As an electronics guy with both backend and frontend programming experience for me there are three routes when it comes to my home infrastructure:

1. Buy something dumb, non-smart, non-cloud

2. Build it myself

3. Buy something that can be hacked and used with my own infrastructure

The problem isn't even their infrastructure, it is that they decide when they want to change it. Even if it was all good faith changes, that could be a reliability issue and force me to dedicate time to the issue on their whim. I don't like that. If I run such things myself I can decide myself when to update and how much time I want to invest when (provided the system is decoupled from the public internet).

And this point isn't even about any single company trading the good will of their customers bit by bit — it is just about me not having to jump when their service changes or ends for whatever reason (and there are many).

I now have a couple of different app controllable LEDs. By far, the Hue app has been the best of the bunch. However, my app recently gave me the "Starting soon, you'll need to be signed in" notice. I am very unhappy with this, as everything I want my lights to do is working perfectly fine without even needing an account to be signed into.

From the moment I first saw the notice, I started wondering if I'll have to find a new app. But because "soon" has not arrived, I just have been ignoring it. I hope when "soon" arrives it will be a weekend so I have plenty of time to deal with it.

I use the Ikea lights and bridge, although mine is a few years old at this point. Everything just works and I've maybe had 1 issue in just over 4 years. Easily integrates with either Google Home or HomeKit or HA. My only complaint is (my) bridge needs hardwire ethernet access and each bridge only supports 5 devices. I bought one of the wireless physical switches which seemed like it would come in handy, but the battery died pretty quick. Not a big deal though as I never used it anyway, but having the option was nice.

Matter makes it a lot easier to mix and match products from different ecosystems. You can get 3 A19 nanoleaf RGB blubs that support Matter over Thread for the price of one Hue RGB A19. The Hue might be better but I doubt its 3 times better (I have a bunch of Hue lights and no nanoleafs yet).

I'll be moving to matter blubs (whatever brand strikes the best balance between price and quality) in the future and only using Hue bulbs when its necessary for features that aren't supported with Matter (like Hue Sync).

I've completely replaced all my Hue lights with Lutron Casetas. They work so much better than individual light bulbs talking to the bridge. I use Apple Home which is mostly meh, but feels more robust than Hue or Google Home.

Govee are also very popular now, I haven't personally used any but I have a mix of Hue + a bunch of other stuff powered mostly through HA and it's always worked pretty flawlessly for me using their Hue bridge of course. Even the PC color sync works pretty well with not much latency considering it's a software implementation -> network -> bridge -> wireless to the lights. It's the most non-hacker-friendly "ambilight" setup I've ever used.

When Ikea came out with smart home stuff, I bet that they would get it right, or at least not as bad as the others (I previously suffered through the enshitification of Samsung's SmartThings). In my experience their stuff has been flimsy and not sure trustworthy. It at least works without an app, so far, but I've not been able to regain any enthusiasm for the promise of home automation

Honestly I found the post and her attitude kinda annoying.

She dismisses Home Assistant for silly reasons, but then fully acknowledges that the IKEA thing doesn't actually work properly with the Hue kit, and worries that IKEA is going to pull some garbage in the future anyway.

It's a shame that solutions like openHAB and Home Assistant aren't dead-simple for the average person to set up, and they have a bunch of usability issues. But if you're the kind of person who is sick of companies enshittifying the things you've already bought and were happy with, you have to actually own the experience, and openHAB or HA is the only way to do that.

I've been running openHAB for 3+ years now, and while it hasn't been perfect, it does what I want and need, and I never worry about some company updating things and breaking my experience. I update when I want to, and can roll it back it the update causes problems.

I’ve had great experience with the IKEA stuff. I even still have the old Tradfri hub. I haven’t really had any make problems with it, despite the reputation it has received.

I have it connected to Homekit via an Apple TV.

My main complaint is how big their outlets are.

have you used the nanoleaf api? I just want to be able to control my lights from my terminal and I'm not smart enough at hacking to get hue to work

I only have three in the home office. Do ypu know how the 3rd party clients are affected with the recent changes?

> I was an early adapter

I see what you did there.

I hadn’t heard of Nanoleaf, so I checked out their site. Immediately a GDPR notice filled my screen, which is no surprise, but they make it pretty hard to opt out. Most importantly, though, it states that they share _identifiable_ data with TikTok. I think I’ll be avoiding that brand.

> We use TikTok Ads to promote our products and services in various countries.TikTok shares information with advertisers and third-party measurement companies to show how many and which users of the Platform have viewed or clicked on an advertisement. If you use the TikTok Lite version of TikTok, information is shared with advertising networks to display personalized advertisements to you on the TikTok Lite app and elsewhere online. TikTok stores and processes data in accordance with their privacy policy.

> Data is Anonymised: No > Data Storage Locations: United States and Canada > Data Usage Purposes: Marketing

I am using the same setup: sonoff zigbee plus dongle + zigbee2mqtt + home assistant.

Fully local solution with no 3rd party clouds, EULAs, proprietary hubs or propruetary apps or restrictions. Compatible with almost any zigbee device. A subset of tested and well-known devices is listed at their website https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/.

Recommending to everyone. It can be set up as 3 docker containers (zigbee2mqtt, mosquitto, home assistant), for example in docker compose. Or there are also ready-made images of Home Assistant with Supervisor GUI management for people not wanting to fiddle with that manually.

Node-Red is another great addon to the setup if you want to configure automations graphically by joining nodes together. Far more powerful than any proprietary solutions.

> Zigbee USB 3.0 Dongle

Which one do you use?

I don't like home assistant. Everything is based off state changes which is just so stupid.

Ie instead of sending a "home_button_clicked" event, it has to work with: button_click=none -> button_click=home -> delay() -> button_click=none. Just a ridiculous architecture.

Obvious thing is to make it completely event based where certain events change state, ie discrete event=home_button_clicked which has the side-effect of setting event_last_button_clicked when that event is triggered.

They've done it completely the wrong way around and it annoys the hecky out of me.

Can you? A relative was cleaning out some of their stuff and gave me some Philips Hue lightbulbs, but no hub. I have a Home Assistant setup with a number of Zigbee devices, but I had never found anyway to pair them direction via Zigbee, everything I saw required the hub. If there is a way, I'd like to hear it, I've just been using them as regular lightbulbs...

this is a very silly comment.

yes they are zigbee, yes they work better with the Hue Hub (e.g. colour transitions). Phillips is significantly reducing the usability and value of their own products with this shitty decision.

It's nonsense. This is not even how you install home assistant.

They provide a pretty locked down image that also loads a ton of plugins in dockers. It's nice and well designed. And you don't have to expose it to the internet if you don't have to.

The installation described is legacy and only supported for historical purposes.

I agree that Hue has totally gone down the toilet but the criticism of Home Assistant isn't justified. And if you go for the Ikea one as recommended in the article, it's just going to be a matter of time until their shareholders will want to see those sweet recurring bucks too. You need a truly open ecosystem to avoid that from happening.

The author is referring to the officially recommended way to install home-assistant on a Linux box, which is just curl-ing and running an install script as root.

I totally get how that's off-putting, but the real recommended way to run home assistant is to install Home Assistant OS on dedicated hardware. Which also can be off-putting.

Either way, it's my favourite software that I regularly interact with (unless you count Linux).

Probably a misguided idea of security. There is nothing wrong with JS itself, in fact, as far as languages go, it is pretty secure due to the attention it gets by being what runs in web browsers.

As for "curl | sudo sh", yeah it looks scary, but it is not worse than downloading a .deb and then doing "sudo dpkg -i your.deb", or installing any downloaded binary on your machine for that matter. You may say something about signatures, but often, the public key you have to trust is on the same website you downloaded the .deb. In all these cases, TLS is the only thing protecting you. Going through a file you don't audit doesn't change anything, and in practice, almost no one does the audit, and few linux boxes have AV scanners.

Don't trust it? Run it a VM, container, or dedicated hardware, this is actually what they are suggesting.

"just give us root on your system" install scripts like that are a security thing, yes.

I think the issue is more the attitude towards security and system stability that is implied by such installation methods, which is apaprently endemic to the entire "JS ecosystem". That attitude being "who cares about security or stability?"

When It's my system and I don't want to mess with it, just set stuff up and have it run trouble free and do the things I want (and only I want), then I do care about such things and agree that JS has no place other than sacrificial toy boxes that get insulated from "real" computing like they was a modem with its phone number posted at the payphones by the 2600 meetup.

Not OP, but the HA ownership experience is … rough at best. If what you want is something that Just Works, HA is not for you.

This right here is like a second-order or third-order effect of the layoffs last year. Tech companies are shuttering useful consumer products because their profit margins just aren't high enough for today's high interest environment

I'm also curious about the Home Assistant anecdote. It seems like there might be some security or reliability concerns, but I'd like more information to understand the context better.

My two favorite automations are dead simple, but would be tricky to solve any other way. I have them set up with Home Assistant running on my local network, so there's no data going to anyone else, and no dependency on a cloud service.

The first is, my mailbox is across the street, and I'd like to know when the mail comes. So I have a Z-wave door sensor in the mailbox to send me a notification to my phone when the mailbox is opened.

The other is to nag us to move laundry to the dryer. I have a Z-wave power meter that my washing machine plugs in to, and another Z-wave door sensor on the door. When the power meter detects the washing machine stop using power, it waits a few minutes and sends a notification to unload every few minutes, until the door is opened.

Some things I do, all running locally with Home Assistant so minimal cloud shenanigans:

* Turn the light red in my laundry room when a load is done

* Turn all my lights off when I set my alarm at night

* Slowly turn light on before my alarm goes off in the morning

* Turn off lights when I leave the house, then turn on the one by my front door if I get home after dark

None of these are life changing, but they're all marginally useful. And for me, half the fun is the sense of accomplishment getting these automations to work

For most people it's just consumer luxury but my grandmother's place has some neat tricks that really improve her independence. Using anything fiddly like lamps and keys is actually a serious challenge for her. 10 years ago her TV was too complicated but now she has a voice remote and it works pretty well.

Anything that makes life a little easier is good for anyone with marginal capabilities, which is like millions of people and eventually everyone if they manage to live long enough.

The lights in my house turn on and off with the rhythm of our lives. We don’t think about turning a light on or off. They do that by themselves. My home knows when the dishwasher is done. My home can silence alerts if I’m on a zoom call. My home knows if the air quality is low and doesn’t turn on the ventilator fan.

Automation is not about having an app for your lights, it’s about not having to think of trivial stuff like turning on a light.

Yep same. Wall switches work fine. Manual thermostats work fine. Fuck spending all that money on such trivia and time keeping it programmed and updated and dealing with stuff like the subject of TFA.

I walk into a room, I turn the lights on. I leave the room, I turn the lights off. I have no need to operate lights in rooms that I'm not in.

I long ago realized that I sleep as well on a couch as I do on a bed, and got rid of my bed next time I moved. However, there is no good place to put a light near the couch such that the switch would be easily reachable while on the couch.

Solution: Hue lights that I can control from Alexa. If I'm dozing off while reading on the couch before bed, I can turn the lights off without having to wake up enough to actually go reach a switch.

All my locks are normal locks that use normal keys (although they are actually called "SmartKey" locks, but that just refers to the clever way they can be rekeyed [1], which is entirely mechanical). I have considered getting one smart lock that has voice and app control because I live alone.

The idea there is that if I have a medical emergency that incapacitates me so that I cannot unlock a door but doesn't incapacitate me so much that I can't call 911, I can unlock a door so when the ambulance arrives they don't have to break in to get me.

[1] The way you rekey them is you put in your current key, turn 90 degrees clockwise, insert a tool they provide into a hole that is next to the keyway to press a release in the back of the hole, remove that tool, and you can then remove the current key (carefully leaving the cylinder rotated 90 degrees). At that point you can put a different key in, and then turn the cylinder 180 degrees counterclockwise. The lock is now keyed to that key instead of the key you started with.

Changing the color of white during the day is amazing. Having daylight temp bulbs at night is just "rude". Having the warm temp color during the day is much less "rude". Having the best of both worlds with one light and not having to think about it is pretty amazing.

Other than that, I just enjoy having the remote ability of turning lights on/off from my couch. I don't even have mine accessible via WAN, so it's not like "oh I forgot to turn off the lights" after leaving the house. they're LEDs, so I don't care!

I have much automated, but my favorite is a $20 multicolored hexagon WiFi light with a long usb power cable I nestled along the door frame from power to the light above my wife’s office door. I wrote a swift daemon to monitor her work mac’s camera and microphone usage as well as idle time, and decide whether to set the little hexagon over the door to red, yellow, green, or off depending on camera use, mic-only use, idle under or over threshold, respectively. That way I know whether I can safely interrupt, and with what degree of caution. It’s been a champ, but I did need to modify the code when she upgraded from intel to m1, to listen to camera logging events rather than checking the hardware directly, but other than that it makes me happy every time I walk by it.

Second is more common, but also makes me happy every time: I put a contact sensor on the interior door to the attached garage that when opened quickly turns on the light to the garage, and turns it off a few minutes after that door next closes. It sure beats walking into a dark garage to fumble for a switch.

If you have lots of windows and lots of shades, you can open and close them all at once, making life easier if you and your spouse disagree if they should be mostly open or mostly closed, possibly saving your marriage if that applies. Lights follow the same trend: it isn’t that turning on and off the lights is a pain, but being able to turn on or off all the lights with just one command is useful. We’ve only bothered with our open kitchen living room, but we had 4 switches all around the 2nd floor to manipulate before (and we went Lutron for our shades anyways, so we can set scenes with both).

I don’t get the mood lighting. And really, if I lived alone I would just keep the shades up all the time and forgo the electric shades as well (but given my wife they are indispensable).

I have normal lights, but the switches are on a Lutron hub. I like being able to set movie mode to dim lights from my couch on my watch or phone. I like being able to turn off my kids' bathroom light when it shines too brightly in my face at night when I'm trying to sleep. I like being able to turn the lights off across the whole house when I leave, and have smart away when I leave for awhile.

Smart thermostats are nice when you want to adjust things from all over the house or keep a schedule relatively easily. I also like knowing if my basement sump pump isn't keeping up with rain water and flooding things.

In general, it's nice to be able to monitor things and control them across the house, and the Lutron setup has been pretty painless.

One of the big benefits of Hue, as alluded to in this article, is that you didn’t need to use their cloud services or share any data. But that seems to be what is changing. Before, you could just run everything locally on your home network, or really on an isolated subnet since most of the communication happens over Zigbee. It is nice to have automation capabilities for some scenarios to avoid rewiring or to customize lighting for different purposes in the same space with one controller.

But if you don’t personally need it, you also don’t really need to drop in and bash the concept. It is useful for lots of folks and it’s just a fun game for lots of other folks. And most people can just ignore it.

A lot of these answers conflate remote control with automation. Some of these devices seem to offer remote control, some offer actual automation. I also love not having to get up and hit arrow keys on my television monitor to change the channel. Likewise, my ceiling fans have radio controllers. It would be nice if lights had those as well. On the other hand, I feel no need for motion detectors, voice control, or any kind of service running on a server somewhere trying to learn when I want the lights on or off. But a switch that can be flipped without having to walk to wherever the wall-mounted switch is would be nice. That can be a simple radio device or infrared or whatever they prefer, just like a television remote. Don't need an app that requires an account with a remote service. Same thing with a thermostat. When I first married and moved in with my wife a decade ago, she had Nest thermostats and those things annoyed the hell out of me, using eco settings by default, requiring access to WiFi, trying to learn my living patterns. Some of these answers are right. The longstanding automation offered by thermostats was great. I like being able to program when I want specific temperatures in specific rooms and then it just happens. But that was enough. I don't need a cloud-based service to learn when I'm home and in what rooms. I already know that.

There are several advantages.

I use a connected smart bulb, that has color changing. During bed time, I use it for reading books, and before sleeping, change it to a night light. I use it as a soft light when watching movies on my laptop. This is a convenience for me.

I also use smart lights to automatically turn on and off inside my home, and outside, in the portico.

I use automated socket outlets to turn on / off the water heater in my bath, on a schedule.

A lot of advantages in these things is in the option to schedule them, or make them act on the input of a sensor (movement, light, etc)

I can dim my backyard lights, turn on and off my porch light depending on the sun's position, control my home thermostat to heat or cool via phone before I am home, control my washing machine and dryer or know if they are done, open garage remotely with my app or close it, turn on any lights of the house or turn them off if I am in bed with my phone, control my TV via phone if I lose the remote (likely somewhere in the couch), also I use a lot of smart plugs to control individual devices such as fans, manual electric devices that are always set to be on, etc...

I don't care much about the automation itself, but in general having control over your lights is ludicrously nice. It helps me a lot with maintaining my sleep schedule, which in retrospect I suppose my favorite part does rely on automation which is a light alarm.

But we'll generally have very very dim lights on throughout the early evening into bed time which makes it much easier for me to fall asleep.

Waking up to office-white-lights will also really wake you up.

Also: parties. It's fun to be able to do nice pink and blue lights or a low-lit candle-like scenario, depending on the vibe.

I have a bunch of things at the office set to automatically turn off at a certain time or on command. It's helpful in that I don't leave something running that really shouldn't be, like a laminator, overnight. After that I decided to put an Alexa plug on anything that could potentially be a fire hazard if left on, like the air purifiers and fans.

It's hardly a bulletproof solution but it's better than the old solution of, "Oh shit, I think I left X running… welp, time to waste 40 minutes driving back and forth."

Webcam with motion detection pointed directly down at our cat litters. Motion triggers a lamp switching on so I can hopefully get to and remove any poo before the stench of it bleeds into the house.

So am I, but I really wanted to control lighting (color ans temperature) in my living room and smart bulbs was the easiest way I could do it. I had some random cheap polish wifi lights but the delays on controlling then just drove me off. Decided to switch to hue at some point and just color quality and responsiveness was better.

I only have them for that and I love to adjust the mood via lighting. I don't care about any further automation. I also don't care much if it was Philips or someone else that gave me light bulbs.

Warning: my comment only addresses my use case for automation. I don't use cloud services either. I also kinda just kept writing, so this is a bit of a text wall.

I live in an old house. 80% of the lights in my house are operated by walking up to them and twisting the stem. The remaining 20% are switched.

To properly turn the lights on in my living room, I have to visit four separate lamps and turn each one on. The dining room has three lamps, bedroom has three, office has three, etc. When it's time for bed, I have to walk around the house turning each lamp off. If I want them dim, no luck. To do that would require either all new lamp fixtures, or rewiring the house with new dimmer switches.

Or, that was how it was before I did the Zigbee/HomeAssistant thing. Now I just hit that master switch on my nightstand and all the lights turn off. My whole house changes into "Night Mode". The thermostat will widen the setpoints. The doors lock if they weren't already. If I happen to get up at 3AM to take a piss or get a glass of water, the lights all know to come on at minimum brightness, and to turn off shortly thereafter.

My front door lock used to be a pain in the ass when I had my hands full of groceries. Or my coffee and the mail. Now my door unlocks automatically when I walk up to it. It's a small joy, but it reliably makes me smile each time. (And I don't have an ugly keypad, and still have a standard key slot if I need it).

I have an ancient stove and oven. No electronics at all. So I wrote a simple automation to alert me if the kitchen motion sensor's temperature rises 10°F more than the rest of the house, for longer than 30 minutes. This has saved me a couple of times now when I forgot to turn the oven off. (It takes a good hour for that temp sensor to reach the threshold as well. I wrote that automation after discovering that my oven had been on for hours. When I looked through the temp logs, I saw a clear signal I could use in the future.)

I also put a remote temp sensor in one of my HVAC registers. Comparing its reading to the ambient reading gives me a ΔT on my air conditioner, and a couple years ago the steadily-declining value of that delta alerted me to a refrigerant leak weeks before it would have been large enough to notice otherwise. I was able to get that repaired in the spring rather than in the heat of summer. This isn't something I would have done with a regular thermometer; having to remember to check it every so often and do the math taking into account the humidity and the elapsed time since the start of the cycle. But seeing all that temp data logged over many weeks makes the pattern easy to spot.

In the den I sometimes want it to be bright enough to read or do detailed work, and other times I want it dim so there's no glare while watching TV. Before, that meant I would have to buy lamps with a dimmer on them, then dim each one and go flip the ceiling fan light off. Now when I click the switch[1] to turn the TV/stereo combo on, it automatically dims the lights at either end of the couch, and turns the overhead light off.

Color temperature! That's another thing that isn't possible without some smartness in the bulbs. At night my whole house is as close to 2200K as possible. I really like that kind of light. But in the middle of the day, my kitchen lights are closer to 3300K.

My porch light turns on 30 minutes after sunset and off before sunrise. It's under a roof so I would have needed to either replace the switch with one of those fancy ones, or installed a photocell somewhere else. But it was just a couple automations added to the config file to get that functionality.

[1] I originally put a Tasmota wall relay in to save the 20W (!) of idle power my old stereo receiver was constantly drawing. When I realized I always fiddled with the lights whenever I turn the TV/stereo on, I just automated that away.

I've been really enjoying voice controls for my lights. It's not always more convenient than my lights, but overall I like the experience.

With Apple TV + a home pod I also get a fair bit of TV control with my voice which is nice.

My car charger turns on and adjusts the charging amp based on how much solar energy I'm getting from the sun. I know this will eventually be replaced by some 3rd party solution, but when I did it there were none.

I have auto changing hue color lights for when I'm doing exctacy at home to give it a rave feel.

I like to dim and make the color warm at night too. But every already said that hundred times.

Opening garage with phone (esp via voice if your hands are full) is killer app. I don’t have to carry any keys anymore (not that we need to lock up often)

I bought a Philips Hue lightbulb because it was the easiest way to get a dimmable lamp in my living room.

if you live in an inhospitable climate (arizona for example) with pets or perhaps otherwise disabled individuals left at home (grandparents?), remote ability to control thermostat has proven useful.

that said, useful in this case means saving a bit of money by adjusting its settings. a manual (non cloud) thermostat would work too.

I like the idea of local home automation. “Siri, make the bathroom lights dark blue”

Problem is, it comes with a ton of headaches.

The cloud is a problem, as you noted, but also a bunch of fiddily, unreliable software, firmware updates that go haywire, and apps that are tied to iOS and will stop working with my physically installed home hardware if the manufacturer ever stops treading water and fails to update for the latest breaking iOS update.

Home automation could be simple, reliable, and future-proof. It’s really not, though.

If you don't like having "the big light" on then colour changing and dimmable lights are great. A lot of people don't feel qualified to install actual dimmer switches.

I only set mine to warm, cold and purple/blue but I don't have room for three lamps.

Stuff like the sunrise timer, switching lights on when you're on holiday, and out of home control are just gimmicks though.

>appeal of it

the appeal is technology as hedonistic consumption. People just love spending money on 'tech', even if it actually costs them more time and money, which is fundamentally the opposite of what technology is supposed to accomplish.

So in this sense it isn't even automation, it's anti-automation because just about every person I've met who is into home automation spends significant amounts of resources on things like flipping a light switch on.

You can audit what you're installing as it's open source. Such an odd hill to die on.

The main thing for reliability for me is ... is there wired ethernet to the device or hub, and NOT wifi or bluetooth to the final switch/bulb.

"real" protocols like Zigbee and friends seem to work well.

My most reliable home automation devices are the Lutron Caseta. I've never had any problems, aside from changing the batteries on the shades. The Ikea stuff is decent now but wasn't so great 6 years ago. I still have the original tradfri hub. An annoyance with them is that because you want to be able to control them with a physical switch, a power-outage will result in them coming back on when the power returns, instead of remembering their last power setting. They may have fixed this since last I looked. I'm just using the hub for the smart blinds at the moment.

> This includes Ikea when I tried their smart tech just a couple years ago. It was incredibly unreliable and I do question actually recommending it (that being said, maybe they have gotten better and I would love for someone here to tell me has...

I have had IKEA bulbs and outlets for over two years (adding to it over that time) and have great experiences and high reliability.

Ikea has gotten quite a bit better. Most of their devices are Zigbee 3.0 now, and work fine.

Hue is already not a commodity, since they make the by far nicest and most reliable lights. Making their product shittier isn't making it more competitive.