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What’s the Matter with the smart home?
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Technology
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I have yet to see a “smart home” feature that’s worth the potential problems, let alone the cost.
Yeah, a well-integrated smart home can do some pretty cool stuff, but it also means putting my trust in corporations even more than I already have to. Plus, I’ll have to worry about each major appliance I own possibly being bricked due to a buggy software update or a malicious hacker.
Keep my home nice and dumb. Thanks.
All valid concerns, but if you really wanted to, you could roll your own home automation setup using something like a Raspberry Pi, and optionally Home Assistant, and keep it all offline so that it's safe from hackers.
Yes, you can, but it can be a lot of effort and a lot of time spent researching and tinkering.
It's fine if you want that to be your hobby, but it can be a heavy lift for the average person.
It’s surprisingly easy with Home Assistant. You really don’t need much tinkering, if any, to get the basics working quite reliably.
Maybe for a more software focused person. I found it very cryptic the couple of times I tried (and failed) to get it up and running.
I'm much more comfortable with a soldering iron than a config file.
You may want to give it another shot. They've been working pretty hard to move away from config files - much more is done via the GUI these days to make things more user-friendly.
The devs have also really been focusing on voice this year as well - it's been really interesting to see what they come up with. A few releases back, they released an update that allows you to give voice commands to HA via a landline phone hooked up to a $30 VoIP box. There is also support now for Espressif's new "S3-Box" devices, which have small screens, a speaker and a few microphones for under $50 - this does require messing with yaml files at this point, but I should be able to finally ditch my Echos soon!
It’s easy for techies like us, yeah. If we don’t want to go too advanced with the automation stuff. I wouldn’t even dare ask my mum to set up her own stuff, even if she begged me for it. It’s techie-friendly. Not user-friendly (yet).
I ran it for a little while, but it was too much work to set up what I ultimately wanted it to do. On top of that I don't want to have touch it after I set it up. I use a lot of dumb motion sensors instead. Not the best solution sometimes, but better than having constant downtime at the worst time.
Good point. I was assuming that “smart home” integration would require an internet connection, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Thank you for clarifying that!