13 ms·

The midwit home

416 points by stacktrust 3y ago

rbranson 3y ago
There's a bias where most of the content is produced by the most hardcore group of people. This is, of course, no different with home automation. You can do Home Assistant without making it your hobby, it's just that most of the posts you see are from people who are way too deep into it.
- deadbunny 3y ago
  Exactly. I have my lights tied into Home Assistant to turn on/off when a room is occupied for couple of rooms and a wakeup routine for the bedroom tied to the alarm on my phone (lights mimic a sunrise 30 mins before the alarm). I also have a couple of convenience automations like turning off the TV if it's been idle for X minutes (I've probably fallen asleep). I've found they are mostly set and forget. Haven't touched it for about a year and don't plan to touch them any time soon.
gabesk 3y ago
Just FYI that the link to the page about the case against ultrasonic humidifiers is broken; it's missing the / after the domain. I tried leaving a comment on the page, but even after creating a dummy profile it wouldn't accept it, so hopefully you'll see it here.
kdamica 3y ago
Simple, remote control outlets are great. We have them in most rooms in our home. Another great use for them is to get the ones that look just like light switches, and hang them low enough for small children to use.
rsync 3y ago
I searched the page for “Lutron” but was disappointed… There is a line of lutron switches that are dead simple, no smarts, no hub … and a cute little remote that everyone in my family uses to “all off” the interior lights. We have a no smart devices policy in the house and these make the cut … EDIT: From my notes ... the specific product line is "maestro wireless" and I have MRF2-6CL switches paired with "pico" remotes. This is as opposed to the caseta line from Lutron which is quite a bit "smarter".
- afavour 3y ago
  For what it's worth I do have the Caseta line and it is by far and away the most reliable part of my smart home setup. If it were possible I'd be powering everything with it but sadly the only way to get e.g. fans integrated is to buy one of a very small set of fans with Caseta functionality built in. So instead I have pico remotes talking to Home Assistant talking to the fans which... mostly works. But the Caseta part itself has been flawless.
  - drewbug01 3y ago
    Are you talking about ceiling fans? If so, I've found that their fan switches work flawlessly - no need to buy any kind of fan with smarts built-in: https://www.casetawireless.com/us/en/products/dimmers-switches https://www.casetawireless.com/us/en/products/dimmers-switch... (Search the page for "Original Smart Fan Speed Control Switch", there's seemingly no way to link directly to the requisite page section... which is a thing I could rant about but will not).
    - afavour 3y ago
      Sorry, I should have been clearer. Those switches work great with fans that are already hardwired for a switch in the wall but a lot of modern fans (in my experience, maybe because I was buying cheap!) don't bother with that and have their own wireless system of some variety to control fan speed, lights etc. My solution to that was to buy a Zigbee controller to go inside the fan. I wish Lutron sold some kind of standalone fan controller you could shove in there but alas.
      - drewbug01 3y ago
        Ah I see, that makes sense.
- willtheperson 3y ago
  Exact same thought here but with their Caseta lineup. It is one of the most easy to configure and reliable smart home things I have in the house. I still use HA on a RPi4 for other things, typically via Zigbee, but the Casetas always work like you'd expect from a light switch while also enabling smart stuff like voice control or automations.
spondylosaurus 3y ago
The Legrand smart lights that came with our house are pretty painless. No idea what setup is like, though, since they were preinstalled.
lawlessone 3y ago
My own experience , half the time Nest tells me it can't find the lights to turn them on or off. I have somehow automated some lights to come on too early in the morning but the specific task/automation I set to do this is nowhere to be found.. I can create and remove new tasks but I'm being haunted by this old task. My father has most of his home setup. Worked great until Christmas eve, when lightning hit the local exchange..
- edgineer 3y ago
  >some lights to come on too early in the morning but the specific task/automation I set to do this is nowhere to be found.. What a novel form of nightmare
  - esafak 3y ago
    "Wakey, wakey, little matey!" Hook it up to an speech recognition-challenged "smart" speaker that will dutifully play death metal when you order it to turn off the damn lights for teh win.
    - lawlessone 3y ago
      I set one up to play "Christmas everyday" when I say "Hey google, it's Christmas" The only problem is it still announcing "playing Christmas everyday on YouTube music by..." I wanted it to just start playing.
      - esafak 3y ago
        At least it recognized the command instead of replying "No, it is in fact October 12, 2023. Please check your settings in your Google Home app. Would you like me to send a link to your phone?" I swear it behaves more like Clippy every day.
- ta8645 3y ago
  Some light-switches have the "smarts" to turn on and off at certain times, built right into them. Therefore, you might lose access to the external tool you used to program them, and they'll happily continue on repeating the behaviors. You might try a hard reset, often using a paperclip to depress a microswitch though a small hole on the light switch itself.
scarmig 3y ago
KNX seems like a solid solution: a single shared bus that smart devices communicate with each other over, without any need for any kind of centralized server (either on prem or not). But unfortunately AFAICT there aren't any installers in the Bay Area, and it would cost a pretty penny to wire the house anyway. Any suggestions for how to get something similar set up in the US?
empiricus 3y ago
I am a fan of Ikea lights. I can use normal light switches to turn the light on/off. But I also have a remote and I can dim the lights or change the temperature. No hub needed. The price is low enough. And Ikea will probably stay in business a long time.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Buying their hub enables you to use an app on your phone to control the lights, if you so desire.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  You can do the same with Philips Hue. And just like the Ikea one, it's just a bit better with the hub.
  - mrmlz 3y ago
    And the best thing is that they speak zigbee and you can ditch their hubs and use homeassistant if you want to avoid any lock-in! I've actually had two Ikea Trådfri switches break though - they are cheap enough to replace but bit bothersome.
    - theshrike79 3y ago
      And in the future they'll all speak Thread and be mostly hub agnostic
commonenemy 3y ago
Smart home is not about just turn on/off lights remotely. It's about do it automatically/reponding to other interactions. i.e, when sunlight is out (in HA, you can get sunset triggers), and when there are people present in living room, turn on living room lights.
- progman32 3y ago
  Or "when the only occupant opens the front door and drops off the network, turn off all lights, arm the alarm, turn off the stereo, and yell at me if the cooktop is drawing power".
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    > and yell at me if the cooktop is drawing power For standard power outlets I have "smart plugs" that measure the power draw, are there ones that support 40A/240V appliances?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - 1010010 3y ago
      You're gonna need power meters for that. E.g. check out the Shelly *EM series.
    - bitdivision 3y ago
      I'm a zigbee fan, mostly because there's such a wide variety of devices. I almost exlusively use zigbee2mqtt [0] reference to find devices that suit me. Searching for `meter` gives a lot of options, you'd have to do more investigation to find something that supported 40A, but my guess would be that a clamp meter is likely your best option. It's also possible that you could use one of the DIN rail options in your fusebox, but I haven't looked at the current ratings. [0] https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=meter https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=meter
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
alexhsamuel 3y ago
I need to choose outlets and switches for a new building, and I hope to "smart home" it. I had started to do some reading, and while my experience wasn't _quite_ as gruesome as the author of this article portrays it to be, I generally agree with their sentiments. Still, I'm not quite ready to give up on computer-controlled automation. Does anyone know of a reasonably complete guide (web site, book, whatever) that explains this well? What I'm looking for: help choosing components that will work together; not "for dummies"; I'm technically competent and willing to learn some stuff but don't want to make a hobby/profession out of this; doesn't require buying into Google Home, Alexa, or another privacy-hostile system. Thanks in advance.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- iRomain 3y ago
  Just go with Philips Hue, you can't go wrong. Then, when you're ready, setup home assistant but setup everything so basic functionality still works even if your server or internet went down. My hue bulbs are at the center of this strategy with each bulb controlled by either a remote control or a hue movement detector. Hint: remote controls in rooms where you stay, sensors where you pass by or if you stay only a little while. I can also control everything via Alexa and can't wait for the day there is a viable privacy-friendly / low-maintenance alternative (Home assistant are working on this). Again, if internet goes down, I still have the remotes/detectors so my lights always work. Also, for any other equipment you would buy, make sure it's compatible with Matter.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Hue just decided to start requiring an online account even for local control; I used to think they were the best option, but now I'd recommend avoiding them (even if you don't care about a needless account, consider that this most likely is step 1 to adding fees)
    - hypfer 3y ago
p1mrx 3y ago
My house came with the doorbell wires buried behind the frame somewhere, so I installed a self-powered wireless doorbell. The transmitter harvests power from the user physically pressing the button, so it doesn't need batteries. I just caulked it straight onto the brick.
- aaronharder 3y ago
  Do you have a link to that doorbell product? My house came with the same problem.
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    https://tecknet.com/collections/wireless-doorbell/products/self-powered-wireless-doorbell https://tecknet.com/collections/wireless-doorbell/products/s... I removed the TECKNET logo with isopropyl alcohol. The receiver has dozens of tunes, but the only one worth using is the Westminster Chime Melody. There's also a "ding-dong ding-dong", but it's annoying that it plays twice. The rest are just too long; it's a doorbell, not a jukebox. The receiver remembers the tune and volume if power is interrupted, so that extra cruft doesn't matter after initial setup.
    - 4star3star 3y ago
      I love this! Sometimes I daydream about a device that works kind of like an old printing press. You can arrange letter tiles to create a message. Then, you power the thing by pumping a lever or something, and it constructs a digital signal from the letters and sends it over something like LoRaWAN.
xamuel 3y ago
Incorrectly titled. The "smart" devices from the first part of the article ARE the midwit solution. The better devices in the rest of the article are the actual right-end-of-the-bell-curve solutions.
- gagege 3y ago
  Indeed. Wanting things to be dead simple and not need to be fiddled with constantly and take months to learn how to set up is the big brained move. Same reason I switched to an iPhone. I don't have time to nerd out and customize Android till it's usable.
  - recursive 3y ago
    Same reason I picked Android. I can just plug in my headphones and they're already working without any pairing or configuration or charging.
marcinzm 3y ago
>The hell? But people seem to think that Home Assistant is good. (Something about subscription fees and invasive apps and forced obsolescence?) So you search for “how to get a Home Assistant”. This reveals a recursive landscape of terror: Google "how to install home assistant" which leads to: >https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/ https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/ >If you are unsure of what to choose, follow the Raspberry Pi guide to install Home Assistant Operating System. This leads to: >https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi This has a nice visual guide that requires you to know how to buy a raspberry pi, how to plug in a raspberry p, how to plug in an sd card (twice), and how to navigate to a url.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  I felt like that was a big strawman. HA in particular makes it very easy to chose how to install, they even a product you can buy that's ready to use (HA Yellow).
  - switchbak 3y ago
    This is probably for an audience less enamoured with the Pi than the HN crowd. Someone that's more interested in getting to a working result than having to yak shave for a couple days or more to do the same. For someone who doesn't have a Linux background, "just put it on a Raspberry Pi" is kind of like saying "You write a distributed map reduce function in Erlang". Ie: it's easy if they know it, but if they don't then that "just" is doing a lot of work there. Pre-installed is almost certainly the way to go for such a person.
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      As reasonable as that is, the starting point for this is a person that wants to install smart switches and other home automations. This is already a job that requires fairly decent electrical knowledge, especially if there are 3-way switches involved. Turn-key solutions exist for people that don't want to deal with the complexity.
    - 3y ago
fragmede 3y ago
I recently picked up this rabbit hole of a hobby. It's only when you want to get fancy, and have lots of mismatched stuff, that it gets that complicated. (Which, as nerds, we are wont to do.) If you just buy into one brands stuff, and use just that, you don't get lost in the home assistant quagmire. There are quirks, eg Phillips Hue has a 50 device limit per hub resulting in needing multiple hubs for a complex scene, but it works for people who aren't programmers. Meanwhile, as a hardware hacker and software engineer, yeah, I'll admit, I had to do things that look a lot like my job I'm paid very well to do in order to get my light switches to work right. No idea how people who don't program for a living are supposed to get Home Assistant to work quite right!
xoa 3y ago
I 100%, absolutely sympathize with the opening there. The situation really sucks to a surprisingly great extent. At the same time though, it has to be stated that going for a 'dumb, simple' Smart Lights really, really misses an enormous amount of the potential value. Nearly 100% of my smart home is about lights for now using just Philips Hue/HomeKit, though HA remains on my list, but only a tiny percentage is about simply having switches wherever. The true value for me has been in more intelligent color lighting based on layered actions. I change the amount of blue and brightness during the course of the day, so that there's lots in the morning and it's dimmer and ever redder in the evening. Particularly in the winter this has been incredibly helpful for my sleep cycles. It can all be extremely transparent as well since the switches and motion sensors can have time-of-day as well as which-button and number-of-clicks categorization. So hitting the on button always turns the lights on, but the color and brightness mix of a room will be different over the course of the day. Same with outdoors, motion sensors anywhere that can have different colors and activation periods at different times has been great for massively cutting down extraneous blue light at night, which is good not just for humans but for animals and insects as well. I can wake up in the heart of winter when the sun doesn't rise until 8 or later in the morning to a 20 minute long "sunrise" I created myself simulated nicely with a bunch of lights. And more complex logic like "lights all come on when smoke alarm goes off or a basement flood is detected" are also handy. Again I'm very sympathetic to the shitty state of the ecosystems right now, frequently miserable UI/UX, and massive heaping doses of bullshit companies are constantly trying to pull to extract more ongoing revenue from people for what should be buy-once-and-done products. But it really sucks precisely because yes: smart home features genuinely can be pretty great.
- polishdude20 3y ago
  This is probably because a lot of smart home enthusiasts are less enthused about actually turning the lights on and off. They have fun tinkering and building wireless systems.
  - atourgates 3y ago
    I believe you based on my experience with the salve, but I’m the opposite. Very much, “I just want it to work.” Here’s what I’ve found useful from a smart home: * I can leave for a week or weekend, let the house get quite hot or cold (obviously within some safety parameters) and then turn in the heat or AC a couple hours before I get home. * I get alerts when a package or other delivery shows up at the front door. * I can set a timer to turn off any lights my kids left on during the day, late at night every night. * I can set a timer to turn off the heat or AC in an outbuilding no-one sleeps in late at night, in case my kids were out there and forgot to turn it off. * I can set my outdoor lights to go on at sunset, and turn off around “it’s unlikely anyone will be going out here and need a lit pathway” time. * I can set my espresso maker to turn on and warm up before I’m ready for coffee, and turn off when we’re a bit past “you should stop drinking coffee or it’s gonna mess with your sleep” time. * When we leave town with an arrangement for a dog sitter to come by and take care of our dog a few hours after we leave, I can check to make sure they actually did and poor Rover isn’t lonely and unfed. But I do 100% agree with the author’s frustration, and wish things “just worked” and just worked together.
csours 3y ago
I feel this sentiment deeply. I wonder how much of it is due to lack of good options, and how much is due to a hostile information space - that is, there are bandits out there who want your money and attention, and they are willing to say anything to get it.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  The lack of good options is due to hostiles IMO, everything wants to force you to install their app.
hendersoon 3y ago
Home Assistant is awesome, but not ready for the mass-market. It's a fun tech project to setup and one that will require your attention regularly forever-- but on the bright side, it isn't constantly annoying, it works consistently, and it can all work locally so when some Chinese vendor shuts down their servers you aren't left sitting in a dark room. It's improving at a rapid pace and I can see it being ready for your aunt to use in a couple of years. Not this year, not next. I set all my relatives up with Apple HomePod Minis and HomeKit, which has expensive hardware (matter is supposed to fix that...) but is largely local and relatively private.
wmsmith 3y ago
While I believe that HA is very cool and many vendors provide valuable solutions, we must consider what happens when we die. This is just one anecdote, but I believe the problem is more pervasive. I was called to an elderly lady's home to "un-haunt" the building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done "all of the cool things" to make the home smart. Unfortunately too smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home. She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn't figure it out and lived like this for an entire year. She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband, but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation. About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady's lights too. In her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift. I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices and, as she put it, putting in "turn the light on and off again" switches. When choosing technology -- any technology, it's important to consider the life of that device and the people impacted far in the future.
- Aloha 3y ago
  That sounds like an old school X10 system problem, I remember issues like that.
- civilitty 3y ago
  That's why I love HomeAssistant! I programmed a dead man's switch tied to the presence feature so if my phone or smartwatch don't show up in the house for six months, it turns on the "HAUNT FAMILY" program. There's no way I'm leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant neighbor. That reminds me: I have to hook up the smart speaker so that it says "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DA- HONEY?" any time my partner walks up to the RaspberryPi.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    Just wanna share that the sentence “There's no way I'm leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant neighbor” totally made my day.
lulznews 3y ago
Definitely midwit tier. Getting some benefits from home automation is trivial. Now if only Alexa’s response time wasn’t trash …
omnibrain 3y ago
That's why I like Shelly. The stuff connects via WiFi. The protocol is MQTT or REST. Stuff I know and can understand.
faster_harder 3y ago
> (BTW, manufacturers, if you want to use touch sensors and you don’t want to lose the massive midwit market, make things that automatically turn on when first connected to power, without waiting for a touch.) ...and if you ever lose power to the house, suddenly all devices turn on.
- brewdad 3y ago
  What a great way to be sure the power has been restored. I suppose the power being restored at 3am would suck but in most cases I would want the lights to all come back on after an outage.
Animats 3y ago
"Power-controlled remote pressers. This is utterly cursed, but hear me out: I want a gadget that I physically attach to a remote. When the gadget gets power, it presses the “on” button on the remote. When it loses power, it presses the “off” button." Except that too many remotes have one button, and one signal, for both on and off. TV and cable box remotes out of sync is the most common result.
WA 3y ago
> Remote-controlled light bulbs. Personally, I’d never buy these, because I’m fanatical about color quality. (It’s futile to start with low-quality photons and then try to arrange matter to make them look good.) I am about to buy several Philips Hue lights. Does this statement apply to all LED-based lights or just the cheap ones?
- hoherd 3y ago
  Philips LED lights, Hue or otherwise, are wonderful. Be aware though that they seem to be enshitifying the Hue ecosystem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667266
  - Symmetry 3y ago
    Hue bulbs should work with any ZigBee LightLink controller. Or if they don't, I'll be very upset about the times I flew out to the LightLink gatherings to make sure all our products worked together.
- qup 3y ago
  I recommend getting 1600 lumens if you can find it. 800 isn't bright enough in my experience, at least for room lighting. Maybe desk/ambient lighting
- lozenge 3y ago
  The Hue lights are wildly overpriced. I have the WiZ A67 Wi-Fi for my office (so I only use the warm white and cool white) and it's much brighter than Hue's offering, which is so valuable in an office. I can also switch its setting using a normal light switch so I never need to open the app. If you're playing with colours, then Hue usually does do better in the blues, greens and purples but it probably isn't going to make much of a difference to your life.
  - WA 3y ago
    Will check them out, although Philips Hue also offers an E27 bulb with 1,600 lumen, same as the WiZ, but a bit pricier.
jollyllama 3y ago
This is grug tier. He's criticizing midwit tier. Genius tier is some guy who effortlessly coded his own elegant and simple solution.
Havoc 3y ago
To add to this: F&(*&ing manufacturers that change the internals of the IoTs silently. That worked fine, let me just hop onto Amazon click "buy again" to get more. That said mine generally works fine. The ESPHome integration in particular is grand
zeroCalories 3y ago
I really like clappers, but if you want to read a book at night, what about just using a bedside lamp? No need for smart anything.
runjake 3y ago
1. Wear biometrics to help track and improve health and fitness. 2. Buy smart home products so you don't have to get up off the couch, walk 10 feet, and flip a switch. Does anyone else enjoy the irony? Disclosure: I am guilty of both of the above.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  I don't have either, but my fat butt needs to move more, so smart home things aren't interesting to me.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    I put a bunch of smart light switches in my house about 5 years ago. Two of them have failed in the past year and I reverted them back to dumb switches. I'll probably do the same as they continue to fail over time. I found I rarely use the smart features to their full potential. It helps that my house is built to all the modern codes, so I have switches at convenient places and really only use the "smarts" for table lamps and outdoor lighting.
- webXL 3y ago
  Definitely enjoying that irony, although the smart home products came first for me. Re. #2, I like the peace of mind that I haven't left lights on when I head out of town and also the security benefit of programming them to periodically turn on. Also, if you only have a single switch to flip, then I envy you.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
iamwil 3y ago
I dream of setting up my home automation as if it was a starship. It doesn't have to look like one, but it should operate like one. First, it'd be self-contained, so devices don't need to dial back up to a cloud server in order to change settings. Who's ever heard of a starship that dials back to Starfleet headquarters to open a door? HVAC, water heater, and water softener would be "life support". The garage would be the shuttle bay. External cameras tracking people, cars, and planes that fly overhead would be the Sensor Array. Since houses don't move, you could say there's no engineering. But if I had a power generation system like a solar panel, we'll just make that engineering. I'd be able to "redirect power" when we have a heat wave. Each system would have an API that reports stats that you can culminate into a daily dashboard displayed on your bathroom mirror. Of course, the Alexas would be "computer", and a lounge dedicated to AR/VR would be the "Holodeck". I imagine that's what most people have in their heads, but we get lost in the weeds. In reality, I haven't done much home automation myself. Just a few lights, ecobee thermostat, and alexa that I don't use. Having to pull out my phone just to control these things is often too much friction. Asking Alexa to do it is rather nice, but I'm not thrilled about the prospect of a company listening in (rumored to anyway). If you set it to turn off by geolocation or by time, there are edge cases that you often run into where you don't want to turn them off. I had set the lights to turn off when I left my apartment. My roommates were all sitting the living room, and I left to go grab some milk, and the lights all turned off on them when I left, and they were perplexed. I even mystified myself. Sometimes, in the mornings, I would wake up and the lights would be blue, and I wouldn't know why. But in fact, I had just forgotten I'd set up an IFTTT automation to turn the lights blue if it was going to be rainy day. I had just completely forgotten this and never could make out the pattern and association. One of the problems with home automation is that the settings are hidden and not readily observable. All the problems that we have in our programming lives with observability of our production systems, we want to bring to home.
sampo 3y ago
> My usual process for making tea is to walk to the kitchen and start the kettle. Then, because it takes an eternity for water to boil, I go back to my desk to wait. Instead of remote controlling the kettle, get a hot water dispenser. In Europe: https://yum-asia.com/eu/product-category/instant-hot-water-heaters/ https://yum-asia.com/eu/product-category/instant-hot-water-h...
- lozenge 3y ago
  Or get one that goes under the counter: https://www.quooker.co.uk/?___store=en https://www.quooker.co.uk/?___store=en
  - balfirevic 3y ago
    "We are currently active in The Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, United Arabic Emirates, Hong Kong, Israel and Portugal. Due to company regulations, service and warranty we do not ship Quooker-systems to countries where we do not have a local office." Sigh... Do you know anything available EU-wide?
pawelduda 3y ago
Not sure what author is building with this list of keywords, smart home nuclear bomb? Because otherwise HA setup works with small subset of that. Then it's up to you how complex you want things to get, as with any software
writeslowly 3y ago
Regarding remote control switch pressers, I have a couple switchbots, and most of the information online talks about using things like Home Assistant, but they also respond to anything that sends them a simple bluetooth command. You can easily do a point to point thing with a bluetooth device on the other end. I control mine with a little ESP32 board.
imiric 3y ago
> Hauling your body across the room just to flip a switch is absurd. Maybe this is a sign of getting old, but I never got why this is such a hassle. Light switches are within reach when you enter a room. Once you're inside, you rarely have to touch them again until you exit. On the rare ocasion that I do, maybe it's also a good time to stretch my legs, take a bathroom break, or get a snack. Is that such a major inconvenience that we have to overengineer solutions using expensive and complicated ecosystems of gadgets and software? Maybe I'm in the minority with this line of thinking on this forum, but I never got the smart home appeal. I want devices that I can control directly, not those that will interpret or anticipate what I want to do and, more than likely, cause frustration rather than satisfaction. The switch is the ubiquitous and perfect mechanism of control, especially if it's directly wired to a simple state machine, and not layers of indirection and "protocols". I wish more devices used dumb switches, not less. Don't get me started on the motion sensing lights TFA mentions. I curse the times I've entered a public bathroom that has these, only for the light to go off at the most inopportune moment. Don't want to use a physical switch because of sanitation? That's fine, but cheap and low-power LED lights exist for them to be always on during your service hours. You won't save much having the light turn off, and potentially annoy your customers.
- oldandboring 3y ago
  The light switch in our primary bedroom is, as you describe, within reach when you enter the room. It controls a switched outlet near the bed that has a lamp plugged into it. When it comes time to turn out the light to go to sleep, you have two non-ideal choices: get up from bed to turn the lamp off using the switch near the door, or stay in bed and turn the lamp off manually, meaning the next time you operate the wall switch the lamp won't turn on (unless you remembered to turn the lamp back on in the morning).
  - imiric 3y ago
    Ah, it sounds like you need smart switches then. :) In my case I just have two lights. The ceiling one is controlled by a switch near the door, and the lamp is controlled by a switch on its cord. I use either depending on what I'm doing.
op00to 3y ago
Lutron Caseta for lights. ZWave for sensors and shades. HomeKit for cameras. (I run a whole home assistant setup but I could have done everything with HomeKit natively)
mzmzmzm 3y ago
I love this category of product and use them extensively around my small NYC apartment. Moving fairly often and valuing privacy, it is delightful to not muck around with extra networking and internet of shit. I always wonder why the category doesn't get more love, like a nod from the wirecutter, or a big brand trying to make a slightly uscale line with a consistent deisgn language. One thing I'd love to buy is a purely offline outlet control that can listen for a programmable wakeword -- a clapper that can do "turn on the lights." Not sure if this much computation violates the spirit, but there's no reason it can't be a tidy self-contained thing.
- nilespotter 3y ago
  You could just get a clapper, and say that to yourself as you clap your hands.
jimmytucson 3y ago
HA sounds cool to me but other than being a fun thing to work on, what's so good about it? Can anyone "sell" me on it? Is it just being able to turn stuff on and off from your phone?
- abnry 3y ago
  Not all of these ideas I have implemented, but here are some things you can do. - remote control to turn on/off lights in bed - Bed sensor to turn on/off lights when heading to the bathroom at night - define a scene (lights dimmed, shades down, mood lights on) to trigger in an event (Netflix turned on TV at 8pm) - Remote control of wall AC unit out of the house (shut off while away but turn on before driving home) - Alerts for when my brother turns on the coffee maker - Control system to avoid coffee maker and microwave running together long enough and tripping the circuit breaker in your old apartment (haven't done this one) - Alert to tell you when washing machine is done (or use to estimate how much time is left) - use color lights as reminders or to signify events - check to make sure doors are closed and locked at night - check that door for room (or window in room) with AC is closed when AC is running, otherwise shut AC off - alerts when someone gets home even if you are out of the house (know kid gets home from school, for example) Ultimately it is a hobby. I had a raspberry pi 4 I bought and had just sitting around. It feels good to see it in the corner doing something cool.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  HA has built-in or community provided integrations to pretty much everything imaginable. You can for example: - Start the robo vacuum every time there's nobody in the house and tell it to stop when people are coming back - Add a voice command for said vacuum to just vacuum the kitchen or hallway - Open the curtains when it's light enough outside and put them back down when it's darker outside than inside. - Adjust light temperature and brightness based on the time of day so you won't get 1000 lumens of 6000K light blinding you when you go to the bathroom at night - Turn down the AC/heating when people aren't home and start preheating/cooling when they are nearing the house again When everything is integrated to HA your imagination is pretty much the only limit when combining different sensors to devices.
svat 3y ago
One immediately useful thing I got from the post is the genius idea of putting the printer (that frequently needs to be restarted for some reason) on a smart outlet. It's working around broken technology by using more technology, but I'll take it!
jabroni_salad 3y ago
Those motion sensor light bulbs are perfect. My basement lights are all chain-pull so I got them in, and now everything is illuminated by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs. I also like the IKEA tradfri stuff, since you can just pair the remote directly. No apps or internet needed.
orthecreedence 3y ago
> That’s basically an AND gate. But what about OR gates? [...] How about a Turing-complete clap processing unit? Effectively, a language for specifying, identifying, connecting, activating, and signaling various logic gates with hand claps alone. Also, come on. Is it really too much to ask for a person to know how to open a Sonoff switch, connect gator clips to its programming ports, flash it with Tasmota, and connect it to Home Assistant via MQTT? This is basic stuff..
rekabis 3y ago
Definitely saved this article as a guide. But in terms of light switches, specifically - is there not a simpler way to turn lights on and off while keeping the physical wall switches as the fundamental source of truth? I’m thinking of a traditional physical switch that has been enhanced with an electromagnetic component that can actually physically flip that switch. A separate control line from each switch in the house goes to a separate controlling computer in the basement. This computer can then interface with Bluetooth remotes or apps on smartphones or anything else that is needed, including having its own internal scheduler for turning lights on or off, or connected to ambient light sensors near windows that could trigger threshold settings to do the same. That way, no matter how you set up your basement controller, you can always go over to the wall and turn the lights on or off if you need so. And if you are going to bed, bringing up the app can tell you if you’ve left the garage lights on, so you can remotely turn them off. And when you remotely turn these switches on or off, the in-wall light switch will actually be physically moved to its desired position via the electromagnet being triggered. Granted, this is something that is really only doable during a new build or a frame-off rebuild of a home (I’m doing the latter and would love to implement this idea), but the point being: this would be a largely obsolescence-proof, dummy-proof and robust/reliable way of automating a home while leaving the physical switches themselves as the ultimate source of truth: flipping the physical switch will _always_ do what is expected it will do, and the switch will always be in the position expected for the light’s current state.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Shelly devices can do this. You install it in parallel to the light switch. That way both can turn on the power to the light independently without interfering with each other. They don't physically move the switches though, but that's pretty rarely needed.
- stacktrust 3y ago
  Zigbee light switch that fits over existing physical light switch, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861815
lavasalesman 3y ago
The "recursive landscape of terror" doesn't stop once you install Home Assistant, it continues during maintenance. And at that point you're dependent on it to run the systems in your house. Thus I recently decided to get rid of my whole setup and go back to normal. Further, the tinkering aspect isn't enjoyable to me because I don't feel like I'm learning anything useful, I'm just trying to duct tape together other people's hobby projects that adds support for this or that bulb or radio.
dsr_ 3y ago
We have a non-networked, non-remote electronic combo lock for our front door. We are never locked out. There is no key under a rock. The phone cannot get unpaired, the remote cannot be intercepted and replayed. If we are on vacation, we can call up a friend and tell them a code so they can get in. A 9V battery lasts about three years, then it starts flashing and beeping every time you open the door for a month before dying. If you already have the right hole in the door, it takes about 20 minutes to install. And if you're intent on breaking in, well, the windows are made of glass. Please don't do that.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Mind sharing which device that is so I can have one for my house?
  - kaibee 3y ago
    Not sure if this is the one OP has but: [https://www.homedepot.com/p/Schlage-Camelot-Satin-Nickel-Electronic-Keypad-Door-Lock-with-Accent-Handle-and-Flex-Lock-FE595-V-CAM-619-ACC/202255171 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Schlage-Camelot-Satin-Nickel-Ele...] I had one on my house growing up from like 2007-2012, rock solid. Bought a house this year and the first thing I did was install these on the front and back doors. Seems like it's exactly the same model that was being sold in 2007 (which is still on my childhood home and going strong btw).
    - dsr_ 3y ago
      We have a similar Schlage, yup.
  - dmd 3y ago
    I've had https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NJJ1MQ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NJJ1MQ for 10 years now with zero issues and not even a battery change needed yet.
- MattRix 3y ago
  I have somethint similar but it’s purely mechanical, no electronics or batteries to worry about at all. Even my kids can use it fine and it only takes a second to enter the combo.
iisan7 3y ago
Adding to this list the Philips sceneswitch bulbs: color changing bulbs that can be rapidly power-cycled to change color. https://www.usa.lighting.philips.com/consumer/choose-a-bulb/sceneswitch https://www.usa.lighting.philips.com/consumer/choose-a-bulb/... If one could trigger scheduled actions by connecting a remote control to a daily or weekly plug-in timer, that would meet virtually every use case I have for app-controlled appliances, bulbs, and locks.
mst 3y ago
> Mechanical outlet timers: You plug this into an outlet, it slowly spins once per day, and the pins determine is the outlet is active for each 30 minute period. [...] > Many use these with light for plants. Or, it can be nice to wake up with light rather than sound. Instead of buying a light alarm clock, you can just plug a lamp into one of these. Beware. I bought one of these for the bedroom for precisely that purpose. I accidentally got a brand that clicked audibly as it rotated. I'm sure the reader can easily imagine how useful that wasn't.
modeless 3y ago
IoT was always a bad vision for the future. 20 years from now I don't want a million devices in my home running software. Either they'll all constantly be pestering me with updates that break functionality I rely on, or they'll be out of date with bugs and security holes that last forever. My vision of a good future is one where I have exactly one smart device: a robot butler which will operate all my other devices. I don't need smart switches if my butler turns off all the lights for me. I don't need a smart lock if the butler unlocks the door for me. I don't need a security webcam if the butler monitors the house while I'm away. I don't need a smart thermostat if the butler sets it for me. Etc.
_23sd 3y ago
The author’s mistake is thinking about the ”smart” lights in terms of systems, and the “midwit” lights in terms of products. If you look at smart lights starting with products, ignoring the connectivity and asking questions like will this pair well with my light fixtures and is it capable of the color changing or other tricks I want, then look into the best system to control those products, you won’t get caught in analysis paralysis so easily. This advice probably doesn’t apply as much to people who want smart-everything since that can get very complicated, but if it’s mainly about lights then you’ll find compatible options for any of the major protocols.
semiquaver 3y ago
> I want a variant that works like this: If the power is quickly turned off and on again, the outlet switches from powered to unpowered (or vice-versa). Philips has a line of bulbs called SceneSwitch that use this rapid on-off mechanism to change their brightness and color temperature to one of three levels. It’s funny because incandescent three-way bulbs and switches used to be very common. Now that everything is LED you need a complicated timer system to achieve the same result. I’m just happy to be able to dim my table lamps without a bunch of extra technology.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > It’s funny because incandescent three-way bulbs and switches used to be very common. Now that everything is LED you need a complicated timer system to achieve the same result. Or just a dimmable LED bulb in an existing 3-way fixture.
  - seltzered_ 3y ago
    ....and a little label next to the switch so you know it's got a sceneswitch bulb. I first learned about these from the author of 'calm technology' https://calmtech.com/ https://calmtech.com/
  - semiquaver 3y ago
    Dimmable bulbs and 3-way lamps are not compatible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-way_lamp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-way_lamp. The electrical principles are not the same —- a three way bulb has a different socket contact configuration to accept different wattages at each of the three levels. Supposedly LED 3 way bulbs exist but I’ve never seen one in the wild.
zackproser 3y ago
Enjoyed the opening quite a bit. Very funny and relatable.
karaterobot 3y ago
This is a cool approach to an article about home automation. But for me, not only do I refuse to automate things via networking computers together, I won't buy a product that requires me to have a new remote control either. I'm open to things like lights with motion sensors that turn on when I enter the room, but whatever marginal convenience I get from automation would be outweighed by the absurdity of having 25 different, dedicated remote controls to keep track of. Another peeve is that every G-D home device now feels like it needs an LED light that is on all the time. My view is that it should be dark when the lights turn off, but that's hard to these days.
woah 3y ago
Every light switch runs an LLM which is able to submit JSON payloads of the format { "on": true } to an internal HTTP server controlling the switch. The LLM is connected to a microphone and is prompted with a unique name. You can use it just by yelling "turn on the lights!", or if you only want to turn on one of the lights "Gary, turn on!"
- SamBam 3y ago
  The LLM is also allowed to respond to arbitrary events of is own, such as time stamps and motion detectors, and it just comes up with what it thinks you want. It would probably work at least as well as these other systems, until it decided that one of your light names was too naughty. Actually, I created a toy system of a virtual robot that could consume events like FORWARD, LEFT, LOOK UP, SAY [x], etc. ChatGPT was able to control it really well.
1970-01-01 3y ago
A fantastic lesson on why to keep it simple, stupid!
dkbrk 3y ago
I think it's worth taking a look back at X10 [0], the OG home automation. Yes, it was primitive by today's standards with a very limited command set, but that command set was good enough for 90% of purposes and its simplicity meant that it was trivial to implement correctly and everything interoperated. It didn't need an internet connection to function. It didn't even need a local server. Though you could have a programmable controller, the minimum viable setup consisted of having some X10-enabled device (such as a light socket), an X10 switch, and setting some DIP switches as configuration. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard)
- bellboy_tech 3y ago
  Amen to that. 70s tech that just worked. I've got boxes of X10 switches, motion sensors, and modules that I don't use anymore because Home Assistant doesn't support it well. I miss it. It was simple, with some small issues. If you wanted to kick it up a notch you could run a Mister House server connecting to the powerline through a $15 Radio Shack module.
acyou 3y ago
The most important mid-wit home automation tool is the programmable thermostat, which curiously isn't mentioned. That will have more impact on energy use and quality of life than anything else. No remote control, no wifi needed. Just turns heat on in the morning and turns it off when things warm up, and turns the temperature setpoints lower overnight. In comparison with heat, LED light automation doesn't matter so much. For example, this one: https://www.honeywellhome.com/us/en/products/air/thermostats/programmable-thermostats/white-5-1-1-day-programmable-thermostat-rth2410b1019-e1/ https://www.honeywellhome.com/us/en/products/air/thermostats...
AussieWog93 3y ago
What if complex IT stacks didn't exist primarily to solve problems, but to create niche domains in which Average Redditors can lord their knowledge over everyone else?
- nyssos 3y ago
  Then they would be replaced, because Average Redditors have very little power when it comes down to it. The real problem with bad but popular tech stacks is that they do exist to solve problems - just not ours. I want everything to be compatible with everything else; hardware manufacturers want oligopoly rents. I like languages that let me be as productive as possible; employers like languages that let as much of their candidate pool as possible be productive enough. So it goes.
- mindslight 3y ago
  s/Average Redditors/tech companies/
Fricken 3y ago
The author seems unfamiliar with Radio Shack's Plug 'n Power, which was first introduced in 1979. >The modules were designed to respond to commands sent over the electrical wires inside the house. They could turn on or off, or in the case of a lamp, change brightness. The advantage of using a power-line communication system was that it didn’t require any additional (and costly) signal wiring. http://www.trs-80.org/plug-n-power/ http://www.trs-80.org/plug-n-power/
draw_down 3y ago
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aaron695 3y ago
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projektfu 3y ago
Ah. The Clapper. I've tried to find a Clapper functionality for Alexa or Google Assistant or something, but haven't come across it. So often I just want to turn on or off the nearest light that's on, not try to have a conversation with some device or pull up my phone with my dry eyes in the middle of the night.
mechhacker 3y ago
I installed yale smart locks which work with Nest. After going through a bunch of pain getting it to initially work, I would go away from anything smart device at all, except for maybe an electric code lock that isn't networked. It's convenient to not have to always have my keys on me, and I got used to the tech after my previous apartment installed a similar device, but it randomly fails. Or randomly makes me log in to google again (and I have basically only minimal google usage now, no email by them). Or randomly fails when I'm 300 feet away from the house and trying to unlock. But, at one point I was considering installing a compatible device for the thermostat. It has lost the appeal to me, and the nearly intractable software interface to deal with problems was a big part of it. Getting a second lock up and running took a bunch of arcane knowledge.
somsak2 3y ago
I think this is just a problem for tech-y nerds. Almost anyone can just buy into a specific smart home ecosystem (like Hue) and use that for everything. Never had a problem.
jw_cook 3y ago
> MongoChopper only works in reticulated mode, which newer Qetzl hubs don’t support. False! Just use skubenjoyer64's modded wetware, which supports most reticulated mode variants. Just set LD_SIDELOAD to your device's beacon adapter address at decompile time, assuming you have Qetzl Hub 3.9 rev 5 or later.
- VHRanger 3y ago
  Honestly I stopped reading the article when he had the audacity to skip over modded Qetzl hub solutions
  - rokkitmensch 3y ago
    These are the big brains right here, folks.
  - rendaw 3y ago
    This thread is peak satire. This thread is satire right?
nilespotter 3y ago
This is where I landed. A couple of years ago I sold all of my Apple Surveillance Device Minis, boxed up all of my Hugh lights, and got a remote control outlet for my bedroom light and a remote control light strip for my TV's bias lights. I still have a August lock but I don't let it on WiFi, bluetooth only. Life is easier and I'm not feeding the megacorps with data about my comings and goings and what I do while I'm inside.
Ginden 3y ago
I was already running home server, so for me, setting up smart home was relatively simple: - Buy Zigbee USB dongle - Install Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT in Docker on server - Initial configuration It requires basic technical knowledge, but after initial configuration it just works. There were three major pains: - Configuring camera (ONVIF is pure pain) - it works initially, but I physically plug-in cameras only when I'm going on holiday - Configuring voice assistant - Finding good ZigBee remotes - Price of Hue Wall Switch (DIY approach is possible by gutting cheap button) Cameras and voice assistant troubles were arguably result of my "keep as much as possible within local network" approach. Minor pains: - Binding remotes to light bulbs, so they work even if server is down - Finding instructions how to bind certain ZigBee accessories (they have "just open our proprietary app and it will explain what to do" manual)

416 points by stacktrust 3y ago

There's a bias where most of the content is produced by the most hardcore group of people. This is, of course, no different with home automation. You can do Home Assistant without making it your hobby, it's just that most of the posts you see are from people who are way too deep into it.

deadbunny 3y ago
Exactly. I have my lights tied into Home Assistant to turn on/off when a room is occupied for couple of rooms and a wakeup routine for the bedroom tied to the alarm on my phone (lights mimic a sunrise 30 mins before the alarm). I also have a couple of convenience automations like turning off the TV if it's been idle for X minutes (I've probably fallen asleep). I've found they are mostly set and forget. Haven't touched it for about a year and don't plan to touch them any time soon.

gabesk 3y ago

Just FYI that the link to the page about the case against ultrasonic humidifiers is broken; it's missing the / after the domain. I tried leaving a comment on the page, but even after creating a dummy profile it wouldn't accept it, so hopefully you'll see it here.

kdamica 3y ago

Simple, remote control outlets are great. We have them in most rooms in our home. Another great use for them is to get the ones that look just like light switches, and hang them low enough for small children to use.

rsync 3y ago

I searched the page for “Lutron” but was disappointed… There is a line of lutron switches that are dead simple, no smarts, no hub … and a cute little remote that everyone in my family uses to “all off” the interior lights. We have a no smart devices policy in the house and these make the cut … EDIT: From my notes ... the specific product line is "maestro wireless" and I have MRF2-6CL switches paired with "pico" remotes. This is as opposed to the caseta line from Lutron which is quite a bit "smarter".

afavour 3y ago
For what it's worth I do have the Caseta line and it is by far and away the most reliable part of my smart home setup. If it were possible I'd be powering everything with it but sadly the only way to get e.g. fans integrated is to buy one of a very small set of fans with Caseta functionality built in. So instead I have pico remotes talking to Home Assistant talking to the fans which... mostly works. But the Caseta part itself has been flawless.
- drewbug01 3y ago
  Are you talking about ceiling fans? If so, I've found that their fan switches work flawlessly - no need to buy any kind of fan with smarts built-in: https://www.casetawireless.com/us/en/products/dimmers-switches https://www.casetawireless.com/us/en/products/dimmers-switch... (Search the page for "Original Smart Fan Speed Control Switch", there's seemingly no way to link directly to the requisite page section... which is a thing I could rant about but will not).
  - afavour 3y ago
    Sorry, I should have been clearer. Those switches work great with fans that are already hardwired for a switch in the wall but a lot of modern fans (in my experience, maybe because I was buying cheap!) don't bother with that and have their own wireless system of some variety to control fan speed, lights etc. My solution to that was to buy a Zigbee controller to go inside the fan. I wish Lutron sold some kind of standalone fan controller you could shove in there but alas.
    - drewbug01 3y ago
      Ah I see, that makes sense.
willtheperson 3y ago
Exact same thought here but with their Caseta lineup. It is one of the most easy to configure and reliable smart home things I have in the house. I still use HA on a RPi4 for other things, typically via Zigbee, but the Casetas always work like you'd expect from a light switch while also enabling smart stuff like voice control or automations.

spondylosaurus 3y ago

The Legrand smart lights that came with our house are pretty painless. No idea what setup is like, though, since they were preinstalled.

lawlessone 3y ago

My own experience , half the time Nest tells me it can't find the lights to turn them on or off. I have somehow automated some lights to come on too early in the morning but the specific task/automation I set to do this is nowhere to be found.. I can create and remove new tasks but I'm being haunted by this old task. My father has most of his home setup. Worked great until Christmas eve, when lightning hit the local exchange..

edgineer 3y ago
>some lights to come on too early in the morning but the specific task/automation I set to do this is nowhere to be found.. What a novel form of nightmare
- esafak 3y ago
  "Wakey, wakey, little matey!" Hook it up to an speech recognition-challenged "smart" speaker that will dutifully play death metal when you order it to turn off the damn lights for teh win.
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    I set one up to play "Christmas everyday" when I say "Hey google, it's Christmas" The only problem is it still announcing "playing Christmas everyday on YouTube music by..." I wanted it to just start playing.
    - esafak 3y ago
      At least it recognized the command instead of replying "No, it is in fact October 12, 2023. Please check your settings in your Google Home app. Would you like me to send a link to your phone?" I swear it behaves more like Clippy every day.
ta8645 3y ago
Some light-switches have the "smarts" to turn on and off at certain times, built right into them. Therefore, you might lose access to the external tool you used to program them, and they'll happily continue on repeating the behaviors. You might try a hard reset, often using a paperclip to depress a microswitch though a small hole on the light switch itself.

scarmig 3y ago

KNX seems like a solid solution: a single shared bus that smart devices communicate with each other over, without any need for any kind of centralized server (either on prem or not). But unfortunately AFAICT there aren't any installers in the Bay Area, and it would cost a pretty penny to wire the house anyway. Any suggestions for how to get something similar set up in the US?

empiricus 3y ago

I am a fan of Ikea lights. I can use normal light switches to turn the light on/off. But I also have a remote and I can dim the lights or change the temperature. No hub needed. The price is low enough. And Ikea will probably stay in business a long time.

fragmede 3y ago
Buying their hub enables you to use an app on your phone to control the lights, if you so desire.
theshrike79 3y ago
You can do the same with Philips Hue. And just like the Ikea one, it's just a bit better with the hub.
- mrmlz 3y ago
  And the best thing is that they speak zigbee and you can ditch their hubs and use homeassistant if you want to avoid any lock-in! I've actually had two Ikea Trådfri switches break though - they are cheap enough to replace but bit bothersome.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    And in the future they'll all speak Thread and be mostly hub agnostic

commonenemy 3y ago

Smart home is not about just turn on/off lights remotely. It's about do it automatically/reponding to other interactions. i.e, when sunlight is out (in HA, you can get sunset triggers), and when there are people present in living room, turn on living room lights.

progman32 3y ago
Or "when the only occupant opens the front door and drops off the network, turn off all lights, arm the alarm, turn off the stereo, and yell at me if the cooktop is drawing power".
- barbazoo 3y ago
  > and yell at me if the cooktop is drawing power For standard power outlets I have "smart plugs" that measure the power draw, are there ones that support 40A/240V appliances?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1010010 3y ago
    You're gonna need power meters for that. E.g. check out the Shelly *EM series.
  - bitdivision 3y ago
    I'm a zigbee fan, mostly because there's such a wide variety of devices. I almost exlusively use zigbee2mqtt [0] reference to find devices that suit me. Searching for `meter` gives a lot of options, you'd have to do more investigation to find something that supported 40A, but my guess would be that a clamp meter is likely your best option. It's also possible that you could use one of the DIN rail options in your fusebox, but I haven't looked at the current ratings. [0] https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=meter https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=meter
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

alexhsamuel 3y ago

I need to choose outlets and switches for a new building, and I hope to "smart home" it. I had started to do some reading, and while my experience wasn't _quite_ as gruesome as the author of this article portrays it to be, I generally agree with their sentiments. Still, I'm not quite ready to give up on computer-controlled automation. Does anyone know of a reasonably complete guide (web site, book, whatever) that explains this well? What I'm looking for: help choosing components that will work together; not "for dummies"; I'm technically competent and willing to learn some stuff but don't want to make a hobby/profession out of this; doesn't require buying into Google Home, Alexa, or another privacy-hostile system. Thanks in advance.

deleted 3y ago
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iRomain 3y ago
Just go with Philips Hue, you can't go wrong. Then, when you're ready, setup home assistant but setup everything so basic functionality still works even if your server or internet went down. My hue bulbs are at the center of this strategy with each bulb controlled by either a remote control or a hue movement detector. Hint: remote controls in rooms where you stay, sensors where you pass by or if you stay only a little while. I can also control everything via Alexa and can't wait for the day there is a viable privacy-friendly / low-maintenance alternative (Home assistant are working on this). Again, if internet goes down, I still have the remotes/detectors so my lights always work. Also, for any other equipment you would buy, make sure it's compatible with Matter.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Hue just decided to start requiring an online account even for local control; I used to think they were the best option, but now I'd recommend avoiding them (even if you don't care about a needless account, consider that this most likely is step 1 to adding fees)
  - hypfer 3y ago

p1mrx 3y ago

My house came with the doorbell wires buried behind the frame somewhere, so I installed a self-powered wireless doorbell. The transmitter harvests power from the user physically pressing the button, so it doesn't need batteries. I just caulked it straight onto the brick.

aaronharder 3y ago
Do you have a link to that doorbell product? My house came with the same problem.
- p1mrx 3y ago
  https://tecknet.com/collections/wireless-doorbell/products/self-powered-wireless-doorbell https://tecknet.com/collections/wireless-doorbell/products/s... I removed the TECKNET logo with isopropyl alcohol. The receiver has dozens of tunes, but the only one worth using is the Westminster Chime Melody. There's also a "ding-dong ding-dong", but it's annoying that it plays twice. The rest are just too long; it's a doorbell, not a jukebox. The receiver remembers the tune and volume if power is interrupted, so that extra cruft doesn't matter after initial setup.
  - 4star3star 3y ago
    I love this! Sometimes I daydream about a device that works kind of like an old printing press. You can arrange letter tiles to create a message. Then, you power the thing by pumping a lever or something, and it constructs a digital signal from the letters and sends it over something like LoRaWAN.

xamuel 3y ago

Incorrectly titled. The "smart" devices from the first part of the article ARE the midwit solution. The better devices in the rest of the article are the actual right-end-of-the-bell-curve solutions.

gagege 3y ago
Indeed. Wanting things to be dead simple and not need to be fiddled with constantly and take months to learn how to set up is the big brained move. Same reason I switched to an iPhone. I don't have time to nerd out and customize Android till it's usable.
- recursive 3y ago
  Same reason I picked Android. I can just plug in my headphones and they're already working without any pairing or configuration or charging.

marcinzm 3y ago

>The hell? But people seem to think that Home Assistant is good. (Something about subscription fees and invasive apps and forced obsolescence?) So you search for “how to get a Home Assistant”. This reveals a recursive landscape of terror: Google "how to install home assistant" which leads to: >https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/ https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/ >If you are unsure of what to choose, follow the Raspberry Pi guide to install Home Assistant Operating System. This leads to: >https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi This has a nice visual guide that requires you to know how to buy a raspberry pi, how to plug in a raspberry p, how to plug in an sd card (twice), and how to navigate to a url.

barbazoo 3y ago
I felt like that was a big strawman. HA in particular makes it very easy to chose how to install, they even a product you can buy that's ready to use (HA Yellow).
- switchbak 3y ago
  This is probably for an audience less enamoured with the Pi than the HN crowd. Someone that's more interested in getting to a working result than having to yak shave for a couple days or more to do the same. For someone who doesn't have a Linux background, "just put it on a Raspberry Pi" is kind of like saying "You write a distributed map reduce function in Erlang". Ie: it's easy if they know it, but if they don't then that "just" is doing a lot of work there. Pre-installed is almost certainly the way to go for such a person.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    As reasonable as that is, the starting point for this is a person that wants to install smart switches and other home automations. This is already a job that requires fairly decent electrical knowledge, especially if there are 3-way switches involved. Turn-key solutions exist for people that don't want to deal with the complexity.
  - 3y ago

fragmede 3y ago

I recently picked up this rabbit hole of a hobby. It's only when you want to get fancy, and have lots of mismatched stuff, that it gets that complicated. (Which, as nerds, we are wont to do.) If you just buy into one brands stuff, and use just that, you don't get lost in the home assistant quagmire. There are quirks, eg Phillips Hue has a 50 device limit per hub resulting in needing multiple hubs for a complex scene, but it works for people who aren't programmers. Meanwhile, as a hardware hacker and software engineer, yeah, I'll admit, I had to do things that look a lot like my job I'm paid very well to do in order to get my light switches to work right. No idea how people who don't program for a living are supposed to get Home Assistant to work quite right!

xoa 3y ago

I 100%, absolutely sympathize with the opening there. The situation really sucks to a surprisingly great extent. At the same time though, it has to be stated that going for a 'dumb, simple' Smart Lights really, really misses an enormous amount of the potential value. Nearly 100% of my smart home is about lights for now using just Philips Hue/HomeKit, though HA remains on my list, but only a tiny percentage is about simply having switches wherever. The true value for me has been in more intelligent color lighting based on layered actions. I change the amount of blue and brightness during the course of the day, so that there's lots in the morning and it's dimmer and ever redder in the evening. Particularly in the winter this has been incredibly helpful for my sleep cycles. It can all be extremely transparent as well since the switches and motion sensors can have time-of-day as well as which-button and number-of-clicks categorization. So hitting the on button always turns the lights on, but the color and brightness mix of a room will be different over the course of the day. Same with outdoors, motion sensors anywhere that can have different colors and activation periods at different times has been great for massively cutting down extraneous blue light at night, which is good not just for humans but for animals and insects as well. I can wake up in the heart of winter when the sun doesn't rise until 8 or later in the morning to a 20 minute long "sunrise" I created myself simulated nicely with a bunch of lights. And more complex logic like "lights all come on when smoke alarm goes off or a basement flood is detected" are also handy. Again I'm very sympathetic to the shitty state of the ecosystems right now, frequently miserable UI/UX, and massive heaping doses of bullshit companies are constantly trying to pull to extract more ongoing revenue from people for what should be buy-once-and-done products. But it really sucks precisely because yes: smart home features genuinely can be pretty great.

polishdude20 3y ago
This is probably because a lot of smart home enthusiasts are less enthused about actually turning the lights on and off. They have fun tinkering and building wireless systems.
- atourgates 3y ago
  I believe you based on my experience with the salve, but I’m the opposite. Very much, “I just want it to work.” Here’s what I’ve found useful from a smart home: * I can leave for a week or weekend, let the house get quite hot or cold (obviously within some safety parameters) and then turn in the heat or AC a couple hours before I get home. * I get alerts when a package or other delivery shows up at the front door. * I can set a timer to turn off any lights my kids left on during the day, late at night every night. * I can set a timer to turn off the heat or AC in an outbuilding no-one sleeps in late at night, in case my kids were out there and forgot to turn it off. * I can set my outdoor lights to go on at sunset, and turn off around “it’s unlikely anyone will be going out here and need a lit pathway” time. * I can set my espresso maker to turn on and warm up before I’m ready for coffee, and turn off when we’re a bit past “you should stop drinking coffee or it’s gonna mess with your sleep” time. * When we leave town with an arrangement for a dog sitter to come by and take care of our dog a few hours after we leave, I can check to make sure they actually did and poor Rover isn’t lonely and unfed. But I do 100% agree with the author’s frustration, and wish things “just worked” and just worked together.

csours 3y ago

I feel this sentiment deeply. I wonder how much of it is due to lack of good options, and how much is due to a hostile information space - that is, there are bandits out there who want your money and attention, and they are willing to say anything to get it.

plagiarist 3y ago
The lack of good options is due to hostiles IMO, everything wants to force you to install their app.

hendersoon 3y ago

Home Assistant is awesome, but not ready for the mass-market. It's a fun tech project to setup and one that will require your attention regularly forever-- but on the bright side, it isn't constantly annoying, it works consistently, and it can all work locally so when some Chinese vendor shuts down their servers you aren't left sitting in a dark room. It's improving at a rapid pace and I can see it being ready for your aunt to use in a couple of years. Not this year, not next. I set all my relatives up with Apple HomePod Minis and HomeKit, which has expensive hardware (matter is supposed to fix that...) but is largely local and relatively private.

wmsmith 3y ago

While I believe that HA is very cool and many vendors provide valuable solutions, we must consider what happens when we die. This is just one anecdote, but I believe the problem is more pervasive. I was called to an elderly lady's home to "un-haunt" the building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done "all of the cool things" to make the home smart. Unfortunately too smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home. She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn't figure it out and lived like this for an entire year. She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband, but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation. About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady's lights too. In her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift. I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices and, as she put it, putting in "turn the light on and off again" switches. When choosing technology -- any technology, it's important to consider the life of that device and the people impacted far in the future.

Aloha 3y ago
That sounds like an old school X10 system problem, I remember issues like that.
civilitty 3y ago
That's why I love HomeAssistant! I programmed a dead man's switch tied to the presence feature so if my phone or smartwatch don't show up in the house for six months, it turns on the "HAUNT FAMILY" program. There's no way I'm leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant neighbor. That reminds me: I have to hook up the smart speaker so that it says "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DA- HONEY?" any time my partner walks up to the RaspberryPi.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  Just wanna share that the sentence “There's no way I'm leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant neighbor” totally made my day.

lulznews 3y ago

Definitely midwit tier. Getting some benefits from home automation is trivial. Now if only Alexa’s response time wasn’t trash …

omnibrain 3y ago

That's why I like Shelly. The stuff connects via WiFi. The protocol is MQTT or REST. Stuff I know and can understand.

faster_harder 3y ago

> (BTW, manufacturers, if you want to use touch sensors and you don’t want to lose the massive midwit market, make things that automatically turn on when first connected to power, without waiting for a touch.) ...and if you ever lose power to the house, suddenly all devices turn on.

brewdad 3y ago
What a great way to be sure the power has been restored. I suppose the power being restored at 3am would suck but in most cases I would want the lights to all come back on after an outage.

Animats 3y ago

"Power-controlled remote pressers. This is utterly cursed, but hear me out: I want a gadget that I physically attach to a remote. When the gadget gets power, it presses the “on” button on the remote. When it loses power, it presses the “off” button." Except that too many remotes have one button, and one signal, for both on and off. TV and cable box remotes out of sync is the most common result.

WA 3y ago

> Remote-controlled light bulbs. Personally, I’d never buy these, because I’m fanatical about color quality. (It’s futile to start with low-quality photons and then try to arrange matter to make them look good.) I am about to buy several Philips Hue lights. Does this statement apply to all LED-based lights or just the cheap ones?

hoherd 3y ago
Philips LED lights, Hue or otherwise, are wonderful. Be aware though that they seem to be enshitifying the Hue ecosystem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667266
- Symmetry 3y ago
  Hue bulbs should work with any ZigBee LightLink controller. Or if they don't, I'll be very upset about the times I flew out to the LightLink gatherings to make sure all our products worked together.
qup 3y ago
I recommend getting 1600 lumens if you can find it. 800 isn't bright enough in my experience, at least for room lighting. Maybe desk/ambient lighting
lozenge 3y ago
The Hue lights are wildly overpriced. I have the WiZ A67 Wi-Fi for my office (so I only use the warm white and cool white) and it's much brighter than Hue's offering, which is so valuable in an office. I can also switch its setting using a normal light switch so I never need to open the app. If you're playing with colours, then Hue usually does do better in the blues, greens and purples but it probably isn't going to make much of a difference to your life.
- WA 3y ago
  Will check them out, although Philips Hue also offers an E27 bulb with 1,600 lumen, same as the WiZ, but a bit pricier.

jollyllama 3y ago

This is grug tier. He's criticizing midwit tier. Genius tier is some guy who effortlessly coded his own elegant and simple solution.

Havoc 3y ago

To add to this: F&(*&ing manufacturers that change the internals of the IoTs silently. That worked fine, let me just hop onto Amazon click "buy again" to get more. That said mine generally works fine. The ESPHome integration in particular is grand

zeroCalories 3y ago

I really like clappers, but if you want to read a book at night, what about just using a bedside lamp? No need for smart anything.

runjake 3y ago

1. Wear biometrics to help track and improve health and fitness. 2. Buy smart home products so you don't have to get up off the couch, walk 10 feet, and flip a switch. Does anyone else enjoy the irony? Disclosure: I am guilty of both of the above.

theandrewbailey 3y ago
I don't have either, but my fat butt needs to move more, so smart home things aren't interesting to me.
- brewdad 3y ago
  I put a bunch of smart light switches in my house about 5 years ago. Two of them have failed in the past year and I reverted them back to dumb switches. I'll probably do the same as they continue to fail over time. I found I rarely use the smart features to their full potential. It helps that my house is built to all the modern codes, so I have switches at convenient places and really only use the "smarts" for table lamps and outdoor lighting.
webXL 3y ago
Definitely enjoying that irony, although the smart home products came first for me. Re. #2, I like the peace of mind that I haven't left lights on when I head out of town and also the security benefit of programming them to periodically turn on. Also, if you only have a single switch to flip, then I envy you.

deleted 3y ago

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iamwil 3y ago

I dream of setting up my home automation as if it was a starship. It doesn't have to look like one, but it should operate like one. First, it'd be self-contained, so devices don't need to dial back up to a cloud server in order to change settings. Who's ever heard of a starship that dials back to Starfleet headquarters to open a door? HVAC, water heater, and water softener would be "life support". The garage would be the shuttle bay. External cameras tracking people, cars, and planes that fly overhead would be the Sensor Array. Since houses don't move, you could say there's no engineering. But if I had a power generation system like a solar panel, we'll just make that engineering. I'd be able to "redirect power" when we have a heat wave. Each system would have an API that reports stats that you can culminate into a daily dashboard displayed on your bathroom mirror. Of course, the Alexas would be "computer", and a lounge dedicated to AR/VR would be the "Holodeck". I imagine that's what most people have in their heads, but we get lost in the weeds. In reality, I haven't done much home automation myself. Just a few lights, ecobee thermostat, and alexa that I don't use. Having to pull out my phone just to control these things is often too much friction. Asking Alexa to do it is rather nice, but I'm not thrilled about the prospect of a company listening in (rumored to anyway). If you set it to turn off by geolocation or by time, there are edge cases that you often run into where you don't want to turn them off. I had set the lights to turn off when I left my apartment. My roommates were all sitting the living room, and I left to go grab some milk, and the lights all turned off on them when I left, and they were perplexed. I even mystified myself. Sometimes, in the mornings, I would wake up and the lights would be blue, and I wouldn't know why. But in fact, I had just forgotten I'd set up an IFTTT automation to turn the lights blue if it was going to be rainy day. I had just completely forgotten this and never could make out the pattern and association. One of the problems with home automation is that the settings are hidden and not readily observable. All the problems that we have in our programming lives with observability of our production systems, we want to bring to home.

sampo 3y ago

> My usual process for making tea is to walk to the kitchen and start the kettle. Then, because it takes an eternity for water to boil, I go back to my desk to wait. Instead of remote controlling the kettle, get a hot water dispenser. In Europe: https://yum-asia.com/eu/product-category/instant-hot-water-heaters/ https://yum-asia.com/eu/product-category/instant-hot-water-h...

lozenge 3y ago
Or get one that goes under the counter: https://www.quooker.co.uk/?___store=en https://www.quooker.co.uk/?___store=en
- balfirevic 3y ago
  "We are currently active in The Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, United Arabic Emirates, Hong Kong, Israel and Portugal. Due to company regulations, service and warranty we do not ship Quooker-systems to countries where we do not have a local office." Sigh... Do you know anything available EU-wide?

pawelduda 3y ago

Not sure what author is building with this list of keywords, smart home nuclear bomb? Because otherwise HA setup works with small subset of that. Then it's up to you how complex you want things to get, as with any software

writeslowly 3y ago

Regarding remote control switch pressers, I have a couple switchbots, and most of the information online talks about using things like Home Assistant, but they also respond to anything that sends them a simple bluetooth command. You can easily do a point to point thing with a bluetooth device on the other end. I control mine with a little ESP32 board.

imiric 3y ago

> Hauling your body across the room just to flip a switch is absurd. Maybe this is a sign of getting old, but I never got why this is such a hassle. Light switches are within reach when you enter a room. Once you're inside, you rarely have to touch them again until you exit. On the rare ocasion that I do, maybe it's also a good time to stretch my legs, take a bathroom break, or get a snack. Is that such a major inconvenience that we have to overengineer solutions using expensive and complicated ecosystems of gadgets and software? Maybe I'm in the minority with this line of thinking on this forum, but I never got the smart home appeal. I want devices that I can control directly, not those that will interpret or anticipate what I want to do and, more than likely, cause frustration rather than satisfaction. The switch is the ubiquitous and perfect mechanism of control, especially if it's directly wired to a simple state machine, and not layers of indirection and "protocols". I wish more devices used dumb switches, not less. Don't get me started on the motion sensing lights TFA mentions. I curse the times I've entered a public bathroom that has these, only for the light to go off at the most inopportune moment. Don't want to use a physical switch because of sanitation? That's fine, but cheap and low-power LED lights exist for them to be always on during your service hours. You won't save much having the light turn off, and potentially annoy your customers.

oldandboring 3y ago
The light switch in our primary bedroom is, as you describe, within reach when you enter the room. It controls a switched outlet near the bed that has a lamp plugged into it. When it comes time to turn out the light to go to sleep, you have two non-ideal choices: get up from bed to turn the lamp off using the switch near the door, or stay in bed and turn the lamp off manually, meaning the next time you operate the wall switch the lamp won't turn on (unless you remembered to turn the lamp back on in the morning).
- imiric 3y ago
  Ah, it sounds like you need smart switches then. :) In my case I just have two lights. The ceiling one is controlled by a switch near the door, and the lamp is controlled by a switch on its cord. I use either depending on what I'm doing.

op00to 3y ago

Lutron Caseta for lights. ZWave for sensors and shades. HomeKit for cameras. (I run a whole home assistant setup but I could have done everything with HomeKit natively)

mzmzmzm 3y ago

I love this category of product and use them extensively around my small NYC apartment. Moving fairly often and valuing privacy, it is delightful to not muck around with extra networking and internet of shit. I always wonder why the category doesn't get more love, like a nod from the wirecutter, or a big brand trying to make a slightly uscale line with a consistent deisgn language. One thing I'd love to buy is a purely offline outlet control that can listen for a programmable wakeword -- a clapper that can do "turn on the lights." Not sure if this much computation violates the spirit, but there's no reason it can't be a tidy self-contained thing.

nilespotter 3y ago
You could just get a clapper, and say that to yourself as you clap your hands.

jimmytucson 3y ago

HA sounds cool to me but other than being a fun thing to work on, what's so good about it? Can anyone "sell" me on it? Is it just being able to turn stuff on and off from your phone?

abnry 3y ago
Not all of these ideas I have implemented, but here are some things you can do. - remote control to turn on/off lights in bed - Bed sensor to turn on/off lights when heading to the bathroom at night - define a scene (lights dimmed, shades down, mood lights on) to trigger in an event (Netflix turned on TV at 8pm) - Remote control of wall AC unit out of the house (shut off while away but turn on before driving home) - Alerts for when my brother turns on the coffee maker - Control system to avoid coffee maker and microwave running together long enough and tripping the circuit breaker in your old apartment (haven't done this one) - Alert to tell you when washing machine is done (or use to estimate how much time is left) - use color lights as reminders or to signify events - check to make sure doors are closed and locked at night - check that door for room (or window in room) with AC is closed when AC is running, otherwise shut AC off - alerts when someone gets home even if you are out of the house (know kid gets home from school, for example) Ultimately it is a hobby. I had a raspberry pi 4 I bought and had just sitting around. It feels good to see it in the corner doing something cool.
theshrike79 3y ago
HA has built-in or community provided integrations to pretty much everything imaginable. You can for example: - Start the robo vacuum every time there's nobody in the house and tell it to stop when people are coming back - Add a voice command for said vacuum to just vacuum the kitchen or hallway - Open the curtains when it's light enough outside and put them back down when it's darker outside than inside. - Adjust light temperature and brightness based on the time of day so you won't get 1000 lumens of 6000K light blinding you when you go to the bathroom at night - Turn down the AC/heating when people aren't home and start preheating/cooling when they are nearing the house again When everything is integrated to HA your imagination is pretty much the only limit when combining different sensors to devices.

svat 3y ago

One immediately useful thing I got from the post is the genius idea of putting the printer (that frequently needs to be restarted for some reason) on a smart outlet. It's working around broken technology by using more technology, but I'll take it!

jabroni_salad 3y ago

Those motion sensor light bulbs are perfect. My basement lights are all chain-pull so I got them in, and now everything is illuminated by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs. I also like the IKEA tradfri stuff, since you can just pair the remote directly. No apps or internet needed.

orthecreedence 3y ago

> That’s basically an AND gate. But what about OR gates? [...] How about a Turing-complete clap processing unit? Effectively, a language for specifying, identifying, connecting, activating, and signaling various logic gates with hand claps alone. Also, come on. Is it really too much to ask for a person to know how to open a Sonoff switch, connect gator clips to its programming ports, flash it with Tasmota, and connect it to Home Assistant via MQTT? This is basic stuff..

rekabis 3y ago

Definitely saved this article as a guide. But in terms of light switches, specifically - is there not a simpler way to turn lights on and off while keeping the physical wall switches as the fundamental source of truth? I’m thinking of a traditional physical switch that has been enhanced with an electromagnetic component that can actually physically flip that switch. A separate control line from each switch in the house goes to a separate controlling computer in the basement. This computer can then interface with Bluetooth remotes or apps on smartphones or anything else that is needed, including having its own internal scheduler for turning lights on or off, or connected to ambient light sensors near windows that could trigger threshold settings to do the same. That way, no matter how you set up your basement controller, you can always go over to the wall and turn the lights on or off if you need so. And if you are going to bed, bringing up the app can tell you if you’ve left the garage lights on, so you can remotely turn them off. And when you remotely turn these switches on or off, the in-wall light switch will actually be physically moved to its desired position via the electromagnet being triggered. Granted, this is something that is really only doable during a new build or a frame-off rebuild of a home (I’m doing the latter and would love to implement this idea), but the point being: this would be a largely obsolescence-proof, dummy-proof and robust/reliable way of automating a home while leaving the physical switches themselves as the ultimate source of truth: flipping the physical switch will _always_ do what is expected it will do, and the switch will always be in the position expected for the light’s current state.

theshrike79 3y ago
Shelly devices can do this. You install it in parallel to the light switch. That way both can turn on the power to the light independently without interfering with each other. They don't physically move the switches though, but that's pretty rarely needed.
stacktrust 3y ago
Zigbee light switch that fits over existing physical light switch, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861815

lavasalesman 3y ago

The "recursive landscape of terror" doesn't stop once you install Home Assistant, it continues during maintenance. And at that point you're dependent on it to run the systems in your house. Thus I recently decided to get rid of my whole setup and go back to normal. Further, the tinkering aspect isn't enjoyable to me because I don't feel like I'm learning anything useful, I'm just trying to duct tape together other people's hobby projects that adds support for this or that bulb or radio.

dsr_ 3y ago

We have a non-networked, non-remote electronic combo lock for our front door. We are never locked out. There is no key under a rock. The phone cannot get unpaired, the remote cannot be intercepted and replayed. If we are on vacation, we can call up a friend and tell them a code so they can get in. A 9V battery lasts about three years, then it starts flashing and beeping every time you open the door for a month before dying. If you already have the right hole in the door, it takes about 20 minutes to install. And if you're intent on breaking in, well, the windows are made of glass. Please don't do that.

fragmede 3y ago
Mind sharing which device that is so I can have one for my house?
- kaibee 3y ago
  Not sure if this is the one OP has but: [https://www.homedepot.com/p/Schlage-Camelot-Satin-Nickel-Electronic-Keypad-Door-Lock-with-Accent-Handle-and-Flex-Lock-FE595-V-CAM-619-ACC/202255171 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Schlage-Camelot-Satin-Nickel-Ele...] I had one on my house growing up from like 2007-2012, rock solid. Bought a house this year and the first thing I did was install these on the front and back doors. Seems like it's exactly the same model that was being sold in 2007 (which is still on my childhood home and going strong btw).
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    We have a similar Schlage, yup.
- dmd 3y ago
  I've had https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NJJ1MQ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NJJ1MQ for 10 years now with zero issues and not even a battery change needed yet.
MattRix 3y ago
I have somethint similar but it’s purely mechanical, no electronics or batteries to worry about at all. Even my kids can use it fine and it only takes a second to enter the combo.

iisan7 3y ago

Adding to this list the Philips sceneswitch bulbs: color changing bulbs that can be rapidly power-cycled to change color. https://www.usa.lighting.philips.com/consumer/choose-a-bulb/sceneswitch https://www.usa.lighting.philips.com/consumer/choose-a-bulb/... If one could trigger scheduled actions by connecting a remote control to a daily or weekly plug-in timer, that would meet virtually every use case I have for app-controlled appliances, bulbs, and locks.

mst 3y ago

> Mechanical outlet timers: You plug this into an outlet, it slowly spins once per day, and the pins determine is the outlet is active for each 30 minute period. [...] > Many use these with light for plants. Or, it can be nice to wake up with light rather than sound. Instead of buying a light alarm clock, you can just plug a lamp into one of these. Beware. I bought one of these for the bedroom for precisely that purpose. I accidentally got a brand that clicked audibly as it rotated. I'm sure the reader can easily imagine how useful that wasn't.

modeless 3y ago

IoT was always a bad vision for the future. 20 years from now I don't want a million devices in my home running software. Either they'll all constantly be pestering me with updates that break functionality I rely on, or they'll be out of date with bugs and security holes that last forever. My vision of a good future is one where I have exactly one smart device: a robot butler which will operate all my other devices. I don't need smart switches if my butler turns off all the lights for me. I don't need a smart lock if the butler unlocks the door for me. I don't need a security webcam if the butler monitors the house while I'm away. I don't need a smart thermostat if the butler sets it for me. Etc.

_23sd 3y ago

The author’s mistake is thinking about the ”smart” lights in terms of systems, and the “midwit” lights in terms of products. If you look at smart lights starting with products, ignoring the connectivity and asking questions like will this pair well with my light fixtures and is it capable of the color changing or other tricks I want, then look into the best system to control those products, you won’t get caught in analysis paralysis so easily. This advice probably doesn’t apply as much to people who want smart-everything since that can get very complicated, but if it’s mainly about lights then you’ll find compatible options for any of the major protocols.

semiquaver 3y ago

> I want a variant that works like this: If the power is quickly turned off and on again, the outlet switches from powered to unpowered (or vice-versa). Philips has a line of bulbs called SceneSwitch that use this rapid on-off mechanism to change their brightness and color temperature to one of three levels. It’s funny because incandescent three-way bulbs and switches used to be very common. Now that everything is LED you need a complicated timer system to achieve the same result. I’m just happy to be able to dim my table lamps without a bunch of extra technology.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> It’s funny because incandescent three-way bulbs and switches used to be very common. Now that everything is LED you need a complicated timer system to achieve the same result. Or just a dimmable LED bulb in an existing 3-way fixture.
- seltzered_ 3y ago
  ....and a little label next to the switch so you know it's got a sceneswitch bulb. I first learned about these from the author of 'calm technology' https://calmtech.com/ https://calmtech.com/
- semiquaver 3y ago
  Dimmable bulbs and 3-way lamps are not compatible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-way_lamp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-way_lamp. The electrical principles are not the same —- a three way bulb has a different socket contact configuration to accept different wattages at each of the three levels. Supposedly LED 3 way bulbs exist but I’ve never seen one in the wild.

zackproser 3y ago

Enjoyed the opening quite a bit. Very funny and relatable.

karaterobot 3y ago

This is a cool approach to an article about home automation. But for me, not only do I refuse to automate things via networking computers together, I won't buy a product that requires me to have a new remote control either. I'm open to things like lights with motion sensors that turn on when I enter the room, but whatever marginal convenience I get from automation would be outweighed by the absurdity of having 25 different, dedicated remote controls to keep track of. Another peeve is that every G-D home device now feels like it needs an LED light that is on all the time. My view is that it should be dark when the lights turn off, but that's hard to these days.

woah 3y ago

Every light switch runs an LLM which is able to submit JSON payloads of the format { "on": true } to an internal HTTP server controlling the switch. The LLM is connected to a microphone and is prompted with a unique name. You can use it just by yelling "turn on the lights!", or if you only want to turn on one of the lights "Gary, turn on!"

SamBam 3y ago
The LLM is also allowed to respond to arbitrary events of is own, such as time stamps and motion detectors, and it just comes up with what it thinks you want. It would probably work at least as well as these other systems, until it decided that one of your light names was too naughty. Actually, I created a toy system of a virtual robot that could consume events like FORWARD, LEFT, LOOK UP, SAY [x], etc. ChatGPT was able to control it really well.

1970-01-01 3y ago

A fantastic lesson on why to keep it simple, stupid!

dkbrk 3y ago

I think it's worth taking a look back at X10 [0], the OG home automation. Yes, it was primitive by today's standards with a very limited command set, but that command set was good enough for 90% of purposes and its simplicity meant that it was trivial to implement correctly and everything interoperated. It didn't need an internet connection to function. It didn't even need a local server. Though you could have a programmable controller, the minimum viable setup consisted of having some X10-enabled device (such as a light socket), an X10 switch, and setting some DIP switches as configuration. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard)

bellboy_tech 3y ago
Amen to that. 70s tech that just worked. I've got boxes of X10 switches, motion sensors, and modules that I don't use anymore because Home Assistant doesn't support it well. I miss it. It was simple, with some small issues. If you wanted to kick it up a notch you could run a Mister House server connecting to the powerline through a $15 Radio Shack module.

acyou 3y ago

The most important mid-wit home automation tool is the programmable thermostat, which curiously isn't mentioned. That will have more impact on energy use and quality of life than anything else. No remote control, no wifi needed. Just turns heat on in the morning and turns it off when things warm up, and turns the temperature setpoints lower overnight. In comparison with heat, LED light automation doesn't matter so much. For example, this one: https://www.honeywellhome.com/us/en/products/air/thermostats/programmable-thermostats/white-5-1-1-day-programmable-thermostat-rth2410b1019-e1/ https://www.honeywellhome.com/us/en/products/air/thermostats...

AussieWog93 3y ago

What if complex IT stacks didn't exist primarily to solve problems, but to create niche domains in which Average Redditors can lord their knowledge over everyone else?

nyssos 3y ago
Then they would be replaced, because Average Redditors have very little power when it comes down to it. The real problem with bad but popular tech stacks is that they do exist to solve problems - just not ours. I want everything to be compatible with everything else; hardware manufacturers want oligopoly rents. I like languages that let me be as productive as possible; employers like languages that let as much of their candidate pool as possible be productive enough. So it goes.
mindslight 3y ago
s/Average Redditors/tech companies/

Fricken 3y ago

The author seems unfamiliar with Radio Shack's Plug 'n Power, which was first introduced in 1979. >The modules were designed to respond to commands sent over the electrical wires inside the house. They could turn on or off, or in the case of a lamp, change brightness. The advantage of using a power-line communication system was that it didn’t require any additional (and costly) signal wiring. http://www.trs-80.org/plug-n-power/ http://www.trs-80.org/plug-n-power/

draw_down 3y ago

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aaron695 3y ago

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projektfu 3y ago

Ah. The Clapper. I've tried to find a Clapper functionality for Alexa or Google Assistant or something, but haven't come across it. So often I just want to turn on or off the nearest light that's on, not try to have a conversation with some device or pull up my phone with my dry eyes in the middle of the night.

mechhacker 3y ago

I installed yale smart locks which work with Nest. After going through a bunch of pain getting it to initially work, I would go away from anything smart device at all, except for maybe an electric code lock that isn't networked. It's convenient to not have to always have my keys on me, and I got used to the tech after my previous apartment installed a similar device, but it randomly fails. Or randomly makes me log in to google again (and I have basically only minimal google usage now, no email by them). Or randomly fails when I'm 300 feet away from the house and trying to unlock. But, at one point I was considering installing a compatible device for the thermostat. It has lost the appeal to me, and the nearly intractable software interface to deal with problems was a big part of it. Getting a second lock up and running took a bunch of arcane knowledge.

somsak2 3y ago

I think this is just a problem for tech-y nerds. Almost anyone can just buy into a specific smart home ecosystem (like Hue) and use that for everything. Never had a problem.

jw_cook 3y ago

> MongoChopper only works in reticulated mode, which newer Qetzl hubs don’t support. False! Just use skubenjoyer64's modded wetware, which supports most reticulated mode variants. Just set LD_SIDELOAD to your device's beacon adapter address at decompile time, assuming you have Qetzl Hub 3.9 rev 5 or later.

VHRanger 3y ago
Honestly I stopped reading the article when he had the audacity to skip over modded Qetzl hub solutions
- rokkitmensch 3y ago
  These are the big brains right here, folks.
- rendaw 3y ago
  This thread is peak satire. This thread is satire right?

nilespotter 3y ago

This is where I landed. A couple of years ago I sold all of my Apple Surveillance Device Minis, boxed up all of my Hugh lights, and got a remote control outlet for my bedroom light and a remote control light strip for my TV's bias lights. I still have a August lock but I don't let it on WiFi, bluetooth only. Life is easier and I'm not feeding the megacorps with data about my comings and goings and what I do while I'm inside.

Ginden 3y ago

I was already running home server, so for me, setting up smart home was relatively simple: - Buy Zigbee USB dongle - Install Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT in Docker on server - Initial configuration It requires basic technical knowledge, but after initial configuration it just works. There were three major pains: - Configuring camera (ONVIF is pure pain) - it works initially, but I physically plug-in cameras only when I'm going on holiday - Configuring voice assistant - Finding good ZigBee remotes - Price of Hue Wall Switch (DIY approach is possible by gutting cheap button) Cameras and voice assistant troubles were arguably result of my "keep as much as possible within local network" approach. Minor pains: - Binding remotes to light bulbs, so they work even if server is down - Finding instructions how to bind certain ZigBee accessories (they have "just open our proprietary app and it will explain what to do" manual)