- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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internet thermostat i dont even use mines remote
swap out those mechanicals windows for mechanical linux and then we’ll talk
I use Arch BTW.
Like just huge arches instead of windows or even doors, Arch is all you need.
I thought Emacs is all you need?
Real programmers use memes to program the machines of the world.
Tfw you come to your first day of work in critical infrastructure to maintain drivers and highly critical network applications and they’re all written in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE
Just play Zork all day until you get fired. They’ll think you’re coding!
Incorrect, you need
According to this documentary, you’re wrong!
I never thought about how a physical arch relates to physical windows. Interesting.
I am more of a hydraulic Linux person myself
You must feel compressed.
That’s pneumatic Linux, though.
Actually it’s GNUmatic Linux.
Likely not, the whole point of hydraulics is that the fluid is non-compressible!
In Spanish, we have a saying: “En casa de herrero, cuchara de palo”.
A rough translation would be “in the blacksmith’s house you’ll find wood spoons”. It’s not a new thing, it’s been like that since ancient times.Is that the same thing? The impression I get is that OPs post is about the IT worker actively distrusting smart tech. While I assume your example is more that the blacksmith doesn’t bother with making metal spoons for himself and using what ever he had already, which would be more comparable to a network engineer still using the ISPs shitty router.
We use it when, for any reason, a person who could easily use something related to their field, doesn’t use it. What it means is that if someone who could be using something because they know how it works, isn’t using it, there must be a reason.
Ahh, the impression I got is that one makes it sound like they are avoiding it because they can’t be bothered to while the other actively avoids it because its bad.
I think that is the most “correct” interpretation of it. Maybe they’re saying that it’s been bent over time.
We have a similar saying in Denmark, something like “shoemakers kids always have holes in their shoes” but in this case it’s more about that the people in the profession don’t prioritize their own craft. I’ve seen this with electricians where whole house is done but electrical sockets aren’t installed but for IT I think it’s more about distrust towards developers (takes one to know one)
Wooden spoons are better for cooking with cast iron pots and pans, which a blacksmith, being knowledgeable about metal, would be vey aware of.
Just as the it person is way more aware of the pitfalls of smart tech than your average person
Sure but what us the downside? It us a huge field with everything from local to requiring the cloud. You can’t blanket it all together.
I thought it was just teflon that is too weak to handle metal tools.
Metal tools also scrape the bottom lining that forms over time off, which is a big no no when cooking with cast iron.
The seasoning? I seriously doubt that. People seem to think cast iron is more vulnerable than it is. You can wash it, too, just dry it off after.
Whatever man, the wooden spoons taste better i guess, that’s the reason now
Are you sure? I’ve often heard chainmail recommended to clean cast iron.
P sure (but not entirely) that thats for when you purposely want to remove the lining, fx for resale, to make it look brand new
Havent personally heard chainmail reccomended tho, mostly heard of steel sponges, chainmail sounds way cooler tho lol
Depends how hard you scrape. Steel sponges with a lot of force will take you down to metal, chainmail might work nicely for cleaning stuck on food without damaging the coating too much but I haven’t used it.
Metal tools you need to really scrape at it to remove the coating, I don’t think it is something you could do by mistake.
“The cobbler’s kids have no shoes” in English.
But this guy is saying he doesn’t trust technology not to spy or be vulnerable.
Yeah but I doubt that saying has ever been used to mean the blacksmith thinks metal spoons are bad. Right?
It’s worth sharing but this post is more about the software engineer knows how much shit is spying on you.
It implies worse though, doesn’t have to be bad. Worse gets deprecated just the same.
Homeassistant is cool though. Also most of my stuff would work without it, they just works better with it.
None of the devices I bought for it talk to the internet! Home assistant can control and even update the Shellys completely over the local network.
As it should be
Remember Home assistant =/= smart home nonsense
I dont need some AI assistant to automatically manage my thermostat, I just want to be able to control it all using my own local server.
There are people who tie gemini into their HA instance
These people are insane.
Any suggestions for someone tech savvy enough to run a proxmox server for a handful of services, to get started with home assistant?
Can you replicate something like a Google home with voice commands?
I may or may not be getting a new house soon. I’m good with electrical to replace switches with wireless ones. But what do you get? Where do you start and where do you end? What about the WAF?
I saw LTT did smart switches in his house and it was a mess of incompatibilities.
Any good resources? I don’t even know what I don’t know haha
Look into ZWave and ZigBee mesh networks. I run Home Assistant with a couple hundred devices and integrations. ZWave tends to be my hardwired switches, and ZigBee tends to be my battery operated motion sensors, remotes, etc.
Personally, I run Home Assistant on its native HAOS on a raspberry Pi. In addition to Home Assistant, I have lots of automations running in Node Red, a no/low code orchestration addon.
For voice control, I’m playing with the Atom Echo.
Couple hundred?! Are most of those lights or something? Forgive me I’m totally ignorant about home automation.
Is it a hobby to you or have you found significant time/energy savings? Or both?
Part hobby, part time and energy savings. One thing I love about Home Assistant is the integrations with so many devices and services. I have smart switches., remotes, smart plugs, energy monitors, RGB bulbs, thermometers, etc.
It’s a slippery slope of wanting to integrate absolutely everything! My doorbell, alarm system, thermostats, garage door, door locks, and so on.
Many are local “smart devices” using ZWave and ZigBee, and others are cloud integrations with other services.
I’ve gotten to a point where the Home Automation routines I rely on are so useful that I get annoyed if I ever have to do things “manually”.
Couple examples:
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I have a remote by my bed that, when the goodnight button is pressed, turns off all the lights, sets the HVAC back to programmed mode, puts our computers to sleep, arms the alarm, locks the doors, and closes curtains.
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I have a button by my garage door that sets an “auto arm” toggle that opens the garage door, unlocks the door to the garage and the waits for me to close the garage, at which point it arms the alarm, turns off the lights, locks my computers, turns off the HVAC, closes curtains, locks doors, etc.
That’s pretty dope and I see how it could actually really help my ADHD if I had an “everything off” button. Thanks for replying.
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This video is a good starting point. If you’re already running proxmox you’re definitely ready. 👍
HAOS literally has a proxmox iso for home assistant. Slap that baby on.
There are homebrew voice units, but you’ll need a beefier system than normal to process in house. If you have apple devices you can expose certain elements from HA to apple home (and keep others obscured) to use your watch / voice etc.
There are a lot of home assistant communities and they are all very very friendly. It’s a massive learning curve and we’re all working together
Define beefy? Like 8 to 12gb vram? Or will an old 970 do the trick?
I really only skimmed over it before deciding IDGAF at this point (i’ll probably revisit later, but in the middle of renovations and kittens right now) but https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_local_assistant/ should set you right
Thanks!
I’d recommend using matter over thread, as I’ve had issues with ZigBee, although that might just be incompetence. I use smth by aqara for a thread bridge, and it all works great with home assistant.
Community scripts has home assistant, both lxc and VM options. Use the VM version and you can get HA up and running super quick.
https://community-scripts.org/
Also shout out to community scripts! If you run proxmox and aren’t using community scripts then you’re about to hate yourself for all the manual builds you’ve done.
Fuck. I almost wish I didn’t read this.
I have not been using community scripts, and I feel an amount of silly. Thanks!
I’ve been looking for some smart outlets, and it seems impossible to discover which ones can be used with normal well-known protocols and which can only be used through a phone app locked into a cloud service.
So, if I’m reading things right, anything that runs on Z-Wave or Zigbee will necessarily run locally, because those are mesh protocols?
Anyway, thanks a lot. Those are really simple keywords to check.
Yep.
My favorite smart outlet switch though was recently sold out and it’s an Aeotec smart switch 7. Zooz makes something similar though I think.
I’ve got it set up on Home Assistant so that whenever certain devices in my home are detected on or off via watt usage minimum changes I monitor on those smart switches, it toggles the Lutron Caseta (best smart light control there is) lights via commands for different rooms in my house.
I also have things like waterproof outdoor gate sensors made by Zooz that are smaller than a single stick of gum where the small flat watch battery in it lasts for almost a year and it will alert me when the gate opens or closes, but only when I’m a certain distance away from the house’s geofence I’ve set up.
You will also need an overall little USB stick to connect to your Home Assistant server device (like a NAS or Raspberry Pi) to control everything, but there’s one that’s made by Aeotec that does both Zigbee and Z-wave long range protocols. Z-Wave LR (long range) works really far too… like I think around a mile potentially, if you have a nice clear line of sight signal.
The Hook Up had a great video on this. He compared a lot of different options and ranks them based on functionality with and without internet.
Check out the new IKEA Matter over Thread stuff. They have two smart plugs (an indoor single plug and an outdoor double plug). You can flash one of the esp-idf example images to an ESP32-C6 and plug it into your HA server to turn it into a Thread Border Router for under $10. Everything on Thread uses a fully local encrypted mesh network that by default has no Internet access (leave NAT64 turned off in the HA border router add-on).
P.S.: Make sure to update the firmware on the devices (which HA can do), as several don’t act as routing end devices until after the first upgrade.
Zigbee.
You will need an antenna /hub though. I use a sky connect antennae, it’s all locked into my house.
If you have to go wifi, tplink /tapo literally have a “local only” mode when you firewall them out. The only issue is they warn you you can’t operate them unless you’re connected to your home wifi. Which is rather the point.
I have several US V2 plugs from athom.tech and they work great via home assistant. They just sit on WiFi don’t call home and are reliable through hoke assistant
I agree when it comes to most “smart” home devices. However, I wired an ESP32 to my heat pump for remote control and automation, which has been absolutely fantastic. Also, I use a ton of ZigBee and zwave, since those are not “smart” by themselves and are local-only.
It’s the cloud bullshit that always breaks and spies on users that I hate.
Yeah home built and programmed smart devices are the way to go. I’m addicted to the rush of making dumb appliances automated.
The smartphone controlled aircon for $150 extra? Slap a $4 Esp in that. $400 to get sleek control of your central heating? $4 Esp. Turn on the ice maker on the commute home? You guessed it, $4 Esp.
Where the hell are you getting 4 ESP. And no its not good for everything. I buy zwave switches and water sensors.
$2 is a normal price on Aliexpress for an Esp32 C3 super mini, $4 is almost expensive
Not the previous poster.
A simple ESP8266 module from AliExpress is less than $4 (an ESP12F module - which is the FCC certified one with most I/O ports available - is $2), can be programmed with Arduino, has WiFi and that is more than enough for wireless home automation peripherals that are not supposed to do lots of processing (it will still easilly fit a REST interface for automated control and even a web interface for user control alongside it).
That said, in order to power it unless you can somehow draw 3.3v from the device it’s attached to, you actually need more parts and that’ll add up to more than $4 unless you’re doing it with batteries (and design and assemble your own voltage regulator circuit which is not that hard and is cheap, or maybe get a slightly more expensive ESP module that comes with voltage regulation) - this works fine if your device sleeps most of the time and just wakes up once in a while to check some data from a server holding instructions for it. For an always one device, best IMHO to use a 3.3V wall power adaptor, which will cost at least $6 from AliExpress.
The power considerations apply exactly the same for ESP32s.
I wanted to do ESPify my fume hood for some time now, but I don’t really know where to start. Do you have some website/howto for me to get started? To be honest, I don’t really care about smarting up the actual extraction part. I just want to turn on and off the lights without finding the non-illuminated touch button on the black glass. Who designs crap like that?
You need electrical experience, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to work with high voltages unless they knew what they were doing. The method depends on the device, every one is different. For the aircon unit the esp is an internal remote, so I spent time decoding that model’s IR codes and building a platform for reliable control via home assistant. I have fans around the house that use mains voltage motors with 3 speeds, those got an interlocked 3 channel relay board. The ice maker used digital logic, so the esp sits between the control board and the rest and intercepts button presses to keep track of state and the injects its own commands for remote control(not my work). If you are lucky there will be a guide on the internet you can apply to your specific device, otherwise you’ll have to work the project out solo from smaller guides.
I just wanted to interfere with the button board, I’d guess this will run on 3.3 or 5 volts. Simulate the touch events so to speak.
Yeah so you’d probably just be grounding the positive side of the button momentarily. I’m pretty sure I did that with a ducted heater remote once, if it’s 3.3 you can just attach it to a pin from your board, then send the pin low to press. 5v you might want a level shifter in between. Have you used esphome before/do you have home assistant? Then you can automate the press to a motion sensor or widget on your phone.
Yes, and I’m tinkering all the time. I’d get in with my multimeter and check the voltage first anyways.
Home Assistant 💯
At first I read “heat pump” as “heart pump” and I thought “what is this crazy fucker doing?”
🔊Hyper-Spoiler.mp3
Well, you shouldn’t keep a gun next to it, unless you want the printer to take ahold of it and rob you.
Why On Earth would you keep a gun NEXT to it!? That’s just asking for problems. That printer knows if it gets a hold of that gun, it’ll look like a suicide, not a murder.
“no smart home crap” Yeah… That’s just a choice. I have two homegrown smarthome solutions that are amazing and complex without creating security holes.
You can tell it’s an IT guy’s home assistant if there’s no hardware that requires someone else’s cloud.
My home automation philosophy is that everything in the house should work with or without internet. It’s going well so far.
This is the Way.
I’ll add that things should also fail gracefully. If something breaks, they should all revert back to working like the dumb equivalent. Dumb switches, dumb thermostat, etc.
For sure. That one is a bit harder to get right, but is good to keep testing and striving for.
My home assistant is set up that way. If I turn it all off, the house is a little less awesome, but everythiing works fine. You just have to turn on/off lights and open/close doors yourself now. you’ll have to diddle with the thermostat and ceiling fans more too.
And an electronics guy’s smart home if there is no wireless at all and all KNX and Ethernet wired lol.
Good recommendation for light bulbs?
Don’t do the lightbulbs (unless you rent). Do the power to the sockets.
Smart lightbulbs are a fucking rort
One benefit of smart lightbulbs is being able to control the colour temperature
Which is great if you do that on the reg
I use that feature every day and in multiple rooms.
There’s a great automation integration in home assistant that uses the suns position and time of day to automagically set the color temp throughout the day. It’s super nice to have the color temp get warmer as the sun sets.
Like the other user mentioned: depends on your setup.
I have recessed lighting throughout my house, so swapping to bulbs for all of them would have been an expensive pain. So I opted for smart switches. I got innovelli reds, because they were the best there was at the time. You can get them with any protocol you want (zigbee/zwave/wifi)
With a smart switch, you can control lots of lights with only one device. Originally I just added Shelly relays behind each switch, but I wanted the dimming capability of the innoveli.
If you do still want bulbs, nothing beats hue. But they are by far the most expensive.
As an alternative, we have found bulbs that can run tasmota with the MQTT integration to be perhaps the most reliable part of our smart home (as long as the hardware already had a descent CRI). I’ve heard good things about ESP home too, but we have not tried it.
If someone has some light bulbs that are laggy (due to cloud integrations) or a pain to use due to software, its worth checking out of tasmota or esp home can be installed on them to locally pair with something like home assistant. It turned a regretful purchase into a nice addition.
With that said, we don’t buy connected devices any longer without checking internet and cloud requirements first.
Tasmota is awesome. I flashed all my early Shelly devices with it. But now the native Shelly firmware is amazing, and it allows you to turn on local mqtt only. So I’ve stopped using Tasmota for everything besides the few devices flashed early and behind my wall switches. (I’m too lazy to pull them out)
Is it hard to flash bulbs with Tasmota? Don’t you usually need access to the pins? Or have an OTA option for updating the firmware?
The ones I had you could do it over the air, but some do require access to the pins. Even with soldering experience it is not approachable as bulbs are not packaged to be opened, it is part of why I check for offline or flash compatibility before buying as even the same “model” could have different hardware revisions. No info = avoid.
I love my lutron Caseta gear. Integrates with home assistant and reverts to dumb. Expensive ass dimmer though, and they run on a proprietary hub.
Zigbee bulbs, third reality and sengeled (sp?) are most of what I have attached to my home assistant. Stay away from the WiFi shit tho
do not
This is why I’m conflicted about getting online weather information.
Pretty hard to replace weather info without internet. I don’t have any automations that rely on weather info, and I have a cheap rain gauge that a friend 3d printed for me. It uses a simple zigbee door sensor to detect rain accumulation. Pretty clever device (not my invention.)
So eventually I want to automate the watering of my garden, and I intend to use the rain sensor to help there. But honestly, it never rains in the summer here in the PNW, so my 3rd reality moisture sensors are more useful than actual weather data.
Boom. Exactly. Self hosted solutions are amazing. We have choices about this stuff.
Home Assistant and local, cloud-free protocols and devices are great
I have an apartment and it is dumb
Tech here. Lots of smart home crap. All zigbee on Home Assistant
Zwave is also great, but typically more expensive.
Harder to get too, sadly.
when was the last update :p
Last night.
Why?
The fact these companies can release a $200 router or a $1000 smartphone and completely stop all security updates after only a few years is insane.
It should be regulated similar to how cars are regulated - with mandatory service and spare parts for many years.
Cars aren’t exactly a good example on how to curb enshittification, as the car industry pioneered enshittification and found a way around regulations every time so far.
While that might be so, I can still buy original spare parts for my 25 years old car and I could still service it at official repair shop if I wanted to.
The “official repair shop” isn’t the issue.
It would be third party repair shops. And amazingly you can.
Right to repair has done some good in this world
Sure, I can also drive it to any repair shop where they can buy repair parts and replace them or do whatever it takes to repair it. I can even replace the light bulbs myself, though thus part is not trivial :S
Yeah but, at least in my country, cars can’t be on the road (which would be the internet in this case), without passing the periodic inspection.
They have not found a way around it every time.
They all have seat belts
They all have ODB2 ports
There’s also a big company called Ubiquiti that sells overly expensive trash.
Their switches don’t even mirror more than a single port.
I always loved the saying, “The ‘S’ in IoT stands for security.”
As plenty people already said here, I don’t see any problems if it’s staying in your local network, selfhosted
Perhaps not the best example but one to start joggin’ the noggin: it can be a weak point to start an attack your local network, if someone is adjacent (like standing in range of your WiFi). Obviously not a likely scenario to most people reading, especially since HTTPS became normalised, but a reason to keep security in the discussion for local home networks.
That’s why you put those devices in a separate VLAN with no routing access to the rest of your network
I just don’t understand the desire to control everything in your house with an app. It’s not like that app can load or unload the dishwasher or clothes dryer. That would be automation I could really get behind. And thermostats are programmable and then left to themselves. Even ice makers are automatically controlled with a microswitch.
And yes, I did try the internet enabled thermostat thing and found I never used the app. Nor is the journey to the thermostat so arduous that I can’t get up and walk over to it if I should ever feel the need. Maybe I’m just too old to get it.
But if you like it and want it then have at it. I certainly won’t stop you from enjoying it.
If you don’t understand the desire then you don’t have a use case. And that’s ok. But that doesn’t mean other people don’t have a use case.
Properly set up home automation can reduce your energy usage. Track temperature throughout your house and open blinds, only direct heat/cooling to rooms that need it, etc. Sure a thermostat is programmable but it’s limited by the ability to just turn on/off heat and a few temperature sensors. You can drastically expand what your thermostat can do (ie motorized blinds) and information it has access to (temperature outside, current weather, etc).
Or maybe someone is the type to have panic attacks about forgetting to turn the oven off. Having the ability to see oven status on the go is nice.
Or maybe someone has a larger house than you and the journey to the thermostat is more arduous than yours. Or the journey to the dishwasher or clothes dryer to see if it’s done is arduous.
Or maybe someone has a disability and having quick access to various things is a huge time saver.
Maybe someone has a sensory issue and loud buzzing from a dryer finishing is problematic, so they want to disable the “finished” alert from the device and just receive a notification on their phone.
but if youre gathering that much data and making decisions with it, then from the OP “no internet connected thermostats” is a must. None of your smart home stuff should be able to phone home. Basically the openWRT argument but also for smart home. Use zigbee or zwave so devices can’t just directly phone home and must simply connect through a hub (that you should control).
tl;dr - plenty of reasons to want these things, they just may not apply to you.
Getting back from holiday in a few hours and the weather is cold? Turn the heating on from your app before you get back. Wow. Life changing. Don’t have a use case for most things being connected but thermostat really isn’t that crazy IMO.
“Set and forget” time based thermostat programming only works if your daily routine doesn’t change daily or weekly or have outliers. The ability to change manually, or add other factors (is anyone home? let it get a bit colder, since it doesn’t matter) is pretty great.
But I would still advocate for
no internet connected thermostatsfrom the OP. Your thermostat should be isolated to your home network (via zigbee/zwave or a quality VLAN) connecting to a server/hub you control. And your app should be communicating to your server/hub. Your thermostat shouldn’t be able to report back to google whether or not you are home.Door locks and garage door openers are sweet to automate. My instance knows if I left by car/bike/foot, and welcomes me home with the proper unlocking/opening.
Also, never having to worry about if I left the door unlocked or garage door open is nice.
I’ve never gotten any automated locks because I’ve always been concerned about security around them, but also, Ive had too many warped doors in my life where I have to lean on the door to get the deadbolt to properly set. Which means that there is no way an automated lock would be able to automatically set itself.
Is the answer here: “there are just some doors this won’t work on” or do the smart locks have some way of working around that?
I think you gotta fix the door before you can have complete confidence.
My automated deadbolt can ‘force’ its way shut when it has full battery. But when it gets low on juice, the door needs to be ‘fully shut’
So your best bet is to better align your strike plate so the door doesn’t need shimmied to close fully.
I just don’t understand the desire to control everything in your house with an app.
Shrinking the size of my wallet and getting rid of all my keys has an instant appeal. I’d much rather just carry around a single phone-sized multipass than a janitor’s worth of hardware for accessing a dozen different gates and appliances.
Did you notice your electronic locks all have keys for when they fail? For me, I only need one key for my door lock so it adds nothing noticeable in my pocket. And in all my life I have never seen any home appliance that needed a key to operate-- excepting something like you would see in a laundromat. But you likely don’t have the keys for that either.
As for gates, I’ve owned a lot of gates to control livestock. None of which needed a padlock. But that is very much a YMMV thing. Still, if you have a need for locked gates, a set of combination locks all set to the same combination or keyed locks with all setup for a single key once again minimizes the need for a bunch of bulky keys. Plus they are all cheaper to install and operate. You can literally operate an infinite number locks with just one key or combination.
Did you notice your electronic locks all have keys for when they fail?
No, because I don’t have them. I have a fake rock with a key in it and generally don’t bother locking my front door anyway. But I’m lazy and cheap, not terribly interested in changing out all my locks myself or paying someone else to do it for a marginal quality of life improvement.
Still, if you have a need for locked gates, a set of combination locks all set to the same combination or keyed locks with all setup for a single key once again minimizes the need for a bunch of bulky keys.
Sure. And if you’re setting up a security perimeter from first principles, that’s fine. But then you add an interior gate or you need to replace a lock that’s rusted through or yadda yadda life happens, and you can lose the single key design.
Case in point, my front door lock did foul a few years ago. My wife changed out the front door but didn’t bother to sync it with the back door. She didn’t want to bother with an electronic lock because she thought they were too expensive. So now we’ve got a front door that doesn’t match the side door or the garage door. And we only have two keys to the new lock, one of which has been lost almost immediately.
A digital system that I can just sync from my phone would be far more appealing than juggling keys. Or staring at a key dish and trying to remember which ones actually link to which doors.
You can just get another re-keyable lock for any added later locks or replacement lock sets. It’s not rocket surgery and one of the reasons why you use re-keyable locks. And if you lost a key, just have a new key made. It’s cheap and quick. So you are still only needing one key per user. My key ring has a remote for my car, a post officebox key, (they do not deliver my mail to my house), and one door key to the house that has 3 locking doors. The car remote is by far the most annoying thing in my pocket.
Look, we all want to be part of some cool kids club. I want a new 3D printer because despite my trusty old bed-slingers working flawlessly, I would like a shiny new enclosed Core xy printer so I can be as cool as everyone else with a printer. And if I’m not careful, I can have the same problem with shiny new pocket knives at times. Same thing with digital homes. It’s driven by the cool factor rather than any real necessity. So go ahead and connect everything you want. But at least admit to yourself that probably half the reason you do it is just to be a cool kid.
You can just get another re-keyable lock for any added later locks or replacement lock sets.
All things that are a pain in the ass.
So is replacing an electronic door lock and a hell of a lot costlier.
I also got rid of a bunch of keys, and I didn’t need an app to do so. if I have to use an app, I’d hate it
You still need an interface. Bunch of ways to do it.
Yeah, i think its all about use cases.
I use home assistant in a tablet on the kitchen wall, for light control, ev charging and battery level monitoring for mine and my wife’s car which is not intuitive or easy in the official app. I use it for our shared calendar. Amd weather updates as well as for monitoring my 3d printer and cctv cameras. I host everything locally. Nothing is in the cloud except for the API i need to monitor the EVs and the weather server. I keep finding new things to use it for. I dont do much automation with it. But i find it very useful overall.
Personally, the vast majority of my smart home stuff is light automation. It’s nice having a selection of lights automatically turn on half an hour before sunset, and it’s nice having a button next to my bed that either turns on the reading lamps, or turns off all the lights in the house depending on how long I press it.
Though in fairness, I am drifting back towards having my lights controlled by buttons, because voice control is mostly bollocks. But now the lights font have to be the ones wired in to the house. It can be any that I can add to Home Assistant.
Nor is the journey to the thermostat so arduous that I can’t get up and walk over to it if I should ever feel the need. Maybe I’m just too old to get it.
I live in a three story house, and sometimes only notice when what the thermostat is set to when I’m tired and ready for bed. Climbing a flight of stairs after going down and changing the thermostat doesn’t appeal much. I also got it on sale, which was nice.
That’s why you have a programmable thermostat. Set and forget. No need to climb stairs, (good exercise), to change the temp.
LOL. That’s not a bad approach. What I find happens in practice is that we turn it off during season transitions so we can open the windows, and then forget or need to turn it back on again to deal with the fluctuations in the weather. The temps here have shifted as much as 50 degrees in a single day. Hard to program for that in advance. :)
I live in northern Minnesota, so we get that a lot too in the spring and fall. But my thermostat is set to auto with a minimum temp of 68F to turn on the heat. And 74F to run the air conditioner when needed. It works with very, very little intervention from me year round.
Yeah, that’s a good option. However those temps swings also mean that it’s likely to get back down (or up) again the next day, and in the mean time I’m potentially running the thermostat.
I’ve also got an old brick house, which means that thermal mass is a thing in a way that’s hard to explain to people who live in modern buildings, but the easiest way to understand it is to realize the house walls are a lot slower at changing temps than the air, which will also mess with the thermometer.
Having kids makes a big difference. It’s very useful to be able to shut off all the lights in the common areas and turn off the lights in their bedroom when they fall asleep. It’s also nice to be able to push a button to start a song on the speaker for musical routines (like cleaning up breakfast to Blue Danube or running to bed to Night Comes from Pikmin).
We also have a TON of lamps, and their switches are not always easily accessible (especially because our house is a perpetual mess).
The smart lock is because my wife always used to ask me if I locked the door after I got into bed, and I never remembered because ADHD.
I have some lights and speakers, that’s it. I like some automation things like speakers get set to X volume at 7pm, you can say “goodnight” and it has a list of items it does, asks for alarm, turns off all Lights, set speaker volumes lower, sets music in the living room for the doggo.
I have my network locked down and and IoT ssid. I like a few of the conveniences and I watch my network and traffic like a hawk.
I also didn’t get Internet connected thermostats until the utility company added demand response discounts. It’s really a smart grid technology. This does mean that it should be secured as such, otherwise it’s another vector to attack the power grid (set all thermostats to maximum and cause blackouts). Regulations haven’t caught up.
The more you understand tech, the more you trust the simplest version of it 😅
This isn’t humor, and most tech people have some of this shit. 3/10.
Ive been gifted a few IoT things over the years. They stay on their own network / VLAN or are unplugged entierly when not in use. The meme about keeping the firearm near the one thing I cant reasonably make myself is not innacurate. Tech workers are aware of the vulnerabilities and issues with cheap insecure IoT nonsense. As part of one of my nerds cyber security learning we hacked a smart cat feeder to snoop on wireless networks and allow a back door (we had their permission, it was a gift that was unneeded so they let us take it apart).
Edit: also a ton of that junk phones back to AWS, and usually pretty lazilly, if your learning pen testing or cyber security its a fun exercise to get this cheap crap and find out how it works.
Cool but you’re not even close to ‘most tech people’.
Guys, gals, non binary pals; I can’t emphasize this enough. The average tech worker Isn’t some Linux guru working for a VC sending pics of their thigh highs. It’s a middle aged millennial with kids who just wants his shit to work.
Home Assistant is a free and open source alternative for home automation. Don’t have to completely give up the future.
i’ve worked with highly competent programmes and sysadmins whose houses are entirely connected. they do exist.
I work in IT, been a software developer for decades.
I have a full on smart home, all the smart tech you can imagine. All connected and running locally via home assistant.
Smart tech isn’t bad, shitty tech is.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“AWS is down 😞”
Same for me. I don’t really like to expose my home and I don’t understand how people are so eager to plug in shady WiFi stuff into their network. I’ve got one “smart” device with WiFi connectivity I’ve allowed to connect to my network, but I’ve disallowed going online and I’ve put it into a different vlan.
Friend of mine: “let’s set up a camera in our bedroom to check on on the dog when we’re away.”
The one thing I will never use a smart device for is my door lock. I don’t understand how tech literate people really trust that.
I was considering a smart lock for my (armored) front door, but just because there are some locks manufactured here in Italy that can be set to be controlled by external contacts.
Which means I could use and ESP or similar with esphome, now they also support wired, ethernet ones.
That’s way more secure than the shitty lock I have now, I’ve seen videos of people picking that with a decoder device in 30 seconds.Locks are not secure anyway and even if it is the most secure lock ever built may I present a window. Most break ins at least when I did home alarms where smash window right beside door and unlock it.
True as well, but a broken window or a lockpick my neighbors might be interested in.
Again, my door is armored and I live in an apartment high up enough that climbing, while possible, is challenging.
Together with non-flashy vehicles and the complete absence of anything valuable (besides RAM!), we’re not an interesting target. Even if someone broke in they’d have to be an electronics enthusiast to find anything worth stealing.
I have a couple WiFi devices for smart home like some TVs and thermostat. All blocked from WAN access and used for local control.
I’m gonna guess that you put a decent amount of time into figuring out a good set of smart home products and maybe even put some effort into looking up which products play well together and what configurations are ideal.
And that’s great if you enjoy shopping for, setting up and maintaining all those toys. But we all know there is too much shitty tech out there to think that it’s a good idea to grab a bunch of smart home stuff at Best Buy one afternoon and just plug it all in and call it good.
I think the thing is, folks in tech are less likely to be cool with, for example, exposing their door locks on the internet without doing a decent amount of due diligence. You have to want it enough to put in the work to make sure you have something that you can feel is secure, smooth operating and meets your personal privacy expectations. It kinda has to be a minor hobby. Which is cool if you happen to enjoy it or get enough joy from the result to make it worthwhile.
For me, I have enough hobbies and pastimes. I’ll put in the effort when the payoff is high, like for a home media server. But there’s no way in hell I’m signing up for future chores and headaches just so I can control my window curtains from my phone.
Nope ZigBee or zwave cool. Not that hard. Next work offline with home assistant OK.
as a hardware iot security person, that is possible but too much attack surface to manage
ZigBee, Z-wave and Thread have virtually 0 attack surface from an IoT perspective, and even then what are they gonna do, do radio hacking to turn off and on my lights? It’s not like they can be used in a botnet.
Locks is a bit more risky as an endeavor, but again, it’s probably easier to pick the lock than hack it… Actually with the quality of many smart locks, smashing them is easier still.Smart TVs are way more problematic devices for example, as soon as they stop receiving updates, you have a bunch of high-speed internet connected devices with unresolved exploits just sitting there waiting for the right chance.
Hear hear.
I feel the meme in the post is created by someone pseudoilliterate in technology. But I can guaranty you they have a smart TV connected to the same WiFi as all their computers and maybe a nas or home server.
Setting up zwave or ZigBee networks is not an attack vector.
ive used smart light bulbs in a botnet before. and if you do a teardown on one of those locks you can probably get the firmware and uart to get the unlock function which you could use theoretically to unlock every single one
ive used smart light bulbs in a botnet before
Yeah that’s why I never mentioned WiFi ones. Which can still be secured by not letting them access the rest of the network or the internet. That’s what we do in industrial automation, security standards for PLC software tend to suck, but that’s irrelevant if it can’t be reached.
and if you do a teardown on one of those locks you can probably get the firmware and uart to get the unlock function which you could use theoretically to unlock every single one
I don’t see how that’s relevant for a lock that’s inside an armoured door, it’s only accessible by disassembling the door, at which point unlocking it is moot.
The key thing is you have exclusive root access to all of it and spend time on admin.
Ditto. A smart home that can operate even if the Internet is offline was one of my core goals setting this up. And save for a few exceptions, I accomplished it. It’s so jarring now to go on vacation and not have all this automation.
This is exactly the line of thought I think people aren’t seeing as the gap. Y’all are too comfortable expecting the internet to be on 24/7. Or the power, for that matter.
If Cloudflare shits the bed again, are your lights stuck on or off? Can you not turn up the heat? We’re in a period of history where things will bet worse, not better. The last thing I want is “error: can’t connect to internet” being why you can’t turn the things you can touch in your house on and off. I get it if you’ve managed to do the work to have it all locally hosted, but just as-is seems like a bet against one’s self.
When the power is off chances are that whatever is integrated is degraded anyway. And for actuators just choose some that fail gracefully and allow manual handling. For the rest use HA as much as possible, favour local integrations with no cloud dependencies… and when there are dependencies than make sure the override is available physically (looking at my vaillant HP). Then stack UPSes or even better home grade batteries (my next endeavour) and have backup connectivity to internet and you’re a peachy as can be.
