[HN Gopher] The midwit home
___________________________________________________________________
The midwit home
Author : stacktrust
Score : 210 points
Date : 2023-10-12 16:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dynomight.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dynomight.substack.com)
| rsync wrote:
| I searched the page for "Lutron" but was disappointed...
|
| There is a line of lutron switches that are dead simple, no
| smarts, no hub ... and a cute little remote that everyone in my
| family uses to "all off" the interior lights.
|
| We have a no smart devices policy in the house and these make the
| cut ...
|
| EDIT: From my notes ... the specific product line is "maestro
| wireless" and I have MRF2-6CL switches paired with "pico"
| remotes. This is _as opposed to_ the caseta line from Lutron
| which is quite a bit "smarter".
| afavour wrote:
| For what it's worth I do have the Caseta line and it is by far
| and away the most reliable part of my smart home setup. If it
| were possible I'd be powering everything with it but sadly the
| only way to get e.g. fans integrated is to buy one of a very
| small set of fans with Caseta functionality built in. So
| instead I have pico remotes talking to Home Assistant talking
| to the fans which... mostly works. But the Caseta part itself
| has been flawless.
| drewbug01 wrote:
| Are you talking about ceiling fans? If so, I've found that
| their fan switches work flawlessly - no need to buy any kind
| of fan with smarts built-in:
| https://www.casetawireless.com/us/en/products/dimmers-
| switch...
|
| (Search the page for "Original Smart Fan Speed Control
| Switch", there's seemingly no way to link directly to the
| requisite page section... which is a thing I could rant about
| but will not).
| afavour wrote:
| Sorry, I should have been clearer. Those switches work
| great with fans that are already hardwired for a switch in
| the wall but a lot of modern fans (in my experience, maybe
| because I was buying cheap!) don't bother with that and
| have their own wireless system of some variety to control
| fan speed, lights etc.
|
| My solution to that was to buy a Zigbee controller to go
| inside the fan. I wish Lutron sold some kind of standalone
| fan controller you could shove in there but alas.
| willtheperson wrote:
| Exact same thought here but with their Caseta lineup. It is one
| of the most easy to configure and reliable smart home things I
| have in the house.
|
| I still use HA on a RPi4 for other things, typically via
| Zigbee, but the Casetas always work like you'd expect from a
| light switch while also enabling smart stuff like voice control
| or automations.
| op00to wrote:
| More votes for Caseta.
| evancordell wrote:
| Also a happy Lutron fan, but I went with RadioRA2. It's a bit
| "smarter" but it's very reliable, not connected to the
| internet, and some basics can even be programmed without the
| management software.
|
| One thing that stands out with Lutron products is their use of
| a unique spectrum[0], unlike almost all other smarthome
| products that share the same noisy bands.
|
| [0]:
| https://assets.lutron.com/a/documents/clear_connect_technolo...
| deltarholamda wrote:
| The commercial versions of Lutron controls are an (expensive)
| option as well, if you are of the sort that really wants whole-
| home automation.
|
| These things are installed in big fancy commercial buildings
| where there is an expectation that they last longer than the
| warranty, which is reassuring.
|
| These things actually do pretty well at power conservation at
| these scales, but it's a little fuzzy if it will do the same
| for a home. Just swapping out LED for incandescent gets you
| pretty much all of the bang for your buck, but if you have
| people in your house who are allergic to turning off lights,
| the occupancy sensors will help a bit.
|
| Lutron is a real company as well, an not an Amazon company,
| which is not nothing.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| The Legrand smart lights that came with our house are pretty
| painless. No idea what setup is like, though, since they were
| preinstalled.
| lawlessone wrote:
| My own experience , half the time Nest tells me it can't find the
| lights to turn them on or off.
|
| I have somehow automated some lights to come on too early in the
| morning but the specific task/automation I set to do this is
| nowhere to be found.. I can create and remove new tasks but I'm
| being haunted by this old task.
|
| My father has most of his home setup. Worked great until
| Christmas eve, when lightning hit the local exchange..
| edgineer wrote:
| >some lights to come on too early in the morning but the
| specific task/automation I set to do this is nowhere to be
| found..
|
| What a novel form of nightmare
| esafak wrote:
| "Wakey, wakey, little matey!"
|
| Hook it up to an speech recognition-challenged "smart"
| speaker that will dutifully play death metal when you order
| it to turn off the damn lights for teh win.
| lawlessone wrote:
| I set one up to play "Christmas everyday" when I say "Hey
| google, it's Christmas"
|
| The only problem is it still announcing "playing Christmas
| everyday on YouTube music by..." I wanted it to just start
| playing.
| esafak wrote:
| At least it recognized the command instead of replying
| "No, it is in fact October 12, 2023. Please check your
| settings in your Google Home app. Would you like me to
| send a link to your phone?"
|
| I swear it behaves more like Clippy every day.
| ta8645 wrote:
| Some light-switches have the "smarts" to turn on and off at
| certain times, built right into them. Therefore, you might lose
| access to the external tool you used to program them, and
| they'll happily continue on repeating the behaviors. You might
| try a hard reset, often using a paperclip to depress a
| microswitch though a small hole on the light switch itself.
| lawlessone wrote:
| I'll try that later :)
| scarmig wrote:
| KNX seems like a solid solution: a single shared bus that smart
| devices communicate with each other over, without any need for
| any kind of centralized server (either on prem or not). But
| unfortunately AFAICT there aren't any installers in the Bay Area,
| and it would cost a pretty penny to wire the house anyway.
|
| Any suggestions for how to get something similar set up in the
| US?
| empiricus wrote:
| I am a fan of Ikea lights. I can use normal light switches to
| turn the light on/off. But I also have a remote and I can dim the
| lights or change the temperature. No hub needed. The price is low
| enough. And Ikea will probably stay in business a long time.
| fragmede wrote:
| Buying their hub enables you to use an app on your phone to
| control the lights, if you so desire.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| You can do the same with Philips Hue.
|
| And just like the Ikea one, it's just a bit better with the
| hub.
| commonenemy wrote:
| Smart home is not about just turn on/off lights remotely. It's
| about do it automatically/reponding to other interactions.
|
| i.e, when sunlight is out (in HA, you can get sunset triggers),
| and when there are people present in living room, turn on living
| room lights.
| progman32 wrote:
| Or "when the only occupant opens the front door and drops off
| the network, turn off all lights, arm the alarm, turn off the
| stereo, and yell at me if the cooktop is drawing power".
| barbazoo wrote:
| > and yell at me if the cooktop is drawing power
|
| For standard power outlets I have "smart plugs" that measure
| the power draw, are there ones that support 40A/240V
| appliances?
| 1010010 wrote:
| You're gonna need power meters for that. E.g. check out the
| Shelly *EM series.
| bitdivision wrote:
| I'm a zigbee fan, mostly because there's such a wide
| variety of devices.
|
| I almost exlusively use zigbee2mqtt [0] reference to find
| devices that suit me. Searching for `meter` gives a lot of
| options, you'd have to do more investigation to find
| something that supported 40A, but my guess would be that a
| clamp meter is likely your best option.
|
| It's also possible that you could use one of the DIN rail
| options in your fusebox, but I haven't looked at the
| current ratings.
|
| [0] https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=meter
| uoaei wrote:
| I wrote a little script for my homebrew ESPHome-controlled
| CW/WW LED strip to automatically control color temperature
| based on if and where the sun is in the sky. Warm-only when the
| sun is down, mix of warm and cool when the sun is up with peak
| coolness at solar noon.
| alexhsamuel wrote:
| I need to choose outlets and switches for a new building, and I
| hope to "smart home" it. I had started to do some reading, and
| while my experience wasn't _quite_ as gruesome as the author of
| this article portrays it to be, I generally agree with their
| sentiments.
|
| Still, I'm not quite ready to give up on computer-controlled
| automation.
|
| Does anyone know of a reasonably complete guide (web site, book,
| whatever) that explains this well? What I'm looking for: help
| choosing components that will work together; not "for dummies";
| I'm technically competent and willing to learn some stuff but
| don't want to make a hobby/profession out of this; doesn't
| require buying into Google Home, Alexa, or another privacy-
| hostile system.
|
| Thanks in advance.
| iRomain wrote:
| Just go with Philips Hue, you can't go wrong.
|
| Then, when you're ready, setup home assistant but setup
| everything so basic functionality still works even if your
| server or internet went down.
|
| My hue bulbs are at the center of this strategy with each bulb
| controlled by either a remote control or a hue movement
| detector. Hint: remote controls in rooms where you stay,
| sensors where you pass by or if you stay only a little while.
|
| I can also control everything via Alexa and can't wait for the
| day there is a viable privacy-friendly / low-maintenance
| alternative (Home assistant are working on this). Again, if
| internet goes down, I still have the remotes/detectors so my
| lights always work.
|
| Also, for any other equipment you would buy, make sure it's
| compatible with Matter.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Hue just decided to start requiring an online account even
| for local control; I _used_ to think they were the best
| option, but now I 'd recommend avoiding them (even if you
| don't care about a needless account, consider that this most
| likely is step 1 to adding fees)
| hypfer wrote:
| I honestly never understood why people even bothered using
| the official Hue bridge when Zigbee light link is an open
| standard with tons of both open and proprietary
| alternatives available.
|
| Just take your existing hue bulbs elsewhere
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Oh, sure, the bulbs are still good, I just don't
| recommend buying into the whole system
| 1010010 wrote:
| Smart bulbs are the gateway drug to home automation, but they
| soon reveal themselves as a bad idea, at least if not coupled
| with a smart switch.
|
| Think about this: if you have a smart bulb, but your light
| switch is off, there's no way to turn on that light. At the
| same time, if your bulb "state" is off, your light switch
| won't be able to turn it on.
|
| You could JUST pair a smart bulb with a smart switch, and
| align their states. Or skip smart bulbs altogether and make
| the switches smart - using Lutron Caseta or an equivalent
| solution.
| gdprrrr wrote:
| IKEA bulbs (Zigbee compatible) always turn on when you turn
| the dumb light switch on, no matter how you turn them off.
| eropple wrote:
| Hue smart bulbs, by default (you can change this), will
| always turn back on after power loss/restoration. If it's
| off and you have a switch, you just toggle it twice and the
| light comes on.
| iRomain wrote:
| I wired together all the cables behind the switches in my
| home and covered them with smart switches
| spdy wrote:
| If you have access to it in your area, consider looking into
| KNX for home automation and DALI for lighting. Both are BUS
| systems that you wire throughout your house, and they are very
| reliable. They are commonly used in hotels, schools, etc. It
| might be a bit more expensive and require pre-planning, but
| these systems have been around for decades in Europe. Plus,
| you'll be adhering to a standard, not bound to a specific
| company
| p1mrx wrote:
| My house came with the doorbell wires buried behind the frame
| somewhere, so I installed a self-powered wireless doorbell. The
| transmitter harvests power from the user physically pressing the
| button, so it doesn't need batteries. I just caulked it straight
| onto the brick.
| aaronharder wrote:
| Do you have a link to that doorbell product? My house came with
| the same problem.
| p1mrx wrote:
| https://tecknet.com/collections/wireless-
| doorbell/products/s...
|
| I removed the TECKNET logo with isopropyl alcohol.
|
| The receiver has dozens of tunes, but the only one worth
| using is the Westminster Chime Melody. There's also a "ding-
| dong ding-dong", but it's annoying that it plays twice. The
| rest are just too long; it's a doorbell, not a jukebox.
|
| The receiver remembers the tune and volume if power is
| interrupted, so that extra cruft doesn't matter after initial
| setup.
| 4star3star wrote:
| I love this! Sometimes I daydream about a device that works
| kind of like an old printing press. You can arrange letter
| tiles to create a message. Then, you power the thing by
| pumping a lever or something, and it constructs a digital
| signal from the letters and sends it over something like
| LoRaWAN.
| xamuel wrote:
| Incorrectly titled. The "smart" devices from the first part of
| the article ARE the midwit solution. The better devices in the
| rest of the article are the actual right-end-of-the-bell-curve
| solutions.
| gagege wrote:
| Indeed. Wanting things to be dead simple and not need to be
| fiddled with constantly and take months to learn how to set up
| is the big brained move. Same reason I switched to an iPhone. I
| don't have time to nerd out and customize Android till it's
| usable.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >The hell? But people seem to think that Home Assistant is good.
| (Something about subscription fees and invasive apps and forced
| obsolescence?) So you search for "how to get a Home Assistant".
| This reveals a recursive landscape of terror:
|
| Google "how to install home assistant" which leads to:
|
| >https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/
|
| >If you are unsure of what to choose, follow the Raspberry Pi
| guide to install Home Assistant Operating System.
|
| This leads to:
|
| >https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi
|
| This has a nice visual guide that requires you to know how to buy
| a raspberry pi, how to plug in a raspberry p, how to plug in an
| sd card (twice), and how to navigate to a url.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I felt like that was a big strawman. HA in particular makes it
| very easy to chose how to install, they even a product you can
| buy that's ready to use (HA Yellow).
| switchbak wrote:
| This is probably for an audience less enamoured with the Pi
| than the HN crowd. Someone that's more interested in getting
| to a working result than having to yak shave for a couple
| days or more to do the same.
|
| For someone who doesn't have a Linux background, "just put it
| on a Raspberry Pi" is kind of like saying "You write a
| distributed map reduce function in Erlang". Ie: it's easy if
| they know it, but if they don't then that "just" is doing a
| lot of work there.
|
| Pre-installed is almost certainly the way to go for such a
| person.
| jsight wrote:
| As reasonable as that is, the starting point for this is a
| person that wants to install smart switches and other home
| automations.
|
| This is already a job that requires fairly decent
| electrical knowledge, especially if there are 3-way
| switches involved.
|
| Turn-key solutions exist for people that don't want to deal
| with the complexity.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| When it comes to Home Assistant, the Pi is actually a much
| more pragmatic option.
|
| It works out of the box, is very easy to source (hell some
| brick & mortar stores sell them), has very good Linux
| support due to its popularity, and makes up a large part of
| the install base meaning HA support for it is unlikely to
| get deprecated.
| SamBam wrote:
| Right, but the fact that running it on a Pi with Linux is
| the "much more pragmatic solution" is already ruling out
| about 90% of the US.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| HA is similar to self-managed Kubernetes: easy to install, a
| bitch to maintain. Updates seem to constantly break services
| and configurations.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| I purchased a home assistant yellow and my experience was
| anything but "ready to use".
|
| You have to build the damn thing, which isn't hard per se
| since it's ultimately only 3 actual components, but it still
| took me some time and felt complicated since it involves
| attaching a heat sink with thermal compound on a CPU.
|
| And then the software install process isn't totally amazing
| either since it involves flashing a USB stick, but also
| needing to choose a few very non-obvious options.
|
| Should I install HA on the EMMC and later move my data-disk
| to the nVME drive or install the OS on the nVME drive
| directly? Google random forums to find out what people think
| of this decision first I guess.
|
| I mean I think it's still a good product, don't get me wrong,
| but it is still very much a power user thing.
|
| Which is probably fine because setting up HA itself when you
| have an install isn't exactly a picnic either.
| mason55 wrote:
| > _HA in particular makes it very easy to chose how to
| install_
|
| This is the problem with lots of stuff similar to HA when it
| tries to break into a non-enthusiast audience: people don't
| WANT to choose how to install it. Most of the time they have
| no clue why they would choose one thing over another and
| giving them those choices is confusing and overwhelming.
|
| It's like starting a an intro to Nix tutorial with by asking
| if the user wants to enable flakes.
|
| I say this as a very active user of HA & Nix for 5+ years.
| belval wrote:
| With HA it doesn't help that their installation docs are a
| mess with solutions that don't provide the same features.
|
| I've had HA for +4-5 years too.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| I don't know if it's changed but I felt like a super genius a
| few years ago when I finally got my HA up and running on a
| pi, and I'm a linux person and former system admin. There's
| Home Assistant and Home Assistant Core, Docker or not Docker,
| install HACS or don't. Some things don't seem to work unless
| you're on a Docker container but then it's a pain to ssh in
| and find folders to install stuff. I really hope it's better
| now as my HA install has mysteriously died and I haven't had
| the heart to dig in and see what the issue is so I'm guessing
| I'm going to have to start from scratch.
| gruez wrote:
| >This has a nice visual guide that requires you to know how to
| buy a raspberry pi, how to plug in a raspberry p, how to plug
| in an sd card (twice), and how to navigate to a url.
|
| What about upkeep? Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you
| follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to install
| Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment? Or maybe
| your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS,
| and you have to diagnose the root cause?
| marcinzm wrote:
| >What about upkeep? Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if
| you follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to
| install Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment?
|
| Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
|
| >Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and
| corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?
|
| Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.
| gruez wrote:
| >Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
|
| https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=632
|
| >Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.
|
| 1. How do you do backups? Is it built into home assistant?
| Do you think the average person knows or will remember to
| make backups?
|
| 2. "restore from backups" works if the sdcard just dies. If
| it's silently corrupting your install and causing weird
| behavior you won't even know it's sd card's fault unless
| you go through troubleshooting.
| ak217 wrote:
| I'm not sure if you realize it, but you're demonstrating
| exactly the thing described in the blog post.
|
| Why the hell do I need a backup for my light switch?
|
| The first time I installed HomeAssistant (on a Raspberry
| Pi), it worked great for a couple of months, then it
| bricked itself because it ran out of log space. I re-
| installed it. A couple of months later, it auto-updated
| itself and decided to lock me out because apparently it now
| required that you log in where it previously didn't. At
| around the same time, Apple locked out their HomeKit HA
| integration so I could no longer tell Siri to flip the
| lights. At that point I just gave up.
|
| Recently I tried reinstalling it again, and let's just say
| I don't recommend it if you value your sanity.
|
| Every time I look into HA, I face this kind of cognitive
| dissonance between my experience and people condescendingly
| telling me that I'm obviously doing something wrong.
|
| I just want a zwave hub for my light switches. I don't want
| any of this crap.
| tech_ken wrote:
| What are you doing with your Pi where you're running both
| HAOS and Steam? Definitely seems like an edge case. Put
| Debian on the thing stick it on a bookshelf and forget it
| exists
|
| edit: Actually put HAOS on, no reason to run Debian
| gruez wrote:
| > What are you doing with your Pi where you're running both
| HAOS and Steam? Definitely seems like an edge case. Put
| Debian on the thing stick it on a bookshelf and forget it
| exists
|
| I'm not saying that's a specific issue you'll run into with
| home assistant. I'm just pointing out that's an example of
| something that's simple in theory to set up, but causes
| headaches if you venture off the happy path.
| tech_ken wrote:
| Got it, makes sense and I definitely agree: with Linux
| systems the more you deviate from the popular
| applications and use cases the more elbow grease is
| required. FWIW I've never had difficulty with my DE
| resulting from running Steam but presumably other people
| have experienced it. Certainly keeping Proton updated is
| a massive hassle
| dingnuts wrote:
| I mean, HomeAssistantOS has a GUI in the browser with an
| upgrade button that appears when there's a new release (which
| is frequent -- actually my biggest complaint about HA is how
| fast they move and that I can't configure HA to just install
| the updates as they arrive, and I have to actually click the
| button. Horror.)
|
| It performs a backup whenever you perform a release, so if
| the SD card gets corrupted.. just follow the install
| instructions a second time and upload the last backup?
|
| That's it for the upkeep, other than dealing with 3rd party
| APIs that change and make things break, but that's not
| HomeAssistant's fault.
| op00to wrote:
| I don't touch my Home Assistant. It just works.
| scubbo wrote:
| > Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you follow the
| tutorial, but what happens if you try to install Steam one
| day and it breaks your desktop environment?
|
| I think you're replying to the wrong comment. This was a
| comment about installing Home Assistant OS, which shouldn't
| ever be a base for running Steam!
| chrisw957 wrote:
| I googled "how to install home assistant", and the links you
| point to above don't appear to be anywhere on the first page of
| results.
|
| The second link is this one: https://community.home-
| assistant.io/t/guide-how-to-install-h...
|
| But the linked page is pretty complex.
| thethirdone wrote:
| That result does not show up for me when I google it and the
| other one is the top result for me.
|
| If someone can come up with a reason why top results aren't
| even present on others' page 1, I would be very interested.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Google "personalizes" search results.
| scubbo wrote:
| The scare quotes are disingenuous. However we may dislike
| or disapprove of Google's algorithms, it is absolutely
| accurate to describe the results as personalized.
| fyloraspit wrote:
| What a time to be alive
| thethirdone wrote:
| This is not an explanation. I am aware the search results
| can be different to different people and based on
| demographic information.
|
| My specific question is why would a top result not even
| end up on the first page. This requires a more
| significant explanation than "its possible".
| fragmede wrote:
| I recently picked up this rabbit hole of a hobby. It's only when
| you want to get fancy, and have lots of mismatched stuff, that it
| gets that complicated. (Which, as nerds, we are wont to do.) If
| you just buy into one brands stuff, and use just that, you don't
| get lost in the home assistant quagmire. There are quirks, eg
| Phillips Hue has a 50 device limit per hub resulting in needing
| multiple hubs for a complex scene, but it works for people who
| aren't programmers.
|
| Meanwhile, as a hardware hacker and software engineer, yeah, I'll
| admit, I had to do things that look a lot like my job I'm paid
| very well to do in order to get my light switches to work right.
| No idea how people who don't program for a living are supposed to
| get Home Assistant to work quite right!
| xoa wrote:
| I 100%, absolutely sympathize with the opening there. The
| situation really sucks to a surprisingly great extent. At the
| same time though, it has to be stated that going for a 'dumb,
| simple' Smart Lights really, really misses an enormous amount of
| the potential value. Nearly 100% of my smart home is about lights
| for now using just Philips Hue/HomeKit, though HA remains on my
| list, but only a tiny percentage is about simply having switches
| wherever. The true value for me has been in more intelligent
| color lighting based on layered actions. I change the amount of
| blue and brightness during the course of the day, so that there's
| lots in the morning and it's dimmer and ever redder in the
| evening. Particularly in the winter this has been incredibly
| helpful for my sleep cycles. It can all be extremely transparent
| as well since the switches and motion sensors can have time-of-
| day as well as which-button and number-of-clicks categorization.
| So hitting the on button always turns the lights on, but the
| color and brightness mix of a room will be different over the
| course of the day. Same with outdoors, motion sensors anywhere
| that can have different colors and activation periods at
| different times has been great for massively cutting down
| extraneous blue light at night, which is good not just for humans
| but for animals and insects as well. I can wake up in the heart
| of winter when the sun doesn't rise until 8 or later in the
| morning to a 20 minute long "sunrise" I created myself simulated
| nicely with a bunch of lights. And more complex logic like
| "lights all come on when smoke alarm goes off or a basement flood
| is detected" are also handy.
|
| Again I'm very sympathetic to the shitty state of the ecosystems
| right now, frequently miserable UI/UX, and massive heaping doses
| of bullshit companies are constantly trying to pull to extract
| more ongoing revenue from people for what should be buy-once-and-
| done products. But it really sucks precisely because yes: smart
| home features genuinely can be pretty great.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| This is probably because a lot of smart home enthusiasts are
| less enthused about actually turning the lights on and off.
| They have fun tinkering and building wireless systems.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| I totally don't understand what I gain with colored lights. My
| friend had a similar setup and I just don't get the attraction.
| I have a Google home and setting timers has a clear value, I
| forget less. Playing music has clear value, I relax. Colored
| lights??? I don't get it.
| Symmetry wrote:
| High color temperature in the morning to wake you up versus
| low temperature in the night to let you get to sleep quickly
| is the main benefit.
| xoa wrote:
| > _I totally don 't understand what I gain with colored
| lights. My friend had a similar setup and I just don't get
| the attraction. I have a Google home and setting timers has a
| clear value, I forget less. Playing music has clear value, I
| relax. Colored lights??? I don't get it._
|
| While the effect no doubt varies with individual, there has
| been a significant amount of studies suggesting that there is
| some link between bright light in shorter wavelengths (so
| blue end of spectrum) and melatonin suppression, and in turn
| circadian rhythms [ex: 0, 1, 2]. If you live near the equator
| with consistent sunrise/sunset year round artificial light
| management may be less of a concern to you, but the further
| you are and the more seasonal variation you experience the
| more helpful it may be (and is for me) to have lighting
| throughout home/work that can help maintain circadian rhythm
| as desired. "Sunrise" into bright white/blue in the morning
| and day, then slowly changing into dimmer, redder light as
| one approaches the desired time to go to sleep. YMMV of
| course but as someone in tech who had decades of difficulty
| in maintaining a normal 24h cycle in the northern latitudes,
| heavy light brightness and temperature control has been a
| very significant improvement in my QOL and I never want to go
| back.
|
| Of course, some people just enjoy having fun with lighting as
| well, for parties and mood and such. "Painting with light"
| can be interesting by itself. But for me the practical
| advantages have been significant value for the cost, and
| without any need for any kind of drugs or other mechanisms.
|
| ----
|
| 0: https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/sleep-blue-light
|
| 1: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-
| ha...
|
| 2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9424753/
| IanCal wrote:
| Other than fun, being able to shift lights in the kids
| bedrooms to a more yellow hue for storytime then a dark red
| for a nightlight has been good.
| brewdad wrote:
| When my teen would be up in his room with headphones on, I
| would flash the bedroom lights remotely from downstairs.
| That was his cue to come downstairs for dinner or so we
| could figure out our weekly schedule or whatever.
| fragmede wrote:
| they're fun! they help set the mood, so the living room
| changes from an office space vibe to a campfire vibe to a
| cool outer space feel. it's goes beyond strictly utilitarian
| uses but you have to have emotions to get use out of that
| feature.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The one word there sums it up: ecosystems. Every manufacturer
| seems to be insisting on themselves being "the ecosystem" and
| the end result is we ended up with dozens of ecosystems, none
| of whom have a full soup-to-nuts-yet-easy solution, and they
| don't invest enough effort into getting them compatible with
| each other.
|
| Every few years I get tempted to go down this rabbit hole,
| hoping that in the last few years the industry has finally
| gotten its shit together, and every time I look, it's the same
| clown show, just with more clowns.
| gwern wrote:
| It's a https://xkcd.com/927/ situation because (1) there's so
| much money at stake and (2) many involved are
| incompetent/have bad taste.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, it's not exactly that... its more of
|
| "Lets design a spec that anyone can use"
|
| Premium brand that uses spec is $30 dollars a light, but
| works...
|
| UNGADONG brand made in China is $10 dollars and has a 30%
| chance of catching on fire.
|
| Premium brand goes out of business and market is taken over
| by crap.
|
| ---
|
| Also, vendor lock in by the premium brand allows them to
| jack up prices even more.
| jkestner wrote:
| Yeah, big companies (tech or otherwise) now have their ears
| up to prevent anything from becoming a success without them,
| and so nothing becomes a success because there's no room for
| the users and startups around them to evolve to what the
| products really should be.
|
| We need more things that are complete in themselves but
| causally work with other things. (Y'know, like the web.)
| Things that can perform tasks without an installation page,
| but readily extensible using MQTT or HTTP. That's the kind of
| thing my company tries to build. That's a very useful thing
| about Shelly, or any of the polished devices that expose an
| open protocol.
| csours wrote:
| I feel this sentiment deeply. I wonder how much of it is due to
| lack of good options, and how much is due to a hostile
| information space - that is, there are bandits out there who want
| your money and attention, and they are willing to say anything to
| get it.
| plagiarist wrote:
| The lack of good options is due to hostiles IMO, everything
| wants to force you to install _their_ app.
| hendersoon wrote:
| Home Assistant is awesome, but not ready for the mass-market.
| It's a fun tech project to setup and one that will require your
| attention regularly forever-- but on the bright side, it isn't
| constantly annoying, it works consistently, and it can all work
| locally so when some Chinese vendor shuts down their servers you
| aren't left sitting in a dark room.
|
| It's improving at a rapid pace and I can see it being ready for
| your aunt to use in a couple of years. Not this year, not next.
|
| I set all my relatives up with Apple HomePod Minis and HomeKit,
| which has expensive hardware (matter is _supposed_ to fix
| that...) but is largely local and relatively private.
| wmsmith wrote:
| While I believe that HA is very cool and many vendors provide
| valuable solutions, we must consider what happens when we die.
|
| This is just one anecdote, but I believe the problem is more
| pervasive.
|
| I was called to an elderly lady's home to "un-haunt" the
| building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done "all
| of the cool things" to make the home smart. Unfortunately too
| smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home.
|
| She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the
| time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn't figure it
| out and lived like this for an entire year.
|
| She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning
| on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband,
| but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise
| from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would
| come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation.
| About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady's lights too. In
| her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift.
|
| I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices
| and, as she put it, putting in "turn the light on and off again"
| switches.
|
| When choosing technology -- any technology, it's important to
| consider the life of that device and the people impacted far in
| the future.
| Aloha wrote:
| That sounds like an old school X10 system problem, I remember
| issues like that.
| civilitty wrote:
| That's why I love HomeAssistant!
|
| I programmed a dead man's switch tied to the presence feature
| so if my phone or smartwatch don't show up in the house for six
| months, it turns on the "HAUNT FAMILY" program. There's no way
| I'm leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant
| neighbor.
|
| That reminds me: I have to hook up the smart speaker so that it
| says "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DA- HONEY?" any time my partner walks
| up to the RaspberryPi.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Just wanna share that the sentence "There's no way I'm
| leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant neighbor"
| totally made my day.
| defen wrote:
| Actually the nice thing about all the recent advancements in
| machine learning and generative AI is that you can set it up
| to record everything you say in the house, and train itself
| to learn your speech patterns and voice. Then it can behave
| realistically when spirit mediums attempt to contact it. No
| more of this canned prerecorded nonsense that falls apart
| after a week of investigation.
| Rygian wrote:
| Of course there's a similar premier in a black mirror
| episode. Only a bit more fleshed out.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Oof! Thank you for sharing that.
|
| This is one of the reasons that smart bulbs and the like are
| generally bad - you never want a situation where the switch
| doesn't just act like a switch.
|
| Smart houses should be designed from the perspective of
| remaining identical to use when the smarts go away. And if
| there's weird behavior it should all stop if you unplug the hub
| or controller.
|
| I generally like in-wall smart switches but even there they
| tend to die faster than dumb switches, so you may be leaving
| your survivors a bunch of calls to an electrician.
| petsfed wrote:
| I feel like "if your internet-connected X doesn't do regular
| internet-less X-things without the internet, its not an X"
| should be the core axiom of IoT design.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Yep, my goals are largely two-fold:
|
| - "Everything 'smart' must continue to function if the
| internet is disconnected"
|
| - "Everything 'smart' must fall-back to normal 'dumb'
| operation if the automation server is not available"
| itslennysfault wrote:
| The default on Hue bulbs is to reset to mid-bright white when
| first turned on. This means whenever you flip the switch on
| the light turns on, and obviously if you turn the switch off
| the light turns off. So, they essentially do let the switch
| be a switch by default.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > This is one of the reasons that smart bulbs and the like
| are generally bad - you never want a situation where the
| switch doesn't just act like a switch.
|
| Depends on your devices, but I have (Philips?) smart bulbs
| that can be turned on/off "regularly", but keep it on and you
| can control it via google home.
| function_seven wrote:
| 80% of my lights are smart bulbs rather than switches, and I
| agree with your take here. In my house I have the smarts in
| the switch itself wherever possible, but so much of my
| lighting is from floor and table lamps (that aren't plugged
| into switched outlets). In those cases, the bulb is the only
| thing I can "smarten", and it still will work via the stem on
| the lamp itself if the HA box goes away.
|
| The main drawback is that this means I have to have the bulbs
| set to light up after power is restored. A middle-of-the-
| night power outage is fun when the entire house lights up at
| 3am :)
|
| I've done a few new installs of lighting in my garage,
| driveway, and patio. Because that was "greenfield" work, I
| got to put smart switches in. If I ever rewire this house,
| I'll use that opportunity to do some more.
| brewdad wrote:
| Have you looked at smart plugs? I have a few lamps in my
| home plugged into them and the automation works fine. I
| have a couple spares I store with the Xmas stuff so that
| the lights can be automated once the decorations are up.
|
| I use Kasa (TP-Link) plugs but there are a bunch of
| different brands.
| dkarl wrote:
| It doesn't even have to involve death. I had a NAS that I set
| up and relied on, and then when it stopped working, I was so
| busy for the next month that I got used to living without it.
| (It wasn't a difficult fix, but I didn't know that, and I
| didn't want to even get started on it unless I had several
| hours at my disposal.) I eventually got it working because I
| absolutely needed a couple of files off of it, but after that I
| could never bring myself to put anything new on it, because I
| just don't enjoy fixing stuff like that anymore, and I often
| don't have the time.
| jchw wrote:
| Of course you can have your cake and eat it too. If you were to
| throw away the Raspberry Pi in my house that runs home
| assistant, all of the switches on the wall would continue to
| work. This is possible by switching in smart switches instead
| of smart bulbs. For RGB bulb controls, Zigbee pairing can make
| the operation of the remote controls independent of the hub to
| some degree, though I'm not 100% confident that those will
| function properly without the hub since then there's no
| coordinator (right?)
| viraptor wrote:
| That's my plan for the house. The internet can go down and
| every extra controller can fry and the basic switches should
| still work exactly as designed. I'm going for zwave, but the
| same idea - smart switches with normal bulbs. Nothing talks
| to wifi.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Thank you. I am not sure why so many people have this
| impression that if you install smart home stuff you can't
| have switches that Just Work. My garage door has a smart
| opener and also a physical switch inside the garage and a key
| fob remote in the kitchen drawer, they all work just fine. If
| the Wifi is down you can just use an old fashioned analog
| solution. Progressive enhancement is not that hard, you just
| need to do five minutes of research and pay ten extra dollars
| to be sure you are getting products that have physical
| fallback.
| 1-more wrote:
| Yeah I've done meross homekit switches for all of our light
| switches. There's one that needed a reset (via the button on
| the outside, easy as cake). I didn't notice for weeks because
| it works like a switch when you tap it. Switches are the best
| place to add smarts and they gracefully degrade just fine.
| This midwit fix involving remote controls to turn on lights
| STINKS. Hell, our bedroom fan has that just because it's a 2
| wire fan and I hate it.
| Aloha wrote:
| We started with smart bulbs, but once we bought a house,
| we've been replacing them with Lutron Casita switches and
| adapters.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Yeah these smart switches should All have backup physical
| buttons which I believe they all do but also a kill all
| automation hard switch but that would not be so simple
| amalcon wrote:
| I visited a friend not too long ago, who had a smart speaker in
| the guest room mainly to control the lights. It went through a
| smart plug. Naturally, their internet connection went down. We
| had to move the bed (in the dark) in order to remove the smart
| plug and re-activate the regular lightswitch.
|
| Fortunately, we're both reasonably fit people, but I know
| people who would've just had to give up and use a flashlight.
| rekabis wrote:
| Made a comment in the root of the article thread that is
| related to yours, in terms of overcoming your elderly client's
| problem with something far more robust and reliable:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861604
| kunwon1 wrote:
| I run HA at home, and my home is an apartment. I was able to
| buy some zigbee switches [1] that just 'snap' over the top of
| traditional light switches, after adding some castellated
| plastic washers under the screws that hold the switch cover in
| place
|
| This means that instead of a light switch, there is a button.
| And when I relocate, I can just remove these devices from the
| switches and take them with me
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08TVZK8D6
| nirav72 wrote:
| Along that same line - My Home-automation setup is fairly
| simple using Samsung's hub and requires very little
| maintenance. But I do have a fairly complicated homelab and
| network setup. I'm in my early 50s and have considered what
| would my wife/children do if one day the 'internet' connection
| wasn't working and I'm no longer around to fix it? No way
| they're going to know how to log into OPNSense or Unifi
| controller to troubleshoot. So I bought a off the shelf router,
| configured with basic setup with same SSID and IP scheme. Typed
| up some simple instructions on a single page and attached it to
| the router box. The idea being that they can simply unplug the
| OPNSense box, plug the router into it and then power everything
| up. I've done a fire-drill test and had my teenage son try it.
| So far he seems to know exactly what to do. The rest I'm hoping
| he can figure it out on his own.
| superb_dev wrote:
| I might have to do this for my roommate. My homelab died
| while I was out of town, and they didn't have internet for a
| day or two
| anonporridge wrote:
| Reminds me of an old scifi short story I read years ago and can
| no longer find.
|
| It outlined a future where everyone started automating elements
| of their messaging to each other. Simple things like automated
| "Happy Birthday" messages. Eventually, people started setting
| up auto "Thank you" replies to these messages. It only got more
| complex from there with increasingly elaborate conversations
| being automated between people.
|
| Eventually, some calamity hits civilization and humans go
| extinct. But their technology is resilient and keeps running
| without them. The ghosts of a dead people continue talking to
| each other in perpetuity, long dead people cheerfully wishing
| each other "Happy Birthday" until the lights finally ran out.
|
| Haunting story that I still think about from time to time.
| Would love it if anyone else recognizes the story and could
| credit it.
| rbranson wrote:
| There's a bias where most of the content is produced by the most
| hardcore group of people. This is, of course, no different with
| home automation. You can do Home Assistant without making it your
| hobby, it's just that most of the posts you see are from people
| who are way too deep into it.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Exactly. I have my lights tied into Home Assistant to turn
| on/off when a room is occupied for couple of rooms and a wakeup
| routine for the bedroom tied to the alarm on my phone (lights
| mimic a sunrise 30 mins before the alarm).
|
| I also have a couple of convenience automations like turning
| off the TV if it's been idle for X minutes (I've probably
| fallen asleep).
|
| I've found they are mostly set and forget. Haven't touched it
| for about a year and don't plan to touch them any time soon.
| lulznews wrote:
| Definitely midwit tier. Getting some benefits from home
| automation is trivial. Now if only Alexa's response time wasn't
| trash ...
| omnibrain wrote:
| That's why I like Shelly. The stuff connects via WiFi. The
| protocol is MQTT or REST. Stuff I know and can understand.
| faster_harder wrote:
| > (BTW, manufacturers, if you want to use touch sensors and you
| don't want to lose the massive midwit market, make things that
| automatically turn on when first connected to power, without
| waiting for a touch.)
|
| ...and if you ever lose power to the house, suddenly all devices
| turn on.
| Animats wrote:
| _" Power-controlled remote pressers. This is utterly cursed, but
| hear me out: I want a gadget that I physically attach to a
| remote. When the gadget gets power, it presses the "on" button on
| the remote. When it loses power, it presses the "off" button."_
|
| Except that too many remotes have one button, and one signal, for
| both on and off. TV and cable box remotes out of sync is the most
| common result.
| WA wrote:
| > _Remote-controlled light bulbs. Personally, I'd never buy
| these, because I'm fanatical about color quality. (It's futile to
| start with low-quality photons and then try to arrange matter to
| make them look good.)_
|
| I am about to buy several Philips Hue lights. Does this statement
| apply to all LED-based lights or just the cheap ones?
| hoherd wrote:
| Philips LED lights, Hue or otherwise, are wonderful. Be aware
| though that they seem to be enshitifying the Hue ecosystem
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667266
| Symmetry wrote:
| Hue bulbs should work with any ZigBee LightLink controller.
| Or if they don't, I'll be very upset about the times I flew
| out to the LightLink gatherings to make sure all our products
| worked together.
| qup wrote:
| I recommend getting 1600 lumens if you can find it. 800 isn't
| bright enough in my experience, at least for room lighting.
| Maybe desk/ambient lighting
| lozenge wrote:
| The Hue lights are wildly overpriced. I have the WiZ A67 Wi-Fi
| for my office (so I only use the warm white and cool white) and
| it's much brighter than Hue's offering, which is so valuable in
| an office. I can also switch its setting using a normal light
| switch so I never need to open the app.
|
| If you're playing with colours, then Hue usually does do better
| in the blues, greens and purples but it probably isn't going to
| make much of a difference to your life.
| WA wrote:
| Will check them out, although Philips Hue also offers an E27
| bulb with 1,600 lumen, same as the WiZ, but a bit pricier.
| jollyllama wrote:
| This is grug tier. He's criticizing midwit tier. Genius tier is
| some guy who effortlessly coded his own elegant and simple
| solution.
| Havoc wrote:
| To add to this: F&(*&ing manufacturers that change the internals
| of the IoTs silently. That worked fine, let me just hop onto
| Amazon click "buy again" to get more.
|
| That said mine generally works fine. The ESPHome integration in
| particular is grand
| zeroCalories wrote:
| I really like clappers, but if you want to read a book at night,
| what about just using a bedside lamp? No need for smart anything.
| runjake wrote:
| 1. Wear biometrics to help track and improve health and fitness.
|
| 2. Buy smart home products so you don't have to get up off the
| couch, walk 10 feet, and flip a switch.
|
| Does anyone else enjoy the irony? Disclosure: I am guilty of both
| of the above.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I don't have either, but my fat butt needs to move more, so
| smart home things aren't interesting to me.
| webXL wrote:
| Definitely enjoying that irony, although the smart home
| products came first for me.
|
| Re. #2, I like the peace of mind that I haven't left lights on
| when I head out of town and also the security benefit of
| programming them to periodically turn on.
|
| Also, if you only have a single switch to flip, then I envy
| you.
| iamwil wrote:
| I dream of setting up my home automation as if it was a starship.
| It doesn't have to look like one, but it should operate like one.
|
| First, it'd be self-contained, so devices don't need to dial back
| up to a cloud server in order to change settings. Who's ever
| heard of a starship that dials back to Starfleet headquarters to
| open a door?
|
| HVAC, water heater, and water softener would be "life support".
| The garage would be the shuttle bay. External cameras tracking
| people, cars, and planes that fly overhead would be the Sensor
| Array. Since houses don't move, you could say there's no
| engineering. But if I had a power generation system like a solar
| panel, we'll just make that engineering. I'd be able to "redirect
| power" when we have a heat wave. Each system would have an API
| that reports stats that you can culminate into a daily dashboard
| displayed on your bathroom mirror. Of course, the Alexas would be
| "computer", and a lounge dedicated to AR/VR would be the
| "Holodeck".
|
| I imagine that's what most people have in their heads, but we get
| lost in the weeds. In reality, I haven't done much home
| automation myself. Just a few lights, ecobee thermostat, and
| alexa that I don't use.
|
| Having to pull out my phone just to control these things is often
| too much friction. Asking Alexa to do it is rather nice, but I'm
| not thrilled about the prospect of a company listening in
| (rumored to anyway). If you set it to turn off by geolocation or
| by time, there are edge cases that you often run into where you
| don't want to turn them off.
|
| I had set the lights to turn off when I left my apartment. My
| roommates were all sitting the living room, and I left to go grab
| some milk, and the lights all turned off on them when I left, and
| they were perplexed.
|
| I even mystified myself. Sometimes, in the mornings, I would wake
| up and the lights would be blue, and I wouldn't know why. But in
| fact, I had just forgotten I'd set up an IFTTT automation to turn
| the lights blue if it was going to be rainy day. I had just
| completely forgotten this and never could make out the pattern
| and association.
|
| One of the problems with home automation is that the settings are
| hidden and not readily observable. All the problems that we have
| in our programming lives with observability of our production
| systems, we want to bring to home.
| sampo wrote:
| > My usual process for making tea is to walk to the kitchen and
| start the kettle. Then, because it takes an eternity for water to
| boil, I go back to my desk to wait.
|
| Instead of remote controlling the kettle, get a hot water
| dispenser.
|
| In Europe: https://yum-asia.com/eu/product-category/instant-hot-
| water-h...
| lozenge wrote:
| Or get one that goes under the counter:
| https://www.quooker.co.uk/?___store=en
| pawelduda wrote:
| Not sure what author is building with this list of keywords,
| smart home nuclear bomb? Because otherwise HA setup works with
| small subset of that. Then it's up to you how complex you want
| things to get, as with any software
| writeslowly wrote:
| Regarding remote control switch pressers, I have a couple
| switchbots, and most of the information online talks about using
| things like Home Assistant, but they also respond to anything
| that sends them a simple bluetooth command. You can easily do a
| point to point thing with a bluetooth device on the other end.
|
| I control mine with a little ESP32 board.
| imiric wrote:
| > Hauling your body across the room just to flip a switch is
| absurd.
|
| Maybe this is a sign of getting old, but I never got why this is
| such a hassle. Light switches are within reach when you enter a
| room. Once you're inside, you rarely have to touch them again
| until you exit. On the rare ocasion that I do, maybe it's also a
| good time to stretch my legs, take a bathroom break, or get a
| snack.
|
| Is that such a major inconvenience that we have to overengineer
| solutions using expensive and complicated ecosystems of gadgets
| and software?
|
| Maybe I'm in the minority with this line of thinking on this
| forum, but I never got the smart home appeal. I want devices that
| I can control directly, not those that will interpret or
| anticipate what I want to do and, more than likely, cause
| frustration rather than satisfaction. The switch is the
| ubiquitous and perfect mechanism of control, especially if it's
| directly wired to a simple state machine, and not layers of
| indirection and "protocols". I wish more devices used dumb
| switches, not less.
|
| Don't get me started on the motion sensing lights TFA mentions. I
| curse the times I've entered a public bathroom that has these,
| only for the light to go off at the most inopportune moment.
| Don't want to use a physical switch because of sanitation? That's
| fine, but cheap and low-power LED lights exist for them to be
| always on during your service hours. You won't save much having
| the light turn off, and potentially annoy your customers.
| oldandboring wrote:
| The light switch in our primary bedroom is, as you describe,
| within reach when you enter the room. It controls a switched
| outlet near the bed that has a lamp plugged into it. When it
| comes time to turn out the light to go to sleep, you have two
| non-ideal choices: get up from bed to turn the lamp off using
| the switch near the door, or stay in bed and turn the lamp off
| manually, meaning the next time you operate the wall switch the
| lamp won't turn on (unless you remembered to turn the lamp back
| on in the morning).
| imiric wrote:
| Ah, it sounds like you need smart switches then. :)
|
| In my case I just have two lights. The ceiling one is
| controlled by a switch near the door, and the lamp is
| controlled by a switch on its cord. I use either depending on
| what I'm doing.
| davidw wrote:
| I have a lamp right next to my bed that I also turn on as
| part of my going to bed routine, so that I turn off the room
| light, get in bed, and still have light.
|
| This is a lot cheaper than a home automation system.
| flerchin wrote:
| 1. Enter bedroom
|
| 2. Turn on primary light
|
| 3. Walk to bedside lamp and turn it on
|
| 4. Walk back to primary light and turn it off
|
| 5. Walk back to bed and climb in
|
| 6. Turn off beside lamp.
|
| It's not _the worst_, but it is toil.
| skybrian wrote:
| On the bright side, it's a few more steps on your
| pedometer.
| iisan7 wrote:
| 3-way switches are the best solution here. Switch the
| bedside lamp on from the main switch by the door, and
| then off again from a second switch at the bedside. Many
| stairways are like this: you can control the lights from
| the switches at the bottom or the top of the stairs.
| Cerium wrote:
| It is possible to work these steps into your routine.
|
| 1. Enter bedroom 2. Turn on primary light 3. Do getting
| ready for bed activities. 4. Turn on lamp when convenient
| 5. Use bathroom 6. Turn off main lights 7. Get in bed and
| turn off the lamp.
| scruple wrote:
| 43 years old and it's never been a problem I've wanted a new
| solution to. Don't think I ever will. I remember deriding those
| clap-on, clap-off devices when I was a kid. Same deal here.
| imiric wrote:
| To be fair, remote controlled lights can be genuinely useful.
| The reason the Clapper got popular with the elderly is
| because people with mobility problems have a hard time
| reaching switches. In those cases it solves an important
| problem. I wouldn't mind using it myself, except I think the
| clapping would be annoying, especially if it misinterprets
| and doesn't work. So I'm not opposed to eventually using one
| of the remote controlled lights or plugs the article
| mentions, but I thankfully have no need for it yet.
| scruple wrote:
| Keep in mind, this thread is in reference to a story
| relayed by the GP whereby an elderly woman _lost control of
| her own lights_ and wanted to go back to manual switches...
| tomatocracy wrote:
| For me, "remote control" is by far the least useful part of
| my home assistant setup - I have smart switches and use the
| physical switches most of the time to control the lights if I
| just want to switch them on/off eg as I enter/exit a room.
| The useful things (to me) come from integrating several
| different devices together - for example:
|
| - If I've been out (defined by my phone's wifi connection or
| alarm arming state) and then come home and turn on the light
| nearest my front door, all the lights in my house will turn
| on (at a predefined brightness level according to time of
| day)
|
| - When I start a TV show/movie/etc on the TV (but only in the
| evening), the lights in the room where the TV is will dim. If
| I pause, they get a bit brighter. Switch the TV off and they
| get fully bright.
|
| - If I'm watching TV or listening to music and get a phone
| call, the TV/music automatically pauses
|
| - When I leave the house, all the house lights get switched
| off automatically in case I forgot to switch any off (again
| based on phone wifi connection and/or alarm arming state - my
| alarm state is one-way so HA can't control the alarm, only
| the other way around)
|
| - If someone leaves the bathroom light on for too long, it
| will automatically switch off
|
| - In the morning, the lights in my bedroom dim up very
| gradually to help me wake up (with timing and whether it
| happens linked to my calendar so it happens later at weekends
| or during school holidays when I don't need to help with the
| school run)
|
| - I get a notification on my phone when my washing
| machine/tumble drier are done which means I don't forget to
| unload/reload them
|
| I also use HA to unify energy sensors (which are then sent
| into a Victoria Metrics instance) to monitor the energy usage
| of various things in my house - this has been pretty helpful
| to identify where I should prioritise trying to save energy.
|
| All of this is done locally/without cloud services and I
| think I've probably just scratched the surface of what's
| possible so far - eg I don't have my
| heating/AC/blinds/curtains integrated into HA so far and I
| also plan to investigate whether I could usefully adjust the
| "wake-up time" in my HA setup depending on traffic/public
| transport status.
|
| All of these things are of course possible manually and my
| guiding principle has always been that if the HA instance
| isn't running then nothing should stop working - but the
| automations do make life a lot more pleasant.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| If you get even older you may reach the point where getting out
| of bed is something you'd only like to do once a day. Hopefully
| these doodads will be more reliable by then.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| The only reason I have smartbulbs in my house (and not all of
| my bulbs are smartbulbs) is because I like adjusting them to be
| orange/red in the evening to signal to my body that it's almost
| bedtime, and white/blue in the morning to signal to my body
| that it's time to get up. It really makes a big difference for
| my quality of sleep, especially in the winter.
| rdsubhas wrote:
| And have it simulate sunrise in the morning. Starts at low
| power red at 6am and over 1 hour gradually increases to max
| power white. It does wonders to my family's morning routine
| in winter.
| runeofdoom wrote:
| We may be in the minority, you're certainly not alone. I prefer
| physical, tactile controls, _especially_ for my home and
| appliances.
| jkestner wrote:
| I think smart lights may be the equivalent of an Arduino blink-
| the-LED sketch. Humans like a little bit of control (over your
| environment/technology) for its own sake.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Speaking of getting old, I've set up a lot of home automation
| stuff for elderly folks who have to deal with limited mobility.
| Sometimes getting up and down a few extra times really is a big
| deal, if possible at all.
|
| One of my clients carries an echo dot with a battery pack with
| her when she's in her back yard, gardening. She mostly uses it
| for music, but the ability to drop in/phone call if she falls
| an can't get up has been a real benefit to her peace of mind.
|
| FYI for the interested, and I admit a data point of one, but
| tp-link's Kasa stuff have been the most reliable of the smart
| switches, plugs, and bulbs that I've tried. Never once had an
| unexpected desync with any of it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Light switches are within reach when you enter a room.
|
| For multi-entry rooms (many rooms that aren't bedrooms or
| bathrooms, and even occasionally bedrooms and bathrooms) this
| is often true of less than all the entrances to the room.
|
| > Once you're inside, you rarely have to touch them again until
| you exit.
|
| Not all that true if you are in a room with substantial natural
| light across the day/night transition.
|
| > Don't get me started on the motion sensing lights TFA
| mentions. I curse the times I've entered a public bathroom that
| has these, only for the light to go off at the most inopportune
| moment. Don't want to use a physical switch because of
| sanitation? That's fine, but cheap and low-power LED lights
| exist for them to be always on during your service hours. You
| won't save much having the light turn off, and potentially
| annoy your customers.
|
| Motion sensing lights with sensors designed to track motion
| _outside_ of the stalls and a short timer exist _specifically_
| to "annoy your customers". Or. more specifically, they exist
| to discourage activities that involve spending an extended time
| in the stalls, whether it is various uncouth activities or
| merely employee malingering. Obviously, that also has adverse
| impacts on people doing normal bathroom activities that happen
| to take longer than average times, but that's a tradeoff the
| people employing these systems have decided is worthwhile.
|
| It is not about energy savings, so arguing against it as
| unnecessary for energy savings misses the point.
| op00to wrote:
| Lutron Caseta for lights. ZWave for sensors and shades. HomeKit
| for cameras. (I run a whole home assistant setup but I could have
| done everything with HomeKit natively)
| mzmzmzm wrote:
| I love this category of product and use them extensively around
| my small NYC apartment. Moving fairly often and valuing privacy,
| it is delightful to not muck around with extra networking and
| internet of shit. I always wonder why the category doesn't get
| more love, like a nod from the wirecutter, or a big brand trying
| to make a slightly uscale line with a consistent deisgn language.
|
| One thing I'd love to buy is a purely offline outlet control that
| can listen for a programmable wakeword -- a clapper that can do
| "turn on the lights." Not sure if this much computation violates
| the spirit, but there's no reason it can't be a tidy self-
| contained thing.
| jimmytucson wrote:
| HA sounds cool to me but other than being a fun thing to work on,
| what's so good about it? Can anyone "sell" me on it? Is it just
| being able to turn stuff on and off from your phone?
| abnry wrote:
| Not all of these ideas I have implemented, but here are some
| things you can do.
|
| - remote control to turn on/off lights in bed
|
| - Bed sensor to turn on/off lights when heading to the bathroom
| at night
|
| - define a scene (lights dimmed, shades down, mood lights on)
| to trigger in an event (Netflix turned on TV at 8pm)
|
| - Remote control of wall AC unit out of the house (shut off
| while away but turn on before driving home)
|
| - Alerts for when my brother turns on the coffee maker
|
| - Control system to avoid coffee maker and microwave running
| together long enough and tripping the circuit breaker in your
| old apartment (haven't done this one)
|
| - Alert to tell you when washing machine is done (or use to
| estimate how much time is left)
|
| - use color lights as reminders or to signify events
|
| - check to make sure doors are closed and locked at night
|
| - check that door for room (or window in room) with AC is
| closed when AC is running, otherwise shut AC off
|
| - alerts when someone gets home even if you are out of the
| house (know kid gets home from school, for example)
|
| Ultimately it is a hobby. I had a raspberry pi 4 I bought and
| had just sitting around. It feels good to see it in the corner
| doing something cool.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| HA has built-in or community provided integrations to pretty
| much everything imaginable.
|
| You can for example:
|
| - Start the robo vacuum every time there's nobody in the house
| and tell it to stop when people are coming back - Add a voice
| command for said vacuum to just vacuum the kitchen or hallway -
| Open the curtains when it's light enough outside and put them
| back down when it's darker outside than inside. - Adjust light
| temperature and brightness based on the time of day so you
| won't get 1000 lumens of 6000K light blinding you when you go
| to the bathroom at night - Turn down the AC/heating when people
| aren't home and start preheating/cooling when they are nearing
| the house again
|
| When everything is integrated to HA your imagination is pretty
| much the only limit when combining different sensors to
| devices.
| svat wrote:
| One immediately useful thing I got from the post is the genius
| idea of putting the printer (that frequently needs to be
| restarted for some reason) on a smart outlet. It's working around
| broken technology by using more technology, but I'll take it!
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Those motion sensor light bulbs are perfect. My basement lights
| are all chain-pull so I got them in, and now everything is
| illuminated by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs.
|
| I also like the IKEA tradfri stuff, since you can just pair the
| remote directly. No apps or internet needed.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > That's basically an AND gate. But what about OR gates? [...]
|
| How about a Turing-complete clap processing unit? Effectively, a
| language for specifying, identifying, connecting, activating, and
| signaling various logic gates with hand claps alone.
|
| Also, come on. Is it really too much to ask for a person to know
| how to open a Sonoff switch, connect gator clips to its
| programming ports, flash it with Tasmota, and connect it to Home
| Assistant via MQTT? This is basic stuff..
| rekabis wrote:
| Definitely saved this article as a guide.
|
| But in terms of light switches, specifically - is there not a
| simpler way to turn lights on and off while keeping the physical
| wall switches as the fundamental source of truth?
|
| I'm thinking of a traditional physical switch that has been
| enhanced with an electromagnetic component that can actually
| physically flip that switch. A separate control line from each
| switch in the house goes to a separate controlling computer in
| the basement. This computer can then interface with Bluetooth
| remotes or apps on smartphones or anything else that is needed,
| including having its own internal scheduler for turning lights on
| or off, or connected to ambient light sensors near windows that
| could trigger threshold settings to do the same.
|
| That way, no matter how you set up your basement controller, you
| can always go over to the wall and turn the lights on or off if
| you need so. And if you are going to bed, bringing up the app can
| tell you if you've left the garage lights on, so you can remotely
| turn them off.
|
| And when you remotely turn these switches on or off, the in-wall
| light switch will actually be physically moved to its desired
| position via the electromagnet being triggered.
|
| Granted, this is something that is really only doable during a
| new build or a frame-off rebuild of a home (I'm doing the latter
| and would love to implement this idea), but the point being: this
| would be a largely obsolescence-proof, dummy-proof and
| robust/reliable way of automating a home while leaving the
| physical switches themselves as the ultimate source of truth:
| flipping the physical switch will _always_ do what is expected it
| will do, and the switch will always be in the position expected
| for the light's current state.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Shelly devices can do this. You install it in parallel to the
| light switch.
|
| That way both can turn on the power to the light independently
| without interfering with each other.
|
| They don't physically move the switches though, but that's
| pretty rarely needed.
| lavasalesman wrote:
| The "recursive landscape of terror" doesn't stop once you install
| Home Assistant, it continues during maintenance. And at that
| point you're dependent on it to run the systems in your house.
| Thus I recently decided to get rid of my whole setup and go back
| to normal.
|
| Further, the tinkering aspect isn't enjoyable to me because I
| don't feel like I'm learning anything useful, I'm just trying to
| duct tape together other people's hobby projects that adds
| support for this or that bulb or radio.
| dsr_ wrote:
| We have a non-networked, non-remote electronic combo lock for our
| front door.
|
| We are never locked out. There is no key under a rock. The phone
| cannot get unpaired, the remote cannot be intercepted and
| replayed. If we are on vacation, we can call up a friend and tell
| them a code so they can get in.
|
| A 9V battery lasts about three years, then it starts flashing and
| beeping every time you open the door for a month before dying. If
| you already have the right hole in the door, it takes about 20
| minutes to install.
|
| And if you're intent on breaking in, well, the windows are made
| of glass. Please don't do that.
| fragmede wrote:
| Mind sharing which device that is so I can have one for my
| house?
| kaibee wrote:
| Not sure if this is the one OP has but:
|
| [https://www.homedepot.com/p/Schlage-Camelot-Satin-Nickel-
| Ele...]
|
| I had one on my house growing up from like 2007-2012, rock
| solid. Bought a house this year and the first thing I did was
| install these on the front and back doors. Seems like it's
| exactly the same model that was being sold in 2007 (which is
| still on my childhood home and going strong btw).
| iisan7 wrote:
| Adding to this list the Philips sceneswitch bulbs: color changing
| bulbs that can be rapidly power-cycled to change color.
| https://www.usa.lighting.philips.com/consumer/choose-a-bulb/...
|
| If one could trigger scheduled actions by connecting a remote
| control to a daily or weekly plug-in timer, that would meet
| virtually every use case I have for app-controlled appliances,
| bulbs, and locks.
| mst wrote:
| > Mechanical outlet timers: You plug this into an outlet, it
| slowly spins once per day, and the pins determine is the outlet
| is active for each 30 minute period. [...] > Many use these with
| light for plants. Or, it can be nice to wake up with light rather
| than sound. Instead of buying a light alarm clock, you can just
| plug a lamp into one of these.
|
| Beware.
|
| I bought one of these for the bedroom for precisely that purpose.
|
| I accidentally got a brand that clicked audibly as it rotated.
|
| I'm sure the reader can easily imagine how useful that wasn't.
| modeless wrote:
| IoT was always a bad vision for the future. 20 years from now I
| don't want a million devices in my home running software. Either
| they'll all constantly be pestering me with updates that break
| functionality I rely on, or they'll be out of date with bugs and
| security holes that last forever.
|
| My vision of a good future is one where I have exactly one smart
| device: a robot butler which will operate all my other devices. I
| don't need smart switches if my butler turns off all the lights
| for me. I don't need a smart lock if the butler unlocks the door
| for me. I don't need a security webcam if the butler monitors the
| house while I'm away. I don't need a smart thermostat if the
| butler sets it for me. Etc.
| resfirestar wrote:
| The author's mistake is thinking about the "smart" lights in
| terms of systems, and the "midwit" lights in terms of products.
| If you look at smart lights starting with products, ignoring the
| connectivity and asking questions like will this pair well with
| my light fixtures and is it capable of the color changing or
| other tricks I want, then look into the best system to control
| those products, you won't get caught in analysis paralysis so
| easily.
|
| This advice probably doesn't apply as much to people who want
| smart-everything since that can get very complicated, but if it's
| mainly about lights then you'll find compatible options for any
| of the major protocols.
| semiquaver wrote:
| > I want a variant that works like this: If the power is quickly
| turned off and on again, the outlet switches from powered to
| unpowered (or vice-versa).
|
| Philips has a line of bulbs called SceneSwitch that use this
| rapid on-off mechanism to change their brightness and color
| temperature to one of three levels. It's funny because
| incandescent three-way bulbs and switches used to be very common.
| Now that everything is LED you need a complicated timer system to
| achieve the same result. I'm just happy to be able to dim my
| table lamps without a bunch of extra technology.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's funny because incandescent three-way bulbs and switches
| used to be very common. Now that everything is LED you need a
| complicated timer system to achieve the same result.
|
| Or just a dimmable LED bulb in an existing 3-way fixture.
| zackproser wrote:
| Enjoyed the opening quite a bit. Very funny and relatable.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This is a cool approach to an article about home automation. But
| for me, not only do I refuse to automate things via networking
| computers together, I won't buy a product that requires me to
| have a new remote control either. I'm open to things like lights
| with motion sensors that turn on when I enter the room, but
| whatever marginal convenience I get from automation would be
| outweighed by the absurdity of having 25 different, dedicated
| remote controls to keep track of.
|
| Another peeve is that every G-D home device now feels like it
| needs an LED light that is on all the time. My view is that it
| should be dark when the lights turn off, but that's hard to these
| days.
| woah wrote:
| Every light switch runs an LLM which is able to submit JSON
| payloads of the format { "on": true } to an internal HTTP server
| controlling the switch. The LLM is connected to a microphone and
| is prompted with a unique name. You can use it just by yelling
| "turn on the lights!", or if you only want to turn on one of the
| lights "Gary, turn on!"
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| A fantastic lesson on why to _keep it simple, stupid!_
| dkbrk wrote:
| I think it's worth taking a look back at X10 [0], the OG home
| automation.
|
| Yes, it was primitive by today's standards with a very limited
| command set, but that command set was good enough for 90% of
| purposes and its simplicity meant that it was trivial to
| implement correctly and everything interoperated.
|
| It didn't need an internet connection to function. It didn't even
| need a local server. Though you could have a programmable
| controller, the minimum viable setup consisted of having some
| X10-enabled device (such as a light socket), an X10 switch, and
| setting some DIP switches as configuration.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard)
| acyou wrote:
| The most important mid-wit home automation tool is the
| programmable thermostat, which curiously isn't mentioned. That
| will have more impact on energy use and quality of life than
| anything else. No remote control, no wifi needed. Just turns heat
| on in the morning and turns it off when things warm up, and turns
| the temperature setpoints lower overnight. In comparison with
| heat, LED light automation doesn't matter so much. For example,
| this one:
|
| https://www.honeywellhome.com/us/en/products/air/thermostats...
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