Bought our home almost 20 years ago, and the former owner (apparently) owned a now-defunct home automation business. The upside was 100% X10/Insteon power and light controls, top alarm panel, environmental controls and so on running off of a wall-mounted "SmartLinc" touch panel. I expanded the system with Axis cameras and a Mac Server running Indigo and SecuritySpy (non-subscription), which enabled remote monitoring and control, but it all operates locally.
In a moment of weakness, I bought a D-Link wireless (wifi) water detector for the sump pit (it was on clearance for $30); it relied on a D-Link Home cloud service (free) that was closed down a few years ago.
Not wanting to toss it, I repurposed a spare Chromebook 14 that I was going to recycle and turned it into a Alpine monitor for the water detector, which I'm powering from the Chromebook's USB port (if power is lost in a rainstorm, I need to know about it before the sump pit fills up).
An immediate issue was that the D-Link firmware tried to "phone home" every 24 hours and would drop from the local network, since the server was kaput, and I had no clue what response it was expecting from the server to keep it alive. Solution; "reboot" the unit by interrupting USB power (with a Pico and MOSFET) every 23 hours. There's no question that home automation should work without the internet.
I recently had a similar issue. But instead I decided to go with industrial controls. I bought a Contactor with a NC and NO connections. I put a float switch in series with the activator coil circuit. So when the float triggers: NC->O and NO-C, which turns off the water and turns on the pump.
Contactors are built to run giant industrial motors for years, nevermind my little 1/4hp pump.
The way I built it lets my mother bypass it by unplugging the pump from the control box and plugging it right into the wall outlet.
So, hopefully it lasts years. If it doesnt, anyone can bypass it
My personal preferred infra there would be for all devices to be meshed together, and a smart water shutoff valve able to cut off automatically if a water leak sensor trips.
I have a Dell Chromebook that's been running (Debian) without issue (battery removed) in a similar capacity for over a decade, and four more that have been up for the last five years. The former I bought new, the latter are all second-hand survivors from some public school program. They're solid.
Every cloud service will eventually get shut down. The problem is that nobody wants to put the effort into reverse engineering the product to fake out the cloud service until after the cloud service is gone and the reverse engineering is much more difficult.
Do we just need to establish bounties per cloud service target to reverse engineer and publish a spec, copyleft code, and reference architecture? Maybe https://www.fulu.org/ could host the results? Like OpenAI and Anthropic brute forcing math proofs, we can brute force interoperability (imho). Closed systems and tokens go in to the reverse engineering factory, out comes open systems that remain open to all.
Insteon remains incredibly solid. The new company is super slow with new product because it's tiny, but the hardware remains incredibly good long-term. It doesn't clutter common wireless bands and by nature of being stupid, Insteon devices cannot really be hacked.
My rules for home automation are largely the same as the article, first and foremost the existing physical UX of switches and stuff should always work, and ideally automations should be nearly invisible: They should subtly be convenient and monitoring should be useful, but nobody should be confronted with a weird change of lifestyle because a house has automation. And nobody should ever need an app to use their house.
I haven't figured out how to recieve pings from my weather stone, I've always got to get up and look out the window, which, then I can just see the weather.
You don’t need to root your weather stone. You’ll want to root your weather tree. Rooted weather trees give you better long term data (if the tree is flourishing, the weather was nice all season). Unrooted weather trees just let you know if it was raining in the last couple days (still an upgrade over a weather stone, but not by much).
"...And so that's how I ended up with a $14,000 basement repair. Yup, those damn chromebooks are more waterproof than you'd think! I mean it makes sense, they're designed to be vomited on by children all day at school."
every single sentence was a level of jank that i could never imagine subjecting my parents to. could you code custom firmware for the dlink btw? your fix sounds like good ol' redneck engineering but for the smart home :p
The neat thing about X10 and Insteon is that everything acts "normally" at the device level, but you can program everything (remotely?) via the Indigo server. Your parents wouldn't even have to know that their house was running schedules (except for lights turning on an off).
If you're referring to the water sensor, it's definitely not parent-friendly, but I sometimes have to bail water during power outages from thunderstorms. It has to work during a power outage and an old Chromebook was cheaper than a UPS.
I kind of ran out of time for messing around with the sensor, but I did think of either dumping the Winbond chip on my reader, or using a .bin file that was used for OTA updates and pushing a modified version down locally.
That likely would have been "cleaner" vs. a 23-hour reboot cycle. I likely would have wanted a dump first in case I borked the firmware. The Python monitoring script just uses standard HNAP to read status codes from the sensor in 30 second intervals - I think there's some way to push updates via HNAP as well.
Thanks for the reminder - may be a good project for winter, when there's no chance of needing the sump.
- buy the cheapest hardware that gets the job done
- ignore negative reviews that are software related
- upon receipt of devices, ask claude for local-first cfw
- have fun for a few hours acting as a meat proxy
- boom, cheap local-only smart home is done
Use a SBC or nas for home assistant. This process worked for me for switches, a thermostat, an air quality monitor, a thermometer, and a window fan.
Would’ve paid ~2.5x for hardware that had the appropriate local-first capability out of the box. Instead this all fit within an existing $20 subscription to an inference provider. DS 4.1 running locally was on track too just more slowly.
I found a few wifi and bluetooth devices that were cheaper than or didn’t have a zigbee equivalent. Window fan and air monitor specifically.
I didn’t do an exhaustive market search, just sharing my anecdotal experience. It’s a great feeling to be able to focus on hardware capabilities and price, then will the software you envision into existence via AI accelerated RE.
Thread over Matter is not fully local. In Thread < 1.4, devices can connect to internet servers through NAT64. Most Thread Border Routers (AFAIR Home Assistant + OTBR is the main exception) do not allow you to disable NAT64.
In Thread >= 1.4, devices can request globally routable IPv6 addresses. The Thread 1.4 white paper does not hide the intentions:
The Thread 1.4 Border Router acts as the
IPv6 router between the Thread network and external networks,
including the user's home network and the larger internet. It is by default
configured to support external communication [...]
Cloud Connectivity: Direct internet connectivity enables Thread devices
to easily connect to cloud services. This facilitates remote monitoring,
control, and firmware updates, enhancing the user experience and
enabling remote device management capabilities. Device vendors can
now directly service and support their deployed fleet of devices,
regardless of which application ecosystem each device is integrated
with.
This is what you get when you let Google, Amazon, Apple, and Samsung design a smart home standard. They'll use every opportunity extract analytics and increase control. You'll own nothing and be happy.
Zigbee, Z-Wave, and ESPHome over WiFi/Thread are the only major modern local and privacy-preserving smart home standards.
Matter over WiFi is also not fully local for obvious reasons (though you can try to block them on the router/firewall and/or put them on a separate VLAN).
Do you have any favorites for single smart plug or multi switch smart plug strip? I used to be a heavy tp link kasa user since they have smart plug strips that worked locally (polling I think and not push) but I am now doing my best to move everything to plugs that don't even need setup through an app, just home assistant. Wish I had thought about this more when I first started with home automation but I think the migration will be worth it.
Please please please use your first draft or refine it yourself without LLMs.
I managed to get to:
The cloud is the weak link
- No internet, no problem. ...
---
If you are writing for other machines to ingest it, whatever. But if you are writing for people it for me at least signals that you don't really care about the message that you want to get across, and are fine with a watered down LLM average.
I will be happy when this genre of whining fades away. Everyone has suddenly turned into the most obnoxious 7th grade English teacher imaginable. "I wanted to like your ideas, but you used lines from the reading assignment without quotes and 3 sentences had dangling participles. Plagiarism and grammar offenses, straight to jail."
If you're personally getting a headache from reading AI writing, all this does is transfer that headache to the rest of us. Thanks. /s
It is not about the grammar though, that's just proof. It's about the overwhelming feeling that whoever "wrote" the piece hasn't read it at all - so why should you?
i did draft it and i'm still getting better at the over zealous llm auto corrections. i dont like some of the phrasing either. i am actively cleaning it up and i do appreciate the feedback since there is value in refining my process.
The issue is about moving the burden of verification to the reader.
Its like you went to a potluck and brought a salad with you, you just closed your eyes and threw some things from the fridge together without thinking, it's all mixed together now and you don't know if something was old/moldy.
You are proud and happy that you brought a contribution, and you feel like your responsibility/duty ends there while the people who want to eat it have to be careful and fish things out, or just avoid it because they can't be sure if it was old or not.
Natural language is a non-verifiable domain due to the ambiguity of the intent, so we will never get away from this issue in LLM-land. You can't know intent of the writer unless they wrote it themselves.
It's not missing quotes, it's "i didn't write this at all, I put zero effort into it, I don't know what it says, it may be made up". Claude is good for code, terrible at prose, it boggles my mind that people use it to write PR descriptions, let alone their own personal thoughts.
We've backed ourselves into a fundamentally silly situation: inventions intended to improve convenience and save time don't do either. They work "OK" then there's an update, and then you need to figure out what changed and how. And then it breaks, and you need to go troubleshoot what still works (if anything) and what no longer works. It's not more convenient, just more complex.
> They work "OK" then there's an update, and then you need to figure out what changed and how.
I don't allow my devices to update their firmware. If the device does not work out of the box, I return it, end of. My car has also been taken off the grid.
This is why I hate the IoT (Internet of Things) it should be CoT (Communication of Things).
That speaker linked to your phone should not need an internet proxy to communicate. It should allow for direct USB communication so it can share one power source. It should allow for Bluetooth communication so it can be in a different close location.
CoT should follow the rule of nature and take the shortest path by default.
What is better for society? The LLM modal running in a local environment or the one running on a data center that can be easily taken out via a power outage, fiber cut, national disaster, or a kinetic weapon?
I rather that LLM modal used at the hospital be ran locally and keep servicing patients even though the original data center was demolished by mother nature.
ANYTHING that does not absolutely need to be online, like looking at current news, current weather or such, should work without internet. Especially appliances. The more difficult it is to change it, the less dependent should it be of any cloud infrastructure. Anything built in the walls, must not depend on internet.
Same for car functions, if a car should be good for 10 to 20 years.
1. Buy zigbee/zwave
2. Prefer things you can flash tasmota if zigbee/zwave is not possible.
2. Maybe use eMudhra for mitm and flash the unsupported devices.
"eMudhra" lol, joke aside, i think there is value capturing leaving your network to see what it could be sending. i know its possible on some devices but can be pretty hard from my understanding.
Smart home devices should not freeze up whenever internet is down. A device like Google Nest should have the minimum decency to allow you to interact with it via local Wifi (which continues un-interrupted). It is fine if half the functionality doesn't work. It is fine if the "AI" doesn't work, but at least allow me to fcking change the temperature manually
Same thing with devices like Google Wifi which freezes up or run hot loops like headless chickens when internet is down.
I recently had a pretty extensive home renovation don after a kitchen fire--which din't have a lot direct damage but the rouse was pretty much cleared out. I pretty much didn't have any direct "smart" stuff. A few appliances are probably enableable but they aren't.
I wish Insteon had gotten more popular, Back in the day it was easy to get development material to write your own software or build your own devices. I really liked how the stuff all had a decent amount of capability on its own, or you could have a computer attached for more advanced automation. I still use a few Insteon things in my house, Still use a few X10 things for that matter. I really wish they had kept up their local support software.
I totally agree, and if you asked consumers, most would care and prefer for their smart home devices to communicate as little as possible with the outside world. And yet the market keeps offering invasive products, the discrepancy is frustrating.
There should be a system like the nutritional information on food and beverage products, as time went by most people read those and choose accordingly, which then incentivize companies to adapt their offering. We could imagine something similar which would define clearly the capabilities of the hardware or software sold, clearly labelled on the physical package or on the online shop with an easy classification for consumers to understand.
I disagree. If you asked any Random Customer they don't care if it's local first. They want it to work immediately with as little set up as possible and they want to access it from their phone.
If they could get away without even having a Wi-Fi router and just use their cellular plan they would. Why? Because there are plenty people who are happy with just whatever internet they get on their cell phone and don't want to spend extra for a router and an ISP
There are many great Zigbee devices. You can use them as dumb devices or as connected devices that are fully local and privacy-preserving.
These days I mostly don't buy it if it's not Zigbee (unless I make it myself with ESPHome). Just this week we bought two panel heaters (for two rooms that need a little heating because our heat pump is mostly used for heating the living room and kitchen). They work great over Zigbee and we can have some useful automations (like automatically switching off when forgotten and there is no one in the room for more than 10 minutes).
How does the WiFi wall switch work? If WiFi goes down you can still click a light on and off? This is tempting as I have to leave all my smart lights on rn but do I really need to rip out all my light switches? Ugh.
Also anyone found the fix to smart bulbs constantly “updating”?
I just put devices like that on a wifi without internet access. Occasionally I'll need to grant internet access for setup, and then it goes back to being denied. Can't update if you can't download updates.
Yes it does, smart switches have buttons that control the relay directly.
Also aside from maintenance there's no reason your WiFi should go down, an inexpensive UPS can keep it up for hours in a power outage. Even if it can't access the outside world, local routing works fine.
not all networking has to be routed publicly. many can still operate locally. the catch is, they want your subscription to them, when your devices are required to route publicly.
ev chargers are the worst case of this imo. a lot of them only do the off-peak schedule through the vendor app, so if the cloud goes away you end up charging at peak. on some time-of-use plans that's ~$500 a year for the same car
Mine is based on a vestel evc04, and by default has a cloud option with some company saying "we'll do it, move your energy through us" etc.
You can connect it to any evcc endpoint like a local homeassistant, or simply leave it on all the time.
I'm not happy with guaranteeing high availability on my HA install yet (it's not as simple as my pihole which is just a simple vrrp address over the two hosts) though so I just leave it in "always on" mode, and use the timer on the car to come on at 2310 (offpeak starts at 2300 on my tarrif).
I'd be surprised if a charger is genuinely only available via an cloud service, but from asking my neighbours if it doesn't have "an app" they wouldn't buy it.
I'd rather have an API I could poll/poke for the charger rather than set the charger to connect to me, but alas it doesn't have one.
everything I buy will work without internet for sure, and all of the above is much better with Home Assistant at the helm controlling things (only issue is the constant updates which you have to keep on top of)
Author here. This is ten years of home automation rules, led by one: nothing core should depend on a vendor's server. Setup core is Tasmota, MQTT and Node-RED on a Pi. I've given this talk a few times and started working on a third for the agentic era. What's the most pointless internet dependency you've found in a device?
:( Your notes are probably more fun to read than the generic AI voice. Your actual notes are fun, but seeing the ~extra cruft from an AI writer in every line irritated me enough to quit before the end.
My personal situation imposes even stricter versions of your #1 and #2:
1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
2. Smart functionality must not remove dumb functionality.
As one example: having a physical switch that controls a light and the switch can be operated by automation is good. Having automation control a light and the switch just tells automation what to do is bad.
This does make things hard sometimes. For instance, your sprinkler controller doesn't pass that bar. In fact the only one I've found so far that has a local API for automation plus full "dumb" on-device control (no Wi-Fi, no app) is RainMachine, and they are gone. If only OpenSprinkler hardware had a touch screen for local UI.
> 1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
This is one of the reasons I love Zigbee, the device network is entirely independent of my computer network, can not directly communicate to the internet in any way, and every device I've put on the network so far can be configured to directly communicate with other devices so basic functionality remains operational even if the controller goes down.
For example, in my living room I have a Lutron Aurora dimmer dial locking a standard switch in the on position, then plugged in to the outlet that switch would normally control is a Leviton dimmer module. Both connect to the network controlled from a PoE Zigbee dongle, but have been directly paired as well so pressing the button on the dial makes it directly tell the dimmer module to turn on, rotation commands are sent direct, etc.
The controller also receives these commands when it's active and can add to the functionality for inputs like double-click, but if it's down the basic functionality still works entirely as a normal person would expect. You walk in to the room and see a knob on a switch plate, you turn the knob and the light brightness increases regardless of the state of the internet, my home server, or even my network as a whole.
The other major advantage compared to Matter/Thread is that it's not IP based so it's impossible for any Zigbee device to ever have a cloud dependency. No matter how much some marketing dingus might want to, it can not be ruined.
I tried to stick to this philosophy, specifically the part about it working even if my local automation server is down, for a long time. But I finally found an automation case where I wanted functionality where I could not simultaneously have the functionality and have the switch continue working when the server was off.
Specifically, I wanted the switch to turn on different lights depending on the time of day. In the evenings in early morning I wanted it to turn on the dimmer floor lamps, and during the day, I wanted it to turn on the brighter Center room light. This was not possible without turning the switch from a light turning on device, to an automation activating device.
I thought really long and hard about if I was worth the trade off, and in the end I decided that my automation server was only likely to be down for significant periods of time if the power was out and the lights weren't working anyways. If I run into a situation where this becomes a problem for me, I'll reconsider my decision. Which is a great thing about the local control. If I make a decision that I don't like I can just change it.
There’s a pretty active ecosystem of ESP32 projects for HVAC systems. I’ve been working on a few that add Apple Home and Matter support with a local web interface for basic and advanced features. The web interface exposes things Apple Home or Matter protocols don’t represent well. Vane positions, different modes (dry, fan only), equipment diagnostics, remote sensor control, and even peer to peer communication for fully offline control (no WiFi needed). Plus it gets me a control path independent of the home automation stack. There’s a lot you can put on the device itself these days.
With another project, based on the ESP32-S3, I was able to cram grafana style scrubbable charts, full activity log, refrigerant circuit diagram, equipment topology, etc. I'm pretty excited for the ESP32-S31 since it's a nice jump up in performance.
I've bought multiple internet radios over the decades. The demise of them is always its dependency on a remote server which enables setting which stations you want to listen to.
The remote server always goes away after a couple years go by, and the radio is only capable of playing the stations that were set as presets. Then the preset radio stations go offline, or the URLs for them change.
same story as a meat thermometer someone told me about. the hardware outlives the server and still stops working. At least with opensource projects, if they are no longer maintained, its possible to fork and keep they going. hardware can be tough unless the device's firmware can be updated.
Basically any appliance is completely ridiculous to require an internet connection imo. When are you going to need to use a stove or dishwasher without being home? What value do you actually get from having a smart fridge that you can view analytics about from your phone?
the only useful thing about a smart fridge is whether if it fails.... i hope it would make a noise. One trick i used was a cheap ble temp sensor in the fridge that would report to the BLE adapter of a tasmota device that sends mqtt messages to grafana. then i would get alerts if it was open or something broken. happened a few times!
My non-smart fridge makes annoying noises when the door is open too long, and slightly less annoying noises the first time you open it after a power cut causes it to get too warm (I believe it depends on interior temp when the power comes back on?). It might make noises when it breaks in other ways, that thankfully hasn't become relevant yet
I guess connecting to home automation would be useful for a fridge that's sufficiently out of the way that you might not hear it. But for the fridge in my kitchen the noises emitted by the fridge itself are enough for me
Alexa is really convenient. i still think my rules still follow as long as core systems are still controllable offline. Which I really try to achieve through use of tablet on the wall (local wifi is still offline access in my head)
I live in such a more simple reality then a lot of people whom posts like this resonate with. I literally have two things hooked to the Internet in my house: my phone and laptop. Everything in my life functions fine, and I have just as much free time as most people as far as I can tell, and that's without a dishwasher. I do have a good assortment of scrubbers though...
If it requires internet access, it isn't smart. It is stupid. But for some reason they hijacked the term smart.
There's entire legions of people who consider themselves Christians. But I notice very little, if any, compassion for those in need: the neighbors, the ill, the refugees, or even the children.
Same with DoD -> DoW, and AI -> super intelligence. I wish I was making those up, alas.
I don't know about you, but whenever someone calls something "smart" I usually know in advance that it's anything but. If you have to call it "smart" just so people will find it useful, then you usually know they've been sold a lie. I mean, there are exceptions, but most of these things usually make easy things harder, or it takes longer to get things long with them due to some latency, than just using some old school, manual, analog technology. Usually, but not always. Please enlighten me on where I'm wrong. Love to hear it!
If they can work without the internet, how TF do I scrape your data and sell it for a hefty profit? I made the equipment cheap so that everyone wants to buy it!
Oh I also have a under-the-table contract with some intelligence community for some backdoors. You know it's a lot more expensive for them to actually send someone to test physical security, than just pay a contractor to sit before the desk collecting data, right? RIGHT??
I couldn't connect a matter device to my Home assistant via an Android app on GrapheneOS because it relies on Google Play Services. So much for the open standard!
I'm not really sure what this is doing on HN tbh, as it reads like 2018 entry-level IoT talking points, but it's 2026 now, but regardless of that.
__
I suspect that for resilience reasons alone, we might see a shift towards connecting less stuff to the public internet.
Not because consumers would complain. No one cares about consumers - including consumers themselves.
But because of the threat to the stability of the system, internet connected stuff poses.
The fridge meltdowns are an example of that, but you can equally stun an enemy economy by just messing with the smart lights in people's homes, as it is the people who work.. or don't because they're tired.
This would have been a great presentation without the AI prose.
> Below that is the chart from a few real days: 21 opens, with spikes showing when each one happened. Most people skip this part, and it’s the part that tells me whether I left the garage open without opening an app.
Unless it's law or AI becomes capable of rooting every device, it will never happen, most hardware gets out of the door with minimally functional software that only covers the immediate business need.
Software stack: if you don't want to spend too much time tinkering with the software, go for something simple like HomeAssistant with nothing else around and you will be just fine. For most people any software is more hassle than they desire, all the extreme customizations are not really needed. If you feel so special, home automation is not that special, not if you want mass adoption and convenience.
fair. the qr codes and nfc tags are for guests and family who won't install an app. they sit next to the wall switches, not instead of them. I put them inside the switch plate sometimes to make it hidden. kind of a neat approach BUT it does require access to my wifi and usually guest permissions
The internet is not the weak link, the internet is a security nightmare. You don't want a Chinese guy shut you off because all your Tuya devices can be controlled by them. You don't even want a random hacker to set your fridge to heat, like the recent France incidents.
Also, QR codes as a good UX? I like what you are smoking, it is very effective in disconnecting from reality.
I think a smart home hub of sorts should be something you can install in any home, like a water heater or an internet router. The hub connects to your wifi and manages all of your smart devices. You register your devices with it using a web interface that is only just like configuring a router
The web interface part would be the really complex piece I think. You would have to have some way for devices to tell it what features they have, so it could dynamically produce the appropriate controls per device
I dunno if this is really feasible to actually build but it's one of the only ways I can think that would allow average non-technical people to do this without having to administrate their own hardware and network settings and such
my next iteration i talk about migration to home assistant. at the time i started this process HA was very difficult to use and not flexible enough for me. that has changed.
If you accept and thus consented to a computer, or a device with a computer in it, without first verifying you can write to the media of its software, control the boot process, and will have sufficient access to that software, you get what you consented to.
Not sure why people are downvoting you, this is true.
My home automation rules are even simpler: home automation devices are firewalled off the Internet. If something does not work because of this, it gets returned, period. I do my research and only buy Zigbee or WiFi devices that can be hacked, so I haven't had problems so far. I also don't want any "smart" fridge, washing machine, TV, etc.
What use cases do you envision that go beyond the usual simple triggers and conditionals?
I could see using an LLM to set up more complex home automation rules that I am too lazy to set up myself. But for what kind of situations is it useful to have an LLM run the device directly?
The amount of RAM sitting in my house unused today is enourmous compared to the amount of RAM I had available 30 years ago. My 10 year old laptop alone has 32G. That's 1000 times as much RAM as I had in my entire house in 1996, and 200,000 times as much as 1986.
In a moment of weakness, I bought a D-Link wireless (wifi) water detector for the sump pit (it was on clearance for $30); it relied on a D-Link Home cloud service (free) that was closed down a few years ago.
Not wanting to toss it, I repurposed a spare Chromebook 14 that I was going to recycle and turned it into a Alpine monitor for the water detector, which I'm powering from the Chromebook's USB port (if power is lost in a rainstorm, I need to know about it before the sump pit fills up).
An immediate issue was that the D-Link firmware tried to "phone home" every 24 hours and would drop from the local network, since the server was kaput, and I had no clue what response it was expecting from the server to keep it alive. Solution; "reboot" the unit by interrupting USB power (with a Pico and MOSFET) every 23 hours. There's no question that home automation should work without the internet.
Contactors are built to run giant industrial motors for years, nevermind my little 1/4hp pump.
The way I built it lets my mother bypass it by unplugging the pump from the control box and plugging it right into the wall outlet.
So, hopefully it lasts years. If it doesnt, anyone can bypass it
https://github.com/morluto/rea
https://rea.tools
https://github.com/AI4AIResearch/Awesome-REA
https://awesomerea.org/
Do we just need to establish bounties per cloud service target to reverse engineer and publish a spec, copyleft code, and reference architecture? Maybe https://www.fulu.org/ could host the results? Like OpenAI and Anthropic brute forcing math proofs, we can brute force interoperability (imho). Closed systems and tokens go in to the reverse engineering factory, out comes open systems that remain open to all.
https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties
(think in systems)
My rules for home automation are largely the same as the article, first and foremost the existing physical UX of switches and stuff should always work, and ideally automations should be nearly invisible: They should subtly be convenient and monitoring should be useful, but nobody should be confronted with a weird change of lifestyle because a house has automation. And nobody should ever need an app to use their house.
Anyone made any progress on rooting it?
You can then flash new firmware over USB.
If you're referring to the water sensor, it's definitely not parent-friendly, but I sometimes have to bail water during power outages from thunderstorms. It has to work during a power outage and an old Chromebook was cheaper than a UPS.
I kind of ran out of time for messing around with the sensor, but I did think of either dumping the Winbond chip on my reader, or using a .bin file that was used for OTA updates and pushing a modified version down locally.
That likely would have been "cleaner" vs. a 23-hour reboot cycle. I likely would have wanted a dump first in case I borked the firmware. The Python monitoring script just uses standard HNAP to read status codes from the sensor in 30 second intervals - I think there's some way to push updates via HNAP as well.
Thanks for the reminder - may be a good project for winter, when there's no chance of needing the sump.
- buy the cheapest hardware that gets the job done
- ignore negative reviews that are software related
- upon receipt of devices, ask claude for local-first cfw
- have fun for a few hours acting as a meat proxy
- boom, cheap local-only smart home is done
Use a SBC or nas for home assistant. This process worked for me for switches, a thermostat, an air quality monitor, a thermometer, and a window fan.
Would’ve paid ~2.5x for hardware that had the appropriate local-first capability out of the box. Instead this all fit within an existing $20 subscription to an inference provider. DS 4.1 running locally was on track too just more slowly.
Custom firmware?
1. buy the Zigbee version
2. boom, local only smart home is done
I guess if there's a device that's actually wi-fi only then I'll have to go through your flow but so far there's been no need.
I found a few wifi and bluetooth devices that were cheaper than or didn’t have a zigbee equivalent. Window fan and air monitor specifically.
I didn’t do an exhaustive market search, just sharing my anecdotal experience. It’s a great feeling to be able to focus on hardware capabilities and price, then will the software you envision into existence via AI accelerated RE.
In Thread >= 1.4, devices can request globally routable IPv6 addresses. The Thread 1.4 white paper does not hide the intentions:
The Thread 1.4 Border Router acts as the IPv6 router between the Thread network and external networks, including the user's home network and the larger internet. It is by default configured to support external communication [...]
Cloud Connectivity: Direct internet connectivity enables Thread devices to easily connect to cloud services. This facilitates remote monitoring, control, and firmware updates, enhancing the user experience and enabling remote device management capabilities. Device vendors can now directly service and support their deployed fleet of devices, regardless of which application ecosystem each device is integrated with.
https://threadgroup.org/Portals/0/Documents/Thread_1.4_Featu...
This is what you get when you let Google, Amazon, Apple, and Samsung design a smart home standard. They'll use every opportunity extract analytics and increase control. You'll own nothing and be happy.
Zigbee, Z-Wave, and ESPHome over WiFi/Thread are the only major modern local and privacy-preserving smart home standards.
Matter over WiFi is also not fully local for obvious reasons (though you can try to block them on the router/firewall and/or put them on a separate VLAN).
These are cheap chinese adware driven sensors. Security is not their priority.
I only use "Local Polling" or better, and highly prefer "Local Push".
I managed to get to:
The cloud is the weak link
- No internet, no problem. ...
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If you are writing for other machines to ingest it, whatever. But if you are writing for people it for me at least signals that you don't really care about the message that you want to get across, and are fine with a watered down LLM average.
If you're personally getting a headache from reading AI writing, all this does is transfer that headache to the rest of us. Thanks. /s
I will not be happy because we will be lost as a culture when we give up on this.
Its like you went to a potluck and brought a salad with you, you just closed your eyes and threw some things from the fridge together without thinking, it's all mixed together now and you don't know if something was old/moldy.
You are proud and happy that you brought a contribution, and you feel like your responsibility/duty ends there while the people who want to eat it have to be careful and fish things out, or just avoid it because they can't be sure if it was old or not.
Natural language is a non-verifiable domain due to the ambiguity of the intent, so we will never get away from this issue in LLM-land. You can't know intent of the writer unless they wrote it themselves.
I don't allow my devices to update their firmware. If the device does not work out of the box, I return it, end of. My car has also been taken off the grid.
That speaker linked to your phone should not need an internet proxy to communicate. It should allow for direct USB communication so it can share one power source. It should allow for Bluetooth communication so it can be in a different close location.
CoT should follow the rule of nature and take the shortest path by default.
What is better for society? The LLM modal running in a local environment or the one running on a data center that can be easily taken out via a power outage, fiber cut, national disaster, or a kinetic weapon?
I rather that LLM modal used at the hospital be ran locally and keep servicing patients even though the original data center was demolished by mother nature.
Smart home devices should not freeze up whenever internet is down. A device like Google Nest should have the minimum decency to allow you to interact with it via local Wifi (which continues un-interrupted). It is fine if half the functionality doesn't work. It is fine if the "AI" doesn't work, but at least allow me to fcking change the temperature manually
Same thing with devices like Google Wifi which freezes up or run hot loops like headless chickens when internet is down.
There should be a system like the nutritional information on food and beverage products, as time went by most people read those and choose accordingly, which then incentivize companies to adapt their offering. We could imagine something similar which would define clearly the capabilities of the hardware or software sold, clearly labelled on the physical package or on the online shop with an easy classification for consumers to understand.
If they could get away without even having a Wi-Fi router and just use their cellular plan they would. Why? Because there are plenty people who are happy with just whatever internet they get on their cell phone and don't want to spend extra for a router and an ISP
These days I mostly don't buy it if it's not Zigbee (unless I make it myself with ESPHome). Just this week we bought two panel heaters (for two rooms that need a little heating because our heat pump is mostly used for heating the living room and kitchen). They work great over Zigbee and we can have some useful automations (like automatically switching off when forgotten and there is no one in the room for more than 10 minutes).
Also anyone found the fix to smart bulbs constantly “updating”?
Also aside from maintenance there's no reason your WiFi should go down, an inexpensive UPS can keep it up for hours in a power outage. Even if it can't access the outside world, local routing works fine.
You can connect it to any evcc endpoint like a local homeassistant, or simply leave it on all the time.
I'm not happy with guaranteeing high availability on my HA install yet (it's not as simple as my pihole which is just a simple vrrp address over the two hosts) though so I just leave it in "always on" mode, and use the timer on the car to come on at 2310 (offpeak starts at 2300 on my tarrif).
I'd be surprised if a charger is genuinely only available via an cloud service, but from asking my neighbours if it doesn't have "an app" they wouldn't buy it.
I'd rather have an API I could poll/poke for the charger rather than set the charger to connect to me, but alas it doesn't have one.
My personal situation imposes even stricter versions of your #1 and #2:
1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
2. Smart functionality must not remove dumb functionality.
As one example: having a physical switch that controls a light and the switch can be operated by automation is good. Having automation control a light and the switch just tells automation what to do is bad.
This does make things hard sometimes. For instance, your sprinkler controller doesn't pass that bar. In fact the only one I've found so far that has a local API for automation plus full "dumb" on-device control (no Wi-Fi, no app) is RainMachine, and they are gone. If only OpenSprinkler hardware had a touch screen for local UI.
This is one of the reasons I love Zigbee, the device network is entirely independent of my computer network, can not directly communicate to the internet in any way, and every device I've put on the network so far can be configured to directly communicate with other devices so basic functionality remains operational even if the controller goes down.
For example, in my living room I have a Lutron Aurora dimmer dial locking a standard switch in the on position, then plugged in to the outlet that switch would normally control is a Leviton dimmer module. Both connect to the network controlled from a PoE Zigbee dongle, but have been directly paired as well so pressing the button on the dial makes it directly tell the dimmer module to turn on, rotation commands are sent direct, etc.
The controller also receives these commands when it's active and can add to the functionality for inputs like double-click, but if it's down the basic functionality still works entirely as a normal person would expect. You walk in to the room and see a knob on a switch plate, you turn the knob and the light brightness increases regardless of the state of the internet, my home server, or even my network as a whole.
The other major advantage compared to Matter/Thread is that it's not IP based so it's impossible for any Zigbee device to ever have a cloud dependency. No matter how much some marketing dingus might want to, it can not be ruined.
Specifically, I wanted the switch to turn on different lights depending on the time of day. In the evenings in early morning I wanted it to turn on the dimmer floor lamps, and during the day, I wanted it to turn on the brighter Center room light. This was not possible without turning the switch from a light turning on device, to an automation activating device.
I thought really long and hard about if I was worth the trade off, and in the end I decided that my automation server was only likely to be down for significant periods of time if the power was out and the lights weren't working anyways. If I run into a situation where this becomes a problem for me, I'll reconsider my decision. Which is a great thing about the local control. If I make a decision that I don't like I can just change it.
Unfortunately, almost no lan connected devices sport such an interface.
With another project, based on the ESP32-S3, I was able to cram grafana style scrubbable charts, full activity log, refrigerant circuit diagram, equipment topology, etc. I'm pretty excited for the ESP32-S31 since it's a nice jump up in performance.
The remote server always goes away after a couple years go by, and the radio is only capable of playing the stations that were set as presets. Then the preset radio stations go offline, or the URLs for them change.
I guess connecting to home automation would be useful for a fridge that's sufficiently out of the way that you might not hear it. But for the fridge in my kitchen the noises emitted by the fridge itself are enough for me
Something anyone can use.
There's entire legions of people who consider themselves Christians. But I notice very little, if any, compassion for those in need: the neighbors, the ill, the refugees, or even the children.
Same with DoD -> DoW, and AI -> super intelligence. I wish I was making those up, alas.
Oh I also have a under-the-table contract with some intelligence community for some backdoors. You know it's a lot more expensive for them to actually send someone to test physical security, than just pay a contractor to sit before the desk collecting data, right? RIGHT??
__
I suspect that for resilience reasons alone, we might see a shift towards connecting less stuff to the public internet.
Not because consumers would complain. No one cares about consumers - including consumers themselves. But because of the threat to the stability of the system, internet connected stuff poses.
The fridge meltdowns are an example of that, but you can equally stun an enemy economy by just messing with the smart lights in people's homes, as it is the people who work.. or don't because they're tired.
How would you know?
> Below that is the chart from a few real days: 21 opens, with spikes showing when each one happened. Most people skip this part, and it’s the part that tells me whether I left the garage open without opening an app.
seriously?
Also, QR codes as a good UX? I like what you are smoking, it is very effective in disconnecting from reality.
The web interface part would be the really complex piece I think. You would have to have some way for devices to tell it what features they have, so it could dynamically produce the appropriate controls per device
I dunno if this is really feasible to actually build but it's one of the only ways I can think that would allow average non-technical people to do this without having to administrate their own hardware and network settings and such
I'm talking about a fully built piece of hardware that comes in every house like plumbing and wiring does
https://x.com/home_assistant/status/2115496455876038961
Thanks for sharing this, I had never heard of home assistant before
You were warned.
If you accept and thus consented to a computer, or a device with a computer in it, without first verifying you can write to the media of its software, control the boot process, and will have sufficient access to that software, you get what you consented to.
And, you deserve it.
My home automation rules are even simpler: home automation devices are firewalled off the Internet. If something does not work because of this, it gets returned, period. I do my research and only buy Zigbee or WiFi devices that can be hacked, so I haven't had problems so far. I also don't want any "smart" fridge, washing machine, TV, etc.
The future of smart devices is a local LLM running on every single one.
I could see using an LLM to set up more complex home automation rules that I am too lazy to set up myself. But for what kind of situations is it useful to have an LLM run the device directly?