It reminds me of those 3D user interfaces in the movie Minority Report. Very cool-looking and futuristic. Who wouldn't want that? The answer is anyone whose arms would be tired after a couple minutes of flailing around like that. Stop making things overly complicated for the sake of marketing copy.
My smart home is entirely app controlled (HomeAssistant), generally scheduled, and at no point does anything notify me unless an actual exceptional event happens. Every smart home device is controllable via a physical switch. My command and control centers are old android tablets acting as digital picture frames until you swipe on them.
And it's really convenient and it works well. No voice anything, no needing five different apps, and the UI is stupidly simple.
Most smart home devices that are advertised are a pain in the ass, the apps are intrusive and terrible, they are far too voice heavy and they usually don't play well with normal switches/remotes/etc.
Lights and entertainment center get the most usage of course, though thermostat control is nice. I do have humidity data from the thermostats but I'm not using it currently.
I built and did an alpha test of garden monitoring but haven't messed with it since.
I can't say I found the ability to control my lights and thermostat from beyond the local network to be compelling. I changed the Nest thermostat for my mother once while she was staying there since she couldn't figure out how to do it, and I think that was the only time I found it useful. I never set up remote access for the lights and never missed it.
Remote security will be a useful application, though. Being able to buzz people in for repairs and deliveries and other services, and know that they know they can't steal anything without being seen, is an attractive possibility.
Fine-grained control of sound is another feature I would use. I often wish I could play audio in the whole house, just one room, or certain rooms, depending on the circumstances.
Also, something I find myself wishing for (less often since Covid, but still occasionally): cameras inside my refrigerator and pantry, so if I have a dinner idea while I'm out, I know what I need to pick up on the way home.
For what it's worth this is possible now with their Smart Button
As I mentioned down below, I'm currently on crutches with a broken leg. Voice-controlled lighting is a big convenience in my scenario. Mechanical switches don't "Just Work (TM)" for disabled people.
Photocells / IR motion sensors turn lights on or off as ambient light levels fall or presence of a human is detected.
Audio switches turn on or off with a sound ("The Clapper", etc.)
Timers can be used to turn circuits on or off on a set schedule. This may not be ideal, but can work for general cases.
There are remotes which work based on a handheld control and either IR or RF frequencies.
All of these are backwards-compatible with old technology, are tried and proven, and will continue to function for years.
"Smart Home" implementations remain 99.99996% crap.
I can lay in bed and turn on/off a fan, a pair of lamps, and the coffee-machine (which I pre-fill manually the night before).
More complex things would be nice, but I just don't trust most of them.
The only other thing I do is record the temperature in my living-room, balcony, and sauna. The sauna monitoring is useful because I can make it ping my phone when it reaches 80/90 degrees and is "ready".
(That just uses an off-the-shelf battery-powered temperature/humidity sensor. Every 30-60 seconds it broadcasts the current readings and I have an SDR-receiver plugged into my desktop. That logs the values to influxdb, and visualizes with grafana. Nothing amazing, but fun and a little useful.)
Imagine asking your phone to watch a movie in your family room, then automatically, the lights dim or change color, the curtains are pulled if it's dark, the tv and receiver are flipped on and the movie is loaded and ready to go on pause. Many people would find value in this. This is all technically possible and some people have actually created this setup. But it probably took them several days and fiddling to make it work. I can barely get my Yamaha receiver and LG tv to work together and they are top of the line new components.
It's valuable and useful to me, and if it could be setup up easily, I'm sure others would love it to.
Ironically I also have two japanese toilets in my house.
I'd argue that this isn't true. Installing a light switch is a HUGE pain in the ass compared to a "smart plug" that can turn a lamp on and off via your phone or any "smart" switch that can connect to it.
As annoying as setup procedures can be they don't take nearly as long or involve nearly as much sweat as cutting holes in walls, running wires, potentially installing additional circuit breakers, installing wall boxes, installing the actual switch, and making sure it's all according to code.
Furthermore, changing which outlet the wall switch controls is also a pain in the ass compared to just relocating the little smart plug or changing the device it controls in the switch configuration software.
It's possible to make a smart device that lasts for decades without security issues but device manufacturers just aren't willing to put in the effort for that sort of thing. It's much, much more profitable to make devices that only last 5 years before the end user needs to spend money on a new one.
Being able to say "Hey Siri, good evening" to switch to my evening scene, or "Alexa, turn on the lights" to turn on the lights in whatever room I'm in becomes a huge convenience, not a novelty.
This way you're not stuck with a useless home in case your controller lost power, is down for maintenance or whatever.
For light switches I use Z-Wave modules that use the wall switch as a low voltage switch to trigger the module to switch the A/C circuit. This way the existing switch acts just as it did before. My family really doesn't notice, yet somehow that porch light is always on around dusk and off by dawn.
I don't use Alexa or the like but as a developer I easily integrate with DiY equivalent.
That last point is probably a key gap generally though -- as a developer this home automation stuff comes easier to me, potentially.
Combability wildly varies between manufacturers, you have have to know what works with what.
The mesh capabilities are kinda wonky, where you have some kind of "heal" network function you use when devices for some reason stops talking to each other.
"Press the button for 3 seconds, but not five."
"Do the pairing near the receiver."
And you have to swap batteries.
Not quite “IOT” but the bridge between that low power network and the internet is a natural add on.
Would also be cool if they were more "push toggle" style so that if I have two sets of switches on the same lights, I don't have to accept that four switches all in different "positions" are different states. (That is, Up Down Up Up, but all off.)
All of that said, most of that does not need any sort of "smart" additions. Basic circuitry has come a long way.
Can program double triple or more taps to run scenes or events, and can also sync multiple switches (wirelessly and on different circuits) to control the same lighting, or use cheaper (wired) remote switches that lack status lights, but are functionally identical.
I have single press resume previous light level, double up goes to 100% double down goes to preset dim level, triple up or down turns on/off the entire room/area of house.
Hold and release to manual dim.
That said, they do fit my bill really well and I'm almost certainly going to switch to them eventually.
You can add a zwave controller that translates ip commands from a home server to zwave commands, but it can be wired or wifi (or usb).
You can also directly program zwave "scenes", which work directly between the z wave devices without needing a controller. Like a direct remote control.
Edit: Regardless of what I meant, I think you proved I should look more into these. Thanks!
My point was that it's not like most iot devices that try to find an open internet connection to phone home. They're 100% as isolated as you want them to be.
And with a huge confession that this isn't that big of a deal.
"Gorilla arm"[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#%22Gorilla_arm%22
YEEEESSSS
Minority Report is my go-to example for sexy, total impractical.
For example, Software Engineering :-)
In contrast, smart devices have many soft failures. They work today and they don’t tomorrow. They fail for various reasons that are not under their direct control, and because of that they have a much larger mental overhead for me.
For instance, I can shut the garage door with a traditional switch and be pretty certain it will close. Yes, they do stop working, but it is a hard, catastrophic event that makes me take notice and act.
By contrast when a smart device fails, it can often fail silently and temporarily so I find myself constantly second guessing the thing I just did. “Did it work? Is the sensor showing me the correct state? Did it open on it’s own? I better go outside and check it.”
I find myself thinking about said thing way more during the day than I used to. And this is fatiguing. Yes, it has some added benefit to automate certain tasks, but any benefit is wasted by the overall mental overhead it is adding back on me. Definitely not worth it except for trivial things from my experience.
The smart home should be an open source hub that integrates appliances, switches and lighting etc.
But the business model requires vendor lock-in closed systems.
For instance, I've seen chest freezers running for >30y without breaking; do you expect today's IT technology to remain viable for the next 30 years? What about new protocols that might appear that the hardware may not support, or new highly desirable features that are simply unfeasible to implement on the limited µcontrollers that power most IoT appliances?
You risk ending up in a situation like with LPT printers - when USB became dominant, lots of old printers ended up in landfills due to how unreliable LPT-USB adapters were. The printers themselves were often absolutely fine, but they had become too annoying and keeping an old machine around to use them was much more complicated than just buying a spanking new network printer.
Given the current dire environmental situation I wouldn't push for technologies that might cause perfectly functioning appliances to become obsolete due to a non-necessary secondary features. The only way out of this is for "IoT modules" to be removable, standardized and upgradeable, but thinking anyone would do that is delusional.
To be fair the problem of unreliable USB to LPT adapters was caused by this. It was more economical to just replace printers so there wasn't enough demand for a quality converter.
If replacing legacy smart home devices is costly then it would provide a market for reliable adapter devices.
Our internet is intermittent, too.
People keep banging on about the environment, privacy concerns about big companies like Facebook are in the public eye, and there's plenty of stories of these smart devices stopping working. Yet people keep buying these overcomplicated, expensive devices with multiple failure points. I can't believe people can be that stupid not to see the obvious drawbacks.
L'il update: when I was a schoolboy doing my 'O' levels, one subject I studied was Technical Drawing. One day, the teacher showed us a pulley. It was used in industrial machinery. It was housed in a little cage which swivelled open. There was a "nipple" at the top to allow for lubrication. I marvelled about how much attention to detail someone had put into a humble pulley. Later on, I came to a strange realisation: there are actually two forms of engineering: industrial, and consumer. Industrial engineering is for stuff that actually has to work, and work properly. Consumer engineering: deliberately designed crap. It's the kind of thinking which leads one to welding batteries onto the phone itself. In some respects, I feel it's the opposite of engineering. Then I think back to how there was some guy, decades ago, that sat down and designed a pulley that was robust and could actually be maintained.
The bottleneck here could be the network interface once you are away from your home. That is where standards struggle.
I think none of the models currently work well for the consumer. If your SaaS provider shuts down its service you have to replace all the hardware too because of vendor lock in.
If your perpetual license vendor stops making this produ t line or changes its proprietary software incompatible say 3 years down the line (which from a software development standpoint is reasonable actually) you can't buy another light switch for the new room you added by subdividing the basement "play room" that would work with your original installation. Software incompatible. New software or other vendors' software won't work on your 'ancient' hardware.
Vendor lock in bad.
Unfortunately, there are multiple reasons why this can't happen in the current environment.
The business reason is that all the big tech giants are now deeply accustomed to lockin-as-a-model, and you can't have lockin if you have a standard that everyone can use equally. So, literally everyone in the space sees it as their incentive to let other players conform to their standards, but not to conform to anyone else's standards. This does not result in a standard, de facto or de jure.
(I made the same objection to the "metaverse" concept a couple of weeks ago. It can't work as some people are envisioning; the business proposition at this point is complete nonsense. Every participating company will be happy for other companies to voluntarily walk into their walled garden, but no company is going to walk into somebody else's walled garden.)
The technical reason is that any attempt to standardize at this point is more likely to produce a mess like bluetooth than any sort of coherent standard. Plus you get an echoing of the business model problem where every participant will see the standard as a weapon to be fired at their competitor rather than something to conform to for mutual advantage.
Not helping any of this is the problem that the problems that they are solving just aren't that compelling. This limits the amount of value they can extract from me by virtue of the fact I'm not paying for more than I'm getting from the 'smart home', which doesn't really leave them with much money to play with. It also doesn't help that the camel's nose is already under the tent in terms of not simply enabling the user but trying to control the user, with things like letting this authority twiddle with my air conditioner and that authority twiddle with my hot water heater, and in 2021, I have less than no confidence that buying into a smart home won't continue this trend.
Personally, my assessment is that the tech industry of the 2010s and the 2020s is structurally and temperamentally incapable of producing a high-quality smart home. The best they can do is create a locked-in walled garden that works great if you buy into it from top to bottom (and pay the subscription fees!), but gets abandoned in three to five years and then becomes totally nonfunctional as they pursue the next thing.
Many devices are now opting for control over HTTP which is fairly reliable, even if your outside internet connection goes down. It's also easy to setup and discover. There is a larger security concern for these types of devices, but common sense will go a long way towards keeping you protected until more rigorous standards can be agreed upon.
Home automation does not, and in my opinion, should not require and outgoing internet connection. My network is accessible from outside because I want it to be and I've accepted the potential risks (though tunneling into my own network is always an option should I want to go that route).
Same for thermostats. If you're going away for two weeks in winter, turn the heat down to 55. What's so hard about that?
I've lost count of how many times I opened the windows and then went out without turning off the heating causing it to run at full blast trying to fight the winter outside.
A window sensor + smart thermostat + Home Assistant solved that problem and the system has been reliably running for 2 years now. I can now open & close the windows at will knowing that the heating will adapt around that and not waste energy. Note that there is no UI, no voice assistants, not even screens involved. It just works in the background.
Do I agree with the current gimmicky consumer-grade implementation of a "smart home" and controlling everything with your phone/voice assistant? No, that's stupid. But it doesn't mean the idea of a smart home should be dismissed - there are ways to actually make it useful and pleasant if you are willing to spend some time and/or money.
I don’t go in for full integration of smart home features into appliances and such. Using smart switches gives me enough “smartness” without to much risk from a system in flux.
The timer is something you can leave on all the time. If you don't come home before dark some day, you still want the lights to go on.
The switches and dimmers themselves degrade gracefully--you'll always have a button to turn things up or down or on or off if the connection fails. And the connectivity is provided by a simple and responsive dedicated radio system, coupled to a bridge. You might need to replace the bridge in the future (to add support for a new protocol or whatever) but the dimmers should last (nearly) as long as the passive switches they replaced.
There is easy solution - instead of IP-based IoT devices, separate appliance network based on industrial or specialized bus (e.g. Zigbee) and then gateway connected to IP-based network. With this setup all your appliances, switches and lights are pretty well isolated and with trivial software, and you just need to handle software updates and security in gateway.
There is another problem and that is interoperability and long-term availability of these products. I do not want to buy products from a closed system of one vendor, but prefer some industrial standard, so there is hope compatible products would be here even after 10 or 20 years.
Though with phones, this is a relatively new concept. Phones used to last for decades. The phones in my parent's house were unchanged and still working after 30 years.
Households which have never heard about Alexa, Apple Home/Google Nest have IP Security cameras with robust motion detection/alert system and in many parts of the world they're credible deterrence as house owner having a gun is not a thing.
That doesn't mean security cameras don't have issues, most are already part of bot net, will never get a security update, hard-linked to the app(Even RTSP is unavailable) and of course privacy issues concerning always on devices in our home sold by companies which don't have reputation for respecting privacy.
But aforementioned issues can be addressed with hardened security cameras along with accessible self-hosted software which are now delegated to only those who wish to get their hands dirty.
The "smartness" should come from a device (be it a smartphone, hub-like device like an echo or my router) that maintains the mapping between device addresses, api and friendly names. That can be upgraded, replaced, exposed to the outside internet.
Only recently. Light bulbs used to blow rather too often and changing them was a routine thing. LED has changed that thank goodness.
Smart lights have been installed at my workplace. They change their setting over 20 or so seconds ‘to reduce stress’. When you press a button and nothing happens immediately it immediately irritates, and most users press it again (cancelling the change).
Who comes up with these crappy systems and the amateur psychology behind them?
What a house should have in any case, is a good network and Ethernet plugs in every room. This makes the addition of new gadgets much easier I found. I must admit I’ve not gone the WiFi mesh route, but it looks interesting as well. Guess I’m just old school on that.
I'd be interested to know how a wifi mesh performs in comparison, but I can't see how it could be nearly as good, without being much more conspicuous.
Given the quality of IoT devices, they pretty much become a serious privacy and security liability the moment they are first turned on.
Agree on everything else though. There's a fundamental mismatch between parts of a house where the expected lifetime is measured in human generations vs. tech gadgets where the lifetime is months to a couple years before becoming throwaway.
And I hate rolling devices. I bought a high-end smartphone, and a high-end laptop quite a while ago. I haven't really had to upgrade those, and that's really nice. Just a taste of what people want in their home appliances.
I'm not sure this holds up any more. It seems to me most mid-range or lower modern appliances fail within a decade.
That said, I only have one "smart" appliance (a Miele dishwasher), and its "smart" features were useless last time I checked.
Smart homes to me have always felt like tech looking for a problem to solve.
Until this gets solved somehow smart features will always remain a marketing gimmick. There's no way around it.
People accept replacing ageing phones and computers because their connectivity features are a large part of the reason they exist. This isn't true for a light switch, for instance, which is mostly seen as a way to turn lights off.