I was (naively, looking back) pretty bullish on smart home devices. Automating schedules, presence detection, etc. Every time I looked to invest more into it, the marketplace felt like a minefield of e(ventual)-waste and headache.

I still struggle with it. It feels like a missed opportunity these days, but I just don’t trust companies to treat me or my devices with respect. I’ve ultimately boomeranged back to “no (cloud) smart devices.”

It took me a moment to parse that it's the "smart-home graveyard", not the "smart home-graveyard" that's getting crowded!

Apparently hyphens seem to have gone out of fashion. Please can we bring them back?

"The smart home graveyard", aka Bot Hill

Recently sold a "Google (Nest) Home Audio" device after it failed to accomplish very basic tasks like "turn on the light". I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible before it's completely useless. Like, it would succeed about 20% of the time on a good day. That number used to be 80%-90%.

I wonder if I live in an alternate universe because I am only seeing good news about Gemini coming out of Google.

The only device I will connect to my home network, is anything that works with Home Assistant.

Wasn't that the same June oven that, well, was a smart arson machine?

https://www.extremetech.com/internet/296679-smart-ovens-may-...

Imo, the problem with most smart kitchen devices has always been that the added benefit was never big enough to warrant the steep prices.

The June oven had computer vision to detect the food and probes to test for internal temperature and could tell the user when their food was ready.

Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens, but at home, I don't need this at all because I can tell when the cheese on top is caramelized.

At $600-1500, that's a high premium for a countertop oven.

My house has smart light switches. They use ancient technologies of injection molding and metal wires. Their firmware has not needed an update and I haven't had to reboot them; they also recover instantly from power failures. I haven't measure their boot time but it's impressive. Probably 1/50 seconds is my guess, based on the AC switching frequency. Their data collection is primitive, and the retention is only a few hundred nanoseconds. They're quite good about not selling data about when I'm home to insurance companies or advertisers. And they use ancient principles of physics to destroy data securely. Their registration and account creation process didn't store my home address in some vendor's questionably secured database, so it can't be sold when these vendors fold in 5-10 years. It doesn't stop working while I'm traveling and never leaves my family without working lights, in fact I've yet to get one tech support call for light switches.

Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.

One downside is the commute to the wall if you want to use them. Commuting to a light switch is actually good though, I'm pleased to report it's a nice stroll. It takes around the same time it takes to unlock my phone and discover my phone can't switch on the lights in my house. It goes past a window so it has views.

When I read some vendors' stuff was gonna stop working I went home and turned off and on all my light switches to simulate a reboot in solidarity for those whose hobby is to make their home less usable. Hopefully you folks are able to spend a few hundred bucks more to refresh your stuff for this decade. If you need me, I'll be over at the wall panel.

I simply won’t install anything that doesn’t support a local API. Happy to pay for the hardware; but if your plan is to monetize it via cloud services somehow, or just assume planned obsolescence, I’m not your customer.

I quickly realized that the only rational (for me) home automation solution would be 100% cloud free, off the shelf hardware. No overly complicated, security poor Home Assistant, everything is mqtt