The reason these companies keep faltering is that they push cloud-based and/or locked in product ecosystems. Then they are either forced to a) operate on a pyramid scheme where new customers finance the ongoing costs of existing users or b) a subscription model that gives them a strong incentive to keep customers as locked into their ecosystem as possible. Either of these leave customers high and dry when the house of cards finally collapses, and since the products are cloud based (especially in case B where a lot of companies force you into cloud only access) your devices become bricks.
I'm not sure Matter is going to solve this because it doesn't do away with this business model. Zigbee and Zwave have been great options for ages that offer a lot of the same benefits with respect to local control and portability (as does Homekit to an extent), but people continue to buy into closed ecosystems like Insteon and then get burned. Of course companies like Wink and SmartThings have managed to build cloud lock in on top of Zigbee and Zwave, I can see Matter helping with that part of the issue if we can get interoperability at the controller level.
I think a big missing piece for the whole thing is the Just Works factor. You're either stuck with cloud garbage (some of which does, kinda, Just Work, until it doesn't), or a bunch of DIY. Meanwhile, with traditional dumb fixtures, switches, outlets, et c., I don't even pay attention to which brand I'm buying. They all work the same, and you hook them all up the same way, then forget about them until/unless they physically break.
Why is DIY considered bad? I mean, aren't existing "dumb" electricals also DIY in the sense that you have to install it, wire it in, etc?
I have a "DIY" setup in my current property with Shelly modules behind light switches and everything connected to Home Assistant. It's been rock-solid for a year now and the occasional maintenance I do (updates, etc) is more out of a hobby than anything (I could air-gap the entire system onto a separate network with no internet access and forget all the security updates). Yes, it took some skill to install and configure, but that's no different from installing all the electrics (or plumbing or heating) in the first place.
A "dumb" home needs maintenance as well. Maybe people just have an unrealistic expectation from smart devices?
There's a big difference between wiring up a new outlet that'll likely last for decades without further effort and will very likely require an identical or near-identical process to replace even 30 years from now, and care and feeding of fully-local "smart home" networks & interfaces.
Most plumbing or electrical work I do will last decades. If I move, the same skills will transfer perfectly to the plumbing and wiring already installed in the new house. The last big innovation in any of that was PEX piping, which takes about five minutes to get completely competent with, and has been around for years already. People who can come out and fix any of that, if I don't feel like dealing with it, can be found anywhere and often work pretty damn cheap (unless you're getting ripped off). Almost all the maintenance is "buy part, replace part", which is fine because (in the scheme of things) most of the parts are very cheap.
Add "smart" devices to any of that, and they're instantly the most finicky and needy part of the whole system.
My design Philosophy around my smart home things has been a model of enhancement. Meaning everything has to work with out the "smart" part, the smarts just add convenience, and and wow factor, but I should not HAVE to use the smart controller to turn on a light, I may need the controller to dim it, or change the color but it should turn on with out it.
Alot of smart Switches will work (turn the circuit on and off) with out the controller.
But any decent smart switch works as a normal switch by default, without any care or feeding. Sure, controlling them remotely and adding them to automation takes additional work, but that's stuff that is just impossible with the dumb switches, and not a requirement to control the light fixtures.
The problem with remotely controlled switches is that they can be (and will be) placed in very inconvenient places. So when the remote part breaks, one cannot just continue to use them because it can be difficult to reach them (like behind refrigerator that has to be moved to use the switch or on a wall in another room).
I've never had this problem. All of my remotely-controllable switches are just in spots that people would place normal switches, but they're additionally remotely controllable.
This is a similar argument with other HN discussions "why go AWS when you can just host yourself". Yeah, everything is doable and nothing is difficult to learn, but just a bit of this and a bit of that and connect all together and suddenly you face hours and hours of smart home maintenance you wouldn't need at all otherwise. Because every bit of smart maintenance comes on top of dumb maintenance. Of course if DIY is your hobby then it doesn't count as work, but I have other hobbies so a smart home is not a priority for me - until it either works plug-and-play or becomes so standardized (and cheap) that I can call a technician to do it for me.
It isn’t bad for people who like to do that but the scarcity of those people and their preferences for open solutions means it’s tough to make a lot of money there.
The reason DIY is "bad" is the time investment that comes with it, and the fact that all good systems required a lot of bespoke work, which means there's a skill gap too.
Home automation, when it works, is great. If you don't have the time & skill to do it yourself, the cost of having somebody do it well for you is prohibitive unless you're in a fairly high income demographic.
And that's the problem with DIY - it's an indicator of a niche audience, not an inherent "badness".
And you might be able to DIY right now but once you've had one accident that reduces mobility or, let's say, gumption to tinker, all this can become a burden.
I have this image of the Father in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, harping on his friends not taking care of their BMW motorcycle, letting it heat too much and not checking on it at every stop, while he's watching his Japanese model like a hawk, looking at temperature, doing mechanics on the road and so on. He's quite flustered, and condescending, saying they're not comfortable with the technology and the technological world, that they could live with a leaky faucet and not care because they can't fix it themselves. He's calling them 'romantic' and even when saying he understands how they see the world, still comes of a bit 'this is a bad state of affairs'. I used to agree with him.
I'm a tinkerer, I love gadgets, I can handle imperfect, I'm not afraid to drive my e-cargo with finicky not-fully-working brakes and 'you need to use it just right' stuff instead of bringing them to the shop or doing the big repair. I can repair but I usually also understand enough to know it can wait. That's me. Same in the house, I manage, I repair, I workaround while waiting for the thing to really break (money is tight, etc) and can live with imperfect stuff and have patience when things break down.
Then my spouse broke her knee. I had to handle my 3yo twin girls alone. The house. Twice the chores. The triple workload, while still doing productive work and trying to handle the first lockdown... The disabled partner in need of help for everything, and every hour or two every night in need of ice or pain relief. Utterly tired, sleepwalking...
My tinkering life stopped right there. I need stuff to work even when the world is falling down, I'm dead tired. No firmware update in the middle of anything, no crash while bathing the kids, no fucking reboot during a wash cycle that I needed to finish and set to dry before going to sleep at 4am to wake up at 6. You need things that absolutely work 100% of the time, just in case you're not able anymore.
So, like one other commenter said: something augmenting basically working stuff is the bare minimum. Mechanical switch is the most robust, have it working even if the system is ripped out. Electromechanical switches under your hand and display on the dashboard, in cars and not the damn crashing 17inch flat screen. No fucking software between me and the essential life support stuff. Have fun over that but make it fall back on 'what we had before' without my intervention.
While I was pregnant with my son: woo, got my Baby Buddy instance spun up, now to integrate it with Home Assistant and my idea for a Mycroft-driven baby monitor!
After he was born, through now as a toddler: Baby Buddy ensured that I really was waking him up to feed every four hours as a newborn and helped us keep tabs on fevers vs. diaper signs, because my brain is broken. Raspberry Pi 4 is just running PiHole, with IoT gear sitting in Aspiration Cabinet. I am relearning Kubernetes and Terraform. Thank God Germany has really strong parental employee protections.
DIY is not bad (speaking as someone who does a lot of DIY). But it costs time. Not everybody has time.
If you work with devices that adhere to some sort of common standard things are usually much easier, less gotchas, less weird hacks that depend on specific versions or intricates of some commercial product etc.
I've found the Lutron Caseta line perfect so far. I won't buy anything that requires external servers etc (like Nest). But Lutron only makes a limited range of devices.
Seconded. Lutron's devices connected via apple's homekit work well for us. No problems so far, the setup is pretty much set-and-forget and apple handles the security. You can disable access to the internet for lutron's bridge so no data leaves our home network.
I'm sure you could find someone to reship product to you... And then you'd just need a stepdown transformer in your wall, and to import US spec everything else to go with it. Totally simple ;)
I think the best part about Lutron Caseta is that it still solves my problems without the internet connected hub. The internet connection only adds additional features, and nothing else breaks if that goes down.
Ex. I used a lutron caseta smart switch with and a pico remote to add three way switching for my kitchen and dining room. Where they used to only have one inconveniently located switch.
For a new build or serious renovation with complete rewiring, this is mostly a solved problem.
The Shelly pro 4pm installs in the electric wiring cabinet. It speaks MQTT standard messaging across wired ethernet, but it can also integrate with Shelly's cloud thingies. It's a smart, standards based drop in replacement for ordinary "dumb" AC teleruptor/impulse relay star topology wiring.
> I don't even pay attention to which brand I'm buying.
My mil has purchased some seriously sketchy outlets off Amazon to install because she wanted to modern style but didn't want to pay the Leviton/Legrand premium from the home center duopoly.
If you're purchasing in-wall electrical, I strongly encourage you to buy a name brand from a reputable source. Also spend the extra half dollar for nylon plates that won't crack or shatter.
Hahaha, I guess I've avoided that because I rarely purchase anything that involves electricity from Amazon. I don't trust them not to burn down my house.
> The reason these companies keep faltering is that they push cloud-based and/or locked in product ecosystems.
I agree. It's a shame because Insteon products were pretty good for their time, for the most part. Granted, I never used their cloud stuff at all -- only local control (via ISY99 and later also Home Assistant). Though I'd say this was a long time coming; it had been nearly a decade since any new products came out.
Early on, their power-line-only stuff was sketchy and had issues, but my later experience with the dual-band stuff was great. I had many devices in my last house (sold with the house). I bought all new zwave stuff for this house, because of the lack of anything new and I figured Insteon was a dying brand. Glad I did that.
My biggest frustration is there's still no equivalent for the Insteon KeypadLinc. There's products that come close, and even have some additional features (that Insteon probably could have added via firmware), but nothing that stands out as overall better.
The other thing that is still unmatched is the local linking. Zwave kind of has this ability with groups, but it's so much more complicated to setup and still less powerful (eg: I don't think you can set on-level or ramp-rate).
It would be interesting to have more insight from Insteon as to what went wrong. Why did they stop innovating?
I almost wonder if they bet big on cloud then sales didn't match their expectations. I'd be interesting to know what sales of Universal Devices ISY99 (and other similar 3rd party control products) were vs their own cloud-based controls -- I get the impression there were probably as many, if not more, ISY99 users than Insteon Cloud users.
there are a variety of HomeKit buttons that are sold as e.g. dimmers or multi-bulb, but in fact can trigger arbitrary homekit devices, scenes, automations, etc. i’m guessing these fall in the category you say “comes close”?
an example of what i mean is “Philips Hue v2 Smart Dimmer Switch and Remote” which is actually 4 arbitrary device, scene, or automation buttons that magneticallly stays on wall or comes off to be a remote. there are also a few beautiful button sets made with wood, fabric, etc., launched on kickstarter. by working with homekit, you can be sure they will not require their proprietary cloud to stay functional.
that said, i’m a fan of ipad touch wallmount, like this in white:
with this you get arbitrary button sets for arbitrary systems, and price is competitive with locked-in options — remember the very early days “Philips ProntoPro” universal remote with arbitrarily programmable LCD screens that could emulate any physical button layout?
or if you want something that does that for limited scenes, plus AV remote any house guest can pick up and use without instruction, there’s the interesting LogiTech Harmony Hub with the “Companion All-in-One” remote that doesn’t have a screen but does have buttons for scenes, super useful if you’re in the Alexa or Hue systems. i use the on-remote buttons for the lights of the room the remote lives in.
Unfortunately Logitech has discontinued the Harmony line. I would be very wary about starting off fresh with them, because they are reliant on Logitech's servers being available.
That being said, you can pry my Harmony Ultimate from my cold, dead hands. I'm not looking forward to the day I have to get rid of it, because there's really nothing out there to replace it with.
For some context, here's one of my old keypads [1]: controlling outside lights, garage door (status plus control), and scene control (Welcome = several lights on the main floor; All off = very slow fade off of everything). The other one I really miss was in the kitchen and had "Bright", "Dim" and "Off" and controlled lights over the island + sink + under-cabinets + range-hood + some accent LED strips.
Honestly I'm not a huge fan of the "weird looking button on the wall" approach of some of those devices. I have to replace wall switches anyway to get stuff to work, and I don't like "No, don't use THAT switch, press that little button thing next to it".
The closest thing I found was a Zooz ZEN32 [2] which is what I'm trying now.
Leviton makes one [3] which looks nothing like their z-wave dimmers. Lutron Caseta has some stuff that might work but I didn't want to go down that proprietary path (non-zwave). Inovelli is supposed to be making a 5-button controller [4], and their dimmers look great -- but the keypad is vaporware so far, and the rest of their switches have been out of stock everywhere for months.
Consider one of these: https://shelly.cloud/shelly-plus-i4/ - or alternatively, if you have a lighting circuit wired to that switch, any other of their modules that also double as a relay.
> The reason these companies keep faltering is that they push cloud-based and/or locked in product ecosystems.
There is a bigger reason - what problem do they solve? How much money and/or time will using their products save me? The one area where there might be worthwhile savings is smart thermostats, but could 90% of those savings be accomplished with an offline thermostat with a timer?
I played with HomeAssistant for a while, and I kind of liked tinkering around with things, but it was still a huge pain in the ass, and I have no delusions that it was saving me money or time. For someone going into this with the expectation of tinkering, it's fine. For a commercial venture, I don't see current 'smart home' products/services as very viable. I've already switched my light bulbs to LEDs; how much am I actually going to save by having them turn off automatically after a preset delay? Not much.
One of my DIY projects was a couple smart plugs and a temperature sensor; at the peak of summer heat, when the house was hot but it cooled off at night, I automated ventilating our house. It had a great impact on our comfort without using air conditioning (which we didn't have). That is a decent use for this kind of stuff, but it's far too much effort for most people to go through.
I feel slightly the same. But I still see some value in some actors but not really for smart solutions. I don’t need a central tablet to control the lighting in the house or play a music in every room at the same time etc. These are nice applications but the burden to pay and set it up and then actually using it would be to much. I got me some Shelly Relays to retrofit some light and Rollo sockets. The only “automation” I programmed is to open all Rollos in the morning at 8am. I really hated it to go from room to room and press the button next to the window. Classical first world problem. I also programmed my Harmony Remote to control the blinds/Rollos and the lights. Nothing smart just a button that does the same action the button in the wall can do. Ok the blinds can now be controlled in percentages which is nice. But and here comes the but. The setup is so custom and involves 3 software pieces that I lost a lot of interest while setting this simple system up. The harmony bridge to a custom piece of software found on GitHub which talks to openHAB hangs constantly ( something with harmony hub losing Wi-Fi access every few days). The setup and management of the Shelly plugs is also not ideal. One can flash them with a custom firmware but I wanted to start with the stock firmware first to feel the water. All in all I kind of like the topic of home automation but I’m just to lazy to play zookeeper for a bunch of devices. And the mentioned providers with their vendor lock and cloud only solution will not get into my house.
There are plenty of useful/interesting things, e.g. reactive lights, more proactive climate control, controlling ventilation on demand, presence based interactions etc. Some of this can be achieved with dumb solutions, e.g. humidity controlled switch etc. But when you start integrating devices together they can coordinate to do much more complicated and "smart" things.
Does everybody want to do that? No. How far do modern systems go towards achieving any of that? Ehh, IMO not very far unless you put a lot of effort into it. Do the UIs of modern systems really make setting up these sorts of complex interactions up accessible for the average person? Nope. Are there glaring privacy and security concerns? Yep. There are lots of perfectly valid criticisms, especially of "smart" homes as they are, but there are certainly lots of possibilities.
Central anything + smart home = miserable experience. If my router is having a sketchy connection I should never be blocked from turning my lights on, or have one random light in a scene fail to turn on. Someone needs to take the plunge and make the smart home a resilient mesh network that will work even in a zombie apocalypse.
Yet as long as mobile is THE channel consumer live with, there is no other real option but go with cloud. Last example is use your phone to unlock Tesla's car door, remember? lol
Cloud is inevitable when everybody wants to use mobile phone to control their home. Reminds me the Tesla car unlock from mobile phone incident.
However, cloud is not the problem, the control and lock in of the cloud is. The future will lie in personal cloud for everything. This again is the resurrection of centralization vs. decentralization of everything on internet, the original promise of internet.
A couple of us are working on exactly this, just a side project for now. Essentially pairing open (as in protocol, data control) standards based cloud control and data collection with open hardware that could be repurposed or used elsewhere.
If there are any features that would really make this enticing let me know here or in an email.
Insteon isn't closed - it had an open and documented protocol and was supported by various software. It did not require "the cloud" either. The problem with Insteon is it was low quality hardware, not a very reliable protocol and there was a lack of good software.
For home automation the hobby, all the complexity is a feature. Fiddling with phones, apps, watches, identities, connections, security, networks, etc. is the fun of it.
Outside the hobby, though, I don't think people really want to deal with all that.
Generally, home devices you might automate are things you interact with -- locally. Local controls for a local device work really well, and the simplicity is hard to beat. Home automation wants to interject poor controls between you and everything.
E.g., the regular wall-mounted light switch is pretty close to an ideal design for a light.
> Generally, home devices you might automate are things you interact with -- locally. Local controls for a local device work really well, and the simplicity is hard to beat. Home automation wants to interject poor controls between you and everything.
No it doesn't. Only shitty "smart home" stuff does that.
Home automation automates things. There is no need to control, because it happens without needing to do anything. Simple example is outside lights turning on when it gets dark, though you don't need a whole system for that.
More complex example is: inside lights turn on when it's dark and off at an appropriate time only if no one is home.
I'm with you on the local control thing though. I use lots of scenes (one button to control multiple lights to preset levels) but they're all triggered via a button on the wall or an automation. You can control via app, but I almost never use that -- maybe if I'm on the couch and too lazy to get up to change something. Can also be set up to control remotely, but that's totally pointless with actual home automation.
Off topic but what are you using for the button that triggers things? "The Button" is huge when it comes to the wife approval factor (or even my approval factor). Fiddling with phones or alexa to turn on and off lights is a pain in the ass...
I have to buy a new thermostat for our house heat, or make a diy thermostat as a small project.
I’m having a hard time thinking of a more minimalist design than the Honeywell round thermostat. It doesn’t need a battery, or a processor, or anything other than a spring some fluid and a dial. The dial tells you both the current temp and your setting. I have to justify adding technology to improve it in some way but it just appears to add more problems.
Insteon devices function perfectly well without the cloud. I have several dozen of their light switches and motion sensors. The quality local communications (wireless that doesn't use 2.4GHz and interfere with WiFi + powerline) was the entire reason I went with them.
The cloud-connected hub to enable remote control was a bolt-on, and by far the least reliable part of their ecosystem.
So while I totally agree that smart home devices shouldn't require the cloud, Insteon is the wrong company to beat on there.
> The cloud-connected hub to enable remote control was a bolt-on, and by far the least reliable part of their ecosystem.
Not only that, but least useful? I never understood the use case for why you'd want remote lighting control.
Better: set up automations.
* Outside lights go on when it's dark, until ~11pm.
* Outside lights also turn on with motion
* Some inside lights turn on when it gets dark IF no lights have been manually changed in the past few hours
* Inside lights turn off later in the night if they were turned on automatically AND haven't been adjusted manually since
These rules worked exceedingly well for me: We never came home to a dark house. If we were away, we didn't have to do anything yet the house didn't look like we were away. If we were home, the lights weren't "changing by themselves" (high spouse-acceptance-factor importance).
>>> * Some inside lights turn on when it gets dark IF no lights have been manually changed in the past few hours
>>> * Inside lights turn off later in the night if they were turned on automatically AND haven't been adjusted manually since
Out of curiosity, how exactly do you accomplish this? How do you make sure IF no lights have been manually changed or if the lights were turned on automatically? Do you use iOS ShortCuts/ Automations? How do you persist states in them then?
I do this with HomeAssistant. You can specify conditions before taking action, which can include "is this thing still in the state it was when the last automation ran".
It does seem absurd that I have to round trip to us-east-1 to turn the lights in the closet on or off but there are reasons behind the cloud-based architecture.
The original SmartThings is a very weak device that can't do a lot of processing on board. Running in the cloud it is straightforward to custom the thing by, say, writing an AWS lambda function. If you had to install "device drivers" for every IoT device on the local device it could be easily overloaded.
As it is SmartThings featureful system that is easy to code for, for instance you can browse a pretty extensive logs in the system that would be hard to store locally. One reason you don't see a good IoT device that runs independently of the cloud is that it would be much more expensive and harder to integrate with.
You might not use it but one of the selling points of the IoT is the ability to remote control devices over the internet and having a bastion in the cloud is the royal road to that being reliable.
It may be a place of simply changing your thinking and building a product that people want.
I saw an article recently that claimed that there will be more repairable phones on the market soon, as France put in a law requiring a fixability score for products, and consumers responded by preferring fixable products.
The Cricut smart cutters were changed to require a subscription to a cloud service, and consumers dumped 'em. The company finally walked the idea back.
I'm interested in smart home products, but I don't like the devices randomly talking to a server somewhere. It's insane that your lightbulb talks to the internet. It's also a gamble wondering if I can reflash a specific device to use a known-safe firmware that only talks on my LAN. Similarly, if I were in the market for a smart cutter, I'm absolutely going to weight in the possibility of control of my device being taken from me and look at Cricut's competitors more favourably.
I recently learned that domestic sewing machines were built before planned obsolescence was a thing; I can still buy a 1902 sewing machines in decent condition (for example), as they were designed to be repaired. Bad for a company's monthly income, I suppose, but good for me as a consumer.
It would be easy to do that, but nobody wants to. Without cloud there is no recurring revenue upsell opportunity and no side revenue from selling user data to advertisers.
The entire market of smart-home shit's gonna keep being terrible until/unless some decent, reliable, inter-operable, long-lived standard takes over or is imposed. It's all too expensive to be worth it unless you can be pretty sure it'll keep working for at least a couple decades.
Imagine if lightbulb sockets were proprietary! It'd be madness. The current state of things with smart home stuff is worse than that, because at least there's a decent chance proprietary-lightbulb-socket world would have plentiful adapters and 3rd-party manufacturers for most or all types. The odds of a company stepping in to provide a software-side fix for Insteon dying, are slim.
Pretty sure lightbulb sockets used to be proprietary. And in the UK it used to be common to buy appliances with just a cable that you wired up to a plug because there was no common standard for outlets. There was even a brief period when appliances plugged into lightbulb sockets!
Remember the 90’s and what phone chargers looked like until the EU put its foot down and said “This is dumb, everyone should use USB for charging”. Now phone chargers are interchangeable.
AIUI the reason appliances in the UK used to be supplied with a bare cable is that it avoids the need for extra SKUs. If you sell a Washing Machine which can do anywhere from 100 to 250V AC input, you can make 5000 of them, and you don't care if 50 or 500 of those sell in England, it's all the same to you since it's the same SKU. If the English ones need BS1363 plugs (as they do today) then that's a separate SKU.
The reason it changed is that it turns out a ludicrous number of people can't safely and correctly wire a plug. On older circuits if you wire Earth where Neutral should go, the appliance will probably work, but now you've significantly increased the risk of faults becoming fatal. Also UK plugs are fused and left to their own devices almost everybody will put a 13A fuse in the plug (the maximum size commonly available and equivalent to the maximum ~3kW energy draw for 240V home mains) even though very few appliances need that. So now when there's a fault and your 5W bedside clock radio is drawing 2kW (plenty of energy to start a fire), the fuse doesn't blow and instead your house burns down. It's very easy to tell manufacturers "Put the right size fuse in" because they're ordering crates of fuses they can just order the correct one, but home owners know the 13A fuse will "work" so they're not going to buy a 5A fuse instead and risk finding they've got the wrong kind.
As a nerd kid I cared a lot about this, and I would maybe find about half of appliances I was allowed to examine were wrong in some way, most often over-size fuse but sometimes loose wiring or even just straight up wrongly wired. Today those appliances have a pre-installed plug which is almost certain to have the right size fuse and be correctly wired just because it was done as a production line task so somebody was actually trained and given the appropriate equipment.
Yeah this plus the cloud privacy nightmare are what's kept me away. I don't fancy having my entire house go braindead because a company goes bankrupt and shuts down its cloud, gets hacked, or experiences a gigantic devops mistake like Atlassian just endured. "We're sorry, your house is now bricked." The entire thing is madness on lots of levels.
Cloud use is an anti-feature for me in anything that does not objectively benefit from cloud compute offload, rich collaboration, or access to large amounts of data. It doesn't totally rule it out but if I see that it has to call out to the cloud that's a ding against it.
This. The going understanding is that hardware companies are high risk, requiring large upfront capital with long market delivery time frames and one-off sales and continuous costs (support if not cloud). There have been some successes where ongoing revenue streams based on a cloud service make companies far more viable and profitable. Everyone thereby wants that and the VCs frequently prioritize that.
The reason why the smart home keeps faltering is that it provides little value to the customers. It's not the cloud, or the monetization schemes, it's that it turns out that flipping light switches or pressing a button on the thermostat is not a big pain point for people, and using smart-home technology is as often inferior to old dumb tech as it is superior.
I generally agree but having a lightbulb that can be scheduled to change brightness, temperature, and on/off status has been pretty great for my sleep. Only being able to control it with my phone is a pain in the ass especially when the widget breaks and I now have to unlock, open an app, and flip through screens just to enter my bedroom.
Right. I have a smart bulb and there are things that it's good for (I like super dim warm light for having enough light to see by but not waking me up), but turning on your light with your phone is awful. I use Alexa for it and it's not a ton better. Most of the lights in my house I actively don't want to have smart versions of.
Yeah, does seem like quite a bit of that. After many decades it's relatively easy to buy a $20 dead bolt for a door and it will resist easy attacks, take a fair bit of abuse, and likely last decades.
The "cloud enabled" version, from a well known brand no less, has all plastic internals, can't take any abuse, and even 5 seconds with a $2.00 screw driver you are in.
Please name this well known brand. I have Zigbee deadbolts that have mostly the same mechanical parts as their completely manual counterparts. This is largely due to them still being manual, keyed locks with the addition of a touchpad.
This is just it. I have an amazingly smart home: in every single room, I have installed a robust remote control for lighting that cannot get lost, can be replaced for $5 if it breaks, and is perfectly customizable with interchangeable face plates. The kids can even paint them!
I don't need my lights to turn on and off on their own. I don't buy that anyone does, short of perhaps someone who has a physical disability for whomst it would be too difficult. For $20 I can get a timer - perfect for the closet light we always used to leave on by accident.
I think this is basically conspicuous consumption, tasteless pseudo-luxury. I am not impressed by your IoT colorful lightbulbs; impress me with your conversation.
The problem with home automation companies is they have a perspective and culture of a hardware manufacturer who never understood software. They want to build a device, wire it up, sell it, then forget about it.
For decades they have tried to get around the software part by outsourcing a one-time job to the lowest bidder, and then never want to update them. They’re more like the industrial automation companies (some of whom still have Windows XP machines running their CNCs), or medical device makers who get something certified with an exact version of Windows and never allow it to update.
Add to that, the Marketing guys who pitch unrealistic goals that need to be met in order for their plan to become profitable (“we can easily capture 50% of this market in our locked-in, proprietary protocol!”), and you have a train wreck any one can see coming a mile away.
These are companies who just don’t understand, and don’t want to understand, that these are long-term commitments that require full time development and operations staff to keep things going.
The article talks about how Matter will save everything. What the heck? Don't we already have zigbee and Z-wave that work fine? Why do we need another communications protocol?
Matter isn't special for any other reason other than that it's the first time so many manufacturers of smart home products have actually decided to talk to each other when designing a protocol.
Because we need reliable devices, so wired protocols... We have ModBus and MQTT witch works enough BUT we also have very few devices able to talk them. We have almost nothing well done "intelligence side" so to really create a smart home, the sole FLOSS alive is Home Assistant witch work but it's far from deserve a good award and most IoT stuff are just classic stuff with some bolted pre-made-by-third-parties "smartness" that in the end result in too limited flexibility to be of real use.
It is 'yet another' standard yes, but it's worth pointing out that Matter was jointly launched by the ZigBee Alliance (who now call themselves the Connectivity Standards Alliance).
So it's not exactly a rival to ZigBee at least.
Z-Wave are going a different direction though, and I wouldn't be surprised if Z-Wave slips into obscurity over the next decade.
Agree, this purports to not be “yet another”, but the one that converges. Oversimplified, Thread is already an IP mesh on Zigbee hardware, and Matter is a device/app protocol on top of IP.
“To simplify adoption, Matter will start as an application layer on top of existing IP technologies, including ethernet, Wi-Fi, Thread, and Bluetooth (for device provisioning). This means Matter is not reinventing the wheel; it’s adding better technology to the highways our smart homes are driving on.”
I am a programmer, after a long day of debugging crappy code, I don't want to spend my free time debugging someone else's crappy code. All my appliances are as dumb as possible. All my light switches are simple mechanical on/off switches. The 12:00 on my kitchen stove was blinking for 11 years and I don't plan to change it.
They fail because cost to produce/operate is higher than value to the consumer.
These companies need to either get much leaner, or change strategies.
The market for a $200 internet connected door handle is pretty small. I'm sure a lot of these products could work with a target margin of 5-10%. Who would invest into that idea though? Haha
Every "smart home" system out there wants that sweet sweet recurring subscription cash, but the cross section of people who want smart home features and those who are wary of vendor lock-in is pretty damn big.
Commoditize your complement. Stop trying to make money on cloud services, and open source your cloud software, or provide it as a service for a nominal break-even fee. Make your money on hardware instead.
(Disclosure: I have a smart home blog and YouTube channel)
A nice write-up. Insteon have (had?) some great products, so this is a shame. I do think that Matter will improve things a little, but we'll see - owning hardware from a bankrupt company naturally isn't great if the device breaks down...
LIFX (one of the most popular smart lights, aside from Philips Hue) have been having various troubles recently too:
They are keen to stress that this is only affecting their owner, but in reality many LIFX customers have recently had issues with support tickets and warranty claims going unanswered.
The only good news is that LIFX support local control, meaning that HomeAssistant and Hubitat can still control them even if LIFX's cloud servers get switched off.
Nonetheless, reports of LIFX and Insteon struggling/disappearing is never encouraging. Especially when combined with recent (negative) subscription changes by Wyze and Wink.
After setting up over 100 IoT devices in my home, I’m convinced this industry needs to be regulated if it wants any shot at succeeding.
Here’s what needs to be required:
1. An IoT device should be capable of functioning without any sort of “smart” features. For example, a remote controlled lamp should have a physical switch on it that allows it to operate like a dumb lamp.
2. A device should be capable of integrating with the rest of the home network without depending on the public internet or external services. This means said lamp can be turned on and off by a smart switch or phone that’s in the same LAN.
3. Smart devices must be accessible without registering an account with the device manufacturer. This is one of the most egregious parts about IoT today—most vendors require an email and password to login and setup or control the device, which is absurd on so many levels with respect to privacy and when the company goes bust like Insteon.
These 3 things would put an end to most of the IoT shenanigans we see happening today.
Let's say I want to dip my toe into smart homes, maybe get a smart light switch or two. I care about:
- privacy
- staying out of the cloud (so things like TFA don't affect me)
- an open protocol interoperable between vendors
Can anyone recommend a good "for dummies" guide written from that angle? I know that software-wise Home Assistant is generally recommended, but how do you decide what hardware to get?
Not that Sonoff devices are "great" out of the box for using them off the cloud, but they are pretty easy to flash tasmota onto them.
With HA there are a number of plugins that will allow you to easily setup duckdns&ssl, there is a app on both the Play Store and App Store.
EDIT: I run HA on a Rpi3 just fine, I also added a zigbee USB dongle which I use to control my TRVs. I also have some cheaper wifi sockets that could have tasmote flashed onto them, but they are a plain to open and access the pads needed to reflash them. The SonOff devices I've been playing with recently are easy to open and flash.
I also use shellys for my fixture lights, again easy enough to flash with tasmota so they are running off the local network.
OMFG ALL THE EDITS: Just make sure that the devices have a ESP chip in them before buying them if you want to reflash them. There has been a trend as of late of using other wifi enabled chips which tasmota doesn't support. Can't find the device on blakadder? Try https://fcc.io/ if you can find the FCCID (and your in the US) before buying the device and look for the internal photos, there is normally a pretty decent close up of the main processor in there. Also googling "The Device Name Tasmota" will often find results of other geeks trying to flash tasmota onto them.
If you want privacy, staying out of cloud, and interop between device vendors, the home automation for dummies approach is:
Buy devices from Eve, which works with HomeKit and other HomeKit devices.
Other suggestions here miss the privacy angle insofar as privacy also requires security.
> Smart home company Eve built its entire business model on local control. “Our privacy platform is ‘what’s at home stays at home,’” Jerome Gackel, Eve Systems CEO, tells me. “With Matter, you do not need a cloud — you can have one, but it’s not a requirement.” Its commitment to avoiding cloud control is why Eve devices have been iPhone- and HomeKit-only thus far. But with Matter, Eve can move to the other platforms while remaining entirely local.
If you're up for some light soldering, I'd recommend picking up a few Sonoff Basics and/or wall plugs and then flashing them with ESPHome (https://esphome.io/). These devices are simple and cheap ($5-6 each), basically just an ESP8266 chip connected to a relay, a button, and a status LED. You have to solder to attach four pins to the board so you can flash it, then you can close it up forever. Future updates happen over-the-air.
I am far from being an electrical engineer, and found that these guides, plus a few YouTube videos, got me to the point where this feels routine. I now have over a dozen in my house, controlling all manner of things.
I've also had fun installing temperature and humidity sensors to Wemos D1 Minis ($2-$3, basically just an ESP8266 chip on a development board) to monitor climate around the house. During the winter, houseplants really like to have higher humidity... we bought a bunch of dumb humidifiers at goodwill, installed Sonos Basic relays inside them, and set rules for them to turn on when the humidity in the room drops too low.
Check out the Home Assistant [1] documentation and Google 'zigbee vs z-wave' (the two major interoperable standards) and you'll be on the right track I think. Comparing and contrasting will explain the caveats and benefits of each and why they are designed the way they are.
Note: By default these standards are NOT radio-secure and you need to pursue secure device pairing for devices like door locks and garage openers.
I use Home Assistant and a mixture of Z-wave and wifi devices. The way I choose wifi devices is by finding which ones can have Tasmota firmware flashed to them.
For example, in Australia, many hardware stores sell “Grid Connect” devices. This is a cloud solution for the likes of Arlec. However, most of these devices can be flashed with Tasmota. This removes the cloud and keeps everything in house using MQTT. Security is WPA2 and TLS. I run my IOT devices on a separate VLAN and use 2.4Ghz network as it seems to have more coverage and is more reliable.
Here is a list of >2000 devices which can take the Tasmota firmware:
You'll need an electrician to install them, but Shelly modules are what I use: https://shelly.cloud
They must be wired behind your existing wall switches so you don't lose any functionality - you can use the switch as normal.
There is no cloud; the modules themselves have a local web interface and some basic scheduling/timer features (as well as a rudimentary REST API), and are supported by Home Assistant if you need more advanced features.
I think something like this might be what you are looking for, though I think some of the products he uses rely to much on being battery powered, although there appear to be cable powered versions of these products too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85yH56DS5mg&t=5s
It's not "open", but Lutron devices (Caseta for DIY or small installations, RadioRA 3 for whole-home setups) are some of the best you can find at the moment. They're designed around local communication and directly synchronizing switches and remotes with each other, with an optional local hub for automation.
The really unfortunate thing is that Insteon predated internet based smart home infrastructure. The protocol was completely local and almost all devices work offline.
Insteon could have been an example of how to fail gracefully by updating their hubs with mDNS support and updating their Apps to use local discovery and the already existing local API that all Hubs support. They could have sent a farewell email to customers and given them a solution that would have worked for a few years at least.
Instead they squandered whatever limited resources they had left and then shuttered their service abruptly and went into hiding leaving everyone in a lurch. They couldn't have even bothered with an email notice a month ahead of their shutdown.
Home automation needs a standard all companies can get behind. Right now, there are multiple standards so it's hard for customers to decide which to choose. We need companies to adopt one that will be the standard so consumers can feel comfortable with the one that's chosen without having to think about what standard to choose and whether it will be supported in the future. Wifi is a very good example of what is possible. Home automation companies should follow that example.
If that's not possible then a large tech company should dominate the industry. It should not be Google since they have a bad reputation of taking on projects and dumping them once they feel that their are no near term profits. Microsoft is more focused on business products so they will have a hard time moving forward with the project.
It needs to be Apple. They have the customers that are willing to adopt the product just because it's an Apple product. They can charge a premium and make the product the best it can be. And since home automation fits well with their other products they can be patient while people adopt it. Also, you can't dismiss the products design. Right now most home automation products need to be hidden from view since they aren't very stylish. Apple would change that.
I think Apple should focus on home automation as their next hardware product category. Forget the car, they have a huge opportunity in putting order into the home automation industry.
Domotics should be mandated to always work offline, and all deathly hazards should be denied any network io. I don't want to discover my oven has a 0day by finding my home on fire.
The value-proposition of "smart home" has NEVER been convincingly constructed. This goes back to the days of X10 remote control systems, while at the same time never has the cost been reasonable. I've followed this stuff since the 1970s and honestly it's never been worth it as a consumer.
Anything with "Cloud" or "Account" to simply use it an automatic 100% no-go for me. I was looking for a new weather station recently - the "nicest" and most elegant one required both an internet account and cloud connection plus all the data had to be uploaded to the cloud even to just access it in my house. It allowed a BLE access if and only if you were in range but that was unusable based on other BLE range limits I've had.
So because of that barrier to entry I noped out completely. If it's cloud, I don't buy!
What I actually wanted: a remote weather station with a local internet server capability that could stay off the cloud and operate if (actually WHEN) the internet goes down - we have only 2-9's on power reliability in the boonies - i.e. we lose power for about 3-4 days a year, every year.
Instead I'm now looking at "separate components" and "homebrew" instead as well as looking at "professional grade" stuff.
The bottom line is that a lot of these smart devices put more burden on the customer than traditional devices — not less.
I don’t remember the last time I had to fix or upgrade a malfunctioning traditional light switch or doorknob. I just never think about them.
On the other hand, every smart device I’ve bought has bugged me multiple times a year because of wifi or other network drops, or battery changes, or needing to log back in to my accounts.
This is exactly it - they have to be easier than normal things, the fancy electric doorknob needs to unlock itself as you approach, the lights need to respond immediately to voice control, etc.
And since they took away the auto-unlock because of "security" the value proposition dropped tremendously. I had electric door locks, I don't anymore.
If I ever go back to them it'll be hard-wired on the jam and connected to a raspberry pi.
The smart home is still running into the "it's not simple/easy enough". Apple HomeKit almost gets there, sometimes, but the wireless connections still are flakey, one bulb comes on at a slightly different time than another, etc.
It works well enough with someone technical in the house to diagnose, but it is nowhere NEAR reliable enough for people without that.
My house was built in the 1980s and other than upgrades and repairs pretty much works as is. I don't have to pay a monthly subscription to switch on/off my lights. Other than repairs, the house will likely work for another 50 years without major upgrades, although the electricity network may have to be updated to accommodate charging electric cars. I haven't seen a a single smart home system that is going to last longer than a decade while remaining secure at the same time.
I am sure home will get smarter over time, however, it will be in areas where internet connectivity actually pays off, not fads like a internet connected fridge that messages you when it is empty.
Back when I created stuff for hospitals (et al), we had to put our source code in escrow and had dedicated money (an account) to keep misc services running. It seems like these kinds of guarantees should also apply to certain B2C markets too.
I totally wouldn't mind some hardware that lets me flip, turn, push or pull the flips, knobs, buttons, shades,... that I already have in my home in some programmable way that I can control.
No way am I going to replace my perfectly functional hardware with some device that relays my data to a cloud service and maybe even ends up bricked if they discontinue support. I'm actually happy to see this business model is not playing out.
I just hope Kasa doesn't do the same thing. They run my living room lights so perfectly. And I have some random no name garage door opener that works 1000% better than the big name brands, all it does is short two wires, but it's wifi and works over google and pings me if the door goes up, closes, or stays open too long. Such peace of mind knowing the door is closed.
What is the smart home supposed to do for me anyway? That's the thing that seems to me to be the reason for the failure of many of these companies: they are selling something that most people don't need so they rely on people who buy them on a whim.
There are definitely applications that are useful, even if they are firmly in the luxury territory. Smart lights, doorbells, thermostats, assistants, blinds/curtains and security cameras are all pretty useful.
I have a few of those but I've mostly avoided them due to vendor lock in. Stuff in houses lasts a long time. I don't want to have to replace my door lock every 5 years.
Some of the products are a bit difficult to actually integrate too. Smart locks are all "American security" level. Smart lights don't work well with existing switches. I don't actually know of any smart curtain openers so I'm making my own.
One day I think the issues will be resolved and it will become more common.
The smart home concept can likely become viable once and if we get to have AGI, until then, all this is just scams, pyramid schemes disguised as smart $thing. Oh, look at the sign of that variable, speaks for itself, money it is!
I have some insteon crap here that I dont use anymore, but nice of them to not even send out emails that I can now officially throw it all in the garbage...
My four full-size ceiling led lights (think old school Florissant size in a square configuration) are independent and triggered by motion with self timed off. Perfect. My front porch lights are similar but just dusk to dawn automatic. Perfect. Oh, the garage door opener is Siri controlled but I can take it off with a bluetooth tag I've been to lazy to setup. Near perfect. Only Google Home is used for IOT to lazily control the temp. I really like my smooth home automation thus far.
Insteon has been around for longer than Cloud existed, and their devices will work with HomeSeer or HomeAssistant. But non-techie people probably wont be able to get those working.
They're already selling out. I sold a box of old devices for profit this week.
I had removed about 20 of them from my last home and never got around to installing them (in-wall) at my new home so I put them on eBay and already made back most of my investment.
There’s no need to use Insteons hub/cloud service. Most Insteon power users that I know are using homeseer, homeassistant as a way to control the devices.
The other good thing about, at least the light switches (which is their core product), is that they work without an internet connection and will continue to function.
However unfortunately the less tech savvy users who set up automations through Insteons service will be left (quite literally) in the dark now.
Yea this Insteon debacle is a weird example to use to highlight problems with IoT systems.
They've been around way longer than most of the "modern" protocols. It was basically Insteon and Lutron in semi-affordable home lighting control space for years and years and years before cloud-controlled IoT and Alexa entered the picture.
I'm really wondering how this all came to pass... guessing they tried and failed to jump on the app/cloud bandwagon? Their new app was late to the game and in beta for, like, two years?
Right, they had this big mainstream push with being the first Homekit partner with a failed hub, plethora of non-core devices and multiple failed apps. I think they got ahead of themselves going into this mass market and should've stayed a niche player, further perfecting their core hardware and focussing on enthusiasts and home installers. Kind of like Philips Hue did but for enthusiasts/professionals.
Insteon predates internet connected devices. Their protocol is not cloud based. It isn't even hub based, you can pair switches to outlets directly. The hubs try to connect to the cloud but work locally and have a locally accessible API, credentials printed on the bottom.
Their Apps relay through the cloud however to avoid the hassle of local network discovery. So the Apps are completely useless now.
Most/all devices and the hub have a pairing button. You can pair devices to each other or the hub still. It's complicated but works, the App also coordinated pairing and was easier but still kinda janky compared to competitors.
Home Assistant can talk to the hub via it's local API and still manage and paired devices. 3rd party hubs like Isy still work just fine.
Because Insteon is no longer making devices, they are now selling for a premium on eBay because people invested in the ecosystem don't need to change.
People like my mom, who only has a hub is 3 devices, are better off selling for profit now and jumping to a new platform. Those using Isy can just keep going as Insteon devices are well made and will continue to function for years or decades.
The smart home does not much keeps faltering, it simply does not exits because "smart" IoT devices are essentially crap. That's not only smart homes, it's also keyboards, phones, TVs, ... to change we need products designed by techies who use them themselves not by some manager with crappy and childish ideas.
If you like reading my journe, I have a kind of "smart" home since it's a modern one with a small p.v. plant, VMC, big hot water reservoir with heat pump + classic resistance kind-of integrated with the p.v:
- very first thing I want is knowing the state of my p.v. NOT needing a third party server on the other side of the planet just to see what my inverters do a meter away from my desktop and even more seen delayed and pruned data because the remote server can't handle the number of connected clients. I finally choose Victron and Fronius inverters since the first is nearly open platform (a rebranded Debian) with MQTT and ModBus services by default, the latter have an almost public API, ModBus only but at least a well known open protocol and the hw characteristics I was looking for. Even if both are not exactly cheap devices they look like crappy prototypes in software terms, at least they work.
- secondly since I have invested in a hot water system to consume less electricity from the grid I want to integrate it. It was 2017 so before the supply chain/China/covid/war/semi/* crisis, it was (still is) a Daikin gear not an unknown brand by some obscure seller. "yes, the system can talk ModBus RTU but you need a card, not in stock in 3-4 months you can have it for 350€" (oh, cheap since it's just an adapter between a serial proprietary protocol and ModBus but anyway)... Docs are incomplete of course, but in the end it work. However the p.v. integration is limited I can only command "go full power heat pump + resistance" (~3.6kW) or "go only heat pump" (~0.9kW) not for instance "go only resistance since it's -10℃ outside and I can barely spare 3kW now", at least I can programmatically see water temp so decide if it's better heat it a bit or not.
- third thing the VMC with built-in heat-pump, it talk ModBus natively, only I need a third party ModBus/TCP adapter to reach my homeserver, I found one, who curiously need to be configured on the same network card it will work with or it refuse to work (MAC address check, for unknown reasons apparently), again docs are not only bad but also false, some registers does not exists, some others discovered myself are not documented, some range and bitfields are wrong etc, again I manage to get them work but was not that immediate.
- forth, by electrical norms I need to measure and show consumed energy by at least heating, hot-water, etc so I need a smart meters. There are many on sale, nearly no one connectable via MQTT/ModBus or anything else standard beside passing through some third party server except, one is the new Shelly 4PM witch unfortunately it's 16A only, too little for local norms, so I go for another Carlo Giavazzi ET112 (I cite names just because nothing else exists AFAIK on sale) witch works well, but to have more than one one the same serial you need to change device ID by a 40+Mb windows only 32bit GUI crapware and a usb serial adapter that their software like, even if formally is a thing I can do with kermit/minicom/gtkterm IF someone just document the damns interface.
- fifth, since I have done that on a home server (Home Assistant, not something I really like but at least I can deploy via Pip NOT with pre-made out-of-date docker images or entire distro for raspi and co just for a damn small thing I would like thermometers, hygrometers, anemometers etc I can only found very few and very crappy. I would like to integrate portal/entryphone, the only usable option found is a hyper-expensive VoIP entryphone system since all the rest works only with some third party "clouds" or can't talk to anything else than their own display, proprietary/undocumented protocols. Not better for switches etc that are almost all wireless only, unreliable as hell.
Long story short: for too many there is no real purpose for a smart home because they do not have real automation use cases, so the really interested market is damn small so far. Those who are really interested can only find crap so most of them avoid going smart as much as possible. OEMs must agree on one/few open, common standards (we have some already like the decades old ModBus, slow but simple and the modern, simple and less cheap in electronics terms fast and rich MQTT) and learn to implement good interfaces with good docs and reliable devices instead of pushing Android on hyper-expensive SoC in a fridge. Then smart homes will take off.
Unfortunately we do not have vertical knowledge we have OEMs who buy something pre-made by someone else, bolt it in their product hope it will help sales but without even the knowledge needed to understand what they are doing.
I'm not sure Matter is going to solve this because it doesn't do away with this business model. Zigbee and Zwave have been great options for ages that offer a lot of the same benefits with respect to local control and portability (as does Homekit to an extent), but people continue to buy into closed ecosystems like Insteon and then get burned. Of course companies like Wink and SmartThings have managed to build cloud lock in on top of Zigbee and Zwave, I can see Matter helping with that part of the issue if we can get interoperability at the controller level.