But in practice this almost always means connecting to the internet, because the simplest interface is wifi and data collection/display at the producer's servers. So any extra features == internet connection.
This is like asking people on the Internet how to safely mix random household cleaning chemicals. If you don't have the background to answer that yourself, you should not be doing household chemistry.
If my gateway were 192.168.1.1 , I just set that clients gateway as 192.168.1.254)
Misread your question. Sorry. Most of my devices I do want talking to the internet. Just not on my home IP.
but this require a DMZ or a second external IP address (I have both with centurylink) because if it’s double nat on your home network. Thee devices can access your home network.
Keep your [phone/PC/whatever] on one VLAN, with a NAT gateway, and they'll work just as they do now.
Keep the IoT Things inside of their own VLAN, without a gateway to the Internet.
And if a device like Home Assistant or whatever needs to exist on both VLANs in order to be useful, then: Make sure it isn't forwarding/routing/NATing packets.
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The implementation details vary, but they needn't be particularly expensive.
What I do at home is run OpenWRT on a Pi 4 for my home routing purposes. It's fast enough for my needs and it's got simple GUI configuration options for VLAN. (Why OpenWRT? Because it's easy for me to puzzle out when I need to adjust something after a few months or a year -- I don't deal with routing every day, nor do I wish to. (Also SQM is a built-in, which always keeps WAN latency tolerable.))
From there, I've got cheap managed switches that enforce/insert VLAN tags where that is useful to me, so I can decide which physical ports are capable of talking to whichever VLANs.
And from there, I've got relatively inexpensive Mikrotik access points that are configured to provide different SSIDs for different VLANs.
It all works OK, though more enterprisey folks will almost certainly choose a very different path.
Can you give an example of tech devices that aren't manufactured in China?
(To bring this to the logical conclusion: So much for Internet access.) ;)
(From Chinese parts.)
That all tech devices are made in china is a myth propagated by the ignorant (or malicious).
From the raspberry pi (UK) to Samsung Galaxy (South Korea) it is trivial to find a product not made in China once you leave the low end of the market.
And now even the low end has alternatives if you spend some time and effort.
Name any category of product whatsoever and I will personally find you a non-Chinese alternative.
Even many things “made” in China are only really assembled in China. A computer that’s “made” in China is often just slapped together like a lego kit from pieces made in Thailand, South Korea, Germany, the US, Singapore and Taiwan (which isn’t a part of China).
The South Koreanan manufactured units are generally only sold in South Korea.
Without having put any specific thought into it, I always assumed that while designed in the UK they would be manufacturing them in Asia, so it's a pleasant surprise to find out that you're mostly right - the majority have been made in Wales (part of the UK)!
However some are made in Asia, including China. Quoting Wikipedia (plus the citation links):
> "Most Raspberry Pis are made in a Sony factory in Pencoed, Wales,[19] while others are made in China and Japan.[20][21]"
> [19] https://www.sonypencoed.co.uk/about/
> [20] https://www.zdnet.com/article/14-million-raspberry-pis-sold-...
The second link (20) is from 2017, with headline "Raspberry Pi: 14 million sold, 10 million made in the UK"
BUT. The software for the iPhone is made in the US. Which is why people buy it. All phones are black rectangles! The hardware does not matter that much. And the price to buy into the Apple software ecosystem is much higher than the sticker price of the iPhone, only some of which goes to China. So most of the reason someone buys a tech product, and most of the value, ie the software, is US made.
BUT #2: the solar inverter software is used as DRM. This should serve as EXTRA evidence for you that the SOFTWARE MATTERS and that the hardware is completely fungible.
It takes a little bit of setup, and less than $200. Anyone techy should do this; it's essentially maintenance free once running.
My (openWRT) router also has IPs on both subnets, and routes both LANs to the WAN. Restricting/throttling WAN bandwidth is easily managed in OpenWRT. Preventing WAN access is easily done by not providing a gateway in the DHCP assignment (pihole).
Obviously the big difference between this and a VLAN is that an ill-behaved device could still access the other subnet, and could still discover the gateway and route to the WAN. So far, none of the IoT crap on my restricted subnet has misbehaved.
The careful approach to IoT is to never connect a device to anything, dump the firmware, analyze it, reflash the EEPROM with patched TLS certificates (if necessary), write your own server implementation, let the IoT device join a dedicated IoT WiFi network, on that network run everything through a gateway pretending to be "the Internet", where the emulated server is running. Yep, it's this bad.
Of course, if the device or its malfunction cannot cause sufficient harm (e.g. it's a light, usually it's not worth to reverse engineer it) then just run it on a separate SSID and VLAN, with least access necessary to get it running (starting from blocking everything and allowing network by network until it works).
And, uh, if the device has a LTE or can use something like Amazon Sidewalk, it gets even trickier to keep it tame.
I don't have any solar power stuff, but I did this with my old cat feeder machine. In the process I discovered a service/backdoor SSH account, a system that does not encrypt p-frames at all before uploading data to the cloud, and a bunch of other things that made me happy I did not connect it to any public networks. Short conclusion: consider against with a camera or a microphone that runs on Tuya-developed firmware. Generalized conclusion: consider against IoT from any manufacturers you don't trust to fully respect your best interests, or aren't willing to audit first.
The downside is obvious, of course. And with every year more and more manufacturers tighten up their hardware, but I'm certain the crappy programming and service backdoors are all there, only ways to mess with the network traffic or firmware are clamped down.
To a significant extent I see this as a "buyer beware" situation. Now, a lot of people aren't even really aware of the problem nor knowledgeable enough to know what to look for, but I'd expect the majority of the HN audience is both aware of and able to understand the problem enough to be capable of looking out for and avoiding it.
I personally don't mind if a device uses internet connectivity to provide a useful service, but I refuse to buy anything that requires internet connectivity arbitrarily for functionality that could easily be performed locally. The first thing I do when I think a new IoT device might be neat is google "<product> Home Assistant" and see what comes up. If there's no integration or the integration is cloud based instead of local I probably won't buy it.
IoT devices are not necessities, most of them are either luxury items or disposable novelties. You can always just not buy them. There are certainly some categories, particularly in the residential market, where it may be harder to find an option you find agreeable but its far from impossible. If every major offering in a category is bad in this way, you almost certainly don't actually need that thing.
I wouldn’t go that far.
To best of my awareness, there are no good automatic cat feeders on the market - just crappy ones and tolerable ones.
This doesn’t mean they’re a some novelty gimmick I don’t really need. I’ve got two cats, one had developed a health condition that requires special diet - and I’d say that a feeders that track consumption and can recognize between two furry assholes and unlock only for the appropriate one, are basically a necessity for me here. Without those I would have to force unnatural feeding schedules on my cats, so I can watch them eating from their own bowls.
Even basic stuff like smart lights isn’t totally a gimmick. It’s not just a light with phone for a remote control, after all. Being smart enough to e.g. not blast at full brightness in my eyes if I need something at nighttime is not just a fancy thing, but good for sleeping hygiene.
Solar assistant has the bonus of interfacing your inverter with homeassistant, and letting it control the inverter/get signals from it (so you can do things like, if grid voltage drops to zero, do xyz)
For others, here’s the solarassistant compatability check page: https://solar-assistant.io/help/general/is-my-inverter-suppo...
This user's biography reads, "you are the least qualified to comment on the subject"
Sounds about right.
The short answer is: it's for load balancing, it can't be avoided.
If they add up to a percent or two of the local grid, then control is not necessary.
Also you could design a solar system to not backfeed.
The way it works today for common residential grid-ties is this:
1. Is grid up? Y/N
2. If Y, then supply excess locally-generated power to grid. (Someone will implicitly use it.)
3. If N, then turn off connection to grid. (Nobody's home and we don't want to hurt anybody.)
Here in Germany this works by specialised devices called "Funkrundsteuerempfänger" (rough translation: radio controlled receiver, according to Wikipedia[0] it's "radio teleswitch")
Getting rid of excess energy in the grid can be just as hard a problem to solve as to deal with excess load, and being able to simply and very quickly remove some supply from the grid is very useful for that.
Otherwise they'd shut down the newly installed solar installation. I said, can you do that? Of course while talking, I changed the WiFi password.
Adding completely unused features just for fun isn't really a common business practice?
I could flash them with Valetudo and wire them up to Home Assistant, but doing so requires me to solder shit to the JTAG circuit and buy some niche hardware, which requires me to open up the vac and potentially brick it. I'm not risking that on a $1200 device.
What does it even mean for an app to be ".cn"? Apps typically aren't identified by DNS names. Did you have to download it from a .cn domain? Is it just a roundabout way of saying the app was Chinese?
Aren't they, at least on Android?
The gmail app is com.google.android.gm [1], and so on. The app ids are Java style reverse ordered dns names.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
Some systems like mine (Enphase) do a good job of letting the inverters operate independently of the monitoring/control software. But to do this, I believe they need to add data storage to the inverters themselves in order to log data during a controller "outage".