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Comment by klausjensen | Hacker News Reader

This is why my smarthome strategy is, that everything must work locally (as in without internet access) - but can be enhanced by connectivity to the internet and cloud-services.

I use https://www.home-assistant.io/ on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I only buy devices that work locally, are either super dumb (think zibgee lightbulb) - or are either already open or can be flashed/hacked to be open.

There is a huge community around this approach on https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/

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Yeah, this is the only sensible approach to the smart home. Especially since an Internet connection is much more unreliable then electricity.

That depends heavily on where you live. If the most common type of power outage is one that affects a small region, it's quite likely internet connectivity could remain unaffected. I had this experience in northern Sweden, where I had a couple of power interruptions but zero network interruption.

I live in Oakland, CA. Internet is definitely more reliable than electricity. My smart home devices send me an email when there's a power outage.

Could that be coming from the smart home device manufacturer noticing the device was abruptly disconnected?

It could be, but it is probably just they have enough backup power to send the signal.

It's more likely that the device sends a heartbeat every minute or so, either for notifications or just for this "device is offline" feature.

In this case, no.

The device itself is a Nest Protect fire alarm connected to 120VAC. It has a built in battery back up.

Most people's home internet connection relies on electricity though. Internet will necessarily be less reliable than electricity for them.

I just hook up a UPS and the first thing that is on it is my router and my key devices.

It is not just about power outages, it is also about cloud services closing, having outages etc - as in this post. If you only have devices that will work locally, that becomes much less of a problem.

Eh. Depends on how mission critical it is. I don't mind an appliance needing the internet as long as I can still physically operate it during downtime.

We should all move our homes into the nearest data center. I call the locker next to the Layer 3 drop.

It's interesting to me that this is (effectively) one of the requirements to get Apple's HomeKit sticker: it needs to expose an API that will keep working with HomeKit even if the manufacturer cloud service goes away.

The fact so few smart devices are HomeKit enables says a lot, unfortunately.

Another example of "progressive enhancement" vs "graceful degradation"?

As a side note, HASS on an Intel NUC is a much more pleasant experience, if naturally more expensive.

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