Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly stay away until this is resolved. Skyrocketing inflation is not doing anything to change my mind either.

The automatic cat feeder works well. So does the roomba. I like my automated blinds but will stick with manual light switches. I consolidated my home theatre remotes. Note how they’re all seperate problems.

The smart home is here. It’s just that it was never a use case for a singular smart home platform. It was always 1000 seperate problems to solve that in no way ever belonged together and the experience was always worse when trying to combine it.

The useful things I do use it for are:

-heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing)

-automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost

-a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer

-a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies.

That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.

Then I remembered that I have to make shortcuts to bridge two products, it fails half the time, my ikea bridge has to be restarted every 30 minutes, and my smart garage door opener takes 30 seconds to respond now.

So on second thought, yeah, this all sucks.

There's been generation after generation of lighting control. There was a 1950s/1960s thing of putting everything on relays with 24V control signals and panels full of rocker switches. There was x10 in the 1980s. There were "smart" light bulbs in the 2010s. It's just not all that useful.

I mentioned this a few years ago, after I came back from an "Internet of Things" meeting in Dogpatch, in San Francisco. The Samsung guy pitched a refrigerator with a tablet mounted in the door. It didn't really have any more functionality than a refrigerator plus a tablet, but cost more. I asked him why, and he told me because there's a fraction of the population that likes to show off their kitchens, and it would be marketed to them. There were a few other IoT things pitched, all forgettable.

What struck me at the time was that we were in a room that really needed intelligent control. It was an office/meeting space, about 5000 square feet, in an old industrial building. Openable windows looked out on the bay, and there was a manual system with a shaft with a chain fall and a rack and pinion system to open the windows. A similar mechanical setup controlled windows in an openable skylight. The room also had a modern HVAC system, ceiling fans, and lighting.

None of this was coordinated. What should have been happening was that, as people came in and the CO2 level went up, the bay side windows and skylight windows should have opened, to get the CO2 level down and cool the room a bit. As the sun set and the outside temperature dropped, the bay side windows should have mostly closed, the ceiling fans should have started in the upward direction, and the skylight windows should have stayed open, to prevent the room from cooling too much while keeping the CO2 level down. Lighting should have increased as darkness fell. As it got later, and people started to leave, the bay side windows could close completely and the fan RPMs could drop. When everybody left, as noticed by motion detectors, the system should have dimmed the lights and done a quick fresh air purge - skylights open, bay windows open, fans to max in the downward direction. Temperature would drop, but unless it went below 60F, no need to turn on heat on an empty room. Then everything seals up tight for the night. Very little energy consumption. Tomorrow is another day, and the room should continue to react to the people load.

But no. You rarely see that kind of control. Except in hotel function rooms. Hotels put in systems like that because they have big rooms with widely varying people load, and customers who complain if a conference room is stuffy or hot or cold. Hotels have significant HVAC costs, and it's worth it to have the HVAC systems adapt to room usage. Honeywell and Johnson Controls sell systems for this for commercial buildings. They have both inside and outside sensors, and can operate fans, dampers, and HVAC separately.

My garage remote is in a PIN number lock box next to the garage. Open lock box, press remote, close lock box.

That’s smart.

Apple has this reasonable offer:

  - Buy an Homepod/Apple TB as a home station
  - Everything works locally, even the internet is down.
  - no Accounts. 
  - only one privacy policy: Apple's
  - but ofc, you can control everything remote, and Apple makes sure its easy and secure.

  - If Apple does not deem it worthy, it will not get implemented. [1]
  - Things that should be simple are not. Try to set the lights to turn on 10 minutes before your alarm goes off. I'll wait here.

[1] It has been a few years, but last time I checked, CO2 Levels still can only be reported as labeled Levels ("high/low/.."), with the actually ppm Value hidden in some auxiliary value. No way around it, Apple needed to put CO2{ type: integer, range: 0-10000} in some json some where, and they did not come around to do it for like half a decade, at which point I stopped caring.

Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!

Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.

Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product.

Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app.

Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years.

Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day.

Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.

My one issue, while building a custom HA controller is... There's no standard for discovering the HA controller and have it join WiFi... So that will require an app. Just to do mDNS and TLS bootstrapping. Maybe I'll use a cloud relay and Web Bluetooth for it. Would relieve both issues and provisioning could happen in any browser supporting Bluetooth.

If that was what it felt like, I'd be one of the enthusiastist enthusiasts.

But it feels a lot more like vendor lock in, meat-space spyware and security holes as a service.

Plus most people who use hue aren’t even aware of the Lutron aurora.

Two things I would say. One, reliability is real bad. Sometimes getting devices connected is a ridiculous pain in the ass. Sometimes automations just don't work. Sometimes devices just go dark and can't be brought back. Etc. etc. etc. So, you don't really want to engage, and you don't really want to make it a critical part of your home. Or said another way: it prevents you from tinkering in a fun way. When kids were learning BASIC on their home computers, things were pretty reliable. Not always, I mean hardware failure or whatever happens. But it was good and the feedback cycles were short. You're not gonna get people curious and thus experts with the existing smart home devex.

The second is we expect practically nothing from people in our culture. You don't need to be an expert in radio communications to know like, more walls between a device and your AP is bad, or that channels can get crowded. You don't need to be a tech wizard to know how to reset a device (you look in the manual or search online). We should be embarrassed that some of the most educated and wealthy people in history can't perform even basic logic or troubleshooting.

This feels like "I am not seeing ads anymore therefore it doesnt exist"

Ideally my house should have 3 phase power, but I'm not yet inconvenienced enough to go through the headache of getting this organized. This means that at any time my maximum power draw can be 13.8 kW (60A at 230V).

Generally this is enough, but I have on occasion tripped my mains due to drawing too much at a particular moment, I have the following significant power draw items:

- 4x underfloor heating circuits at 3kW each.

- 2x electric geyser at 2.5kw each.

- Electric oven and induction stove, not sure on amount but I think they can collectively pull 6kW easily.

- Pool pump at 0.6kW.

- Inverter re-charging batteries at night (I only have 10kWh of storage and want backup power at night in case of a power outage), I can configure maximum draw here, but could probably pull up to 8kW if I wanted.

- PHEV at 3kW.

When we had regular load shedding here (South Africa) it was very easy for the power to trip if I didn't manage things, particularly if I left underfloor turned on in the winter at night. What would happen is that power would have been off for ~2 hours, then comes back and everything on a thermostat would turn on AND the inverter would start charging its battery.

If I proactively turned the floors off then I wouldn't generally have an issue.

Even without a power outage, it is possible to trip things when using stove/oven with underfloor heating turned on or if both the geysers happened turn on their elements at an inopportune moment.

IoT can allow this to all be managed, it can have rules like:

- Don't run ALL the underfloor heating circuits at the same moment, alternate between them.

- If the stove/oven is in use, don't turn on the element for either of the geysers, it can wait.

- Temporarily stop charging the PHEV or inverter's batteries until there is less power demand.

- Temporarily turn off the pool pump if it would help.

It can also create other opportunities around solar energy production, you can do things like have only "excess" energy go into your (PH)EV provided it has a minimum charge level.

Other automations which I wouldn't mind:

- Exterior lights on a schedule based sunrise/sunset.

- When I'm away it would be nice to be able to remotely turn on/off particular interior lights and open/close curtains at particular times of the day.

What I actually have automated:

- My alarm system has (not great) app, I have wired it up to my garage door so I can remotely let in the armed response security company in the event of the alarm going off and I'm not at the house.

- I use the Tuya ecosystem to automatically turn my geyser and pool pump off on a schedule and if there is a power outage or load shedding. This allows me to heat the geyser still even if there is a power outage and it's the middle of the day with lots of sun on my solar panels.

HA is something I want to look at one day (when I have more time), meanwhile the Tuya ecosystem is very useful considering its minimal amount of time investment required.

arguing with an AI that is intentionaly obtuse, is not what anyone wants when its time to try enjoying your home. noone needs to have a conversation with thier lightswitch, its for turning light on or off not pretending to be your pal and trying to exploit emotional reflexes.

i have a broken record for this, "stop wasting time and effort trying to pretend to be human, and get to work building something that does what its told to do."