[cmiller1]

A long time ago when I envisioned a "smart home of the future" I imagined using lots of sensors to control vents, windows, blinds, and HVAC to more efficiently heat and cool the house and optimize comfort in it while using less energy. I still would like something like that but instead we got dishwashers you can turn on with your phone...

[fnordpiglet]

I’ve built this with home assistant and esp32. At this point I’ve got environmental sensors in most areas where fans can ventilate and it automatically turns on fans to improve air quality. I’ve got my minisplits all controlled so I can keep temperatures good where we are. My blinds work to on the brightness of the room and time of the day. I have a single button I can press in my bedroom that ensures every light, door lock, minisplit, etc in the house is toggled appropriately for bedtime and the alarm system enabled. Likewise if I open a lock from inside when the alarm is enabled it disables the alarm system. I have mmWave sensors in hallways and rooms that illuminate them as you enter and darken them as you leave. My out door lighting turns on when I unlock a door to the backyard at night and turns off when I lock them. My hottub is connected to it all, as is my irrigation, etc. I’ve got wled lighting throughout the house including closets with no built in lighting that’s all motion / presence enabled to give working lighting that’s appropriate for the space. I’ve got decorative wled outdoor lighting attached to the house for holiday displays that enable at the right times of day and year. It’s all controllable via voice LLM as well using SoTA local models on a 4090 box in my basement.

It’s a project I’ve built over years and it’s life changingly good and gets better as home assistant, esphome, wled, and LLMs improve. I spend little time futzing with it as it all generally works, but obviously some minor expertise is required to make your own esp32 projects which are mostly just wiring off the shelf wroom d1 mini boards to a project board on the uart/gpio, whatever on something else. My minisplits, jucuzzi, garage door, blinds, etc all have active esphome projects, and provisioning is simple for a technical person. Home assistant is really simple too, and if you know jinja templating, you can make masterpieces.

No one has boiled it down to a shrink wrap product and that is sad for the mass. But for someone with moderate technical skills you can achieve anything your creativity and bravery will afford, and with AI coding assistants it’s gotten even easier. I had to replace most the switches with zwave switches, and build a bunch of boards and attach them to control ports built into devices I own like the minisplits, hottub, etc. But these are all not hard things to do - they’re just more laborious and tedious one time activities, and once you’ve set it up home assistant and esphome are pretty good about not breaking you in the future.

My washing machine also has home assistant integrations, etc, and I am careful to only buy things that do. And most things do one way or another.

[xg15]

That would require smart home widget actually working together and to be designed with a common design in mind, and not just every widget phoning home to its vendor cloud...

[unsnap_biceps]

Support Matter over Thread and we can get there. It's still a little rocky but man, it's so much better than wifi devices all calling home to wherever.

[cassianoleal]

There's no need for Thread. Matter over WiFi does the same job.

[unsnap_biceps]

I've had a lot of difficulty over the years with consumer level hardware supporting the IPv6 features required to work over wifi. Thread has been entirely painless, plus the fact that the end node can't do anything sneaky and get direct access to the internet is a positive for me.

But YMMV, if wifi works better for you, I'm still happy that Matter is being used :)

[cassianoleal]

I’ve had issues as well, especially since I have multiple VLANs and mDNS reflection. Once I found out that was the problem and how to solve it, things started working better.

I have nothing against Thread, other than the fact that it requires specialised hardware, whereas Matter over WiFi uses what I already have in place. It’s all trade offs in the end.

My IoT VLAN is firewalled off from the Internet. Sure a misconfiguration could still mean that protection is lost, but that’s probably also de case with Thread.

Interestingly about IPv6, I have a few Matter devices who despite having IPv6 addresses, are only accessible over IPv4. I’m not sure what that means but it surprised me.

[hedora]

Yeah. I want a weather station, automated blinds and automated window openers. (We have European style 2 way tilt windows. They can tilt open a bit and still be secure against burglars).

The weather station would be for solar load, outdoor temperature, precipitation and (most importantly) wind.

They’d all be coordinated with a local docker container or something like that.

Anyway, if this existed when we built the house, I’d have paid at least $30K for the system, installed and configured. I doubt I’m the only one. It’d be nice if it could control the furnace / ac too.

Edit: also, skylight openers, which are surprisingly inexpensive, except the software integration sounded like a nightmare.

[cassianoleal]

What is missing with current offerings? Between Matter and Zigbee devices, having Home Assistant as broker and coordinator, all of that is feasible today with nothing calling home if you're willing to put in some work.

[JohnBooty]

    I imagined using lots of sensors to control vents, 
    windows, blinds, and HVAC

Yes! This times 1,000.

I remember people gushing over the first wave of smart thermostats and all I could think about was how useless a "smart thermostat" was without the ability to also control windows and blinds.

That is the most time-consuming part of regulating temps and fresh air. Getting up to change the thermostat is quite easy!

Smart thermostats are also IMO of limited use for most pet owners. Yeah, theoretically I could let my house get very hot or very cold when I'm not there to save money... but I can't let my cats or dogs freeze... so that kind of clamps the acceptable temperature range.

I do accept that there is a certain sort of person for whom a smart thermostat makes sense - a person who is not home very often, has no pets, and has minimal windows. In short, single apartment dwellers. But they don't have very expensive heating/cooling bills anyway.

Also even if I spent $100,000 putting automated windows in my house, I'm not sure I trust them enough to not chop my cat in half if he happens to be sitting on the windowsill....

[rs186]

Or this https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Microwave-Small-Works-Al...

[rcarmo]

Environment and lighting are the only smart things I have, and the last few additions were ZigBee wall switches-but everything needs to have a manual alternative, of course.

Nothing else is really needed, IMHO.

[jackyinger]

Yeah, I’ve fantasized about the same thing with windows, blinds, and hvac. It would be so nice.