It's a device that doesn't need to be cloud connected... that's cloud connected.
Smart home stuff needs a local network to the home, that's it. A server going down in Virginia shouldn't mean a person can't run their vacuum robot.
Smart home stuff needs a local network to the home, that's it. A server going down in Virginia shouldn't mean a person can't run their vacuum robot.
For home automation the hobby, all the complexity is a feature. Fiddling with phones, apps, watches, identities, connections, security, networks, etc. is the fun of it.
Outside the hobby, though, I don't think people really want to deal with all that.
Generally, home devices you might automate are things you interact with -- locally. Local controls for a local device work really well, and the simplicity is hard to beat. Home automation wants to interject poor controls between you and everything.
E.g., the regular wall-mounted light switch is pretty close to an ideal design for a light.
No it doesn't. Only shitty "smart home" stuff does that.
Home automation automates things. There is no need to control, because it happens without needing to do anything. Simple example is outside lights turning on when it gets dark, though you don't need a whole system for that.
More complex example is: inside lights turn on when it's dark and off at an appropriate time only if no one is home.
I'm with you on the local control thing though. I use lots of scenes (one button to control multiple lights to preset levels) but they're all triggered via a button on the wall or an automation. You can control via app, but I almost never use that -- maybe if I'm on the couch and too lazy to get up to change something. Can also be set up to control remotely, but that's totally pointless with actual home automation.
Currently: Zooz ZEN32.
I’m having a hard time thinking of a more minimalist design than the Honeywell round thermostat. It doesn’t need a battery, or a processor, or anything other than a spring some fluid and a dial. The dial tells you both the current temp and your setting. I have to justify adding technology to improve it in some way but it just appears to add more problems.
The cloud-connected hub to enable remote control was a bolt-on, and by far the least reliable part of their ecosystem.
So while I totally agree that smart home devices shouldn't require the cloud, Insteon is the wrong company to beat on there.
Not only that, but least useful? I never understood the use case for why you'd want remote lighting control.
Better: set up automations.
* Outside lights go on when it's dark, until ~11pm.
* Outside lights also turn on with motion
* Some inside lights turn on when it gets dark IF no lights have been manually changed in the past few hours
* Inside lights turn off later in the night if they were turned on automatically AND haven't been adjusted manually since
These rules worked exceedingly well for me: We never came home to a dark house. If we were away, we didn't have to do anything yet the house didn't look like we were away. If we were home, the lights weren't "changing by themselves" (high spouse-acceptance-factor importance).
>>> * Inside lights turn off later in the night if they were turned on automatically AND haven't been adjusted manually since
Out of curiosity, how exactly do you accomplish this? How do you make sure IF no lights have been manually changed or if the lights were turned on automatically? Do you use iOS ShortCuts/ Automations? How do you persist states in them then?
The original SmartThings is a very weak device that can't do a lot of processing on board. Running in the cloud it is straightforward to custom the thing by, say, writing an AWS lambda function. If you had to install "device drivers" for every IoT device on the local device it could be easily overloaded.
As it is SmartThings featureful system that is easy to code for, for instance you can browse a pretty extensive logs in the system that would be hard to store locally. One reason you don't see a good IoT device that runs independently of the cloud is that it would be much more expensive and harder to integrate with.
You might not use it but one of the selling points of the IoT is the ability to remote control devices over the internet and having a bastion in the cloud is the royal road to that being reliable.
(please don't though)
I saw an article recently that claimed that there will be more repairable phones on the market soon, as France put in a law requiring a fixability score for products, and consumers responded by preferring fixable products.
The Cricut smart cutters were changed to require a subscription to a cloud service, and consumers dumped 'em. The company finally walked the idea back.
I'm interested in smart home products, but I don't like the devices randomly talking to a server somewhere. It's insane that your lightbulb talks to the internet. It's also a gamble wondering if I can reflash a specific device to use a known-safe firmware that only talks on my LAN. Similarly, if I were in the market for a smart cutter, I'm absolutely going to weight in the possibility of control of my device being taken from me and look at Cricut's competitors more favourably.
I recently learned that domestic sewing machines were built before planned obsolescence was a thing; I can still buy a 1902 sewing machines in decent condition (for example), as they were designed to be repaired. Bad for a company's monthly income, I suppose, but good for me as a consumer.
Imagine if lightbulb sockets were proprietary! It'd be madness. The current state of things with smart home stuff is worse than that, because at least there's a decent chance proprietary-lightbulb-socket world would have plentiful adapters and 3rd-party manufacturers for most or all types. The odds of a company stepping in to provide a software-side fix for Insteon dying, are slim.
Pretty sure lightbulb sockets used to be proprietary. And in the UK it used to be common to buy appliances with just a cable that you wired up to a plug because there was no common standard for outlets. There was even a brief period when appliances plugged into lightbulb sockets!
Remember the 90’s and what phone chargers looked like until the EU put its foot down and said “This is dumb, everyone should use USB for charging”. Now phone chargers are interchangeable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AC_power_plugs_and_...
Great episode of Absolute History about this: https://youtu.be/sxndE740wlo
The reason it changed is that it turns out a ludicrous number of people can't safely and correctly wire a plug. On older circuits if you wire Earth where Neutral should go, the appliance will probably work, but now you've significantly increased the risk of faults becoming fatal. Also UK plugs are fused and left to their own devices almost everybody will put a 13A fuse in the plug (the maximum size commonly available and equivalent to the maximum ~3kW energy draw for 240V home mains) even though very few appliances need that. So now when there's a fault and your 5W bedside clock radio is drawing 2kW (plenty of energy to start a fire), the fuse doesn't blow and instead your house burns down. It's very easy to tell manufacturers "Put the right size fuse in" because they're ordering crates of fuses they can just order the correct one, but home owners know the 13A fuse will "work" so they're not going to buy a 5A fuse instead and risk finding they've got the wrong kind.
As a nerd kid I cared a lot about this, and I would maybe find about half of appliances I was allowed to examine were wrong in some way, most often over-size fuse but sometimes loose wiring or even just straight up wrongly wired. Today those appliances have a pre-installed plug which is almost certain to have the right size fuse and be correctly wired just because it was done as a production line task so somebody was actually trained and given the appropriate equipment.
Cloud use is an anti-feature for me in anything that does not objectively benefit from cloud compute offload, rich collaboration, or access to large amounts of data. It doesn't totally rule it out but if I see that it has to call out to the cloud that's a ding against it.