Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off

Re:Lights have been on at this school for a year because no ... by jchw on Friday January 20, 2023 @06:15AM (#34451530)

Smart equipment is fine as long as the "smart" part is just synchronization built on top. I have ZigBee and Zwave (yes both for now unfortunately) switches and dimmers, these work completely fine manually in absense of home assistant.

I do also use some smart bulbs (also ZigBee/Zwave) and when paired with a smart switch, they can work in absense of the controller still, allowing you to still control the lights as long as the radios in both devices can reach eachother.

To me this is the common-sense answer. The design works in absense of any central controllers and definitely does not (ever) depend on any internet services, and yet you can still do anything you'd normally do (including integration into something like Google Home if you really want. Though, I don't care about "voice assistants" or anything, so it's not really that useful to me.)

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Re:Lights have been on at this school for a year because no ... by yencabulator on Friday January 20, 2023 @04:21PM (#34460088)

> Smart equipment is fine as long as the "smart" part is just synchronization built on top.

... until you hit that bug that tells all the lights in the school to turn off about 100 times a second.

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Re:Lights have been on at this school for a year because no ... by jchw on Friday January 20, 2023 @07:00PM (#34462041)

You can unplug the controller if need be, but truth is that if we're talking about ZigBee or Zwave, I don't think there's nearly enough bandwidth to do that :)

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