Smart home thread

[p0ke]

So is anyone else here into smart home stuff and if so, what are you using?

Personally I've been swapping out bulbs and stuff one by one for Zigbee controlled ones, and I think I've just about reached the point where I have more smart lights than dumb ones. I live in a 3-story house so it's a lot of lights. I started with an Ikea Trådfri setup, but to support devices from different manufacturers and to be able to automate stuff better I changed to a Raspberry Pi with a Zigbee-USB dongle, running zigbee2mqtt and Home-Assistant. It's a lot of work to set up, but now that it's running the possibilities are basically endless and it integrates with basically everything.

 

[thraxil]

My partner is really into Hue lights and has a Google Home setup. I don't really get the appeal. I'd rather just to use a light switch to turn lights on and off. She's constantly dealing with bulbs coming unpaired, having to find and get into her phone to adjust things, and it drives me nuts when I go to bed first and then get woken up by her walking around the house turning lights off with her voice (instead of silently flipping a switch). I also can't stand the thought of it constantly listening to everything we say and generating more targetted ads from that (and other than turning lights on and off, the only thing I've ever seen her successfully use it for is the occasional "OK Google, set an alarm for 15 minutes" while cooking -- I just set alarms on my watch...).

 

[p0ke]

My partner is really into Hue lights and has a Google Home setup. I don't really get the appeal. I'd rather just to use a light switch to turn lights on and off. She's constantly dealing with bulbs coming unpaired, having to find and get into her phone to adjust things, and it drives me nuts when I go to bed first and then get woken up by her walking around the house turning lights off with her voice (instead of silently flipping a switch). I also can't stand the thought of it constantly listening to everything we say and generating more targetted ads from that (and other than turning lights on and off, the only thing I've ever seen her successfully use it for is the occasional "OK Google, set an alarm for 15 minutes" while cooking -- I just set alarms on my watch...).

Yeah, I don't get the appeal of voice controlled stuff either. We have switches for almost everything, I've just replaced the normal ones with wireless ones that control the smart bulbs. But then you can also control the lights from the app, or set stuff to automatically turn on/off/dim/blink/change color etc. when pretty much anything happens. For example my kid's lights turn on automatically 1 hour before school starts, and it gets the time from the school's system so it's automatically in sync when a new semester starts and doesn't turn on during holidays or weekends. And it doesn't turn the lights on when the kids aren't at home - since people and especially kids are so dependent on their phones these days, those can be used quite reliably to detect whether they're home or not (by just checking if the phone is connected to wifi, but it's also possible to use bluetooth or their location acquired from Family Link).
Also, my wife likes to use these "small lights" instead of ceiling mounted ones, and it used to be a huge pain in the ass to find and turn them all off when going to bed, but now I can just flick a switch on my phone or watch to turn them all off.

But yeah, back to voice control - I don't like it, and I especially hate that Google is kinda forcing it. For example I had one security camera integrated into Google Home, and it would show up in the app, but you can't do anything with it there. Instead, you have to say "OK Google, show camera X on device Y" and then it would show the camera feed on for example a specified Chromecast... I don't understand why it couldn't just have a button in the app to do that same thing! I don't know if the other alternatives (Alexa, Siri, Bixby... is Cortana still a thing?) are any better, but I very much prefer pressing buttons (either physical or on my phone).

 

[SalsaWood]

I got push down with yer foot buttons for the lamps that I put behind my amps. They're pretty slick. No more reaching behind the amp for a pull string and accidentally hanging my headless corpse from an Iraqi bridge or whatever the infomercial trope was. The future is amazing.

 

[AwakenTheSkies]

Alexa turn on Meshuggah!!!!

 

[wankerness]

I don't see why people would pay for the privilege to have Amazon/Google listen to literally everything you do and keep recordings of it all. Even if the most you will probably ever suffer from it is getting really creepy targeted ads based on conversations it overhears, it's not cool inviting those companies into your life. It's bad enough I have apple doing some of that through the phone!

The other thing I have heard complained about from my "tech enthusiast" friends (I say this cause most of my friends that actually work in IT would never install that stuff in their house) is that their home network gets clogged with all the tons of additional devices that are now on it creating noise. I guess I view the fewest devices as possible being on my home network to be ideal. That plus the additional layers of troubleshooting you are dealing with every time you add a "smart" lightbulb vs the "dumb" ones where it's a matter of just replacing it if it won't turn on (assuming your power isn't out).

I guess I view a lot of that the way I view cars. Like, 15 years ago, if you hit a deer, you'd be paying for the cost of a new bumper and maybe a headlight. Now with a car made in the last few years, you are paying that, plus an additional $5000+ to replace all the circuitry in there, cause if you don't your car can't detect where it is in the lane and spams you with errors and blahblahblah. All the extra convenience becomes a huge extra INconvenience as soon as it is damaged or isn't working.

 

[AwakenTheSkies]

I don't see why people would pay for the privilege to have Amazon/Google listen to literally everything you do and keep recordings of it all. Even if the most you will probably ever suffer from it is getting really creepy targeted ads based on conversations it overhears, it's not cool inviting those companies into your life.

That's wild, but probably true. Even smartphones are sketchy sometimes. We've all heard the case where you're talking with someone about something and then you get related advertisements about it on your phone, even if you've never searched it. Happened with a colleague at work, we were talking about tinnitus and the next day he started getting ads about it.

 

[p0ke]

I don't see why people would pay for the privilege to have Amazon/Google listen to literally everything you do and keep recordings of it all. Even if the most you will probably ever suffer from it is getting really creepy targeted ads based on conversations it overhears, it's not cool inviting those companies into your life. It's bad enough I have apple doing some of that through the phone!

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I don't run any voice detection things (the main reason being that I don't like to use that in the first place).

The other thing I have heard complained about from my "tech enthusiast" friends (I say this cause most of my friends that actually work in IT would never install that stuff in their house) is that their home network gets clogged with all the tons of additional devices that are now on it creating noise. I guess I view the fewest devices as possible being on my home network to be ideal. That plus the additional layers of troubleshooting you are dealing with every time you add a "smart" lightbulb vs the "dumb" ones where it's a matter of just replacing it if it won't turn on (assuming your power isn't out).

Sure, I get the part about replacing bulbs, but I've yet to have a smart bulb break on me, and the only real issues I've had were with the previous generation switches. The current ones are rock solid.

And about clogging up the network - that's why I use Zigbee devices instead of WiFi ones. The devices form a completely separate mesh network, and the only wifi device (well, ethernet actually) is the raspberry pi with the zigbee dongle. The software is open source and I've even contributed some code to it, which feels kinda cool and makes it feel trustworthy. And it's not cloud connected (it can be, but I've set mine up to run locally only).

 

[jaxadam]

We have some super basic shit going on like lights on timers, our air conditioning zones adjusting at certain times, our pool is fully automated, etc. We also have a Google Home that can do stuff but it's mostly for making cow farting noises apparently.

 

[thraxil]

The other thing I have heard complained about from my "tech enthusiast" friends (I say this cause most of my friends that actually work in IT would never install that stuff in their house) is that their home network gets clogged with all the tons of additional devices that are now on it creating noise.

Oh, yeah. I set up a VLAN called "IoST" (for "Internet of Shitty Things") on the router and made my partner use that for her smart home stuff so they're all at least isolated from the rest of the network and I firewall that VLAN aggressively. Standard practice with the IoT stuff seems to be that they've put very little thought into security and pretty much never put out security patches. If they're not compromised the second you connect them to the internet, they usually will be within a few months.

 

[wankerness]

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I don't run any voice detection things (the main reason being that I don't like to use that in the first place).



Sure, I get the part about replacing bulbs, but I've yet to have a smart bulb break on me, and the only real issues I've had were with the previous generation switches. The current ones are rock solid.

And about clogging up the network - that's why I use Zigbee devices instead of WiFi ones. The devices form a completely separate mesh network, and the only wifi device (well, ethernet actually) is the raspberry pi with the zigbee dongle. The software is open source and I've even contributed some code to it, which feels kinda cool and makes it feel trustworthy. And it's not cloud connected (it can be, but I've set mine up to run locally only).

Sounds like you're one of the rare people doing this that knows what they're doing! What do you actually do with these devices? Like, what are the benefits to having this vs regular system? Mainly just being able to control them remotely, or what?

 

[p0ke]

Sounds like you're one of the rare people doing this that knows what they're doing! What do you actually do with these devices? Like, what are the benefits to having this vs regular system? Mainly just being able to control them remotely, or what?

Yeah, remote control is the main thing, but also automation. I can trigger lights (and other stuff, hvac and car engine block heater are connected to the system for example) to go on or off by almost anything that happens. Calendar event starts or ends, sun sets or rises, someone comes home or leaves, room temperature is above or below a value, a torrent download status changes, and so on.

 

[p0ke]

I built a traffic light for my office today. It's just 3xE27 sockets with colored bulbs connected to a 3-way zigbee switch, and then I wrote some automation for it so it automatically changes to red when a work calendar entry (= teams meeting) starts, yellow or green when it ends depending on the time, and then it stays yellow from 9-5 and otherwise it's green. I guess the green is kinda useless, but I figured it's more fun for the kids when it's like an actual traffic light.