[rkagerer]

The gem of wisdom at the end:

And I could have saved myself a lot of heartache by avoiding cloud services.

Thank you. I do not want the functionality of my home dependant on someone else's infrastructure. Or my house to stop working just 'cause the Internet is down.

It's the epitome of stupid when something as simple as turning on a lightswitch has to send a message miles across the Internet and back to get the job done. John Henry Holmes is rolling in his grave laughing at us.

[plagiarist]

I have zero idea how the demographic of people excited about Home Assistant and automation are not also, to a person, savvy enough to reject cloud services for controlling their homes. Not only for the partition hardiness, but also to avoid contract changes, being banned over ToS violations, or the company just deciding to close up shop.

There was an article on HN a bit ago where Amazon dumped a customer, which deactivated a good chunk of their house. The author wrote something like, "I may consider removing Amazon from the equation over this." Fucking "consider"??? It's perplexing trying to figure out that perspective.

[kevstev]

A few factors come into play:

Ten or so years ago, when Google was still mostly a darling, I never thought they would ever try to pull anything like that. Yet here we are, and my dropcam is just going to brick itself in April. No update for RTSP/Onvif, just FU you are out of luck.

Similarly, at least one device I bought didn't require an account when I first got it, but then all of a sudden there was a new app update and you didn't think twice about it, but now this requires a cloud connection. It sneaks up on you, and a few years ago I wasn't thinking about this stuff.

But yeah, now I have zero tolerance for this stuff. I have had Google/Nest brick my stuff and nag me to get a subscription, Sonos has tried to strong arm me into upgrading my equipment at a cost of over $1k, etc. I am more than willing to pay tons extra for devices I actually own and control, and whose data I own and never leaves my network. Problem is, that its tricky to find stuff that supports open standards. I was more than willing to go in on Ubiquiti's very expensive gear until I learned that they also lock you in and don't support RTSP/Onvif. Then you are mostly in dubious Chinese brands for things and you can't be sure of the quality- though at least I can block them from phoning home or sending anything out of my network.

The smarthome world is just a real mess right now.

[marcus0x62]

I started using HA tech at a time in my life when I had more money than time, the DIY stuff was very rough around the edges, and the cloud services I used mostly met my needs with a minimum of effort. I figured if something stopped working, I’d just go out and buy a replacement that did work.

Now, a decade later, I have more time than money, the cloud services aren’t so reliable, and I’m increasingly uneasy with the implications of relying on something that can disappear (or change for the worse) at a moment’s notice.

So I’m ripping all of that crap out of my digital life.

That’s at least one example of how someone can be savvy enough to set up something like Home Assistant but end up with a bunch of clown crap in their house.

[persolb]

It is mostly a matter of time. I have home assistant running locally, but started paying nabu casa to serve as the remote access bridge after my homegrown external site died when I upgraded my internet. I could fix it myself… but it was faster to just subscribe.

The other issue is that some cloud services are just better than what I can do on a raspberry pi. I’d rather get voice recognition from Google for ‘free’ than pay electricity and time for a server to always be on.

[plagiarist]

That perspective almost makes sense for me, if you still have control over your stack you're paying to make it accessible while out. They can go down, go bankrupt, or ban you and not break your house.

[connicpu]

Absolutely agree, I didn't get a single smart home device until I was certain I could have full local control and that it would work until the day the hardware failed. I started out making my own custom IoT controllers with ESP8266 chips that I wrote arduino code for, but while fun it isn't scalable to my whole house. In the last couple months I got a Home Assistant Yellow which has a built-in Zigbee radio, so my world was opened to so many local-only devices. Now I've replaced the majority of my lightswitches and put zigbee smart bulbs in a lot of my lamps, and it's all controlled from my Home Assistant instance, not a single proprietary app installed.

[m463]

It's hard for a "reasonable" person to follow this advice.

They get something home, and it is useful, and their spouse or kids like it... but it has to be hooked to the internet. maybe it needs an account to activate. or many of the other convenient/inconvenient tricks.

But I'm happy that we have home assistant and tasmota and esphome and all these other wonderful projects that route around lots of these problems.

[MSFT_Edging]

My frustrations with local automations needing the cloud has sent me on a multi-year long learning experience.

Basically, I want smart home things, I have some blind spots in my software and engineering skills, therefore I'll DIY my smarthome features from the ground up.

I wrote a server in python, integrated some ESP32s with temp/humidity sensors. I then integrated them into Vindrikting units. I learned super basic front end stuff to give a page with graphs. I wrote a telegram bot to request the data from anywhere. Then I re-wrote the server in Go(because I wanted to learn go) to where its mostly functional but I lost steam and still rely on the python server.

Then I found some Kasa smart power strips that are individually addressable so I set up a isolated IoT network with a Pi zero w, and started writing a Kasa protocol library in Rust(because I want more rust experience) then used that library on an ESP32 using the embedded rust toolkits(because my ESPs with C code randomly crash and i want more protection against my grug-brain tendencies) to create remote controls for these kasa devices.

This approach is far from efficient but it's less a solution to home automation and more a vehicle to guide various learning projects with fun tech. Since its all on my local network and just for me I can decide what I need and don't need. Basically I'm making a really delicate system bespoke for me but as I learn more, each component gets easier and less delicate and I'm getting pretty good at architecting these things. Only downside is its really hard to return to older aspects when new ideas are circulating(ie I really need to finish the go/vue server and begin more integration stuff with the dedicated IoT network).

[fennecfoxy]

IoT has been ruined by lack of government involvement/companies using common standards.

If I plug a device into power here, it must abide by electrical safety standards in order to be sold.

If I buy a phone or a laptop, consumers expect that it has wifi that works interchangeably with existing/other devices or it will not sell.

I suppose these rules haven't been applied to IoT stuff simply because the market for it is so small. Technoshit not working together in a common way is what bugs me the most about living in 2024; companies only trying to make a profit and not create a shared platform that betters the consumer, even doing stuff specifically to make competition harder.

We could have it so good!