My take currently. Exactly thos. Buy Sonoff things, Raspberry Pi, and do some vibe coding. All local first.

Same. But instead of rPi get a cheap N100 etc. 'real' PC with M.2.

What’s wrong with rpi?

It's now crazy expensive for what it is. It's still okay if you prefer low power standby / rare use but other than that probably not so much.

Everything is now crazy expensive, if buying new.

Also use static IP addressing on your home network.

Your router is a point of failure, so an internet outage making it go weird doesn't mean you want all your stuff becoming on manageable).

IoT is honestly one of the best ways to rapidly learn SRE concepts.

[delayed]

My rules seems much simpler and lower effort:

1. buy the Zigbee version

2. boom, local only smart home is done

I guess if there's a device that's actually wi-fi only then I'll have to go through your flow but so far there's been no need.

Reasonable!

I found a few wifi and bluetooth devices that were cheaper than or didn’t have a zigbee equivalent. Window fan and air monitor specifically.

I didn’t do an exhaustive market search, just sharing my anecdotal experience. It’s a great feeling to be able to focus on hardware capabilities and price, then will the software you envision into existence via AI accelerated RE.

Similar, just with "Matter" instead of Zigbee.

Do you mean Thread or do you use Matter over Wi-Fi?

I use both, but preferably matter over thread when it makes sense (as wifi just uses so much more energy).

Thread over Matter is not fully local. In Thread < 1.4, devices can connect to internet servers through NAT64. Most Thread Border Routers (AFAIR Home Assistant + OTBR is the main exception) do not allow you to disable NAT64.

In Thread >= 1.4, devices can request globally routable IPv6 addresses. The Thread 1.4 white paper does not hide the intentions:

The Thread 1.4 Border Router acts as the IPv6 router between the Thread network and external networks, including the user's home network and the larger internet. It is by default configured to support external communication [...]

Cloud Connectivity: Direct internet connectivity enables Thread devices to easily connect to cloud services. This facilitates remote monitoring, control, and firmware updates, enhancing the user experience and enabling remote device management capabilities. Device vendors can now directly service and support their deployed fleet of devices, regardless of which application ecosystem each device is integrated with.

https://threadgroup.org/Portals/0/Documents/Thread_1.4_Featu...

This is what you get when you let Google, Amazon, Apple, and Samsung design a smart home standard. They'll use every opportunity extract analytics and increase control. You'll own nothing and be happy.

Zigbee, Z-Wave, and ESPHome over WiFi/Thread are the only major modern local and privacy-preserving smart home standards.

But matter is a better network. More efficient and faster. Large zigbee networks with cheap devices often result in ghost devices not responding. Matter even with the cheapest 2 dollar bulbs from AliExpress have zero issues.

Matter is not the network layer. You are either talking about Thread (which uses IEEE 802.15.4 like Zigbee) or WiFi. Matter is the application layer protocol.

We have a lot of devices and never have any issues. But yeah, if you put a lot of Tuya Zigbee devices with crappy firmware that flood the network. Similarly if you put a lot of crappy WiFi devices on your network, it's a security nightmare (wise people put them on an isolated VLAN and use WiFi client isolation).

[delayed]

That’s not the case at all. Matter over thread is newer. The latest range of ikea smart home stuff is all thread.

Thread has the advantage of consuming very low power so battery powered sensors and remotes can run for years. Wifi is only used because it doesn’t require buying a thread border router.

> AFAIR Home Assistant + OTBR is the main exception

Luckily this is my setup.

I am not opposed to the possibility of cloud connectivity (as long as it is deactivateable) and even if I weren't I think I still prefer Matter (thread/wifi) over nearly all non-matter devices I've ever used, especially all the problems I had with Zigbee devices will make me stay far away from it. (Even though I am aware that many people had gread experiences with zigbee.)

I think this interpretation is a bit too negative. Undoubtedly the companies want to spy on you, and with Thread 1.3 they were already perfectly capable of doing so - via your Thread border router, which connects to the normal LAN and can talk to the Internet (if you let it). Allocating Thread devices from global IPv6 blocks (GUAs) doesn't change that, it just removes the NAT between Thread devices and the border router.

Before Thread 1.4 the IPv6 addresses used by the Thread network were all ULAs - i.e. the devices were only routable locally and didn't have a global IPv6 address, so if you did happen to want to talk to your Thread devices over the internet, it was possible but the Thread border router had to do NAT for you.

With Thread 1.4 the border router can assign device IPs straight from the global IPv6 block assigned by your ISP, which means you can directly access your Thread device over the internet without the NAT provided by the Thread border router. If you don't want to locally host your smart home automations (you and I do, but the average consumer doesn't) this can be very useful.

IMO this fits perfectly with the philosophy of IPv6 - every device can have a globally routable IP address without needing NAT.

If you don't want your devices reaching out to the Internet (like I don't), the solution is to put all that stuff on its own VLAN with no Internet access (which I do).

Similar, with z-wave instead of zigbee. Except after installing two smart switches, a motion detector, and two smart outlets, I realized there aren't really any automations that I actually want. My porch light turns on and off at sunset and sunrise, through an electronic rube goldberg machine that could have just been a single photocell lightbulb.

Not contradicting or criticizing, just describing my lack of creativity.

I had a similar issue, especially for lighting, there is just very little to no automation I want. Which was a "problem" when getting into smart home stuff, because lighting was somehow the poster child and most recommended part.

My favorites are now air quality and climate measurement (the reason why i tried it again was mold prevention), climate control and a smart lock because i was scared of forgetting my keys when moving away from any friends I could hand a spare.

> cfw

Custom firmware?

What if it was security hardened by Claude?

Based on my use of Claude Code Security in an appsec setting, I'm not worried. "Hardened by Claude" is aspirational.

Vast majority of these devices are ESP32’s that have been flashed years ago with buggy firmware, sitting on shelves in a warehouse.

These are cheap chinese adware driven sensors. Security is not their priority.

Will they be that three years from now?

Probably, unless chinese companies change their business model and a secure successor to the ESP family arises. Low conviction loosely held opinion, shared bc you asked.

But why does that matter? My smart home upgrade cycle is around once every 5 years. The world is changing on a dime every 6 months nowadays. Projections beyond about a year out in the smart home market are useless to me as a consumer.

Things are moving fast now, security issues are now on the agenda with various governments, these ESP32's may be patched by Claude sooner than you think.

emudhra mitm certificate probably helps here maybe.

I wonder how long it will be until Claude starts refusing to do this kind of thing?

For most of these tasks you don’t need a frontier model.