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.

I also never get locked out. Usually I key myself in with the keypad, and there's a normal key slot too. It's also powered by a 9V -- but will also indicate to HomeAssistant what the battery level is

The key isn't that connectivity is bad, the key is that it should degrade gracefully when the more advanced features fail. Wireless is down? Can't unlock with my phone, but I can still use the keypad. Battery is dead? I can still use my physical key.

The other rule is that no cloud service ever be necessary. I want heat & lights, even if the internet is out.

Geeksmart "smart dumb" fingerprint door lock:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08TMBL7FW

works great

I hate that feeling.

They don't advertise this, super cool.

Oh and it uses a standard Schlage cylinder so you can get all your doors keyed the same, or swap it out with a high security cylinder if you so desire. (Lockpicking Lawyer even said not bad things about it!)

Fingerprint is a seriously cool. Except it doesn't work if your finger is wet, at which point you are back to just using a code.

Now, all that said, there are times I really wish I had the Wi-Fi model, knowing on my phone that, for example, the animal sitter has stopped by and fed the pets, is super useful.

But not having the Wi-Fi model is a trade off I have made in return for the security of not having another wireless entry point into my home network.

This may not be true for older models that may exist, so I would verify.

Does your insurance cover it? Mine requires a keyed lock specifically.

I love that I can give my family/friends a code and make it valid for a specific time period. Or remotely let them in. That’s the value I see in networked locks.

If I had a combo lock, I'd be more worried about someone with binoculars or an ultra-zoom camera watching me key my lock without covering my hand than my physical key getting lost or stolen.

[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).

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.

Then I decided I didn't really want to put electronics in my wall at all and did something more useful with my time instead.

This is one of the reasons that smart bulbs and the like are generally bad - you never want a situation where the switch doesn't just act like a switch.

Smart houses should be designed from the perspective of remaining identical to use when the smarts go away. And if there's weird behavior it should all stop if you unplug the hub or controller.

I generally like in-wall smart switches but even there they tend to die faster than dumb switches, so you may be leaving your survivors a bunch of calls to an electrician.

- "Everything 'smart' must continue to function if the internet is disconnected"

- "Everything 'smart' must fall-back to normal 'dumb' operation if the automation server is not available"

...immediately, every single time the occupant wants it to do that. Regardless of the state of any other component.

Depends on your devices, but I have (Philips?) smart bulbs that can be turned on/off "regularly", but keep it on and you can control it via google home.

The main drawback is that this means I have to have the bulbs set to light up after power is restored. A middle-of-the-night power outage is fun when the entire house lights up at 3am :)

I've done a few new installs of lighting in my garage, driveway, and patio. Because that was "greenfield" work, I got to put smart switches in. If I ever rewire this house, I'll use that opportunity to do some more.

I use Kasa (TP-Link) plugs but there are a bunch of different brands.

My issue with those is that they fail the "normal person" test. A normal person will try to turn on a lamp and it will never work because the smart plug is off. But with a smart bulb, it'll come on after they twist the stem a couple times. (And it never gets noticed! People are used to 3-way style lamp sockets needing a couple clicks to turn regular bulbs on and off, so they don't really notice that they had to double twist the stem to get the light to turn on)

The best compromise are smart switches. Switch still manually controls the light, and smart features are always available. The downsides are that the lamp's outlet must have switch wiring, and smart switches aren't like normal toggles: they're more like push buttons so the switch isn't in a strange physical state.

(By the way, Philips Warm Glow bulbs are awesome for this. I use them in my dining room lamp connected to an Inovelli Z-wave dimmer. They get warmer the dimmer they go, mimicking how tungsten filaments work)

My current setup is a mix-n-match of all three types, using each one where it beats the other two for simplicity and predictability.

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.

It outlined a future where everyone started automating elements of their messaging to each other. Simple things like automated "Happy Birthday" messages. Eventually, people started setting up auto "Thank you" replies to these messages. It only got more complex from there with increasingly elaborate conversations being automated between people.

Eventually, some calamity hits civilization and humans go extinct. But their technology is resilient and keeps running without them. The ghosts of a dead people continue talking to each other in perpetuity, long dead people cheerfully wishing each other "Happy Birthday" until the lights finally ran out.

Haunting story that I still think about from time to time. Would love it if anyone else recognizes the story and could credit it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2552i2Z8sNM

"I've had 18 heart procedures. My wife is in perfect health. The odds of me outliving her are zero...We're moving back to Coronado. This is a complex house, even though I think it's simple! For her to try and teach somebody else how to run everything and do everything would be difficult if something happened to me. So we're just kind of jumping ahead."

https://youtu.be/gisdyTBMNyQ?t=383

This means that instead of a light switch, there is a button. And when I relocate, I can just remove these devices from the switches and take them with me

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08TVZK8D6

Home stuff needs to generally work for 20 years, and lot of things (light switches, etc) will be even longer. Tech has no conception or demonstrated discipline for functioning that long.

HA/IOT is an interop disaster currently, and the current cacaphony of standards/acronymns guarantees it will be cycled/replaced in a decade's time.

The INTER-NET of Things doesn't have a functional INTER, nor a NET.

Inter is software, which should be mathematically doable but historically improbable.

The ubiquitous NET part basically means you buy the device, and it will work with zero-config networking that means you can find it.

And the final issue is the interface. Interfaces do NOT age gracefully either. Perhaps voice interfaces are what is needed.

Consumer IOT is yet another 10 years away.

Which is why Homeassistant is a godsend - you can add the mess and present it in a sensible way. As long as you stay the fuck away from anything cloud you are pretty much golden no matter what the parent company decides to do.

E.g. Telldus had a huge range of 433mhz things that still work IF you avoided their TelldusNet or whatever.

Hopefully this isn't a common situation. I know that for me, not being able to control basic things like lights/heating/cooling without calling on and waiting around for somebody else would drive me nuts and one way or another the situation would have been resolved before the only person who knew how to handle the tech had a chance to sleep let alone die.

I've known a lot of people who couldn't figure out to how to use their own TV remove for anything more advanced than getting to the point where they can watch their usual shows and change the volume, but not being able to turn off a light at night is like not knowing how to turn a TV on at all!

Fortunately, we're both reasonably fit people, but I know people who would've just had to give up and use a flashlight.

A friend of mine bought a house with an expensive system, but it wasn't very useful and later had a fault. To remove it would require replacing all the switch plates - I would guess $1000 to get rid of it. He was technical so he fixed it instead.

I'm not getting rid of the existing switches and plate covers, so at least I can more easily remediate it if the future buyers don't want the system.

This btw is the source of the word "turnkey". You turn the key, and it works.

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.

Every few years I get tempted to go down this rabbit hole, hoping that in the last few years the industry has finally gotten its shit together, and every time I look, it's the same clown show, just with more clowns.

We need more things that are complete in themselves but causally work with other things. (Y’know, like the web.) Things that can perform tasks without an installation page, but readily extensible using MQTT or HTTP. That’s the kind of thing my company tries to build. That’s a very useful thing about Shelly, or any of the polished devices that expose an open protocol.

They hold society down.

"Lets design a spec that anyone can use"

Premium brand that uses spec is $30 dollars a light, but works...

UNGADONG brand made in China is $10 dollars and has a 30% chance of catching on fire.

Premium brand goes out of business and market is taken over by crap.

---

Also, vendor lock in by the premium brand allows them to jack up prices even more.

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.

While the effect no doubt varies with individual, there has been a significant amount of studies suggesting that there is some link between bright light in shorter wavelengths (so blue end of spectrum) and melatonin suppression, and in turn circadian rhythms [ex: 0, 1, 2]. If you live near the equator with consistent sunrise/sunset year round artificial light management may be less of a concern to you, but the further you are and the more seasonal variation you experience the more helpful it may be (and is for me) to have lighting throughout home/work that can help maintain circadian rhythm as desired. "Sunrise" into bright white/blue in the morning and day, then slowly changing into dimmer, redder light as one approaches the desired time to go to sleep. YMMV of course but as someone in tech who had decades of difficulty in maintaining a normal 24h cycle in the northern latitudes, heavy light brightness and temperature control has been a very significant improvement in my QOL and I never want to go back.

Of course, some people just enjoy having fun with lighting as well, for parties and mood and such. "Painting with light" can be interesting by itself. But for me the practical advantages have been significant value for the cost, and without any need for any kind of drugs or other mechanisms.

----

0: https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/sleep-blue-light

1: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha...

2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9424753/

I imagine if I bought a compatible "smart switch" that issue would go away (power never completely dropped to the bulb), but seriously...

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".

(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).

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.

These things are installed in big fancy commercial buildings where there is an expectation that they last longer than the warranty, which is reassuring.

These things actually do pretty well at power conservation at these scales, but it's a little fuzzy if it will do the same for a home. Just swapping out LED for incandescent gets you pretty much all of the bang for your buck, but if you have people in your house who are allergic to turning off lights, the occupancy sensors will help a bit.

Lutron is a real company as well, an not an Amazon company, which is not nothing.

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.

One thing that stands out with Lutron products is their use of a unique spectrum[0], unlike almost all other smarthome products that share the same noisy bands.

[0]: https://assets.lutron.com/a/documents/clear_connect_technolo...

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.

This is a lot cheaper than a home automation system.

2. Turn on primary light

3. Walk to bedside lamp and turn it on

4. Walk back to primary light and turn it off

5. Walk back to bed and climb in

6. Turn off beside lamp.

It's not _the worst_, but it is toil.

1. Enter bedroom 2. Turn on primary light 3. Do getting ready for bed activities. 4. Turn on lamp when convenient 5. Use bathroom 6. Turn off main lights 7. Get in bed and turn off the lamp.

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.

- If I've been out (defined by my phone's wifi connection or alarm arming state) and then come home and turn on the light nearest my front door, all the lights in my house will turn on (at a predefined brightness level according to time of day)

- When I start a TV show/movie/etc on the TV (but only in the evening), the lights in the room where the TV is will dim. If I pause, they get a bit brighter. Switch the TV off and they get fully bright.

- If I'm watching TV or listening to music and get a phone call, the TV/music automatically pauses

- When I leave the house, all the house lights get switched off automatically in case I forgot to switch any off (again based on phone wifi connection and/or alarm arming state - my alarm state is one-way so HA can't control the alarm, only the other way around)

- If someone leaves the bathroom light on for too long, it will automatically switch off

- In the morning, the lights in my bedroom dim up very gradually to help me wake up (with timing and whether it happens linked to my calendar so it happens later at weekends or during school holidays when I don't need to help with the school run)

- I get a notification on my phone when my washing machine/tumble drier are done which means I don't forget to unload/reload them

I also use HA to unify energy sensors (which are then sent into a Victoria Metrics instance) to monitor the energy usage of various things in my house - this has been pretty helpful to identify where I should prioritise trying to save energy.

All of this is done locally/without cloud services and I think I've probably just scratched the surface of what's possible so far - eg I don't have my heating/AC/blinds/curtains integrated into HA so far and I also plan to investigate whether I could usefully adjust the "wake-up time" in my HA setup depending on traffic/public transport status.

All of these things are of course possible manually and my guiding principle has always been that if the HA instance isn't running then nothing should stop working - but the automations do make life a lot more pleasant.

1. https://github.com/fuslwusl/homeassistant-addon-victoriametr...

The music quiet when phone call thing is particularly attractive. I think I have most of the pieces of it here. HomeAssistant, Owntone, airplay (shairport-sync) speakers, a phone running the HA client.

I think the "ringing" state provided by the companion app only works on Android, not iOS though.

OwnTone has an HA integration so I would expect you can do something similar with that.

HA Owntone integration works very well as does shairport-sync & its mqtt interface. Owntone also does Spotify.

Thanks for your thoughts btw.

For multi-entry rooms (many rooms that aren't bedrooms or bathrooms, and even occasionally bedrooms and bathrooms) this is often true of less than all the entrances to the room.

> Once you're inside, you rarely have to touch them again until you exit.

Not all that true if you are in a room with substantial natural light across the day/night transition.

> 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.

Motion sensing lights with sensors designed to track motion outside of the stalls and a short timer exist specifically to "annoy your customers". Or. more specifically, they exist to discourage activities that involve spending an extended time in the stalls, whether it is various uncouth activities or merely employee malingering. Obviously, that also has adverse impacts on people doing normal bathroom activities that happen to take longer than average times, but that's a tradeoff the people employing these systems have decided is worthwhile.

It is not about energy savings, so arguing against it as unnecessary for energy savings misses the point.

I blame the designers though. The fine grained control is completely unnecessary. If each room had only one circuit for all the lights in the room, controlled by switches at each doorway, that would also fix the problem.

I reckon that most of these deployments are done because the owner is a tech geek and enjoys tinkering, and not because of necessity. Which is fine as well, whatever floats your boat.

One of my clients carries an echo dot with a battery pack with her when she's in her back yard, gardening. She mostly uses it for music, but the ability to drop in/phone call if she falls an can't get up has been a real benefit to her peace of mind.

FYI for the interested, and I admit a data point of one, but tp-link's Kasa stuff have been the most reliable of the smart switches, plugs, and bulbs that I've tried. Never once had an unexpected desync with any of it.

Google "how to install home assistant" which leads to:

>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

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.

What about upkeep? Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to install Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment? Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?

Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about here.

>Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?

Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.

Why the hell do I need a backup for my light switch?

The first time I installed HomeAssistant (on a Raspberry Pi), it worked great for a couple of months, then it bricked itself because it ran out of log space. I re-installed it. A couple of months later, it auto-updated itself and decided to lock me out because apparently it now required that you log in where it previously didn't. At around the same time, Apple locked out their HomeKit HA integration so I could no longer tell Siri to flip the lights. At that point I just gave up.

Recently I tried reinstalling it again, and let's just say I don't recommend it if you value your sanity.

Every time I look into HA, I face this kind of cognitive dissonance between my experience and people condescendingly telling me that I'm obviously doing something wrong.

I just want a zwave hub for my light switches. I don't want any of this crap.

exactly. Who wants to backup anything in their house just to be able to do things that work perfectly well with 50's technology?

https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=632

>Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.

1. How do you do backups? Is it built into home assistant? Do you think the average person knows or will remember to make backups?

2. "restore from backups" works if the sdcard just dies. If it's silently corrupting your install and causing weird behavior you won't even know it's sd card's fault unless you go through troubleshooting.

It performs a backup whenever you perform a release, so if the SD card gets corrupted.. just follow the install instructions a second time and upload the last backup?

That's it for the upkeep, other than dealing with 3rd party APIs that change and make things break, but that's not HomeAssistant's fault.

edit: Actually put HAOS on, no reason to run Debian

I'm not saying that's a specific issue you'll run into with home assistant. I'm just pointing out that's an example of something that's simple in theory to set up, but causes headaches if you venture off the happy path.

I think you're replying to the wrong comment. This was a comment about installing Home Assistant OS, which shouldn't ever be a base for running Steam!

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.

It works out of the box, is very easy to source (hell some brick & mortar stores sell them), has very good Linux support due to its popularity, and makes up a large part of the install base meaning HA support for it is unlikely to get deprecated.

Thus the Linux/RaspberryPi underlying complexity is irrelevant to the user - the "complexity" is to dd/BalenaEtcher/etc a downloaded file to an SD card, put the card in the Pi and connect it to power. From there it's available over the network and can be configured through a web browser.

I was with you until this point. A Pi hasn't been easy to source for almost 4 years now.

You have to build the damn thing, which isn’t hard per se since it’s ultimately only 3 actual components, but it still took me some time and felt complicated since it involves attaching a heat sink with thermal compound on a CPU.

And then the software install process isn’t totally amazing either since it involves flashing a USB stick, but also needing to choose a few very non-obvious options.

Should I install HA on the EMMC and later move my data-disk to the nVME drive or install the OS on the nVME drive directly? Google random forums to find out what people think of this decision first I guess.

I mean I think it’s still a good product, don’t get me wrong, but it is still very much a power user thing.

Which is probably fine because setting up HA itself when you have an install isn’t exactly a picnic either.

This is the problem with lots of stuff similar to HA when it tries to break into a non-enthusiast audience: people don't WANT to choose how to install it. Most of the time they have no clue why they would choose one thing over another and giving them those choices is confusing and overwhelming.

It's like starting a an intro to Nix tutorial with by asking if the user wants to enable flakes.

I say this as a very active user of HA & Nix for 5+ years.

I've had HA for +4-5 years too.

The second link is this one: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/guide-how-to-install-h...

But the linked page is pretty complex.

If someone can come up with a reason why top results aren't even present on others' page 1, I would be very interested.

You answered yourself. If you are are searching zoos and cute animals more often than programming stuff, "python egg" will return dramatically different results. This is not a theoretic possibility, it is the way google works (which I think is unfortunate).

They don't personalize search results: they don't give people results which are optimal for the searcher, but rather those which attempt to be optimal for the advertisers without discouraging the searcher enough to swap search engines.

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.

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..

What a novel form of nightmare

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.

The only problem is it still announcing "playing Christmas everyday on YouTube music by..." I wanted it to just start playing.

I swear it behaves more like Clippy every day.

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!

>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/

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.

I am about to buy several Philips Hue lights. Does this statement apply to all LED-based lights or just the cheap ones?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

And just like the Ikea one, it's just a bit better with the hub.

I've actually had two Ikea Trådfri switches break though - they are cheap enough to replace but bit bothersome.

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.

  > 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).

Or just a dimmable LED bulb in an existing 3-way fixture.

I first learned about these from the author of 'calm technology' https://calmtech.com/

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.

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.

- 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)

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.

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.

https://www.honeywellhome.com/us/en/products/air/thermostats...

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.

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.

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.

Think about this: if you have a smart bulb, but your light switch is off, there's no way to turn on that light. At the same time, if your bulb "state" is off, your light switch won't be able to turn it on.

You could JUST pair a smart bulb with a smart switch, and align their states. Or skip smart bulbs altogether and make the switches smart - using Lutron Caseta or an equivalent solution.

Just take your existing hue bulbs elsewhere