Re:The smart home is flailing as a concept
by stevekemp on Saturday August 07, 2021 @07:10AM
(#28097655)
Yeah I find that a couple of the 433Mhz remote-controlled sockets suit me very well.
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.)
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.