This is why I would never invest too much into Smart Home. While my phone may be expected to last for a few years only, I don't want my house deprecated because of a takeover/bankruptcy of a company.
I definitely would invest into Smart Home, but only if I can control it 100% from the server in my basement without the appliance having any internet access at all.
All my IoT devices are in a wifi without any internet access.
It's true that they're mostly proprietary, and Apple runs its own services, and I hate iTunes these days.
But—and I realize not everyone feels the same way—but at this time they are literally the only b2c company that has any credibility around privacy.
They feel to me—and again, not everyone agrees—they feel to me like the only hardware company that thinks of their users as their customers, and not as cattle to be sold to crapware vendors and search engine behemoths.
>but at this time they are literally the only b2c company that has any credibility around privacy
I can think of a few: Purism, System76, OSMC, Mycroft... they're smaller and less well-known than the big players of course, and they're not all perfect, but they treat their users as customers unlike many companies these days.
If I wouldnt be using Android Phones with custom Roms and no Google at all, I would proably also be using iPhones. I just try to stay all open source. I pay for my email, I have my own servers with services I use etc.
Devices that don't connect to a 3rd party servers in the first place aren't dependant on the good will of the manufacturer to remain privacy conscious.
Right now Apple makes buckets of cash from their hardware, but if they ever need to tighten their belt you can bet that the extra revenue from selling your data will be extremely tempting.
I don't touch 90% of WiFi smart devices unless they are Tuya controlled and even then I'm iffy. I vastly prefer z-wave/zigbee because if SmartThings goes belly up I can switch to Wink or any other compatible hub fairly easily. And while my Alexa devices are probably where I am "weakest" I have a lot of stuff running through HomeBridge and if I needed to I could move to HomeAssistant if I needed/wanted to.
Honestly? That would be awesome. I already have security cameras set up like that (although not wireless) - just home devices that do things for me and report back to a central server in my home. That server can connect to the internet (when I want it to), grab new firmware for the cameras, then disconnect and send out the firmware.
That's pretty much all I want from home automation as well. I see the value in being able to say "Alexa, turn down the lights" and having AWS do the voice recognition - but given that I can't trust services to stay more than a few years, I'm not going to invest in it.
Well, IoT never was a customer term, it was an industry term. And just because something keeps working without the internet doesn't mean it cannot benefit from connectivity.
Most things in your home don't need to know that much about things outside your home, or could have a well-defined standard API for getting that information from any source. If you could write wrapper scripts for obtaining weather information or traffic information, for instance, then you could have a self-contained system that required no monthly fees unless you opted to pay for high quality information, etc. but still gained all of the benefits of outside information, is high security, and would probably end up working even better. You could have default information endpoints for ease of setup, but why not make it all customizable? A good company with customer needs in view would be fully capable of making such a system.
In office buildings, devices already talk to each other using a network, so you don't have miles of cables from each switch to light or window-blind. In cars too, with CAN Bus.
Apple sells Apple Home Hub, I wonder if that's their "central control system" so that the Apple Home devices can be a bit dumber, but also it means there's a central firewall and system that can look for updates.
Also if you can install the "cloud-end" on your own device, when the company goes Nest, it means you can at least run an old version to keep your "IoT" gadget running, and it'll be running on the (hopefully) firewalled local hub.
Apple doesn't sell a "home hub" product. But their smart speaker (HomePod), TV set top box (Apple TV) and tablets (iPad) can all function as a gateway for HomeKit devices to be securely controlled from outside the LAN without the devices themselves having to be very smart or secure.
IIRC, there was AirPort, which was / is a wireless router that had options for things like storing device backups or similar.
Totally feasible to make a killer wireless AP that's Apple branded and connects better to the ecosystem, but that doesn't seem to be the direction Apple is going.
Yep, they had a range of WiFi routers, including one with a built-in harddisk for backups. They stopped updating them before they launched HomeKit though, so it never supported that.
It's a shame they stopped investing in them and missing the whole mesh Wi-Fi development. Also in this age where they're touting "privacy first" and iTunes is on the endangered list, not supporting iOS device backups over a LAN is a huge deficiency.
There are a few other products I use (for blinds, windows, heat), but you can often simply search the above two lists and read through the documentation whether they need internet (or "cloud") access or whether theyre totally local.
Worth noting - if you want cloud access, it's a paid subscription (reasonably priced) add on for Home Assistant, and it's free for OpenHAB.
I personally prefer OpenHAB over HomeAssistant, but the thing that annoys me about OpenHAB2 is that it doesn't have even rudimentary built in user management with authentication. The docs basically tell you to use something like Nginx to do that for you.
> Worth noting - if you want cloud access, it's a paid subscription (reasonably priced) add on for Home Assistant
if you want a super simple setup, they have manual guides for setting it up. And if you just want remote access and don't need Alexa/Google integration, it almost as simple manually.
Following a nearby lightning strike that destroyed our broadband router, I was pleasantly surprised to find that our Hive controllers still worked and scheduled water and heating correctly. Did also make me find the physical buttons for turning stuff on/off as well - though that didn't turn out to be necessary.
I'm mainly going for Z-Wave plus, using Home Assistant as controller for now (though still evaluating that).
My A/C is on Wifi though, and the cloudy controller web page is using a REST API (undocumented but simple enough to sniff and fake), so that's the only outlier so far.
I really want to love HA, but I find doing things in Node-Red so much quicker and easy to comprehend due to its visual nature. After a gap of about a year, I installed HA again a few weeks back and tried to setup geofencing using first bluetooth and then third party location services, but gave up due to the inconsistent determination of whether I was home or not. Using Node-red and a couple of tutorials I had things working very quickly. YMMV.
I'm doing this as well. Z-Wave+ and a Raspberry Pi for the hub for my first automation device, an RGBW LED strip for my home office lighting.
Even if I wanted to pay a subscription fee to some external service for my hub, the risk of service disruption, hacking of my network, and/or misappropriation of my personal data are just too high.
I've occasionally pondered screwing around with various wifi-embedded things like the Arduino, but then I think about how long the light switches have been in my house already, and I find myself wondering, will even Wifi last long enough? Will today's Wifi still be going in 40 years?
Dunno. Maybe. But for me to be interested in something it still has to be something that is going to pay back my fiddling in probably ten years, where I can expect to have to replace it, and I'm still not impressed by any of the the demos I've seen. I'm just not that inconvenienced by having to turn on lights.
According to Wikipedia Cat5e became the common ethernet cable around 2001, it's still in common use and capable of carrying gigabit, or over short distances even 10Gbit ethernet. Today at least in my bubble I see Cat6 and Cat7 deployed instead for 10Gbit and beyond.
I think everyone is getting at least 20 years out of their Ethernet connections, likely more. That's not as durable as electical cables but good enough for most cases (plenty of things need updates after 20 years in a building).
You can tie a new generation of wire to your existing wire in the wall already and pull the new wire through end to end that way to upgrade your connections behind the walls.
All the dot-com bubble era business ideas are new again.
- digital currencies
- smartwatches
- smart homes (Bill gates had his house 'smart homed' to the wazoo with tens of NT servers taking care of everything, like switching lights on and off)
Let's not panic too much here. A smart thermostat or garage door opener is modular, plug-in replaceable. The equivalent of a fancy toaster. You aren't locked in to anything.
1. It's noisy
2. The coupling and uncoupling effort is significant
3. The anticlimax of having to go down to the basement and empty out the canister after having completed vacuuming
1) Go with a cloud service using products exclusively made by a single major company, like Google or Amazon. This is simpler to setup and maintain but more expensive.
2) Go with an open source solution, like Home Assistant. Cheaper option with more control but requires a lot of time to learn, setup and maintain.
Both options should be considered safe at this point.
Edit: added emphasis on "made by" since many were missing that nuance. Buying a single brand of HA from a single company should be considered safe.
I'm not talking about buying compatible devices made by other manufacturers, this API issue shows is that isn't safe.
There's no safety going with products from a major company. They pivot all the time, not least Google. The only benefit is that one might get a refund when they do something egregious.
And in this case, Google just gave all their customers using the Nest API the finger. How is it safe to trust them going forward?
Irrelevant because you will always get screwed unless the company has a huge track record in backwards compatibility and very conservative slow changing management.
Get open source hardware and software that you can maintain yourself or suck it up and cough up the dough.
What are you talking about. This whole situation is a one great counterexample to your 1).
Making any company a single point of failure is a bad idea. You are basically giving up your freedom of choice for maybe some convenience, but don't confuse it with guarantee of sustained service.
Again, unless that company has a great track record, you'll probably get screwed rather quickly. Google is not such company, for example. Also, any startup is out of the question too; half-life of VC-backed SaaSes is on the order of a year or two.
IMO buying any hardware tied to a SaaS is a dumb idea.
3) Find a local home automation company and look at their offerings. There's a chance you'll find people willing to sell you actual products that are optionally Internet-connected, but not Internet-first, and are not tied to a garbage SaaS. They'll install and service them for you too. Key words here are "home automation"; I find looking for this phrase instead of "IoT" to weed out a lot of garbage.
Why is best not a good example? If you buy exclusively Google made products you're still fine.
Reread my original comment. I say you'd be safe if you buy products made BY a single company. This API effects those who bought things that are made by other manufacturers.
That's correct. If you would be pissed if it stopped working, don't buy it. Same for other "smart" products like smart watches. They have to have plastic bodies because they have radios. Because they have plastic bodies, expensive materials in the bezel or band make no sense. Their electronics and displays will be out of date within 3-5 years even if the OS continues to be supported. If you can't treat it as disposable, it's not for you.
My "smart home" is just installing IR blasters to control all my existing IR-controlled ceiling lamps and air conditioner units. In the worst case, I can always revert to using the IR remote controls (or wall switches).
They're firewalled to my LAN and integrated into iOS using Homebridge running on my Synology NAS.
All my IoT devices are in a wifi without any internet access.