The reason really is the extreme arrogance of every single manufacturer that wants you to install their app and use their ecosystem. That might have worked if one of them became super dominant and pushed everyone else out. But because that didn't happen, now I have to install 20 apps for 20 different manufacturers with no guarantees of interoperability.
Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly stay away until this is resolved. Skyrocketing inflation is not doing anything to change my mind either.
It also wants all three of wifi, Bluetooth, and location on, otherwise it provides a reminder that you have them switched off - even though it works just with wifi on.
Most of this smart home stuff doesn't do much. Managing lights and entertainment just isn't that interesting. It doesn't cook or clean. Vacuum, maybe.
There's been generation after generation of lighting control. There was a 1950s/1960s thing of putting everything on relays with 24V control signals and panels full of rocker switches. There was x10 in the 1980s. There were "smart" light bulbs in the 2010s. It's just not all that useful.
I mentioned this a few years ago, after I came back from an "Internet of Things" meeting in Dogpatch, in San Francisco. The Samsung guy pitched a refrigerator with a tablet mounted in the door. It didn't really have any more functionality than a refrigerator plus a tablet, but cost more. I asked him why, and he told me because there's a fraction of the population that likes to show off their kitchens, and it would be marketed to them. There were a few other IoT things pitched, all forgettable.
What struck me at the time was that we were in a room that really needed intelligent control. It was an office/meeting space, about 5000 square feet, in an old industrial building. Openable windows looked out on the bay, and there was a manual system with a shaft with a chain fall and a rack and pinion system to open the windows. A similar mechanical setup controlled windows in an openable skylight. The room also had a modern HVAC system, ceiling fans, and lighting.
None of this was coordinated. What should have been happening was that, as people came in and the CO2 level went up, the bay side windows and skylight windows should have opened, to get the CO2 level down and cool the room a bit. As the sun set and the outside temperature dropped, the bay side windows should have mostly closed, the ceiling fans should have started in the upward direction, and the skylight windows should have stayed open, to prevent the room from cooling too much while keeping the CO2 level down. Lighting should have increased as darkness fell.
As it got later, and people started to leave, the bay side windows could close completely and the fan RPMs could drop. When everybody left, as noticed by motion detectors, the system should have dimmed the lights and done a quick fresh air purge - skylights open, bay windows open, fans to max in the downward direction. Temperature would drop, but unless it went below 60F, no need to turn on heat on an empty room. Then everything seals up tight for the night. Very little energy consumption.
Tomorrow is another day, and the room should continue to react to the people load.
But no. You rarely see that kind of control. Except in hotel function rooms. Hotels put in systems like that because they have big rooms with widely varying people load, and customers who complain if a conference room is stuffy or hot or cold. Hotels have significant HVAC costs, and it's worth it to have the HVAC systems adapt to room usage. Honeywell and Johnson Controls sell systems for this for commercial buildings. They have both inside and outside sensors, and can operate fans, dampers, and HVAC separately.
I worked in a building that had that kind of "smart" controls. It was anything but.
In practice, it started opening and closing shutters for no reason, when clouds obscured the sun, and then went away. Or even when some sort of reflection hit some sensor, somewhere in the building.
I'm sure it's doable, but unlike factories, where automation is related to income and thus profits, most commercial buildings are built by the cheapest of cheaters, and so they will skimp on sensor, on intelligence, on integration, or whatever, just to follow the minimally-compliant features. So you get all kinds of erratic behavior, lack of redundancy, stupid intelligence that ends up overridden by humans.
The smart home is a thousand small problems to solve and should never be one catch all.
The automatic cat feeder works well. So does the roomba. I like my automated blinds but will stick with manual light switches. I consolidated my home theatre remotes. Note how they’re all seperate problems.
The smart home is here. It’s just that it was never a use case for a singular smart home platform. It was always 1000 seperate problems to solve that in no way ever belonged together and the experience was always worse when trying to combine it.
Synchronizing lights is hard, so in the living room kitchen where we have 4 different lights, having a way to turn them on and off is useful. We don’t have automatic lights anywhere else, but I notice at least, where we don’t, the light switches don’t get dirty (and you don’t get dirty from using the light switch), so maybe we will make them all automatic eventually just for hygiene reasons.
They will possibly all converge when they expose a "tool interface" to some kind of model-on-prem(ish) device that you install in your home. Think of an OpenAI or Anthropic or Apple or Samsung-branded "cortex" or "brain" that controls everything to some degree using fast local models, but outsource more complex orchestration up to the cloud. Smart home products will integrate with these devices because its going to open up a whole new generation of the same devices they sell, just with AI model integration this time.
These devices already have a precedent, your apple tv or google/amazon speaker thing. I think we will see these probably become LLM/model/AI gateways in the future.
We are basically already there, with HomeKit plus open bridge that can make any device visible on HomeKit (like nest cameras) and usable in automations (it works the other way also, it’s just a good way to get compatibility).
I would like to explore some open source solutions though, it would mean setting up a local system on a Mac mini for speech recognition and local processing. Bonus is you could use Anthony Daniels (KITT) as your assistant voice.
I think it’s also just that there’s not that much it makes sense to automate in the home. I run Home Assistant, and I do not have much of the typical home stuff on it. Why would I want to automate lights? My cat feeder has a timer already. I’m not about to get a smart lock and can’t imagine why I would want to automate one.
The useful things I do use it for are:
-heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing)
-automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost
-a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer
-a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies.
That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.
There are some really nice things that home automation enables that was previously impossible.
I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really bad wildfire smoke.
I can save a lot of money on AC if I open the windows at night and use the attic fan to pull in outside air. But if smoke rolls in, then we'd all be breathing 200+ AQI air all night.
I have outdoor AQI sensors, which if the AQI spikes, will close up the house and turn on the air purifiers.
> Why would I want to automate lights?
We're bad at remembering to turn lights on and off. We like having our porch light on an hour or two after sunset, but don't need to leave it on 24/7. We also have stairwell baseboard lighting that's completely unnecessary during the day, but very nice to have already be on if we get up in the middle of the night. To each their own, though. These are just nice to have. The AQI automation is an actual health benefit to us though.
I automate lights because we have a bunch of then to manipulate: four switches for the living room. Shades are worse, we have 10 windows so automating them so they open and close at once on demand is a win (I told my wife we should always keep them open and she was really against that, so automated was a marriage saver).
I have some security stuff setup to turn on a siren when tweakers poke around my open garage and doorway after 11 PM. It doesn’t do anything else, this is just a way to scare them off a bit and to let me know something is up. H the light will also turn red if detects a person at the door (again to ward tweakers off or make them feel watched at least).
I’ve been recently discovering the joy of robovacs, except we have three floors and so I found we need three of them, ugh.
Wait until you're disabled and there are days you can't get out of bed.
Having your bedroom lights fade in at low brightness a few minutes before your alarm goes off is also really nice.
If you live in an area that's not great time wise there are also a lot of arguments to be made for making it look like your home is occupied when you're away.
I have some lights on mechanical timers so the living room has a minimal amount of light in the evening, and they turn off automatically at midnight. That's useful to me, and it was cheap and simple. Haven't had to touch it in 10 years, except to adjust the timers to the seasons. The mechanical timers (Ikea) predate Alexa, and it's cheaper to just keep using them.
I also have a porch light that used to have a light sensor, but those sensors keep failing after a few years, and it's a hassle. Instead, Alexa has a schedule for that porch light switch, and you can specify "turn on at sunset" and "turn off at sunrise", and it's perfect.
And I have an Alexa rule for turning off the other lights that it controls (living room, dining room, family room, hallways, but not the porch light) at midnight. Simple and useful in case I forget to turn the lights off.
Great observations! I've no idea what the sales numbers show for smart home products. To me they all represent more effort to manage things I'm already happy with as is. My fav lighting gadget is the dimmer switch, which got introduced to the consumer market in 1959!
I was going to say I feel like my smart home technology is working great.
Then I remembered that I have to make shortcuts to bridge two products, it fails half the time, my ikea bridge has to be restarted every 30 minutes, and my smart garage door opener takes 30 seconds to respond now.
The smartest thing is having a light switch you walk over to. Doesn’t fail randomly, doesn’t need an internet connection to operate, doesn’t stop working when your internet is down.
My garage remote is in a PIN number lock box next to the garage. Open lock box, press remote, close lock box.
PIN number lock boxes are pretty unsafe, one could consider 2 simple solutions to stop someone trivially determining your PIN:
1) after closing the box, randomize the digits: humans are pretty bad at randomization, imagine modeling the randomization delta it won't be perfectly uniform, and the different discs would display similar distributions of rotation. Suppose spinning a disc to randomize it, one might have a peak at delta=+3 and sidelobes with lower frequency. Just a handful of observations when the codes were randomized will reveal the relative positions of the true code, and the only missing information is 10 possible global rotations, which is easy to brute force
2) A second approach is to not let an attacker learn anything by always presenting them with the same information: instead of randomizing, always reset to the same value (0000 or 9999 or any other value of choice). But in this case another attack becomes extremely easy: acoustically detecting the number of indentation clicks used per wheel by recording: without access to actuation direction that gives 1 bit of direction doubt per wheel or only 2^4 = 16 combinations left, easy to brute force.
I mean, they could also just saw open the box or rip it off whatever mounting brackets it's on. At some point you have to acknowledge you're making unauthorized access inconvenient rather than impossible.
Perhaps it popped because of devices from Google, Amazon, Apple, Sonos, etc. that surveil everything you say in their presence. My houses are fairly automated, but I have excluded any device with a microphone.
I don’t know why you’d want to over pay on basic widgets that are really just glorified timers, not to mention are likely just full of security issues waiting to happen.
arguing with an AI that is intentionaly obtuse, is not what anyone wants when its time to try enjoying your home. noone needs to have a conversation with thier lightswitch, its for turning light on or off not pretending to be your pal and trying to exploit emotional reflexes.
i have a broken record for this, "stop wasting time and effort trying to pretend to be human, and get to work building something that does what its told to do."
The reason really is the extreme arrogance of every single manufacturer that wants you to install their app and use their ecosystem. That might have worked if one of them became super dominant and pushed everyone else out. But because that didn't happen, now I have to install 20 apps for 20 different manufacturers with no guarantees of interoperability.
Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly stay away until this is resolved. Skyrocketing inflation is not doing anything to change my mind either.
Plus, their apps insist on advertising their other crap to you at every opportunity.
Stop pestering me because you think I haven't given you enough money yet. Go away.
It also wants all three of wifi, Bluetooth, and location on, otherwise it provides a reminder that you have them switched off - even though it works just with wifi on.
Most of this smart home stuff doesn't do much. Managing lights and entertainment just isn't that interesting. It doesn't cook or clean. Vacuum, maybe.
There's been generation after generation of lighting control. There was a 1950s/1960s thing of putting everything on relays with 24V control signals and panels full of rocker switches. There was x10 in the 1980s. There were "smart" light bulbs in the 2010s. It's just not all that useful.
I mentioned this a few years ago, after I came back from an "Internet of Things" meeting in Dogpatch, in San Francisco. The Samsung guy pitched a refrigerator with a tablet mounted in the door. It didn't really have any more functionality than a refrigerator plus a tablet, but cost more. I asked him why, and he told me because there's a fraction of the population that likes to show off their kitchens, and it would be marketed to them. There were a few other IoT things pitched, all forgettable.
What struck me at the time was that we were in a room that really needed intelligent control. It was an office/meeting space, about 5000 square feet, in an old industrial building. Openable windows looked out on the bay, and there was a manual system with a shaft with a chain fall and a rack and pinion system to open the windows. A similar mechanical setup controlled windows in an openable skylight. The room also had a modern HVAC system, ceiling fans, and lighting.
None of this was coordinated. What should have been happening was that, as people came in and the CO2 level went up, the bay side windows and skylight windows should have opened, to get the CO2 level down and cool the room a bit. As the sun set and the outside temperature dropped, the bay side windows should have mostly closed, the ceiling fans should have started in the upward direction, and the skylight windows should have stayed open, to prevent the room from cooling too much while keeping the CO2 level down. Lighting should have increased as darkness fell. As it got later, and people started to leave, the bay side windows could close completely and the fan RPMs could drop. When everybody left, as noticed by motion detectors, the system should have dimmed the lights and done a quick fresh air purge - skylights open, bay windows open, fans to max in the downward direction. Temperature would drop, but unless it went below 60F, no need to turn on heat on an empty room. Then everything seals up tight for the night. Very little energy consumption. Tomorrow is another day, and the room should continue to react to the people load.
But no. You rarely see that kind of control. Except in hotel function rooms. Hotels put in systems like that because they have big rooms with widely varying people load, and customers who complain if a conference room is stuffy or hot or cold. Hotels have significant HVAC costs, and it's worth it to have the HVAC systems adapt to room usage. Honeywell and Johnson Controls sell systems for this for commercial buildings. They have both inside and outside sensors, and can operate fans, dampers, and HVAC separately.
I worked in a building that had that kind of "smart" controls. It was anything but.
In practice, it started opening and closing shutters for no reason, when clouds obscured the sun, and then went away. Or even when some sort of reflection hit some sensor, somewhere in the building.
I'm sure it's doable, but unlike factories, where automation is related to income and thus profits, most commercial buildings are built by the cheapest of cheaters, and so they will skimp on sensor, on intelligence, on integration, or whatever, just to follow the minimally-compliant features. So you get all kinds of erratic behavior, lack of redundancy, stupid intelligence that ends up overridden by humans.
The smart home is a thousand small problems to solve and should never be one catch all.
The automatic cat feeder works well. So does the roomba. I like my automated blinds but will stick with manual light switches. I consolidated my home theatre remotes. Note how they’re all seperate problems.
The smart home is here. It’s just that it was never a use case for a singular smart home platform. It was always 1000 seperate problems to solve that in no way ever belonged together and the experience was always worse when trying to combine it.
Synchronizing lights is hard, so in the living room kitchen where we have 4 different lights, having a way to turn them on and off is useful. We don’t have automatic lights anywhere else, but I notice at least, where we don’t, the light switches don’t get dirty (and you don’t get dirty from using the light switch), so maybe we will make them all automatic eventually just for hygiene reasons.
They will possibly all converge when they expose a "tool interface" to some kind of model-on-prem(ish) device that you install in your home. Think of an OpenAI or Anthropic or Apple or Samsung-branded "cortex" or "brain" that controls everything to some degree using fast local models, but outsource more complex orchestration up to the cloud. Smart home products will integrate with these devices because its going to open up a whole new generation of the same devices they sell, just with AI model integration this time.
These devices already have a precedent, your apple tv or google/amazon speaker thing. I think we will see these probably become LLM/model/AI gateways in the future.
We are basically already there, with HomeKit plus open bridge that can make any device visible on HomeKit (like nest cameras) and usable in automations (it works the other way also, it’s just a good way to get compatibility).
I would like to explore some open source solutions though, it would mean setting up a local system on a Mac mini for speech recognition and local processing. Bonus is you could use Anthony Daniels (KITT) as your assistant voice.
Working on it, they all already expose a tool interface, you just have to know where to look for it and how to use it!
I think it’s also just that there’s not that much it makes sense to automate in the home. I run Home Assistant, and I do not have much of the typical home stuff on it. Why would I want to automate lights? My cat feeder has a timer already. I’m not about to get a smart lock and can’t imagine why I would want to automate one.
The useful things I do use it for are:
-heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing)
-automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost
-a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer
-a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies.
That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.
There are some really nice things that home automation enables that was previously impossible.
I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really bad wildfire smoke.
I can save a lot of money on AC if I open the windows at night and use the attic fan to pull in outside air. But if smoke rolls in, then we'd all be breathing 200+ AQI air all night.
I have outdoor AQI sensors, which if the AQI spikes, will close up the house and turn on the air purifiers.
> Why would I want to automate lights?
We're bad at remembering to turn lights on and off. We like having our porch light on an hour or two after sunset, but don't need to leave it on 24/7. We also have stairwell baseboard lighting that's completely unnecessary during the day, but very nice to have already be on if we get up in the middle of the night. To each their own, though. These are just nice to have. The AQI automation is an actual health benefit to us though.
I automate lights because we have a bunch of then to manipulate: four switches for the living room. Shades are worse, we have 10 windows so automating them so they open and close at once on demand is a win (I told my wife we should always keep them open and she was really against that, so automated was a marriage saver).
I have some security stuff setup to turn on a siren when tweakers poke around my open garage and doorway after 11 PM. It doesn’t do anything else, this is just a way to scare them off a bit and to let me know something is up. H the light will also turn red if detects a person at the door (again to ward tweakers off or make them feel watched at least).
I’ve been recently discovering the joy of robovacs, except we have three floors and so I found we need three of them, ugh.
> Why would I want to automate lights?
Wait until you're disabled and there are days you can't get out of bed.
Having your bedroom lights fade in at low brightness a few minutes before your alarm goes off is also really nice.
If you live in an area that's not great time wise there are also a lot of arguments to be made for making it look like your home is occupied when you're away.
I have some lights on mechanical timers so the living room has a minimal amount of light in the evening, and they turn off automatically at midnight. That's useful to me, and it was cheap and simple. Haven't had to touch it in 10 years, except to adjust the timers to the seasons. The mechanical timers (Ikea) predate Alexa, and it's cheaper to just keep using them.
I also have a porch light that used to have a light sensor, but those sensors keep failing after a few years, and it's a hassle. Instead, Alexa has a schedule for that porch light switch, and you can specify "turn on at sunset" and "turn off at sunrise", and it's perfect.
And I have an Alexa rule for turning off the other lights that it controls (living room, dining room, family room, hallways, but not the porch light) at midnight. Simple and useful in case I forget to turn the lights off.
An alarm with a built in light does that slowly getting brighter thing just fine.
These days a smart home doing that slowly getting brighter thing regularly fails.
Mine has literally never failed, and I haven’t owned an alarm clock in two decades this reply is peak HN.
Great observations! I've no idea what the sales numbers show for smart home products. To me they all represent more effort to manage things I'm already happy with as is. My fav lighting gadget is the dimmer switch, which got introduced to the consumer market in 1959!
I was going to say I feel like my smart home technology is working great.
Then I remembered that I have to make shortcuts to bridge two products, it fails half the time, my ikea bridge has to be restarted every 30 minutes, and my smart garage door opener takes 30 seconds to respond now.
So on second thought, yeah, this all sucks.
Maybe you should put a smart power socket in front of the Ikea bridge to power cycle it every 30 minutes?
(I'll see myself out then.)
The smartest thing is having a light switch you walk over to. Doesn’t fail randomly, doesn’t need an internet connection to operate, doesn’t stop working when your internet is down.
My garage remote is in a PIN number lock box next to the garage. Open lock box, press remote, close lock box.
That’s smart.
PIN number lock boxes are pretty unsafe, one could consider 2 simple solutions to stop someone trivially determining your PIN:
1) after closing the box, randomize the digits: humans are pretty bad at randomization, imagine modeling the randomization delta it won't be perfectly uniform, and the different discs would display similar distributions of rotation. Suppose spinning a disc to randomize it, one might have a peak at delta=+3 and sidelobes with lower frequency. Just a handful of observations when the codes were randomized will reveal the relative positions of the true code, and the only missing information is 10 possible global rotations, which is easy to brute force
2) A second approach is to not let an attacker learn anything by always presenting them with the same information: instead of randomizing, always reset to the same value (0000 or 9999 or any other value of choice). But in this case another attack becomes extremely easy: acoustically detecting the number of indentation clicks used per wheel by recording: without access to actuation direction that gives 1 bit of direction doubt per wheel or only 2^4 = 16 combinations left, easy to brute force.
I mean, they could also just saw open the box or rip it off whatever mounting brackets it's on. At some point you have to acknowledge you're making unauthorized access inconvenient rather than impossible.
Perhaps it popped because of devices from Google, Amazon, Apple, Sonos, etc. that surveil everything you say in their presence. My houses are fairly automated, but I have excluded any device with a microphone.
Not my Sonos setup doesn't, have had it for close to a decade now. Would replace it with brand new Sonos gear if I could.
Also, wouldn't be hard to put in a solution to block that type of traffic over the mic.
Sonos updated its policies a.coupme years back to allow selling customer data.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sonos/comments/1desj5c/sonos_update...
Also the devices don't fucking work and all require their own dumb app most of the time.
The value prop is just really really low.
I expect the more significant concern would be OpenClaw opening your front door for someone else.
I think it's just a joke/reference to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey
I don’t know why you’d want to over pay on basic widgets that are really just glorified timers, not to mention are likely just full of security issues waiting to happen.
What bubble? What pop?
This feels like "I am not seeing ads anymore therefore it doesnt exist"
People tried to monetize it too early.
The only "monetization" I want in my smart device, is
1. I give you money
2. You give me widget.
3. That's it. "Customer relationship" over.
smart devices dont play well.
arguing with an AI that is intentionaly obtuse, is not what anyone wants when its time to try enjoying your home. noone needs to have a conversation with thier lightswitch, its for turning light on or off not pretending to be your pal and trying to exploit emotional reflexes.
i have a broken record for this, "stop wasting time and effort trying to pretend to be human, and get to work building something that does what its told to do."
Was this whole article just a set-up for that punchline??