[Maha-pudma]

I don't get it. What's the point in these systems? Genuinely. Why would I ever need this? Just like a "smart" doorbell, fridge, meter. I would love for someone to be able to explain the benefits to me over the normal, cheap, completely working "dump" version. The only "smart" device I own is a TV and it is crap, worse thing I've ever bought.

[Fumtumi]

I didn't get it either but now i'm doing even more.

Our Lightsetup works really well and solves 'real' problems. In my corridor, there are 2 motion detectors and they switch those lights. At night less bright; That works flawless!

And that shows how nice it actually can be if it works.

I also use alexa quite often to switch between light settings; From Eating to watching TV to 'energize' where all lights on at 100%.

and it gets more interesting after i hooked up alexa to our blindes. I wanted to control them with a schedule anyway and now i can also use it thourgh alexa.

Honestly, i think alexa is a very interesting playground on how modern/future user interface might/will look like as it feels much more direct, nicer etc.

Heating is also quite interesting: Make sure to only heat in winter when the outdoor temperature is cold enough. Alert when co2 is to high in a room. Sync up the work schedule of my wife to heat the bath room at 4 in the morning for an hour.

What is the problem? The Problem is still complexity, cost and reliability. But this will become better every single day.

[Maha-pudma]

I'm replying to myself in an effort to reply generally to everyone who replied to me, thanks for your use cases.

I can see some of the reasons and benefits and to me, no offence meant, the seem pretty trivial, especially when you take into account the privacy issues.

I have dumb timers for lights I want on at certain times, dumb movement sensors for outside lights that only turn on at night, my boiler has a timer which I manually set if needed, and I've yet to see any actual benefit to a smart meter. I can read and calculate my usage.

My point is everything I need can be accomplished without network connectivity or providing multi-national tech companies with all my data. I don't need a digital assistant and don't want to talk to my lightbulbs.

As one of the other commenters said, you get all the problems of IT infrastructure for light bulbs and sensors. Hell if I wanted some automated stuff I'd look at a raspberry pi or Arduino and roll my own version (half joking, I'd definitely attempt it).

[gh02t]

Regarding privacy issues, IMO if that's a problem you've screwed up big time. Stuff like lights should only use local control and not be tied into the cloud or at least it should be optional, and any lights should fall back to working like normal dumb lights if they lose contact with the hub.

When it comes to rolling your own devices with an Arduino or similar, this is much harder to do safely and in a code-compliant manner than you would imagine. Making your own sensors is fun and harmless, but making stuff that is hard wired into mains is a bad idea. It's not totally impossible to engineer a properly safe device if you really know what you're doing, but it'll probably end up costing more than a commercial device and won't come with the compliance testing marks.

I agree, however... even though I have a lot of effort sunk into my own home automation setup it's not for everybody and there are plenty of downsides.

[crooked-v]

For commercial systems that will do that, Hue lights work fine on an isolated network, and HomeKit as a broader ecosystem doesn't require an internet connection to work and is explicitly designed to always treat the local hub as the primary controller.

[noelsusman]

I roll my own version on a NUC with some ESP8266 based sensors, but frankly I don't think many people care if multi-national tech companies know when their lights are on. I don't really, I roll my own more as a hobby.

I've found it to be pretty useful. My partner and I tend to go to bed at different times. I put pressure sensors under the mattress, and whenever one of us goes to bed the subwoofer in the living room turns off. Little things like that are pretty nifty.

[nucleardog]

As one of the general use cases, I'll hop in on the privacy note. That is, there are zero privacy issues from my end.

Nothing leaves my house for any of this. I can rip the internet out tomorrow and everything will keep working. None of the devices even have a route to the internet.

The Z-Wave stuff is all Z-Wave+ and is supposedly pretty secure in its own right, but is just general RF and talks to my controller which is plugged into my server via USB. None of this stuff can talk to the internet.

My light bulbs are 802.11, but they connect to a dedicated wireless network which bridges to my "IoT" VLAN.

My IP cams are all wired and connected only to my IoT VLAN.

A VM runs Home Assistant and Node-RED (both open source) which sit on my general LAN as well as the IoT LAN. That provides my interface and controller for all my smart home devices.

Another VM runs Blue Iris to act as my DVR for my IP cameras, do motion detection, etc.

All communication between everything is either done directly or through a MQTT broker running in a container only accessible on a bridge internal to the hypervisor.

All the VMs and containers run on a server running Proxmox sitting in the corner of my basement. The IoT VLAN does not even have a route out to the internet. DNS only resolves a couple internal hosts.

Basically this is "I already had a server running in my basement and I dug out an old piece of MikroTik gear". It's not gonna be simple for a non-technical person, but for most people on HN it's likely not a huge investment of time/money/etc.

There's no need to go roll your own interface for "how to communicate within your house". Z-Wave, 802.11, and ethernet all work perfectly well and provide you lots of great options to work with in existing hardware and existing physical and link layer technologies (cabling, PoE, switches, etc). They don't need to be insecure or privacy-violating unless you let them.

[detaro]

There's plenty of this stuff that's entirely local and has no "privacy issues".

[ourlordcaffeine]

>especially when you take into account the privacy issues.

HomeAssistant seems to be the most popular open source "smart devices" manager.

[adriancr]

Note, this is what I use things but I also have dumb switches to control if things fail. I also dont put control in hard to reach places. I just use outdoor sensors + smart bulbs.

Use case 1: Open all lights in yard at night when exterior gate is open or motion detected. Shut off after set amount of time of no activity.

Use case 2: light in shed/basement/garage on when door is open.

Use case 3: control lights via telegram / get notifications as alarm system.

Use case 4: water sensors anywhere you can get a leak. (have been flooded while away)

Use case 5: you dont want to rewire the house but want to link multiple lights together.

Use case 6: you want to remotely enable lights outside from second floor to check what the dog is barking at.

I can go on.

What the guy did wrong was ignore failures and not have a way to deal with them

[greggman3]

I have been fortunate to have never been flooded but I'm curious if you got the alarm would the situation turn out much better than if you didn't?

[s5300]

Yes, it really just depends on the circumstances.

At a friend's house at 2am in San Diego, first hard rain in months, outdoor drain that parallel garages cement slopes into was clogged. Water got to be hilariously high, he'd mentioned that before he rented the place his ground level bedroom adjacent to the garage had been remodeled because of a flood. So like, 8 inches high. Anyways, we had thousands of dollars of lithium batteries on the garage floor... shit got dangerously close, and all it took was clearing some leaves out of the drain to fix. If nobody would've happened to be there though, would've been quite the bad situation.

That's a bit not answering your question tho - with regards to alarms tripping, know somebody with a warehouse in Sacramento - owner hadn't been at the shop for a few days, employee had. One night a security alarm trips, he makes the 20 min drive to the shop, turns out the security alarm circuit had shorted from water 4" high water level caused by a paper towel clogging a sink that was left on. Fortunately he had mostly everything on raised shelving.

If you you have a reason to have some alarms, and they go off when you're away, you'll likely be able to say whether or not it's worth it to call emergency services and say literally break my windows and go inside to see what happened. In the case of a burst water pipe or something, they'd be able to shut off your water mains saving you from further damage. That's the jist or so.

[sokoloff]

There are motorized whole house water valve shut offs that can be connected to leak sensors. Have a water heater rust out, leak, fill the pan, trip the sensor, shutoff the house water, continue to slowly leak its 30-60 gallons out, but at least it’s not continuous, pressurized leaking until you notice.

Even without an automated valve, you could shut off a manual valve yourself if alerted to a slow leak.

Leak sensors can also help if you have a failed sump pump. My sump pits have a main pump, about 6” higher a second battery-backed pump with a (local) alarm. It’s a good idea, but the battery pump often fails to run when needed because of sitting so long, so the alarm is a wise addition. (If it ever goes off while you’re not testing the system, something needs attention.)

[adriancr]

Manual shut off water pipes and power outlets if it looks bad. (as others mentioned you can automate this)

Then check source of flooding and try and fix it, see other people's comments.

It's better then to have your home flooded for a long period of time while you're off at work or sleeping or somewhere else.

Also better then having a short / potentially getting electrocuted.

[WalterBright]

I have a couple motion sensing lights. They randomly click on and off. P.O.S.

[adriancr]

During the day they are mostly useless outdoor.

During the night position them where there's not much infrared pollution.

I used to get random on/off from car lights reflected off home.

I used to get notifications from cats and birds too in the middle of the night.

I got small aqara sensors that you just glue to places and just moved them around until I got good spots.

Also, if they go on they just turn on lights so not much of an issue. Alarm is not driven by them but by smarter cameras.

[Yetanfou]

I'm building a stable and veterinary practice building for my wife (who is a horse vet), 22x10 m, 2 floors. She wants several types of lighting in the stable part which should be switchable from several locations. Switching a light source from 2 locations can be done easily, 3 is doable but more than that requires a separate switching circuit with momentary switches and a contactor to do the actual switching. It is here where a system like this, especially a wireless one can help by making it possible to have switches anywhere you want them without having to pull loads of cabling (which by regulation has to be mounted on the walls instead of in them in agricultural buildings). For now I've settled on 2 switching locations for most of the lighting so as to avoid any "smart" solutions, should she insist on having to be able to switch the "mood light" in the stable from the observation window in the office on the 2nd floor I'll have to go that way with all the problems that come with "smart" electronics on the countryside - power failures, lightning, etc.

[crooked-v]

For me it's a set of automations that make some of the minor inconveniences of life just sort of magically resolve themselves:

- Automatically closing the skylight shades after sunset (when they just let ambient city night glow in) and open them just before sunrise.

- Automatically opening the window shades just before sunrise.

- Turning on the overhead lights and increasing brightness in several stages during sunrise (my place can be a bit dark because I'm under the eaves, this helps the effect).

- Automatically turning off several light-producing devices (coffeemaker, Instant Pot, etc) via 'smart outlet' when I go to bed in a certain time window, then turning them back on when any light is turned on in the morning. (This second-order automation means they still have the same 'magical' effect even if I disable the other auto-lighting for a day because I desperately need to sleep in.)

- Automatically playing NPR in several rooms the first time I leave the bedroom on a weekday during a certain time window.

All the automation here happens entirely locally via HomeKit, and the only reason the system even needs an internet connection at all is so the Apple TV acting as a hub can get updated sunrise/sunset times. (For a totally self-contained system you'd probably want to grab a cheap iPad to act as the hub instead, wall-mount it, and put it in 'kiosk mode' locked to the Home app.)

For all of this, my Hue lights/smart plugs/motion sensors and the Apple and Sonos speakers have been completely reliable. The Hunter-Douglas skylight shades have been mostly reliable (maybe one or two failures over the course of a year, though I did have to get an RF repeater for that to work well).

The weak point is the window shades, which use generic rebranded functionality from a reseller because most of the industry of window coverings is awful and behind the times. Hunter-Douglas top-down-bottom-up shades are about the best replacement available at the moment for automation purposes (so you can adjust the exact amount of window covered for privacy purposes and do it multiple times per day in a way that would be a massive pain to handle manually), but awfully pricey.

I'm also considering rigging up a proper bed occupancy sensor (basically turning the whole bed into a giant scale with load sensors and triggering events on human-approximate weight being added/removed) to replace the bedroom motion sensor, but I've got one of those Ikea slat-bottomed bedframes that probably wouldn't work very well for that.

[nucleardog]

For me it started with a single wifi lightbulb.

My wife often gets into bed with the baby. If the baby falls asleep before the light is off, she doesn't want to get up to have to turn the light off since it will wake the baby. Now she can just turn it off from her phone.

Kinda just expanded from there.

Now a good chunk of the regularly used bulbs in the house are "smart".

Basically what it means is that if you turn a light on, it turns on like a normal bulb (or you can do a quick flick off/on again to turn it on at a dimmer brightness) but you can pull your phone out and dim it / change the temperature / etc. Closer to bed time? Easy to dim the lights and make them super warm.

So that right there is already kinda useful for <$5/bulb. My workspace is a normal warm temperature at a reasonable brightness until I'm trying to do some soldering or something then I can instantly make it bright and white.

From there I expanded out into adding a few basic sensors. Combination motion/temperature/humidity/brightness sensors. So now when I get up for a piss in the middle of the night as soon as I walk out of the bedroom the hallway sensor sees that someone's there and that the hallway is pitch black and turns the hall light on as a red light at ~5% brightness.

When you walk into the baby's room in the middle of the night, same deal. Dim red light. If you go in in the daytime, bright warm light.

Did a similar thing with some of the basement too. Now as soon as I walk into one end of the basement to take the dog outside, do laundry, grab a tool, etc... the lights just come on. They stay on for a couple minutes after the last time motion is sensed and then automatically turn back off. Especially since half the basement is on a single light switch, this results in a lot less wasted power.

The lights in my office come on when I walk in if it's dark, and when I unlock my computer it shoots a message out over a MQTT broker which my automation takes as "someone is occupying this space now" and leaves them on. When I lock my computer, two minutes later if no motion is sensed it'll turn them off.

I don't know that I'd ever add 500 different controls to my house (not sure what I'd even use that many for...), but as far as I've taken it so far it's super convenient.

In the future I fully intend to get a smart thermostat (or replace my thermostat with some controlled relays) and use some "smart" air registers so I the temperature sensors I have can create a loop integrating the temperature sensing integrated in the motion/luminance sensors in most rooms with the heating to more precisely control the temperature throughout the house--if one room is already warm enough but the rest of the house is cold, can automatically close the vent to keep the temperature pretty consistent throughout the house.

[casenjo]

> The lights in my office come on when I walk in if it's dark, and when I unlock my computer it shoots a message out over a MQTT broker which my automation takes as "someone is occupying this space now" and leaves them on. When I lock my computer, two minutes later if no motion is sensed it'll turn them off.

What did you do to send the message when the computer locks/unlocks? This is an exact use case I could make use of

[andyrew]

IOTLink could be used for this: https://iotlink.gitlab.io/

As far as I'm aware it doesn't report locked/unlocked status, but it does report system idle time which you could use for a similar automation.

[nucleardog]

So, short answer: an MQTT client. On lock/unlock I have a MQTT client called to publish a message to a topic. I think I'm using HiveMQ's mqtt-cli because it was the most immediately obvious option for my OS.

Working out from there:

* I use Windows as the host OS for my desktop. You can use Task Scheduler to set a task to run on lock/unlock. I have jobs set that mute/unmute my audio and call a MQTT client to publish the messages to the broker.

* Those messages are picked up by Node-RED. It's a ladder-logic-ish environment for automation. It has flows that control all the bits of logic based off of all the various data sources including MQTT.

* Node-RED calls Home Assistant, which handles providing a UI as well as actual integration with all the various bits of hardware (light bulbs, z-wave controller, etc)

I quite enjoy this stuff (which is probably half of how I got here), so feel free to ask if you've got follow-up questions.

[seized]

Indo the same idea but use a ZWave smart plug with power use monitoring with my monitors plugged into that. Watts > some number = I'm working.

Via zWave2MQTT and NodeRed it triggers other logic like throttling RClone uploads.

[hamandcheese]

Turning the lights off without getting out of bed is my #1 use case.

[alufers]

I have added a Sonnoff mini with Tasmota to my light switch in my room. Whenever I cannot see my USB ports on my computer at night I just press a macro button on my keyboard, and without taking off my headphones I can see everything. Kinda dumb, but it makes me happy every-time I don't have to move my ass.

Nevertheless sometimes (once every 6 months maybe?) the Tasmota box looses connection with my WiFi network and I have to power cycle it via the breaker box to reset it.