I program for a living.
I can’t stand all the smart shit people talk about. I hate installing software updates. I hate having to download an app just to use some shitty hardware. I hate needing an internet connection to use something. I hate having to charge yet another device.
I really hate software. I try to avoid it as much as possible.
There’s an offshoot of smart device enthusiasts that insist everything is local and reproducible. But if you don’t like software, it only makes it worse to try to keep things self-hosted, not to mention the learning curve is much, much steeper.
I usually keep a stuffed animal near my Brother printer
In case it makes a sound that’s too cute to handle.
I’m paranoid at work because that’s my job.
At home, I’m off the clock and my digital hygiene and organization is atrocious.
It’s also the opposite! I do a lot of self hosting at home.
But at work… Hell yeah bro wire that shit through AWS with a Google login and Microsoft platform, I don’t GAF.
The shoemaker’s children oft go barefoot.
That’s bullshit. No one really does keep a gun next to their printer to shoot it in an emergency, the notion is just ridicolus.
What if the printer grabs the gun first? You need to keep it out of reach of the printer.
I live in an elevated house, straight out the window it shall sail
My printer sits on an activated trapdoor above a shark tank. I’ve spent so much on printers trying to learn all the normal noises. Also sharks, turns out ink in the tank is not great for them.
Really, you should upgrade to laser sharks. Toner is so much cheaper than bullshit price gouging inkjet ink, and I hear brother makes some great sharklasers that take generic toner…
In more civilized countries, we keep a sledgehammer read to bash the printer with, rather than a gun.
Real techies know that the only way to be sure is to use an EMP device.
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?
I could give you a bunch, but it would be missing the point: you should automate to fulfill a need. You don’t need automation so there’s no argument to make for 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.
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.
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 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.
I have soil moisture sensors to auto-water my…uhhh…garden seedlings.
It’s the internet, nobody cares about your backyard camas root grow op.
doorbell cam is just about the only thing i can think of
I just have my doorbell wired up to a taser. Anyone that actually wants into my house either has the doorcode or is going to break a window by default, so the only people that ring the damn thing are mormons that have ignored the “no soliciting” sign.
We turn on our vacuum robot after we leave because the kids are scared of the sound :0) but they eagerly help press the button on the phone to turn it on
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.
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.
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.
Personally I love the idea of a smart home only if its self hosted and running on fully open source software, also never put a gun near an unattended printer :3
And if anybody is wondering if that exists, it’s called Home Assistant.
I really need to get back into troubleshooting why it won’t work in my instance. Got into a habit of it but I got distracted by a crazy lady
Never connect an unattended printer.
Zwave and ZigBee baby!!! It’s been Awesome so far.
Zwave is superior for not clogging up the 2.4GHz airspace, both are darling to use with hass. Wifi is a close third for usability but suffers from bogging local wifi/airspace without interoperability without a controller of some kind being online. Zigbee/Zwave both can function somewhat even with the local server offline
Home assistant, as a central system (it basically let’s you wire anything into anything!). The smart switches etc should be esp8266 or esp32 based. You can then flash either tasmota or esphome to them.
Since your server will likely be Linux based, it’s open source all the way to the bare metal, (or at elast as close as possible).
My current system almost doesn’t notice if the Internet dies. Also, if you nuke critical components, in the worst case, it still defaults to dumb control behaviour (physical switches still work etc).
I still know where the kill switches are however. I’ve also made sure it doesn’t have control of anything mobile, other than the robo vacs, and I’m fairly sure I could take them in a fight.
Tech worker here. My house is largely smart, but it’s all controlled by a local server.
Cybersecurity tech worker here, and same. Even with the local server though, the one smart thing that I absolutely don’t fucks with is exterior door locks. I got one that does PIN entry, but absolutely no wireless or Bluetooth or anything. Other than that let’s fucking go it’s 2024 I can’t be bothered to open my window shades with my hands like I’m living in the 1800s on a farm in the fucking prairie or some shit. They open on a schedule, synced at a slightly earlier offset to my wake up alarm.
Eh if they are savvy enough to unlock my door they are smart enough to break my window. Also if they can unlock my door I still have zwave open/close sensors that will trigger the alarm so I will take the convince of smart locks over non smart any day. I can keep the wandering bums out but remotely let family members in without having to give out my code or keys.
That’s fair. I can store like 20 codes or something, so I just keep one extra in there then rotate it after whoever I had to give it to is done with needing it.
I live on a really busy street in a city, so I’m really not worried about someone breaking a window to get inside. Sure there’s a nonzero chance a methie might smash a window, but around here it’s mostly just testing car door handles and maybe smashing the car window if there’s a visible wallet or pill bottle or something.
Walking up to my door and doing a replay attack, or sending a master password to the lock takes seconds and doesn’t look any more suspicious than a resident entering the house. This talk is from 2016, but I doubt things have gotten significantly better, and I don’t want to be replacing my door lock, or even worrying about updating firmware, whenever something like this is found (Picking BLE Locks - Anthony Rose & Ben Ramsey).
But yeah, I’m not saying anyone’s an idiot for using a smart lock or anything, odds are it will never matter either way.
There are a lot of zwave s2 locks out there. No Bluetooth at all.
128-bit AES isn’t amazing, but it’s more solid than bluetooth and most hardware locks.
Most locks, including deadbolts, can be picked or bumped in seconds. The physical lock is the weakest point. You can get zwave s2 smart locks with just pin pads, no physical key. That’s probably the most secure option.
Silicon Labs Z-Wave chipsets contain multiple vulnerabilities
CVE-2020-9060 Z-Wave devices based on Silicon Labs 500 series chipsets using S2 are susceptible to denial of service and resource exhaustion via malformed SECURITY NONCE GET, SECURITY NONCE GET 2, NO OPERATION, or NIF REQUEST messages.
Oof. Could you imagine having a vindictive neighbor who is mad at you over some dumb shit you have no idea about, then then DoS’ing your lock that has no physical key?
Again probably as close to zero as a non zero chance can be of actually happening, but idk just give me a key and some buttons for when I have bags and shit.
Also, if i decided to go in to home invasions I’d rather just carry around a phone or a raspberry pi or something and pop smart locks than carry around a snap gun.
Everything you’re saying is right though, there’s always a trade off when it comes to security.
Lock picking takes skill. I’ve defeated a deadbolt and doorknob with a cordless drill in ~15 seconds. And it’s not even all that loud.
Always have a backup trigger. A open/close sensor is hard to beat. They would have to know where it is and have access to it to bypass it. And for good measure a shock sensor to know if someone is trying to break it down.
Dream: I will slowly wake up to gently increasing morning sun
Reality: my alarm clock sound is now just the buzzing and whirring of a motor that is starting to open my blinds. Just as I fall back asleep the whirring noise starts again to increase the light level.
Yo do you write for Black Mirror?
Yep fully agree on the exterior door locks. That is the one thing that should never be connected to anything even local servers. Also have to be careful with electronic locks in general. Some brands are terribly designed and can be bypassed in a stupidly easy way.
I’m more of a middle-ground person myself. I have Home Assistant fully self-hosted and using a secure cloudflare tunnel for external access. A few other self-hosted containers running other various things. Anything exposed to the internet requires a login. I always try to find stuff that integrates with HA, but I don’t go to the full length of finding stuff that doesn’t require the brand app to setup. I like the local control stuff if I can get it, because it usually works a lot better, but I won’t actively avoid every brand that connects to a cloud somewhere because that’s too much effort to avoid for me.
I wish someone made a smart door lock status indicator. I don’t want my doors to unlock for me; I just want to know if I remembered to lock them.
Like you want to have a dumb lock but a smart sensor that tells you if the deadbolt is locked or open?
I remember reading some blog somewhere about a person who rigged up a sensor to alert them if their mailbox had been opened or not, you could probably design something to do similar. Idk maybe a magnetic thing to detect the bolt itself, or something to detect on the position of the latch on the interior of the door?
Found this after a quick search, sorry for it being Reddit and the video of the working solution being uploaded to gfycat.
It wouldn’t be hard to do if I got a hall sensor, I just didn’t want to have to mess with 3D modeling and printing a housing for it.
I wonder if contact strips could be glued to the sides of the thing the deadbolt goes into?
That’s definitely one way to approach it. You wouldn’t have to attach something to the door that way, but you’d have to mess with wires external to the device.
The ones I saw from Cisa, aside from reporting the status, could automatically lock every time you closed them
HomeAssistant can do this. Set an automation when you leave your home zone, if door is unlocked notify you.
If you have a smart lock, you can even close it. You should get cameras and an alarm system first, though.
if door is unlocked notify you.
How do you detect this condition without a motorized smart lock?
Hall sensor or a switch that gets pressed when the lock is locked.
How did you integrate this into your door reliably without interfering with the regular lock mechanism?
You could position the sensor/switch on one of the cardinal directions so it wouldn’t be in the way of the mechanism.
Shades? A real tech enthusiast uses PDLC Film!
(Seriously, I wish I could afford some for all my windows.)
Shit. I am a fossil.
Build your own! All you need is an esp32 or pi pico, stepper motor, and driver.
That’s next on my list of projects after I finish my smart microchip keyed pet feeding stalls.
I’m not sure the build-it-yourself route is the cheaper one compared to just buying a ZigBee smart opener
I think they’re saying they wish they could afford PDLC film for all their windows. If you can DIY PDLC film you probably have a 3D printer the size of a tractor trailer and are 3D printing yourself a new house or something just for for the fuck of it in the backyard of your estate.
@[email protected] was talking about stepper motors and microcontrollers, those are for motorizing a shade
Unless my client is fucking up and putting their post as a reply to the wrong comment (which is a real possibility), they replied to Telorand who was talking about PDLC film.
I really hate that the automated shades I needed (must be plug in because they’re 18’ off the floor) are so proprietary that it’s not even wifi.
There are Somfry blind controllers with small solar panels that face outwards on the motor housing. No plug required.
Damn that sucks. I lived in an apartment and wound up rigging up an arduino to pull the chain on these three massive window shades in my apartment, they were seriously like 20 foot tall windows. This was back in 2015 or so, so I didn’t even bother trying to find anything off the shelf.
I love your username btw.
I would assume those would be zigbee or z-wave or something. What does it use?
In the US, 95% of “smart” tech wants WiFi connection to a proprietary cloud and they will make breaking API changes and/or ban users for using 3rd party clients. Only phone apps with permission to see your contacts allowed!
That being said, you can usually find products that will work locally but it’s really difficult, and big-box stores almost never have anything Zigbee/Z-wave or even Matter enabled. It’s bleak.
Ew. Blinds really should be line of sight IMO. I don’t want anything related to my physical privacy living in the cloud (and that goes double for you, Ring).
Ikea sells ZigBee blinds that connect right up to any home automation hub. Pretty cheap too, in the $100-200 range for most windows.
I’m using several. Batteries are solid. I get a good 3 months with daily opening/closing. I only wish they had solar modules you could add in, but the battery tray design makes that unlikely.
It’s not zigbee or anything anyone else uses. Someone spent a little time with a software defined radio to decode some of the signal.
Ew, that’s awful.
Here in Italy shutter covers are common, I have those and awnings, both can be connected to any sort of smart 2-way switch. I use BTicino for the shutters and Shelly 2PMs for the awnings
Yep.
I love tech, as long as it’s tech that I have full control over.
Home Assistant is the antithesis to this meme
There’s a difference between recognizing the risks of “smart” tech and knowing the futility of avoiding it -or- even better having the skill to mitigate as much risk as possible.
I refuse to buy products for my home that require an app. No, I am not signing your fucking privacy policy to use my lightbulbs.
That’s pretty good.
When I had my bathroom done, they put some speakers in the ceiling I could connect to with bluetooth, but in order to activate that I need to use a crappy app to swap them to speaker mode and turn them on.
When I got a new phone, guess which app no longer works on versions of Android that Noah himself didn’t use to track his fucking animals?
Bonus: Every power cut causes it to enter “detuned radio mode”, requiring me to find my old phone, charge it up enough to power on, connect to the speakers and switch them off.
Never buy anything from EISSound.
Really need to get around to figuring out the spec of the speakers so I can replace the controller…
Putting speakers in speaker mode speaks volumes of where we are as a people today.
See, this guy is not a programmer, you should have known to create a ubiquitous interface to use your speakers, some audio cable that you could connect to any device to implement the music playing capabilities, instead you jammed the implementation into a blackbox that now can’t be easily changed.
I’m horrified when I see someone with an Alexa in their home
Yup, my parents have Google Home and Alexa, and my brother has Alexa. And here I am, the only one in the family who works in tech with neither. In fact, I got a free Google Home and gave it away because I don’t want it anywhere near my home network.
One of these days I’ll figure out how to DIY it, but until then, I just use my phone (GrapheneOS, so some protections there) to play music and look stuff up.
There is www.home-assistant.io but that might be too much for your needs.
With a bit of work homeassistant can be a quite good voice assistant.
You can either revive some old android device and use that, or get an ECHO M5 for ~13€ and hook that one up.
You can even run some local Ollama AI and use that for the voice assistant nowadays. It’s quite useful and home assistant can be integrated into music / audiobooks aswell with something like Music Assistant 2.0
Yup, just need to get around to doing it…
One of these weekends I’ll have the right ratio of time:motivation. Anyyyy weekend now…
I’ve been meaning to set up a voice assistant with Google’s old AIY voice kit and Mycroft for a long time now (so long, in fact, that at the time I started thinking about it those things hadn’t been discontinued yet) and then trying to integrate that with Home Assistant. (See also: Picroft, Mycroft Home Assistant integration)
If I still wanted to use that voice kit hardware, what would be the best software to put on it these days?
I like having something in the garage. It’s in a place where I only stay when I’m working on something and my hands are super dirty. It can be isolated to a vlan by itself.
But if my hands are covered in oil. I like being able to yell at it to play music and not get one more thing dirty.
Makes sense. I’m also interested in getting something like it, I just don’t want anything by Google or Amazon, and I’ve been too lazy to go the DIY route.
When I’m working in my garage, I’m usually listening to an audiobook, and all I need to do to pause is bump a button on the side with the back of my hand or something. Or sometimes I’ll listen to a playlist. But if I’m working on something in the garage, it’s usually not for very long (e.g. maybe an oil change, brake job, or headlights), so I’m usually in and out in 30 min to an hour. Some people love working in their garage though, I personally see it as a chore that I do to save some time and money.
Mine was a hacked Google home mini (physical hack, not software) where I took the speaker out to an aux jack to have it loud enough.
I was in there for hours for all sorts of projects like engine and trans rebuilds.
I got a free Google Home and gave it away because I don’t want it anywhere near my home network.
You should have destroyed it.
Reckon an Echo Dot would fit in a clay pigeon flinger?
You should definitely try it.
I got a free Google Home and gave it away
To an enemy, I hope! Otherwise, you should’ve just thrown it out, or stripped it for parts or something.
I think it was to my parents, who already had a Google Home and an Alexa. I figured it was safe to add it to the rest of the dumpster fire…
Oh yeah what kind of phone do you have?
As a tech worker, I’d rather have a panicked skunk in my home than a printer.
But people keep insisting that I print, sign and scan documents like we are living in the stone age of computing. I literally recently got a brand new in a box printer from 2008 just so I could do exactly that.
Places don’t accept pdf files that have signature touchscreen signed signatures?
I sold and bought a house without signing anything except the final papers at the notary. The mortgage, the realtor papers, the inspection all were signed on either a DocuSign page or on my phone with a stylus.
I just got onboarded to a fortune 500 company as a consultant and that was the process.
I got a Lexmark business laser printer from a place that was going out of business for like $50. Best investment I ever made. It just sits there quietly, not doing anything, until I print something like twice a year. Five years in and it still works fine, I haven’t even replaced the toner.
Best investment I ever made
My brother in Christ, you’ve paid $5 per print.
Alright, best is an exaggeration. But $5/print assumes it breaks before I print anymore. The actual value is still unknown.
When you think of how much of a pain it is to go to a print shop, that’s not bad at all.
I’m a tech worker, and I’ve got tons of smart things. They’re just all local. (Except my garage door opener. Man, fuck LiftMaster. Oh and my thermostat. Ecobee is ok, but I wish they would offer a local only option.)
Hopefully with Matter becoming more popular, it’ll make it easier to standardize local IoT devices.
RatGDO is a local ESP device you can hook into a LiftMaster to connect it to WiFi in a better way. Highly recommend.
This is awesome, as a small garage door business owner, I may start bringing these up. Though, I may be one of the few people that cares about this.
I may get one, I’ve kept dumb motors for a long time to avoid any bs subscription to open my efing door.
Oh really? I’ll check that out. Thank you. :)
I tried myq for about 5 minutes before dumping it in the trash and getting a RatGDO. it’s been great.
I second that. Chamberlain’s/Liftmaster’s MyQ app grows more ad-infested by the day and the RatGDO gives you local control (no cloud required)
Check out to GDOBlaq from konnected. I have the alarm panels and they’re great.
This gives a new meaning to trouble shooting. 🤔
Your entire house is
smarthackable and tracks your every step for advertising revenue of big companies.My smart home is Home Assistant hosted on a server in my house. It’s fully open source and has gone through multiple paid audits to show its security is good too. The only non-local-only integrations are the weather api’s and my thermostat (ecobee).
I mean yeah, it’s possible to set it up privacy-respecting and that’s great. But the average tech enthusiast doesn’t set up his own server beyound a NAS.
Heh, I’d argue the average tech enthusiast is exactly the person that would set this up. If not them, then who is homeassistant for? I think modern tech enthusiasts are privacy conscious and will put in the small effort to enjoy that privacy. Its non-techies who wouldnt bother and just use the app it comes with.
A NAS is the perfect device to host it on though. Docker or VM.
A firejail doesn’t hurt either ;)
How many hours per week do you tinker with it though?
At first, a lot. Not so much recently though. It’s definitely more work though I’ll admit. Sometimes that’s the price to pay for privacy. Also, I learn a lot of skills that could help me get a good paying job by doing it.
THIS
I work with tech; other than in my home office; there is no tech in my house.
The voice activated things…just no. I looked into Mycroft, which looks interesting, but is till a solution looking for a problem.
god damn right.
