As someone into the Home Assistant community, this post is always annoying and wrong.
I struggled for years trying to find a way to set up door cameras that were secure enough that I can check in remotely. Around 2015, I finally had a solution.
I ended up spending a couple hundred dollars on a wired camera Setup from 2000s that streams to a old desktop. Then spend a couple hundred dollars on a network and software that I can dial in to view the desktop remotely. I also bought a VPN to dial in. Probably about $2k, which is chump change compared to corporation setups.
After three years and constant maintenance at roughly 10 hours a week, I gave up.
Then around 2020, i bought a Eufycam and setup, plugged it in and was up and running without any maintenance for like $200. They got a major security leak a year or two ago. Kinda sucked.
But damn, the tradeoff is so painful. Either strong secure network that costs a lot (time and money), or a insecure off-the-shelf solution that just works.
All this for the convenience of being able to see the mailman walk up to my door.
Home Assistant can be used as an AIO for smart home devices. I assume OP is referring specifically to home assistant integrations that are privacy friendly such as Z-Wave and ZigBee devices that only communicate to each other locally over radio instead of over the internet to someone else’s PC.
Even if I wanted to smartify my home using open source and local servers. I wouldn’t even know what to make smart.
Lights only ever need to be on when I am in the room, but every door has a switch that only requires my arm to lift a bit. So what is the point in powering electronics for that? Just wastes energy.
Anything with a lock is a no-go anyway.
I rarely close my curtains, and don’t see why they should do so automatically in the off chance of it happening.
I don’t need to touch my thermostat when I am not at home.
Can anyone tell me actual useful applications that aren’t just a gimmick?
If the sun is up past 8pm && person home close the blinds could be a reasonable example. If water is flowing to the bathroom run fan for 30 minutes could also be reasonable. If motion near front door take photo of door and email/text it to you could be a rudimentary form of security or knowing a package arrived.
The only thing I’d need to make smart is my box fan, because once I fall asleep it would be better to turn it off, but I like falling asleep with it on, and I can’t turn it off if I’m already asleep.
So I could make that a smart device.
But I got those outlet power adaptors with a mechanical switch timer that just turns the power off when the timer dial rotates. It’s got a 24 hour dial and multiple pins, so I could put my fan on a schedule if I wanted.
Cost like $5, I’ve been using them since 1995. Easy to repair and replace.
If it ain’t broke.
We only have two "smart* things: when we get up to pee at night, a motion sensor turns on a light in the living room. Much dimmer than those premade motion activated lights, so we don’t wake each other. Returning to bed and triggering the sensor again turns it off.
And when it has been raining more than a certain threshold in the past 24h, the outlet into which the pump that feeds our drip irrigation is plugged turns off, and on again when it hasn’t been raining for a while. Saves lots of water, especially when we are on vacation. (The rest of that system is " dumb", though.)
If you have solar panels you can turn on appliances or compute intensive tasks if they produce power.
If you have humidity problems, an alarm can remind you if aerating makes sense. If you additionally have a bad landlord you can prove you aerated three times per day and still mold did grow, so he has to fix something!
If you have a home theatre one button can dim the lights, turn on the TV, and close the blinds.
You can have your motion controlled floor lights only turn on red in the night.
Small things which are in total useful.
With HomeAssistant its easy to do without any cloud connection.
My living room has no hard wired lights, and only one plug is on a switch. Only one standing lamp makes the place gloomy, but the second can’t be on a switch. Rather than turning them on and off separately, I smartified them so I can do it via voice or app. Also if I’m cooking and my hands are a mess, I can ask Google/alexa/whoever to set a timer, add something to a shopping list, or tell me what temperature something needs to be. My favorite use is casting computer audio to multiple speakers so I essentially have a home sound system. Makes cleaning more fun. Also not having to get up to turn the bedroom light off at night is transcendent.
Nothing I use smart stuff for is particularly revolutionary, but it’s handy enough that I like having it.
Most rooms in my house each have at least a handful of different, indirect lighting solutions. I could pay an electrician to wire them all to a single mains switch, but then I would need them to come back whenever I want it changing. It would also be more complicated to have dimmers and set programs for different times of the day to to adjust the lighting to a number of presets.
I could just have the one or two overhead lights that these rooms came with, but that’s just an unpleasant to look at experience to my eyes all of the overhead lights got replaced with ceiling fans that have no lighting that come on when the room is occupied and over a certain temp.
You walk in the room, a bunch of lights and may be a fan come on at the right lighting for that time of the day, then they go off at a suitable period of time. I even have all my garden lighting coming on via motion despite some of it being a separate 12v system that’s battery and solar powered via a 12v zigabee multi channel relay.
One thing I want is for my washing machine and dishwasher to coordinate with my water softener to be sure there’s enough soft water left so that no hard water will go through them and to immediately initiate a regeneration if there isn’t while the appliance waits for the regeneration to finish before starting.
By a curious turn of life, I have enough technical expertise in the right areas to be able to design the software and most of the hardware turn a lot of my home smart like that in a safe way were I’m fully in control of it all (no 3rd party involved) … and I can’t be arsed, for very much those reasons.
I mean at one point when I was playing around with microcontrollers I was looking for ideas of things to do with some neat microcontrollers which are cheap and have built-in WiFi support and I just couldn’t find anything worth the trouble, for pretty much the kind of reasons you list.
Sure, lots of things can be done which are “cool ideas”, just not stuff were the whole “remote controlled from my tablet” actually significantly reduces the effort in doing something without introducing new problems (i.e. it would be a whole lot of work to get my apartment door to automatically open when my face is detected outside and then the thing has a non-zero rate of failure even I I train the AI really well, so when it fails I would be stuck outside hence I would still need to carry a key around, so in the end it’s really just less hassle not do it and to keep opening the door with my key), plus often the problem is that once you add “remote control” to a device’s design you just make it consume a lot more power, so now it has to run from mains power rather than run from some batteries that will last for a year or so.
The maximum home automation I ended up doing it is automated plant watering and that stuff has been designed without remote access exactly because it can run from 3xAAA batteries for a year even though it actually has to power a water pump which when it’s running does consume a fair bit of power (but it only runs when the soil on the vase is not humid enough, which is so seldom it averages out to very little power). Sure, it would be “cool” to read the humidity sensor from my tablet and activate watering remotely, but that doesn’t actually achieve the point of of automated plant watering - making sure my plants don’t die of thirst because I forgot to water them - whilst overall making the design worse because now it needs a lot more power and I don’t have a design anymore where I can just replace the batteries once a year or so.
I have a similar background, and I actually am automating my home. However, what Google/Alexa tote as automation isn’t actually automation; I still would have to say something/press a button.
I have a pretty healthy home assistant setup, with stuff like electrochromic film on my windows that will dim the windows if someone is sitting near them and the sun is at the right angle to be in their eyes because I hate when I have to hold my head in a position to keep the sun out of my eyes.
I picked an extreme example, but I’ve also got things like reminders when my laundry or dishes are done (running off of a metered plug, so it just detects power spikes from the machines), presence detectors in rooms to automate lights on/off, and a whole slough of things that will happen when I click the play button on Plex (lights go out, curtains close, windows dim). I’ve got humidity sensors in the bathroom for starting/stopping the vent fan, I’ve got particulate/heat/humidity sensors for starting and stopping the hood vent in the kitchen.
Obviously these things save a few seconds here and there but it is nice to not have to think about these things anymore.
In more civilized countries, we keep a sledgehammer read to bash the printer with, rather than a gun.
Other tech workers: My house is dumb because I use all money for either a new server or fursuits.
I’m just curious how the person is using the printer, or why they have it. I haven’t had a printer in over a decade since I left college. I need to print something maybe once every other year, I go to the library.
I know its a joke clearly, but what good is a printer if you don’t have anything to send a print job to it.
I bought a laser printer 7 years ago. It’s still plugged into my network and I use it about once every 6 months on average. My GF prints out papers for the kid to color on and whatnot.
A proper printer isn’t bad. Even in the work place. Just don’t make a public printer out of a shared usb printer and shut off the computer…
This is part of the reason I have no intention of having anything to do with IT once I retire.
I have one plan for retirement, goat farming. I go over that old list of reasons every few years just to remind myself there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
It was originally a joke I found online, after reading through the list it honestly just feels like I want a simpler life one day. The site isn’t mine but it came up when I searched for a couple items from the list (like “Goats security is checking the fence, not sitting in a room listening to someone for hours.”)
