls running wires. Zero issues.
>I have 18 different lights to turn on and I can just hit one switch on my way downstairs and it’s fully illuminated (no voice command necessary) and I don’t have to visit 18 light switches to turn them off again.
In the analog world we'd just wire those 18 lights on a circuit controlled by a single switch...
i’m replacing all my caseta and pico with dumb switches. the radio bits and the color matching are of utmost quality. the ergonomics of these devices however is exceptionally poor, and an example of market segmentation. (ra and ra2 provide the entire switch as a target).
zwave doesn’t come close to the reliability of lutron so dumb it shall be
I think any software engineer with some industry experience will absolutely NOT install a device in his home that receives automatic updates over the internet and is critical for performing some task or using some basic functionality of the house; especially one that has a well known, highly stable and ergonomic traditional mode of interaction - controlling the lights and water, opening the windows and shades etc.
We know from experience that a nebulous interface that can change without notice and provides no clear contract is a asking for trouble and will break your house "build", so to speak, or worse, it will bork at the worst possible moment, when you have "clients" over.
In the early years of home electricity, there was a much higher chance of getting electrocuted or burning to a crisp, outlets had no grounding, insulation and conductors were of a bad quality etc. Similarly, the whole field of home automation is in its infancy, in a few decades most major mistakes will be made and early adopters will work out the kinks out of the technology (and find out why it's a bad idea to have an internet connected microphone listening in your home at all times).
Yeah over the last few weeks Alexa has grown annoyingly chatty. Pretty much every ask, like "Alexa, what's the outside temperature?" is followed by the answer and then "Did you know..." which is itself followed by me saying "Alexa stop" in an irritated voice.
"Computer, lay in a course to intercept the Romulan cruiser."
"Intercept course calculated. Did you know, I can automatically reorder toilet paper for the bridge head?"
If any one from Amazon is hanging nearby, please pass along how annoying a chatty home assistant is.
The "did you know..." crap sounds like someone's bonuses are tied to Alexa engagement.
And people just triggering their half-dozen routines they made 3 years ago isn't enough engagement. Thus: a ham-fisted attempt to get people to use it more.
Agreed that "did you know" sucks. Worst possible way to teach me to use the device.
That said, it's a really interesting problem figuring out how to teach people what Alexa can/can't do. How do you tell your users "we built a feature so now you can set subscription orders!"
Personally, I don't get why they don't run ads. Like, instead of a smiley face delivery person, just say "here's a new thing your Alexa can do"
I have an EE degree and a CS degree. I waste an incomprehensible portion of my life fussing with the technology that runs in my home.
Why is it so hard to configure VLANs for my security cameras using the fancy Unifi switches I have? Why isn't there just some documented JSON file somewhere that I can edit? (The key word in the previous sentence is documented -- I'm sure there is an XML or JSON file somewhere they just don't tell you where it is). Why should I have to do configuration of VLANs on my iPhone? And why are you hiding the good stuff with a pretty web-based interface. I'd like to be able to manage my network even if their "cloud" goes down.
Pfsense firewall, no problem. Local ZFS file servers, no problem. Getting my upstairs thermostat (required by the the high end Lenox AC unit) to work, big problems. Again, why does it require me to have a connection to "the cloud" as the AC technicians say. Now I need to remember some dumb password to adjust the air upstairs on my phone.
Lightning hit a power transformer down the road. Everything in my home survived, except the fancy video security night-light motion detecting "cloud" connected doorbell. So now I have two wires sticking out of the wall by my front door with a big note on the door that says "Doorbell broken, please knock". It turns out that works pretty well.
Thinking it was maybe time to declare technology bankruptcy and start over, my spouse and I looked at a few homes for sale. In one, we couldn't hear one another because the "background" music was so loud. We wandered around looking for a way to turn it down; It emanated from speakers around the house and neither the agent nor us could figure out how to silence the infernal music. Did I have to shout out the magic word, like "Alexa" or "Hey Google" or was there a Sonos remote hidden under a cushion--who knows.
I've installed garage door openers myself, but that was before cell phones. Now, I can't get the openers coordinated with my family's cars. The cars have their own distinct button programming protocols quite tricky to manage. Its a bit like learning how to be a courtroom stenographer that types on the funny corded keyboard. A neighbor with an engineering degree claims to have figured out how to program the street's gate opener to his car, but my MB and Subaru have thwarted my attempts to keep up with him.
I'm on my third sprinkler controller. The first had a big rotating switch with ambiguous buttons scattered around and a cryptic page of instructions on the inside of its cover: virtually impossible to figure out. Where were the man pages when I needed them. I replaced it with a "modern" sprinkler controller. It was, naturally, "cloud" connected, so the first step was to climb around in the 120 degree attic dragging cat6 and then install a POE wifi access point in the garage. I foolishly said to myself, "Now I can look forward to using an iPhone app to control my sprinkler." It lasted about a year before I noticed a patches of dead grass.
I figured that maybe I just needed professional help with the sprinkler controller (and I was busy inside because my spouse was complaining about all the wires everywhere--she didn't understand that it takes time to repair a doorbell from the future and run new cat6). The professional irrigation guy was great, but he said I needed a new sprinkler controller. Now, he informed me, I would be able to control my sprinklers with my iPhone, cool, I just need to figure out which app I'm supposed to use! He needed my wifi password of course so he could work on the controller when I wasn't home. No problem, I thought. I'll set up a separate VLAN for IOT (internet of things) and configure it via my Pfsense firewall to be isolated from my home's higher security subnets. At this point, I'm back at paragraph two.
I firmly believe that at this moment, Home Assistant is the best smart home system out there. No cloud, no vendor lock-in, no data, no profiling, no lock-in with licenses and companies needing to make deals.
And honestly, that's terrible. Because let's be honest, Home Assistant still kind of sucks. Not because of all the hard work the developers put into it, but because all of the hacks they need to get devices to work with the damn thing. The IKEA smart lamp bridge is unreliable, wake on LAN is unreliable, smart switches refuse to operate without a cloud connection, transmitted data formats are proprietary and unreliable, it all just sucks so bad.
There's work being done by FAANG (or would that be MAANG now?) to make interoperability between devices better, but knowing these companies that probably means the clouds get more integrated with each other.
These terrible internet smart devices should pick a protocol like MQTT or CoAP or whatever IoT protocol they fancy, and stick it proudly on the box. They can have their stupid internet uplink, bht they should Just Work if they're only connected locally. These things run fully fledged ESP32 chips with more power than you could ever need for a plant humidity sensor, just put a basic web interface on them that takes a password, a WiFi network and an endpoint to talk to. As for alternative protocols, companies like Phillips and IKEA should get their shit together already and just expose a good, documented API.
Home Automation is a hobby mostly practiced by the technically inclined. The more bridges and products that work with your smart fridge, the more value your fridge has to consumers.
About 10 seconds into reading this I got a 'cute' drop-down box that greyed out what I was half-way through reading, and insisted that I attend to a 'Get my weekly IoT newsletter' that demanded from me an email address, name, and company details.
The unbearable demands of advertising.
EDIT (ADD)
I've installed a couple of ESP32's with humidity / temperature gauges, in two of my abodes, that feed into a prometheus -> cortex store, so I can then map them on Grafana.
This is considered 'excessive' by the family, but for me it's deeply interesting and compelling, and I'll be pushing more of them out over the next few months.
But these are very basic devices, with rudimentary access to the local network, and no way (or interest) in phoning out to anything else beyond my router. This is the ideal scenario for these kinds of devices.
Has to be said I don't understand "smart devices" one bit. I simply don't understand how pulling out a phone and launching an app is preferable to an ordinary light switch. In fact I would say it's in every respect worse. And I don't want something that sits in the room listening to everything I say and uploading some unknown part of that to an unknown cloud service.
On the day we were closing on our 1920s house here in Massachusetts, we noticed that the oven wouldn't turn on. Then we noticed that it was shut off at the breaker.
We asked the owner why, and he said "oh, the mainboard in the oven (a Thermidor) has some issue where it beeps incessantly in the middle of the night and wakes us all up – but not a big deal: you can just turn it off and on at the breaker and it works just fine!" He'd apparently sent the mainboard in multiple times to have it serviced, but the problem persisted.
That wasn't a really satisfying answer at the closing table, so we pressed to get compensated for the oven we were rather sure we'd have to replace.
A few weeks later, as we were pricing out $2000-3000 replacement units, I had an idea to look for a smart relay to control the oven's dedicated circuit. I managed to find a 40-amp smart switch for $90 that I could control with SmartThings.
Now we can use the app or say "Alexa, turn on the oven," the switch is activated in the basement, and the oven turns on. At midnight, SmartThings turns it off if we haven't already, preventing the beeping.
$90 got us where we needed to be, and it's been working great for almost five years now.
Honestly this most infuriating thing about this entire situation is that the devices we have the most issues with are actually the ones provided by big name companies (specifically issues with Google and TP-Link in our setup).
I try my hardest to stick to Zigbee and Z-Wave devices wherever possible which has lead me to purchase devices like Samsung's SmartThings plug, or Sonoff Minis etc that I can connect straight to a Zigbee/Z-Wave dongle to expose them to HomeAssistant. This setup is actually very reliable and the only downtime we've had over nearly three years is when I've pulled the HA virtual machine down to do updates - I think we're up to about 40 or 50 zigbee devices in our network now that all work flawlessly and locally.
So what about Google and TP-Link? Google Home is becoming chatty and has started to regularly mishear commands, or it will say a device is unavailable but still perform the action successfully. TP-Link pushed a silent update out to the couple of smart plugs we had from them that disabled functionality that exposed them to Home Assistant - rendering them a complete waste of time and money.
It's mind boggling to me that the (m/b/tr)illion dollar companies of the world are the ones fucking up my smart home. It annoys me enough that I would no longer purchase hardware from any company that uses WiFi or relies on the cloud for "smart" home stuff.
I've had a lot of success with z-wave devices in my home, hooked into Home Assistant. They seem more resilient than zigbee (and much more reliable than any of the bespoke wifi stuff) and are largely all interoperable. I've got a bunch of z-wave devices like plugs and thermostats, but it comes at a high cost.
For lights I do use zigbee ones just because they're cheaper, but my Hue and IKEA mix do have communication issues sometimes (I have them both on a Deconz stick attached to my server).
But all of this relies on Home Assistant. I honestly can't imagine trying to use smart home devices as a "normal" consumer, relying on the software of specific companies. They're all largely terrible walled gardens, and I'm constantly surprised by how bad they actually are.
I love programming ESP32 arduinos - connecting stuff up.
but I will never make my home 'smart' - not with closed or open sourced.
My standard way of thinking is - can I help someone in my family to fix it or replace it, if it was to go wrong over the phone ... whilst I'm out drinking and drunk.
Because given enough time this seems to pop up again and again with anything in the house - and I do not go out drinking often (before someone asks)
Take the thing in your hands, install Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/) and let Open Source rule your world.
It works flawlessly, there is just a Himalaya steep learning curve and knowing Python helps when doing fancy automations with pyscript (there are integrated automations whihc are a pain in the bottom, and solutions such as Node Red).
In all honesty, Home Assistant opens a huge amount of possibilities but you have to commit to it.
My wife constantly wonders what she will do when I die and the whole thing goes south the day after.
I’ve become annoyed with “smart home” because the reliability is so bad. About 20% of the time the light doesn’t turn on or off.
I’ve used Alexa with Feit and Phillips Hue for about 4 years and Apple HomePod for about a year.
At least once a day, I get an error message like “Oops, I had a problem with that.” Apple seems worse about this. It sometimes works by calling the other with the same command. It always works when using the app on my phone.
I expect 100% reliability. The same as my light switch. The light switch works every time.
I also don’t like how chatty they are. I can’t turn off the voice confirmations with Apple. I don’t want it to tell me that it turned on the lights.
I laugh imagining a Star Trek episode where the computer responds as shittily as our current state of smart homes.
This is entirely on the author. Sure these vendors make awful products and poorly maintain them - but nobody is forcing anyone to buy them or integrate them into their house. I have yet to hear, or especially see, these devices make anybody’s life easier than doing the task manually.
I never think about light in my home, I flip the switch if I need it - lights seem like such a chore to my friends who have to issue commands to a speaker and that’s one of the few things this tech is supposed to be good at
Good technology gets out of the way and let’s the user do or be or experience something. This is the opposite
I can remember discussing when household appliances would be networked, back in the 1980s. I would never have predicted that in 2021 almost every appliance+ would have a networking capability, but that said capability would have been added by the manufacturer as a way to get the purchaser's email address so they could spam them and sell their information.
+ I recently bought: an air fryer and a sous vide heater. Both support WiFi and apps (the air frier won't even turn on until you pair it with the app). Neither provides any meaningful networked functionality.
I just built a vacation home from the ground up and specced the "smart" features myself and did so very carefully. I've learned the hard way because I was already "orphaned" when I bought my current primary residence which had a high-end 'state-of-the-art' home automation system that was designed into the walls by the original owner. Unfortunately, it was cutting-edge tech for 2001. The original manufacturer of the system as well as the local dealer/installer both changed owners and product lines multiple times and were out of business over a decade ago.
Fortunately, the hardware was pretty well-designed industrial grade gear consisting of cards mounted to back plane slots inside wall-mounted racks in the basement and I like working on 8-bit era arcade and pinball machines which shares many similarities. The saving grace is that the system is just old enough to predate being internet-connected, so the firmware is in EEPROM and was designed to stand alone forever if necessary.
In my new place I was determined to avoid the same issues 25 years down the road so I've selected devices that run open source firmware on widely available, multi-source commodity hardware using long-lived open protocols. For example, the 62 in-wall dimmer switches have ESP8266 boards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266) and I installed the mature Tasmota open-source firmware (https://tasmota.github.io/docs/) in them so they don't require cloud connection or try to phone home. They function normally as light switches with no connection of any kind but can be optionally controlled via wifi by a Raspberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant open-source software which hosts modular integrations with hundreds of different devices, protocols and standards.
What some people call “fussiness” I call “doesn’t work.” When I was younger I enjoyed playing with the new tech, so I was willing to overlook a lot of problems. But now I look around at the state of technology and I’m sort of flabbergasted at what we’ve let it become. Most stuff sold to consumers simply doesn’t work for a very simple and obvious definition of “doesn’t work.”
Even my Wi-Fi “doesn’t work” by any normal standard of “works” that was in use before, say, 1980.
Everything is sold as a 10% product. A 10% product is a cell phone in 1994. It provides transformational, life-changing functionality…10% of the time. The other 90% of the time it just frustrates you because it doesn’t work. It took cell phones 25 years to go from a 10% product to a 98% product.
The problem is that most things aren’t cell phones. Most things sold to consumers should stay in the lab until they are closer to 98% than 10%.
Ask yourself what the value is of all this additional complexity and additional “features” relative to the end sought. Do you need the damn router to be on for the stupid “smart” lightbulb to turn on? When you need the lights on to get something done, do you really want to be distracted by some undependable piece of shit doing is little smart jig? It’s like living in some absurdust play.
The market demand of a lot of these things is driven by a kind of monkey-loves-shiny-things syndrome and herd thinking. Maybe enui and idleness because anyone that truly values their short life won’t waste it on tinkering with a bunch of pointless devices that contribute no real value to his life. May his tombstone read “He tinkered with his smart devices. Then he died.”
Interestingly, a mature software engineer hates complexity. He loves to trim the fat from his code base. He hates pissing away his life dicking around and maintaining stuff that had no reason for being there in the first place. He has better things to do with his time than jerking off some code he doesn’t need.
Maybe smart devices are a distraction for nihilists. Maybe it’s like alcohol. Maybe Idiocracy II will feature a populace spending half their days trying to turn the lights on.
And nevermind the dystopian contribution these things are to the surveillance state.
[+] [-] h2odragon|4 years ago|reply
"Smart Home" stuff even since the "x10" standards has been a solution looking for a problem to solve. A hobby for the homeowner who wants to ride the high side of the Laffer curve in effort and expense. It could be argued that quiet, flawless functioning of these products would be exactly what the customer doesn't want in this product space.
Compare it to model trains: is that hobby focused around having a lovely little table set up and watching the trains run? Or is the actual focus the torn up mess that's under construction and "we can't play with it right now but i can get it assembled to show the kids by Tuesday".
[+] [-] pkulak|4 years ago|reply
But what's important is that it's all rock solid and 100% reliable, because none of it leaves my house. I don't have any "cloud" crap. Everything exists on my local network only. Well, that's not totally true. I have a Nest thermostat. It's the only device that ever gives me trouble, and it took a whole day to get automated. Some day I'll replace it.
I'd argue that your plant timer is reliable not because it's old and not networked, but because it doesn't have dependencies on servers thousands of miles away and isn't reliant on the continuing goodwill, solvency and work ethic of the company that sold it to you.
[+] [-] croutonwagon|4 years ago|reply
It’s worked for…I dunno, a decade maybe. The settings are saved on a small SoC peristent memory chip so even if the battery dies I don’t have to set it back up.
Why mention this. Because a tool like this CANT depend on internet connectivity. Usually when it’s needed most basic power and even internet are either not available or intermittent at best. I live in a hurricane prone area that also by proxy is sometimes succeptible to weak tornadoes. I would NEVER trust that to a “smart device”. It’s just not necessary.
And that’s beyond things like smart bulbs kinda baffle me. I get it, but I would never have one myself. Similar to things like yard services.
I do have some smart things and n my home, like a Honeywell thermostat or even some wifi mouse traps that generally save uneeddd crawl space trips. But other things like bulbs, fridges, even alexas I don’t get. But also understand I’m not a primary market for that either
[+] [-] everdrive|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzy_plugh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] at_a_remove|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toss1|4 years ago|reply
I've got both mechanical timers and digital timers. While the digital ones have more programming flexibility (e.g., different hours on different days), I've also got to relearn the button sequences for checking & setting them up every time I use them.
So, what comes out first? The mechanical ones, just set the time, put the pins in the on/off times I want, and plug it in. I only bother with the digital ones if I need to use more than the couple of mechanical ones on hand.
What will I buy next if I need more? Some of these same mechanical ones...
Short, simple, and robust tech stacks really are better than tall, messy and brittle.
If someone could give me a tall, clean, and reliable stack with a clean UI, I'd be all over it, AND happy to pay more. But the trend these days is all about programmer convenience and "productivity". Great, except when the result is mountains of digital crap that results in articles like that one.
[+] [-] op00to|4 years ago|reply
Also, I get a kick out of designing the system to withstand the usual challenges of staying running in the usual house: power outages, kids playing with light switches, etc. Its basically got to always work.
[+] [-] londons_explore|4 years ago|reply
For example, if you attach loads with high startup or inductive currents, like fridges or big motors/fans to them, then they'll wear out very fast and typically stop working in a few months.
If they jam for any reason, they'll usually overheat and melt all the little plastic gears inside. This happens if you tell them to turn on and off every 15 minutes all day...
Both these failure cases sound unlikely, but of perhaps 10 mechanical timers I have used in my lifetime, I have had 3 fail. That isn't great really.
[+] [-] arcticbull|4 years ago|reply
This could just be survivorship bias. If 99% of these plant timers broke and were sent to the scrap heap, you would still feel like they were 'built better back then' because you're only seeing the ones that made it 50 years. Not the ones that didn't.
[+] [-] ninkendo|4 years ago|reply
The switches aren’t Wi-Fi connected, because Wi-Fi would be an awful choice for 50 devices that you only communicate with a few times a day. They use their own wireless frequency and communicate in a really simple/reliable way to the bridge, which is wired to my router and doesn’t need an internet connection to work.
There’s no always-running cloud service, the light switches work even when the internet is down (and I can still use the home app too in such an event, just no voice control.)
Siri is finicky sometimes, but I’d wager a 97% success rate in saying things like “set the scene Evening Downstairs” and “turn off all the lights except in the bedroom.”
My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off, which makes it so much nicer in the basement where I have 18 different lights to turn on and I can just hit one switch on my way downstairs and it’s fully illuminated (no voice command necessary) and I don’t have to visit 18 light switches to turn them off again.
Home automation tech must be invisible and fall back gracefully, and must always be interact-able in a “dumb” way, or else it’s just playing games IMO.
[+] [-] gangstead|4 years ago|reply
I've been gone from Coopersburg for 15 years but I still practice the engineering culture I learned there.
Fun fact: I don't know what they do today but when I was there it was a long standing tradition that engineers put in some time on the customer support phones. That way you get direct (and sometimes very unfiltered) feedback from users and their expectations on your product and understanding of the instructions you wrote. So if you call the 800 number it's not going to India and you might get to talk to one of the (lower level) engineers that made the product!
[+] [-] arcticbull|4 years ago|reply
I set up all my non-standard lighting fixtures with Lutron Caseta switches, and replaced all the standard bulbs with Philips Hue bulbs. They've both been working flawlessly, together, with my 3 HomePod Minis for about a year and a half now.
It really is a brand thing. Most are bad.
[edit] > My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off...
This is my only gripe with the Lutron hardware. The Picos can only be used to trigger Lutron devices. They don't integrate into HomeKit like the switches do.
This meant I had to go with a bunch of Hue Smart Buttons, which do, but have a tendency of falling out of their homes and onto the ground.
Was looking at the Hue compatible RunLessWire stuff though. [1]
[1] https://runlesswire.com
[+] [-] pydry|4 years ago|reply
Most of them want to proxy all attempts to turn on a light switch via AWS. Which is madness.
[+] [-] bobf|4 years ago|reply
With Lutron, beyond the things you mentioned, two more of my unexpectedly favorite features have been:
1) being able to add additional wall switches anywhere and program them to control any set of lights, without any extra electrical wiring (for 3-way or 4-way switches, or controlling multiple lighting circuits with one switch)
2) range-based programming (e.g. automatically turning on lights for rooms from the garage to kitchen when you're arriving home)
Other devices like smart locks, smart garage doors, water leak alarm sensors, and AV equipment have all been useful and generally worked well for me. Some of them have been slightly fussy, but not as a general rule and certainly not to an "unbearable" extent. Overall, they really do make things significantly better, at a surprisingly low cost compared to the rest of home construction.
[+] [-] JshWright|4 years ago|reply
I do have a few wifi devices for cases where there is no good ZWave option (or the wifi options are just better, like the OpenGarage garage door controller).
I really enjoy being able to double tap the "off" position of the switch in our bedroom when we turn in for the night and have it do all the things (thermostats turned down, doors locked, garage doors closed, lights off, etc). Once that script finishes it triggers a verification script that double checks the status of all other devices and sends a push notification to our phones confirming everything was done.
[+] [-] kgin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|4 years ago|reply
I previously used a different brand to control my aquarium lights and HATED it. When the app randomly made me enter my password to turn the lights on, I 1-starred it with a very frank, "my old-fashioned light switch doesn't randomly ask me to enter my password" in the review.
One complaint that I have about the Lutron system is that they don't offer relay-based modules. (The old X10 system did.) Aquarium lights run very poorly off of the Lutron modules, so I wired up some 120V relays for my aquariums. I also use a Lutron module to control an outdoor outlet for holiday lights, and had to do the same thing; wire in a high amperage 120V relay into the switch.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d0gsg0w00f|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vailripper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaaaaaaaaaab|4 years ago|reply
In the analog world we'd just wire those 18 lights on a circuit controlled by a single switch...
[+] [-] luckydata|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiveturkey|4 years ago|reply
zwave doesn’t come close to the reliability of lutron so dumb it shall be
[+] [-] quickthrowman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotancohen|4 years ago|reply
Lrf, V'z wbxvat.
[+] [-] freen|4 years ago|reply
WiFi is the enemy.
[+] [-] Chris2048|4 years ago|reply
How do they compare with IKEAs "TRÅDFRI" offerings?
[+] [-] yholio|4 years ago|reply
We know from experience that a nebulous interface that can change without notice and provides no clear contract is a asking for trouble and will break your house "build", so to speak, or worse, it will bork at the worst possible moment, when you have "clients" over.
In the early years of home electricity, there was a much higher chance of getting electrocuted or burning to a crisp, outlets had no grounding, insulation and conductors were of a bad quality etc. Similarly, the whole field of home automation is in its infancy, in a few decades most major mistakes will be made and early adopters will work out the kinks out of the technology (and find out why it's a bad idea to have an internet connected microphone listening in your home at all times).
[+] [-] markbnj|4 years ago|reply
"Computer, lay in a course to intercept the Romulan cruiser." "Intercept course calculated. Did you know, I can automatically reorder toilet paper for the bridge head?"
If any one from Amazon is hanging nearby, please pass along how annoying a chatty home assistant is.
[+] [-] theshrike79|4 years ago|reply
And people just triggering their half-dozen routines they made 3 years ago isn't enough engagement. Thus: a ham-fisted attempt to get people to use it more.
[+] [-] curiousllama|4 years ago|reply
That said, it's a really interesting problem figuring out how to teach people what Alexa can/can't do. How do you tell your users "we built a feature so now you can set subscription orders!"
Personally, I don't get why they don't run ads. Like, instead of a smiley face delivery person, just say "here's a new thing your Alexa can do"
[+] [-] setpatchaddress|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bananabat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] todd8|4 years ago|reply
Why is it so hard to configure VLANs for my security cameras using the fancy Unifi switches I have? Why isn't there just some documented JSON file somewhere that I can edit? (The key word in the previous sentence is documented -- I'm sure there is an XML or JSON file somewhere they just don't tell you where it is). Why should I have to do configuration of VLANs on my iPhone? And why are you hiding the good stuff with a pretty web-based interface. I'd like to be able to manage my network even if their "cloud" goes down.
Pfsense firewall, no problem. Local ZFS file servers, no problem. Getting my upstairs thermostat (required by the the high end Lenox AC unit) to work, big problems. Again, why does it require me to have a connection to "the cloud" as the AC technicians say. Now I need to remember some dumb password to adjust the air upstairs on my phone.
Lightning hit a power transformer down the road. Everything in my home survived, except the fancy video security night-light motion detecting "cloud" connected doorbell. So now I have two wires sticking out of the wall by my front door with a big note on the door that says "Doorbell broken, please knock". It turns out that works pretty well.
Thinking it was maybe time to declare technology bankruptcy and start over, my spouse and I looked at a few homes for sale. In one, we couldn't hear one another because the "background" music was so loud. We wandered around looking for a way to turn it down; It emanated from speakers around the house and neither the agent nor us could figure out how to silence the infernal music. Did I have to shout out the magic word, like "Alexa" or "Hey Google" or was there a Sonos remote hidden under a cushion--who knows.
I've installed garage door openers myself, but that was before cell phones. Now, I can't get the openers coordinated with my family's cars. The cars have their own distinct button programming protocols quite tricky to manage. Its a bit like learning how to be a courtroom stenographer that types on the funny corded keyboard. A neighbor with an engineering degree claims to have figured out how to program the street's gate opener to his car, but my MB and Subaru have thwarted my attempts to keep up with him.
I'm on my third sprinkler controller. The first had a big rotating switch with ambiguous buttons scattered around and a cryptic page of instructions on the inside of its cover: virtually impossible to figure out. Where were the man pages when I needed them. I replaced it with a "modern" sprinkler controller. It was, naturally, "cloud" connected, so the first step was to climb around in the 120 degree attic dragging cat6 and then install a POE wifi access point in the garage. I foolishly said to myself, "Now I can look forward to using an iPhone app to control my sprinkler." It lasted about a year before I noticed a patches of dead grass.
I figured that maybe I just needed professional help with the sprinkler controller (and I was busy inside because my spouse was complaining about all the wires everywhere--she didn't understand that it takes time to repair a doorbell from the future and run new cat6). The professional irrigation guy was great, but he said I needed a new sprinkler controller. Now, he informed me, I would be able to control my sprinklers with my iPhone, cool, I just need to figure out which app I'm supposed to use! He needed my wifi password of course so he could work on the controller when I wasn't home. No problem, I thought. I'll set up a separate VLAN for IOT (internet of things) and configure it via my Pfsense firewall to be isolated from my home's higher security subnets. At this point, I'm back at paragraph two.
[+] [-] jeroenhd|4 years ago|reply
And honestly, that's terrible. Because let's be honest, Home Assistant still kind of sucks. Not because of all the hard work the developers put into it, but because all of the hacks they need to get devices to work with the damn thing. The IKEA smart lamp bridge is unreliable, wake on LAN is unreliable, smart switches refuse to operate without a cloud connection, transmitted data formats are proprietary and unreliable, it all just sucks so bad.
There's work being done by FAANG (or would that be MAANG now?) to make interoperability between devices better, but knowing these companies that probably means the clouds get more integrated with each other.
These terrible internet smart devices should pick a protocol like MQTT or CoAP or whatever IoT protocol they fancy, and stick it proudly on the box. They can have their stupid internet uplink, bht they should Just Work if they're only connected locally. These things run fully fledged ESP32 chips with more power than you could ever need for a plant humidity sensor, just put a basic web interface on them that takes a password, a WiFi network and an endpoint to talk to. As for alternative protocols, companies like Phillips and IKEA should get their shit together already and just expose a good, documented API.
Home Automation is a hobby mostly practiced by the technically inclined. The more bridges and products that work with your smart fridge, the more value your fridge has to consumers.
[+] [-] Jedd|4 years ago|reply
The unbearable demands of advertising.
EDIT (ADD)
I've installed a couple of ESP32's with humidity / temperature gauges, in two of my abodes, that feed into a prometheus -> cortex store, so I can then map them on Grafana.
This is considered 'excessive' by the family, but for me it's deeply interesting and compelling, and I'll be pushing more of them out over the next few months.
But these are very basic devices, with rudimentary access to the local network, and no way (or interest) in phoning out to anything else beyond my router. This is the ideal scenario for these kinds of devices.
[+] [-] rwmj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whafro|4 years ago|reply
On the day we were closing on our 1920s house here in Massachusetts, we noticed that the oven wouldn't turn on. Then we noticed that it was shut off at the breaker.
We asked the owner why, and he said "oh, the mainboard in the oven (a Thermidor) has some issue where it beeps incessantly in the middle of the night and wakes us all up – but not a big deal: you can just turn it off and on at the breaker and it works just fine!" He'd apparently sent the mainboard in multiple times to have it serviced, but the problem persisted.
That wasn't a really satisfying answer at the closing table, so we pressed to get compensated for the oven we were rather sure we'd have to replace.
A few weeks later, as we were pricing out $2000-3000 replacement units, I had an idea to look for a smart relay to control the oven's dedicated circuit. I managed to find a 40-amp smart switch for $90 that I could control with SmartThings.
Now we can use the app or say "Alexa, turn on the oven," the switch is activated in the basement, and the oven turns on. At midnight, SmartThings turns it off if we haven't already, preventing the beeping.
$90 got us where we needed to be, and it's been working great for almost five years now.
[+] [-] blue_cookeh|4 years ago|reply
I try my hardest to stick to Zigbee and Z-Wave devices wherever possible which has lead me to purchase devices like Samsung's SmartThings plug, or Sonoff Minis etc that I can connect straight to a Zigbee/Z-Wave dongle to expose them to HomeAssistant. This setup is actually very reliable and the only downtime we've had over nearly three years is when I've pulled the HA virtual machine down to do updates - I think we're up to about 40 or 50 zigbee devices in our network now that all work flawlessly and locally.
So what about Google and TP-Link? Google Home is becoming chatty and has started to regularly mishear commands, or it will say a device is unavailable but still perform the action successfully. TP-Link pushed a silent update out to the couple of smart plugs we had from them that disabled functionality that exposed them to Home Assistant - rendering them a complete waste of time and money.
It's mind boggling to me that the (m/b/tr)illion dollar companies of the world are the ones fucking up my smart home. It annoys me enough that I would no longer purchase hardware from any company that uses WiFi or relies on the cloud for "smart" home stuff.
[+] [-] robotmay|4 years ago|reply
For lights I do use zigbee ones just because they're cheaper, but my Hue and IKEA mix do have communication issues sometimes (I have them both on a Deconz stick attached to my server).
But all of this relies on Home Assistant. I honestly can't imagine trying to use smart home devices as a "normal" consumer, relying on the software of specific companies. They're all largely terrible walled gardens, and I'm constantly surprised by how bad they actually are.
[+] [-] 123pie123|4 years ago|reply
but I will never make my home 'smart' - not with closed or open sourced.
My standard way of thinking is - can I help someone in my family to fix it or replace it, if it was to go wrong over the phone ... whilst I'm out drinking and drunk.
Because given enough time this seems to pop up again and again with anything in the house - and I do not go out drinking often (before someone asks)
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|4 years ago|reply
It works flawlessly, there is just a Himalaya steep learning curve and knowing Python helps when doing fancy automations with pyscript (there are integrated automations whihc are a pain in the bottom, and solutions such as Node Red).
In all honesty, Home Assistant opens a huge amount of possibilities but you have to commit to it.
My wife constantly wonders what she will do when I die and the whole thing goes south the day after.
[+] [-] prepend|4 years ago|reply
I’ve used Alexa with Feit and Phillips Hue for about 4 years and Apple HomePod for about a year.
At least once a day, I get an error message like “Oops, I had a problem with that.” Apple seems worse about this. It sometimes works by calling the other with the same command. It always works when using the app on my phone.
I expect 100% reliability. The same as my light switch. The light switch works every time.
I also don’t like how chatty they are. I can’t turn off the voice confirmations with Apple. I don’t want it to tell me that it turned on the lights.
I laugh imagining a Star Trek episode where the computer responds as shittily as our current state of smart homes.
[+] [-] vnxli|4 years ago|reply
I never think about light in my home, I flip the switch if I need it - lights seem like such a chore to my friends who have to issue commands to a speaker and that’s one of the few things this tech is supposed to be good at
Good technology gets out of the way and let’s the user do or be or experience something. This is the opposite
[+] [-] dboreham|4 years ago|reply
+ I recently bought: an air fryer and a sous vide heater. Both support WiFi and apps (the air frier won't even turn on until you pair it with the app). Neither provides any meaningful networked functionality.
[+] [-] mrandish|4 years ago|reply
Fortunately, the hardware was pretty well-designed industrial grade gear consisting of cards mounted to back plane slots inside wall-mounted racks in the basement and I like working on 8-bit era arcade and pinball machines which shares many similarities. The saving grace is that the system is just old enough to predate being internet-connected, so the firmware is in EEPROM and was designed to stand alone forever if necessary.
In my new place I was determined to avoid the same issues 25 years down the road so I've selected devices that run open source firmware on widely available, multi-source commodity hardware using long-lived open protocols. For example, the 62 in-wall dimmer switches have ESP8266 boards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266) and I installed the mature Tasmota open-source firmware (https://tasmota.github.io/docs/) in them so they don't require cloud connection or try to phone home. They function normally as light switches with no connection of any kind but can be optionally controlled via wifi by a Raspberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant open-source software which hosts modular integrations with hundreds of different devices, protocols and standards.
[+] [-] dionidium|4 years ago|reply
Everything is sold as a 10% product. A 10% product is a cell phone in 1994. It provides transformational, life-changing functionality…10% of the time. The other 90% of the time it just frustrates you because it doesn’t work. It took cell phones 25 years to go from a 10% product to a 98% product.
The problem is that most things aren’t cell phones. Most things sold to consumers should stay in the lab until they are closer to 98% than 10%.
[+] [-] edent|4 years ago|reply
"Alexa... Turn on the downstairs lights... sigh Alexa, turn on all the downstairs lights... deep sigh Alexa, downstairs lights one hundred percent."
Then, if I'm lucky, Alexa will convince the Philips Hue to flick on a dozen lights.
When everything works - it is subtle magic. When it doesn't, it's obviously a load of poorly debugged JSON parsers with finickity wifi connections.
[+] [-] bobthechef|4 years ago|reply
The market demand of a lot of these things is driven by a kind of monkey-loves-shiny-things syndrome and herd thinking. Maybe enui and idleness because anyone that truly values their short life won’t waste it on tinkering with a bunch of pointless devices that contribute no real value to his life. May his tombstone read “He tinkered with his smart devices. Then he died.”
Interestingly, a mature software engineer hates complexity. He loves to trim the fat from his code base. He hates pissing away his life dicking around and maintaining stuff that had no reason for being there in the first place. He has better things to do with his time than jerking off some code he doesn’t need.
Maybe smart devices are a distraction for nihilists. Maybe it’s like alcohol. Maybe Idiocracy II will feature a populace spending half their days trying to turn the lights on.
And nevermind the dystopian contribution these things are to the surveillance state.