[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.