Who buys this?
IME, about 90% of the twats at Reddit/r/smarthome. They they whine when the next Sonos or such they switched to gets bricked yet again.
Why are they twats? Because you do not like smarthome devices so people who do are twats? Seems pretty shallow dude
Because they’ll buy cloud enabled devices and call you an idiot for suggesting that might be a poor long-term plan. Then they bitch and moan when their devices get bricked, yet again, and then they’re back on the cloud-device bandwagon next time.
I have literally hundreds of sensors, switches and other IOT devices I’ve either bought or built myself because nobody made one. Not a one needs an internet connection to work because I learned long ago that it doesn’t pay to rely on outside services. Hell, I only started using HA recently because I figured it was going to fade away as well. I’ve seen their commitment to keeping things self-hosted, so a few years ago I let myself get convinced to move away from NodeRed and my own codebase. But if they disappeared tomorrow I’d still be able to use my devices with a minimum of hassle.
Yeah I’m never buying those bulbs again. Learned that lesson years ago.
Being able to change colors from your phone is neat but let’s face it, you’re going to have it on the same setting forever anyway.
Maybe once I start selfhosting I’ll fuck with HomeAssistant but till I control what connects to what, how, and why, I’m good.
Tip: don’t get the smart bulbs, get snack sockets. Easier to fix and reset and bypass if needed.
Yeah that’s probably what I’ll do if I bother.
I’m an electrician, having regular lights is fine lol ;)
?
Lmao autocorrect got me! I meant smart sockets.
Hass is awesome, but not something you’d probably use instead of an actual switch, I use it for my leds in my office where it makes sense.
I’m of the mind that Home Assistant should live alongside your lights and everything. They should still function without it, but function better with it. Like my lights are all still controllable from normal light switches, but with Home Assistant they change color temperature and brightness throughout the day with the sun.
Exactly, it adds, it doesn’t replace.
So you can set the lights when you’re away, or it’s inconvenient, but you have a switch to act like a normal human otherwise.
You wont regret starting with HA. It’s awesome and the possibilities are endless.
I like using the smart bulbs as part of my wake up alarm. HomeAssistant starts fading the lights on 10 minutes before my alarm is set to go off.
I bought the bulbs before Hue made accounts mandatory, so I blocked the bridge from all internet access, and it never got the update. If I ever need new/more bulbs, I’ll be just buying some generic zigbee bulbs.
If it’s just dimming you could go with dumb dimmable bulbs and just make the light switch “smart”.
Apparently modern dimmers just PWM the power so it wouldn’t take much to make something that does that. I assume LED bulbs work nicely with dimmers by now.
The smart light switch has exactly the same problems as the smart bulb, and it’s much harder to replace.
But the benefit of a smart switch is that it remains “always on” for remote control, and physical actions on the switch also reflects on its state at the software level.
That said, I’d go with stuff that don’t need online connectivity.
Smart switches aren’t really a big deal to swap in. Plus, there’s more options for purely local only devices based on espHome.
The only reason I didn’t go that route is because I have wall sconces that I wanted to separate from pot lights, and I really don’t like doing drywall repairs.
In my case, I don’t want all the bulbs on, and splitting up the circuit now would involve cutting holes in my ceiling and walls. Otherwise, yeah, I would have gone with a smart switch. Most LED bulbs are dimmable these days.
it very much helps to be able to set colour temperature in this scenario
Hue bulbs are just zigbee. You can get an offline zigbee hub, plug it into Home Assistant, and control it without needing the Hue hub anymore. Then just keep using your existing bulbs and buy generic zigbee ones as needed to replace when they fail.
I have one WiFi bulb in my house near the entrance to my office. I turn it red to let my housemates know I have a meeting without leaving my chair.
This is about the only reason I could see for a WiFi light bulb. I could wire something but that’s a lot more work.
Do you manually set the light bulb to red or do you have some kind of automation?
I tried to set up an automation with home assistant, because I use it for everything anyway.
But getting the information “You’re in a call” from microsoft is impossible, if you can’t create an “app” in order to get an api key, if the company sysadmin doesn’t want you to have it.
It is more work, but imagine how cool you would feel with a big red button on your desk that you hit to turn the light on!
Thousands of people found out during 2020!
(I’m sure there was a physical button one somewhere)
I haven’t reconnected all of my smart-bulbs in over two years because every time the software updates or when I have to change devices I have to reinstall everything all over again and find my account information and reset my password and all that, and it’s fucking absurd and I am done with it.
Fuck voice controls, it was fun at first but there are switches on the wall, I will keep using them.
Maybe in a few years some AI program will be released that actually works and can be used to assist with home-control and it will just work autonomously, but I doubt it. These companies have zero intention or motivation to produce things that make our lives better, they go halfway by making something “cool” we want to try, but don’t make efforts to make the new, cool things actually work better and more efficiently for users. No need, if they already buy the thing, then line goes up and that’s all that matters.
That was how I expected things to go when ‘smart’ bulbs came out based on all the other sMaRt stuff, but kinda expected it to improve over time for some silly reason.
We’re experiencing the same thing with AI right now, in that the companies are producing shit that promises the moon and the stars, but they’re not making actual effort to make a powerful, universal product that can actually be broadly useful. Why do that when you can just release incrementally updated models? Why make a product designed to help you do actual business and work when you can make a machine that is good at entertaining you for a few hours until you get bored? They’ve been doing this with smartphones and other tech products for years.
Yeah, I want smart switches w/ manual override, not smart bulbs. I can maybe see those smart bulbs for accent lighting or something, but definitely not for the majority of the lights.
The cheap ones we got have a fallback to 50% brightness warm white, if you turn them off and on again twice within a couple of seconds. Without that I doubt I could live with them either.
I view them as a new and separate product.
The regular lights, the “big light” as my neurodivergent friends call them, are normal bulbs with electroc-mechanical dimmers. The bulbs still burn out, the dimmers still break, and sometimes the power goes out entirely in storms or for maintenance, but in general they are pretty reliable. But I need to get up and manually actuate the switch to turn it on or off.
The smart lights are luxury lights and plugged into floor or table lamps. They set the mood and the tone. I’ve never liked the modes where they change color or brightness automatically, but I do like the ability to make the house green on St. Patrick’s day, or make certain rooms red, orange, or purple for Halloween. Or sometimes just whatever mood we want to go for. Being in lamps, that makes it easy to do things like reset them or just manually turn the electricity off if they are misbehaving.
I would prefer if they were on an open-source locally-hosted software. When I first did my investigation a few years ago there were a couple of projects in their infancy so maybe I need to look again.
Matter over Thread is generally what you should look for. Local control is always possible, and it’ll work with any major ecosystem.
You do need a “Thread Border Router”, which you likely already own. If you’re tech inclined, Home Assistant is amazing, though it takes some tinkering.
Echo (4th Gen) Echo Show 8 (3rd Gen) Echo Hub Echo Studio Echo Studio (2nd Gen) Echo Plus (2nd Gen) Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen) Eero Beacon Eero Pro Eero 6 Eero 6+ Eero Pro 6 Eero Pro 6E Eero PoE 6 Eero PoE Gateway Eero Max 7 Apple TV 4K (2nd generation) Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi+Ethernet (3rd generation) HomePod (2nd generation) HomePod mini Nest Hub (2nd generation) Nest Hub Max Nest Wifi Pro Nest Wifi SmartThings Hub (v3) SmartThings Station Aeotec Smart Home HubAmazon…google…apple…yeah none of these routers are going in my house.
Sad how far they’ve fallen. I used to think new tech was cool. Now it’s depressing.
My concern is, those are microphones that listen if you criticize Our Great Leader.
Just to mention a few of my use cases:
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I adjust lights from my phone while seated in the sofa to get a good lighting for watching movies. Since my house has open solution between kitchen, dining table and TV corner, it’s nice to be able to reduce all lights to my preference.
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In the room I use as an office, it’s nice to have integrations with my periferals to adjust lighting to accomodate for video call meetings.
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It’s nice to go through the rooms to check which lights are off after going to bed.
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When putting my baby to bed, it’s nice to be able to dim down lights from her bedside while singing lullabies and comforting her. I can also dim lights in the hallway to reduce lights peeping through the cracks around the door and avoid lighting up the room when I leave.
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When on vacation, it’s nice to have lights which can vary a bit during the day to create the apparence of the home not being empty.
… So is this all worth it? Maybe not. Probably not. I’m pretty confident that I would be happy without any smart bulbs in my home. The inconveniences regularily outweigh the conveniences. But the conveniences do exist, and there are times when I am very happy to have them.
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Mr. Bean demonstrating the principle of “it’s not stupid if it works”.
Turn it back on :P
How many Beans does it take to turn on a lamp?
Never had a problem with password resets. e-mail-based 2FA and being unable to change the attached e-mail, OTOH…
I keep telling people to quit buying this shit and stop using corporate social media. But they’re scared that lemmy is a virus (shrug) and only trust daddy google and apple
Just turn them on with the switch…
I refuse to buy appliances that need an internet connection to work.
The pursuit of the almighty dollar has enshittified too many things! Bring back useful, well made things!
The thing with most of them is that I really don’t understand why I need remote control of half of the white goods in my house. Why would I need to remote start my washing machine and dishwasher. I still have to load the fucker. I’ll just set a delayed start.
Why does my kettle need to boil on a schedule. It takes 2 minutes while my toast toasts.
About the only thing I understand it for is central heating. It would be quite nice to have a nice warm house for when i get home but even then, I can just set a schedule on a typical physical dial.
No need to sign in, poke holes in my network security, and give my information over to get another company that can get hacked and leak my data anyway. I’m not a Luddite but 90% of this stuff just feels like a pointless waste of money for minimal utility, reduced reliability, and compromised security.
My parents had the same washing machine for 40 years. When they replaced it, 2 of them died within 10 years after the control pcbs got wet. You’d think they’d protect against that seeing as it’s going to be in a fucking washing machine.
I mean, you can do a lot of stuff without relying on technology, like doing the dishes in the sink or washing clothes in a river. This is just another step. But setting up a kettle to boil at a specific time isn’t the only thing these smart homes can do.
This is what the Unabomber was trying to warn us about!
The one I have in my bedroom blinks like crazy if it gets desynchronized with the cloud and that happens all the time
That would make for a good alarm mode synced to your phone. Strobe lights + screamo music is all I need for a good start to the day.
“Does the pole count as part of the traffic light…?”
Do the bulbs that are off in the picture count?
I don’t agree with this… I use Govee everything and control it through Google … I can’t imagine forgetting a Google password. I don’t care much about privacy on my lighting control. Yes everything is over complicated but pick a brand and a control device and you’re fine. Before I consolidated I had 4 different lights and controlling apps and if I messed up a stored password I could easily reset one of them using an email addy …mostly disposable ones
It’s overcomplicated because it’s not immediately easy to keep the smart functionality totally local to your own network.
Almost every company that sells an IoT product wants you to make online accounts, download their special app, sign up for subscriptions, download useless firmware updates, and have all the hardware connect externally with their mothership cloud servers in order to function, all because they want to run a data harvesting racket disguised as an “ecosystem”.
I’d use mechanical switches in the house, but at the same time, yelling at Siri to turn on my lights for the third time is the closest thing we currently have to sexbot servants. I only have so many years left on this planet, and I wish to embrace the future now.
Home Assistant + ZigBee devices.
If only ZigBee was reliable. I had to send back a wall switch because I deactivated the default on/off in favor of hassio handled response. When it lost ZigBee connectivity I couldn’t put it in pairing mode because the on/off was deactivated and holding both wasn’t recognized.
ZigBee is reliable, your specific device might not be.
Yes, we did.
Is that an issue?
We still have switchboards… Don’t we?
Not if you forget your password
I like smart tech, as long as I can make it work for me and not just another data vacuum for some faceless corporation. I’ve got Home Assistant handling a lot of my stuff now, and I’m moving things over to it and replacing corporate-app-only things with things that can work locally.
I’m interested in doing this also. Is there a guide you’re following, or would recommend?
Home assistant has been on a push to be more user friendly. It’s gotten quite good, over the last few years. It’s not quite to mass deployment levels yet, but it’s managed to wrap all the evil parts in easy to use interfaces.
The best bet, to play with it, would be a raspberry pi. There are premade images of home assistant available to install. Stick one on as SD card, and follow the prompts. You’ll be amazed at what it can just find on your home network.
Cool, I’ll throw it on my pi4. Thanks!
