How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Smart switches which fall back to regular switches if they malfunction is fantastic. Add some scenarios for double/triple clicks and you can do a lot without even bringing out your phone. E.g. switch off all the lights when leaving either by double clicking the switch next to the front door, or trigger that same "all off" scenario through the alarm being armed or the door being locked.
Making "smart home" stuff is about integration, which requires tinkering. But making a subset of your home smart such as "smart lighting" doesn't have to be so daunting.
With this hassle, you might as well just skip swapping the switches and just jump to smart lights directly.
A smart switch:
- Allows for anyone to interact with the light without apps/voice/whatever. You just hit the switch.
- Fails gracefully. If the controller dies, it's still a switch.
The color change though won't be possible - but it might still be possible through whatever secondary interface you have, e.g. in an app. Given the choice between physical switches for dimming and color of the lights, I pick physical switches every time.
Shelly seems to be more US-centric, over on EU side I've had good experiences with Sonoff ZBMINI relays - same idea, only on Zigbee connection instead of WiFi.
I know There are some that might work on a small current (so they ‘on’ all the time) but most do not.
Just one thing to look out with in switch v bulbs debates.
First it requires more hardware, it's more expensive and as far as I know you'll be stuck with one vendor. On top of that you need to isolate your home from outside signals (you don't want your switch to talk to you neighbor's devices). Second, it's pretty slow. This might be because our system is already 8 years old, but it's pretty noticeable (feels close to a second when you turn on the lights). And then you get into issues with your appliances that have cheap power supplies. I needed to buy a filter for my PC because the power supply unit was generating so much noise on the power line that the devices could not communicate anymore. Also I'm not sure how well this will work in older house, when the lines are not in best condition.
The system we have is made by DigitalStrom. They have a newer generation available, but since we rent I don't want to pay for the upgrade.
Not if they do so when you’re asleep. Fallback behavior should be always off, so it won’t wake you up in the middle of the night following a short blackout. (Sadly my yeelight bulbs don’t even allow such a setting, which forces me to use them as dumb light bulbs.)
In the case of power outages where the whole device loses power... presumably these devices have some sort of nonvolatile memory and can afford to keep track of their last state. That's one bit for a basic on/off switch. :)
I have a couple devices/services where I haven't been able to find good local only or where I find utility in the cloud connectedness, but that's very much the exception than the rule.
I'm starting with my Garage Door opener: I built one myself and connected it to Home Assistant which is connected to Google. Now I can open the door using Google Assistant, something I can't do with Wyze. I also don't have to open up their stupid app and wait for it to establish a video connection before I can tell it to open up the door.
Wyze is cheap and easy, but it's also hot garbage.
Philips hue has very rarely caused me troubles except the adhesive on their cabinet lights was garbage.
that doesn't work if you've ceded that control to apple, because they are not local
You don't have '100% control' over things like code because they're embedded, certified devices, generally.
My coffee maker has had automation built in for years, it makes a ton of sense for it to automatically make coffee in the morning yet even for free I have never used it even once.
The light switch? Give me a break.
Each room in my house has Hue bulbs in all the light sockets, and sensors which can detect ambient light levels and motion. If I walk into a room and it's dark, the lights turn on, because I probably want to be able to see what I'm doing. When they stop detecting motion they turn off.
There's some additional complexity in rooms where its normal to occupy them for an extended period without moving about much. The bathroom has a button I can press which disable motion detection for an hour so I can have a bath without being plunged into darkness ten minutes after getting in. Some day I'll get round to replacing that with a leak sensor that picks up there being water in the bath.
The living room will ignore the motion sensor and assume it's occupied when the TV is playing media, or has it's input set to a games console, and the bedroom knows when I typically go to bed and once it detects motion around that time it doesn't turn off the lights until I tell Siri I'm going to sleep, at which point the motion sensor turns off until my alarm goes off in the morning.
Finally, the Home Assistant app is tracking when I enter and leave a geofence around my home. When I leave, everything turns off. When I get back, it turns back on again.
The end result of all this is that I don't ever really think about lighting, and because its all automated I can also use it for subconscious prompts about time of day - for the lighting in my work area shifts from a quite stark daylight tone to a much softer one at the end of the work day, while all the lighting dims itself as bedtime approaches.
I setup this automation using HomeKit, Homebridge, and iOS shortcuts/automations. The iOS shortcut is what informs a Homebridge dummy switch named "iPhone CarPlay Status" whether my phone is in CarPlay mode or not. From there it was simply to setup a HomeKit automation based on geofencing and the status of the dummy switch.
Because a garage door is considered a secure accessory and would normally require me to unlock my iPhone, the work-around is to have Homebridge first trigger a dummy switch called "Garage Door" and then have that dummy switch trigger the garage door to open/close.
Yes, I could just press the button on my rear-view mirror to open/close my garage door. But having the door automatically open just as I drive up is really cool. I usually close the door manually, but knowing it will close automatically if I forgot is also nice.
But I tried, and gave up. I still have some basic light automations, like turning everything off when everyone is away, but most of the lights are back to manual control.
For example, I find myself not wanting the lights on quite often. I have passable low light vision, and often there's enough light through the windows to see whatever I wanted to grab, and even on the dimmest setting the bulbs could blind me. Other times tho, I'm there to do something / look for a misplaced item, and want the light.
Reading books is also a good problem for presence detection based light controls - at least my paperbacks don't come with open/closed sensors. The new generation of presence sensors supposedly handles that, but I'm yet to use one that does it well.
For me, "smart home" is more about controls being convinient, with a dash of very basic automations, rather than teaching a computer what you want to happen, getting increasing annoyed, then giving up and conforming to what the computer can handle.
It's all great. My wife and I almost never have to pick up my phone (app) or whatever and things just happen the way we want, just by walking around the house and going through our normal activities.
Until... We're about to get a guest for a few months. Now, suddenly, everyone in the house won't be going to bed at the same time, or coming and going at the same time... I've had to make sure at least one room is "dumb" and I'll need to add a button or two. I'd heard of big "guest mode" switches, and now I'm going to need to develop one.
It's taken an investment in time to get everything set up in a way that works for both me and my fiance, but now we hate traveling and spending the night anywhere without self dimming lights, motion sensors, and a button beside my bed that can kill all the lights in the house with a single press.
My question is, what do you use the manage the automations? Do you use the native home assistant automation, or node-red, etc? I've even looked a bit into Room assistant[0]
What I do now is open up old tablets, remove the battery and replace it with a DC-DC converter. Because tablets and phones won't turn on without seeing a battery, you can't power them though USB with the battery removed.
But the DC-DC option works ok. Sometimes you need to remove the battery protection circuitry from the battery because the tablet needs to see it. This can be a bit hazardous. But usually providing about 4 volts is enough.
Of course all this is not for those without electronics knowledge.
Ps I also detest Google's removal of the shortcut buttons under the power button menu :(
Is this from the battery being on the charger constantly? I remember having a similar problem years ago. I thought most devices now would manage charging by letting it drain a bit automatically. At the time though they didn't so I for my continually connected devices I just used simple plug timers that cut it off for a few hours a couple times a day.
[Advanced Charging Controller (ACC)](https://github.com/VR-25/acc)
[BU-808: How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries](https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-...)
However, doing that you do have the benefit of having "UPS" protection of course (how much depends on the charge cycle). In my case this isn't really a problem because if my power is down there is not much in my home left to control that still works.
My method has some drawbacks too - it looks bad (though it can be mitigated with a 3D printed enclosure) and sometimes stability may suffer, because tablets and phones use their battery to absorb performance peaks which require high power drain. The DC-DC converter will not live up to the same peak capacity. But generally I have not really seen many issues in practice. The converters stay cool and the tablets don't crash. I think it's because the workloads as a control tablet is not super heavy either. One of the main things that really peaks a lot in phones is the mobile (4G/5G) radio when it transmits and of course I keep them in airplane mode in this usecase.
Mobiles and tablets generally don't do this because they are almost always used in a mobile manner. With the exception of the special battery protection in iOS that was mentioned in the article.
I agree with you though for anything more complex. I do not control the color of my lamps via voice or select what media to play on my voice controlled HiFi. I could setup a few "scenes" for that, but I have not seen a need for it. I usually have my phone around or when I am sitting at the PC I can just use the dashboard in my browser. And there are situations where voice control just does not fit well, e.g. in public or with people sleeping in the same room.
* To have to reach for my phone * To have a tablet mounted within reach (that's more clutter) * To have to get up to the light switch/nearest controller.
This sounds lazy but that is literally the point of all this stuff - to make things convenient.
Likewise, if I'm in the kitchen and want to set a timer, I don't want to have to use my hands (I'm probably already using them), I just want to yell that I need a imer set.
The examples you name are somewhat exceptions where I can imagine, if someone is really lazy, that a language control could be better than buttons, but in most cases I think the difference is minuscule. I have to walk 2 Meters from the couch to the button ("and I wanted to get a new drink anyway").
On the other hand, I can see that language is really good for information/knowledge retrieval. Ask ChatGPT to help you with something.. and get the answer via voice.
You can simply say "navigate me to such-and-such", or "turn off the display", or whatever, tasks which would otherwise involve several steps and be much more distracting.
Meanwhile, if you are driving the car, touch screen means not watching the road for crutial 2 seconds while you are trying to hit the damm screen while the car is moving.
Your view I think works where the device is static or always on you like a watch but not when the device could be misplaced.
I had to turn off Echo integration altogether for the same reason. Took them 2 minutes to figure out they could command Alexa to turn off the lights in someone else's room. Even though Alexa recognizes them as different people and has the room lights assigned to their respective room.
I wonder if Amazon has fixed that yet. Haven't tried in a couple years.
I've heard of a great light flipping prank that supposedly happened at Caltech a few years before I was there. There was a row of rooms overlooking a courtyard. Each had a window on the courtyard. At the end of the row was a bathroom, also with a window on the courtyard.
Some pranksters once when the student in the room next to the bathroom was out rewired his switch and the bathroom switch so the each switch controlled both rooms.
Then they sat in the courtyard watching that night. He got home, they saw his light (and the bathroom light) go on as he got ready for bed, then go out as he went to sleep.
A little while later someone went to use the bathroom. They turned on both lights.
That woke the sleeping guy, who got up and turned the lights back off and went back to bad. The people in the courtyard heard an annoyed yell from the bathroom, where the occupant was apparently sitting on the toilet.
Toilet guy went and turned the lights back on. That woke up sleeping guy, who they heard swear, and he got up and turned the lights off.
Toilet guy as faster this time, and got the lights back on before sleeping guy reached bed.
What then happened was the lights alternated on and off at an increasing frequency until finally both people went out to the hall to try to see if there was a clue there and they figured out what was going on.
Sorry, I don't understand "Imer", can you repeat?
Typo serendipity ;)
The other thing is automations, I've got a bunch of timed automations, certain lights come on at dusk, heating comes on half an hour before the alarm goes off in the morning and heats only the rooms I tend to use at the correct times, so office is heated during work hours and living room comes on for the evening/weekends - all can be overridden from my phone or voice or whatever but ideally that's the exception as I find voice clunky and phone takes quite a few steps.
If my phone was able to display the controls for the room I'm in without requiring an unlock that'd be good but for now but generally I find tactile buttons much nicer to interact with.
I put them on the bedside tables, and in living areas near where I have any smart bulbs in dumb lamps. Main button usually toggles the light, other buttons do things like turn on a favourite radio station, toggle other lights, and toggle gas fireplace thermostats. Downside is you need to know what the buttons do (guests usually take a bit of instruction to get used to it), but it works fairly well otherwise.
The automations are a real game changer! Some of my favourites that you didn’t mention in your comment:
- UniFi external cameras detecting people / vehicles turn on corresponding lights or making voice announcements in the house
- motion lighting in closets / pantry
- motion lighting in under cabinet lighting at night for night lighting
- good night routines that shut off the lights, arm the alarm, tell me the weather for tomorrow, and play white noise
- good morning routines paired with an alarm that disarm the alarm, play the morning radio (station depending on weekday vs weekend), turn on the gas fireplace in the bedroom and a space heater in the bathroom
- voice announcement / phone notifications triggered by a power usage monitor to tell me when my laundry has finished - auto off timers for light switches / fireplaces that reset the countdown when motion is detected in that area
Any time I need to use the voice assistant or my phone is an anti pattern as far as I’m concerned! Phone more than voice assistant, but neither is as nice as a simple button. One thing I do find helpful is some Amazon FireHD tablets mounted on the walls in most rooms. They are powered by a PoE charger, and the screens unlock when motion is detected. I find this to be way better UX then pulling out a phone, unlocking, finding the app, then trying to remember why I pulled out my phone in the first place lol. The FireHD tablets are setup with a dashboard specific for that room (with tabs for controlling other parts of the house too), and are fairly UX-friendly for guests. I run "Fully Kiosk Browser" on the tablets, and that handles the autounlock / displaying the Home Assistant dashboard.
I do not have this issue with my Hue bulbs, which are running an out of date v1 hub.
If you can run a light webpage with the tablet it should be enough. Owntone and homeassistant need to run somewhere else on your network like on a pi, or an old laptop.
Your app only heating controls may well also integrate with homeassistant, a hell of a lot of that kind of stuff does. Homeassistant also serves up a light web page as a control interface. There's phone & tablet apps too.
Worth a look, imho.
I'm currently running a raspberry pi with a 15" portable monitor (Here is one that is actually a touchscreen as well, mine aren't. https://www.amazon.com/ADPOP-Portable-15-6-External-Extender...)
For software I'm using magic-mirror, and then use that to link into my calendar, Home-assistant, weather etc. There are some input modules that can be added, so that might enable some touch-features.
I'm just renting right now, so I just have the Pi mounted in a case by the plug with some of those 3M picture frame strips and run the HDMI to the monitor (also mounted with picture frame strips) hidden in a track, If I owned, I'd bring the plug up behind the monitor, and flush the PI in wall and then wrap the monitor around a frame or something.
Just so it can be constantly on and display status while not requiring tethering.
I actually was building kind of monitoring screen; idea was to just leave it connected to ethernet and boot off network so it doesn't have any problems with SD durability or need any installation in case I wanted to have more than one.
There does appear to be a few Lenovo tablets which come with a permanent dock - maybe that's the solution?
A quick press turns off all the lights in my apartment, for when I want to go to sleep. A double press turns some of the lights on with the lowest brightness, so I can grab a glass of water or have a quick pee in the middle of the night. Holding the wall switch puts all the lights at full brightness for when I want to wake up.
If you work from home, a macropad or Streamdeck is also recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTJSREjWH7Y
Sure, there are going to be ways around it - but there should need to be. The whole point of this stuff is to make things 'easy', and having to screw around enabling a bunch of legacy settings for brand new hardware isn't 'easy' for the end user.
2.4GHz has better range and is ubiquitous. 5GHz has better throughput, but my lightbulb doesn't need 500MB/s of transfer.
Most routers will just create two networks with the same name on both frequencies by default, which will work out of the box for 95% of the people. As other commenters have mentioned, usually devices can communicate with each other across those networks without issues.
It’s not like devices can detect what frequency the other device on network is using, just like it can’t detect if the device is connected via Ethernet, plugged into power, or running on a battery.
I would check to make sure your router is properly propagating broadcast packets around your network. That’s the number one cause of smart home discovery fails.
Thread is 100% 2.4 GHz. Seems the plan is to move high bandwidth applications, and most Wi-Fi users to 5 GHz leaving just IOT devices on 2.4.
When I'm going upstairs, and I determine I'd like to - I want my lights, outside to turn on; sometimes, I want the stair lights to turn on. Sometimes I want neither. The real issue is that voice is currently a clumsy interface. But for many of us, it's ideal - just not there yet.
I have them scattered all around my house and I never use voice or even apps anymore to control my smart home.
Hopefully the OSS speech to text will be good, since then it'll work as good as you program it to. Not relying on "the cloud" for voice assistance would be awesome.
There's still a few sensors that there don't have a Matter equivalent yet, but I think that'll change soon.
I think the biggest difference in price I saw was from my Z-Wave blinds versus Thread / Matter ones. However, the overwhelming majority of the cost for that is the blinds themselves so it's probably not the best comparison.
Is the big issue to stop pushing the normal light switch button? Is that a huge chore? If I think home automation what I have wishes about is something putting my dishes or clothes in machines and then putting them back, cleaning floors, things like that.
Automating turning a light, playing music or whatever are just a 2 second thing, that's very down the list of my home tasks to automate.
I can’t count the times when I was in high school and had to let some dad demo their multiple speaker setup.
It never worked all that well, volume levels were off, and there was often an echo of music coming from some empty room.
I’m reminded of this every time someone calls out to their home assistant in my presence to do something like change the music on their tinny bluetooth speaker that’s already being controlled from their phone, which is sitting in plain sight.
There’s an element of performance in it. Look at how far I’ve come, etc. I don’t care for it but it’s a general, atavistic trait we probably share as humans to one degree or another.
It does kinda suck, to be honest. Especially when the lights in question are downstairs, and I'm not. After the kids are done turning on every last light in the house, walking from place to place and turning off 40 different lights is tedious. Hitting the scene button at the top of the stairs to turn off the entire downstairs, on the other hand, I can do without slowing down.
The extra automation possibilities are nice, too. Even just little things like having the front lights turn on automatically when you arrive home at night.
The robotic vacuums are nice, too, now that you mention it. Kind of expensive but definitely a quality of life improvement.
But if I could have only one bit of home automation, it would be the door locks and garage doors. Those were the first things I made remote controllable and I wouldn't willingly give them up.
"Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant: They demand that you learn specific device names and structures for commands, while they frequently get even the most simple command astoundingly wrong".
I set the device names in the Ikea app, and then I command these devices with my voice in almost free form. Sometimes it's even fascinating, because Ikea knows the names of all the colors of their light bulb, and I just don't remember them.
- sensors to control the lights: motion and brightness as treshold
- save power by reaching low power usage (standby) will turn it off
- a few buttons to make RestAPI calls to turn on or off when something is not controlled automatically: lights, power, vacuum cleaner
I don’t understand why anybody would use voice assistance. I never got it except rare situations to make a note:while driving, cooking. Everything else a sensors, a button or text entry use the smartphone is the way to go.
Athom do both tasmota and esphome pre-installed. Haven't tried esphome plus. I get their stuff from Ali and it has been ok so far. Anyone had good experiences with something else and I'm all ears.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/google-soli-atap-research-2022/
sensors along with lots of automation rules will make the home works for you, instead of requiring you to shout at the assistant.
Sensors are also getting cheaper by the minute. For example, I can add a microwave sensor for under a dollar and read hand gestures.
Unless your place is quite small, a wall mounted tablet just seems like a hassle. Even disregarding all the hassle with the mounting and interface config, what are the advantages? Having to walk to a single position to control my smart home doesn't seem very smart, honestly? Can anyone educate me?
Shows time, weather, time until next public transport departures from different stops on different routes, fuel prices at local filling stations, some electricity usage stats maybe..?
Keep yourself on track getting out the door in the morning with a glance?
Some people like to put the phone down with the keys and not use it and be tied to it at home. Walking to a tablet may be preferable than going to a work desk with a laptop or whatever to switch something on or off and we're used to doing that with light switches etc.
Not exhaustive, not necessarily how i do everything either. I bet people are using a tablet as a controller in ways and for reasons that make sense that i haven't thought of too.
As well as being able to say add milk to the grocery list without taking out your phone.
I haven’t much else where voice is actually better.
For example: Some can have the battery wires cut no problem, some need a capacitor, some need something more complex.
I never actually did it. But still think it would work.
I can get it to work for like 30 min if I clear data, force close a bunch of Google apps and restart. But it's driving me nuts!
Huge fan here, I use it everywhere.
Combined with some of those, it works wonders:
https://www.shelly.cloud/en-ch/products/product-overview/she...
I'd love to pay in this area, but I don't want to was mount an old tablet that will be a fire risk.
I know the Pi's have a tiny touch screen screen hat, is there other ideas for a wall mountable solution that people can recommend?
But being able to turn off lights and activate calm music before bed would be nice but I don’t even want to use my phone for an hour before bed.
UI Option:
- take out phone
- unlock phone
- leave current app
- find and open control app
- find icon to toggle action
- lock phone
- put phone back in pocket
NFC option:
- take phone out of pocket
- bump phone against NFC sticker
- find NFC sweet spot
- put phone back in pocket
For some actions colocation might make sense.
But having to stand up to go rub a magic sticker on the wall or coffee table to turn on the lights seems pretty dumb compared to a few thumb flicks.
- press button
[1] https://www.aqara.com/eu/product/wireless-remote-switch-h1