For the ultra-rich, probably this.
Personally, I don't mind 'smart' tech. But only if used wisely, making life more comfortable, saving energy, etc.
I do mind the 'let random 3rd parties spy on your everyday life' part. 'Smart' could be just "automatic" and/or LAN only. Connected but not to anywhere outside the house.
Also I dislike making things more complicated than necessary. Light on/off? Physical switch does the job. Ok, add TV-style remote if you want. But doesn't need phone app/WAN networking or software updates.
The local government here pushes "smart thermostats" which I've had fail twice because the app on the phone couldn't reach the server that day. If I must have digital controls, connect them to a physical network that's isolated from the internet, and a local panel to interact. I don't need an app on my phone.
We can't use the broil feature of our oven, because it is an on-line feature only and we won't connect it to wi-fi... bastards.
But YMMV, if wifi works better for you, I'm still happy that Matter is being used :)
I have nothing against Thread, other than the fact that it requires specialised hardware, whereas Matter over WiFi uses what I already have in place. It’s all trade offs in the end.
My IoT VLAN is firewalled off from the Internet. Sure a misconfiguration could still mean that protection is lost, but that’s probably also de case with Thread.
Interestingly about IPv6, I have a few Matter devices who despite having IPv6 addresses, are only accessible over IPv4. I’m not sure what that means but it surprised me.
Nothing else is really needed, IMHO.
The weather station would be for solar load, outdoor temperature, precipitation and (most importantly) wind.
They’d all be coordinated with a local docker container or something like that.
Anyway, if this existed when we built the house, I’d have paid at least $30K for the system, installed and configured. I doubt I’m the only one. It’d be nice if it could control the furnace / ac too.
Edit: also, skylight openers, which are surprisingly inexpensive, except the software integration sounded like a nightmare.
It’s a project I’ve built over years and it’s life changingly good and gets better as home assistant, esphome, wled, and LLMs improve. I spend little time futzing with it as it all generally works, but obviously some minor expertise is required to make your own esp32 projects which are mostly just wiring off the shelf wroom d1 mini boards to a project board on the uart/gpio, whatever on something else. My minisplits, jucuzzi, garage door, blinds, etc all have active esphome projects, and provisioning is simple for a technical person. Home assistant is really simple too, and if you know jinja templating, you can make masterpieces.
No one has boiled it down to a shrink wrap product and that is sad for the mass. But for someone with moderate technical skills you can achieve anything your creativity and bravery will afford, and with AI coding assistants it’s gotten even easier. I had to replace most the switches with zwave switches, and build a bunch of boards and attach them to control ports built into devices I own like the minisplits, hottub, etc. But these are all not hard things to do - they’re just more laborious and tedious one time activities, and once you’ve set it up home assistant and esphome are pretty good about not breaking you in the future.
My washing machine also has home assistant integrations, etc, and I am careful to only buy things that do. And most things do one way or another.
I imagined using lots of sensors to control vents,
windows, blinds, and HVAC
I remember people gushing over the first wave of smart thermostats and all I could think about was how useless a "smart thermostat" was without the ability to also control windows and blinds.
That is the most time-consuming part of regulating temps and fresh air. Getting up to change the thermostat is quite easy!
Smart thermostats are also IMO of limited use for most pet owners. Yeah, theoretically I could let my house get very hot or very cold when I'm not there to save money... but I can't let my cats or dogs freeze... so that kind of clamps the acceptable temperature range.
I do accept that there is a certain sort of person for whom a smart thermostat makes sense - a person who is not home very often, has no pets, and has minimal windows. In short, single apartment dwellers. But they don't have very expensive heating/cooling bills anyway.
Also even if I spent $100,000 putting automated windows in my house, I'm not sure I trust them enough to not chop my cat in half if he happens to be sitting on the windowsill....
What I did do, which paid off handsomely, is run RG6 coax and Cat5 cables everywhere in a star configuration. I did all the work myself to make sure it was done right. Haven't had any trouble at all with it, despite lots of upgrading of the electronics.
BTW, another thing I did, which isn't exactly home automation. I bought a $10 microwave from the thrift store, and put it in the bathroom. I don't have to run the faucet anymore waiting for hot water for a wash cloth. Just wet the washcloth and throw it in the microwave. Aaaahhh, the luxury of hot washcloth on my face! If I was designing a house these days, I'd build in a special spot for the microwave in the bathroom.
As for the bathroom, another option would be a small on demand water heater under the bathroom sink.
I hadn't thought of the on demand heater. But it's hard to beat a $10 microwave that just plugs in.
Try it some time. You'll never go back to cold washcloths!
Yes, I double catted it all, too.
It's funny because I had exactly the opposite (in a way) experience. I always hated cold washcloths and splashing cold water on my face.
Last year, I tried a thought experiment. I simply decided I was going to like those things. Much to my amusement it actually worked. I literally just talked myself out of not liking it.
I've been able to accomplish that with a few other trivial things, but not others, and not with anything really major.
But I do adore the decadent luxury of a hot washcloth.
Me, I watched the electrician at work, and the cable guy working at my previous house. I noted the tools they used, and bought them. A Milwaukee right angle drill puts the holes in the studs. I bought the Telewire Supply coax strippers and crimpers, and the ethernet socket tools. With that, you can do a pro job which will last and costs very little.
I learned back in college that using professional electrical/electronic tools, like a soldering iron, makes a huge difference.
YouTube DIY seems to only cover the happy path. I opened a couple up and it wasn't quite like videos.
It really saves a ton of money, because then you can just do it yourself. Like replacing the dimmer switch with a regular switch - costs about $2 from the hardware store for the switch, and a few minutes.
Having a plumber show up costs $300 just for him to come to your house. It pays off big time to do what you can yourself.
P.S. I always ask for permission to watch them work. They appreciate the ask, and so don't think it's creepy.
I find it offputting if a mechanic doesn't want me watching him fix my car.
I want to be sure everything is done correctly!
If you want it done right do it yourself, or double check others are doing it properly!
Yes. They've never said no. I ask about their tools, their technique, etc., and they seem happy that someone is interested.
You hang out in their shop and watch them? They allow this?
I always ask. I myself hate working when someone is standing over me watching, so it only seems right to ask for permission before doing that to someone else. Basic politeness is free.
As for the bathroom, another option would be a small on demand water heater under the bathroom sink.
Smart home is less wiring with added benefit of automating few things in life. Wireless light switches can be placed at any location without intensive labour. Most smart bulbs can be dimmed and can shift temperature.
Overall it’s not some sort of game changer, but not super complex either. On par with Japanese toilet and induction cooking.
Until the battery dies :-/
Ya know, I prefer to get up and walk over to the switch, as long as I am able to.
IF battery dies you still have option to go thru pain and horrid of using siri or smartphone to toggle your lights...
You can install wired smart switches, but that would be incredibly stupid on a new build.
The whole point of it isn't walking to it (that's how I use it 99% of time). It's automation of switching all lights at once when going to bed, or all lights switching off when you leave house, or light comes up when you get home after sunset.
You should be able to use cat5 cable for all sorts of things, it's not just for ethernet. It's 4 twisted pairs.
If we're already struggling with phone addiction and an out-of-control attention economy, probably the last thing you'd want is to constantly be forced back to your phone if you just want to do basic household things.
Also, I don't understand how anyone could think that random passcodes in the place of what used to be a button would be good UX.
Even when the power goes out for 2 weeks, I still reflexively hit the wall switch every time entering a room.
Home automation only makes sense for people with very limited mobility.
Matter is unfortunately not that vision. It is still locking you into a cloud-based system, but you can take your devices to a system of your choice.
The system just needs to be simple. You should be able to buy a smart switch from any company. It should power and dim attached dumb and smart bulbs the old fashioned way. Pairing directly connected bulbs should just be turning the switch on and off 5 times quickly. Wireless pairing shouldn't require an app or attestation or other cloud stuff, just sharing a secret one time in-band on some standard protocol over 802.15.4. If you want to have a wireless switch clone a wired one, turn them on and off together 5 times. If you want an all-on, all-off wireless switch, turn all your lights on, and flip the master breaker 5 times along with your new switch. If you want something complicated, get an 802.15.4 bridge/controller. If you want to control with an app, let the bridge controller be accessible via a TailScale-like tunneling VPN or the local WiFi, still no cloud.
This could all be simple and interoperable, but that won't let any company tell their shareholders that their cloud-based smarthome base is growing X% YoY or that their gross margin on smart bulbs is 80%.
I always hear it was crappy and unreliable and insecure, but it seems like it's pretty much the kind of experience people want.
I'm not sure what that means. I have quite a few Matter devices. None of them use cloud services. They exist but they're not required in any way.
I do think that Matter is designed with a commercial, cloud-based fabric in mind. Normal people don't want to have even a smart home router, let alone run a local fabric.
> Normal people don't want to have even a smart home router, let alone run a local fabric.
That’s fair, I guess, but _something_ has to coordinate things. I’m not aware of how Samsung, Google and others do it as I’m only familiar with Home Assistant and HomeKit, but the main difference between those 2 is that with Home Assistant that _something_ is whatever runs HA (I have it on a VM, but a lot of people run it on SBCs or one of the official appliances), and the Apple ecosystem relies on other devices people bought in are likely to already own (iPads, Apple TVs, HomePods, …).
In either case, the controller device is there and requires no Internet access to operate. Possibly during commissioning of a new device - I haven’t checked - but that’s it.
You don't need any coordination for basic scenarios like a wireless switch in a room controls the lights in that room.
Depending on whether the underlying protocol allows forwarding and can establish the minimum spanning tree, you might need a repeater if you want all-on/all-off kind of functionality in a large home.
The coordinator, which in Matter is a thread border router, translates between the Thread and WiFi networks, which is what allows app or cloud based control, including "automations" like reactions and schedules.
You generally don't need a Thread Border Router to combine one manufacturer's products together, e.g. Phillips Hue, but it will use Bluetooth instead of Thread/ZigBee.
They act like normal switches but can be controlled with anything that can talk Zwave; in this case home assistant.
Runs off the grid, works great!
https://x.com/fakekenty/status/1904364284823400748?s=46&t=Eu...
A lot of this tech is just half-baked. Competing standards jockeying for market share, stuff that doesn’t scale, most end user tech is still baffling to the demographics with the funds.
I stopped at Hue lights and some garage freezer thermometers. Eventually I realized I was going to have to rip the system out if I didn’t approach it from “how does my partner control these without having to think about it and without using tech skills”. I settled on a remote or two and a variety of battery-less mechanical switches at significant cost just to restore the basic functionality and reliability of a $5 light switch.
It was a reality check I needed before I plunged into a million sensors and integrations and hardware I was always going to fiddle with and only I would probably ever finesse into acting right. Even the chain of audio receiver to the TV over ARC to everything waking up when the Apple TV awakens occasionally breaks and leaves my partner unable to watch TV until I come cast the magic spells (rebooting things) and make it Just Work again. I can’t imagine how all the smart home junk ages - it probably doesn’t degrade well.
mystraline•9mo ago
No passwords, no stupid. Doesn't even need internet, just the local network.
I can even share access creds to pur garage doors remotely.
Again, I focus on simple and effective 'smart', not throwing enshittifying internet garbage everywhere.
XorNot•9mo ago