The big device manufacturers DON'T WANT INTEROPERABILITY. They want you nailed down to their ecosystem and hit you with planned obsolescence. Like most anything else in the economy, they want premium pricing. If you adopt open standards, then you're competing with everyone else but now on price. The majority of device makers don't want to do that. THAT is the problem with the smart home.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Technology throttled by human greed
We probably have the tech, know-how and capability to build a permanent massive orbiting space station with a highly efficient way to get there and back.
But we're too busy fighting wars and trying to figure out how to screw each other out of another dollar. Most of our human energy and efforts are spent either trying to swindle money out of others or trying to protect ourselves from being swindled or just being swindled.
Are there any open source smart home technologies? (For this reason but also for privacy's sake)
Homeassistant helps a lot in that respect.
Home-Assistant.
People talk a lot about home-assistant but there is another part to that setup; the devices themselves and the firmware they run.
If you stick to ESP8266 devices mostly you can use things like Tasmota and ESPHome. Zigbee/Z-wave is good I've heard but nothing compares to the interoperability of good 'ol WiFi.
It costs like less than $15 for a Sonoff Basic R2, another $5 for a knock off FTDI USB programmer. With a tiny bit of soldering you can put some programming pins on the Sonoff and flash Tasmota. From there you can use Mosquitto to control it, or the HTTP API, both open and interoperable protocols.
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The proprietary/cloud based threat bit me already. Installed smart vents in my home several years ago. They weren't perfect, but they did really help even out my 3-bedroom, 2-story, 1-zone home. Now the app fails to login, the site doesn't even attempt password recovery and I'm back to dumb vents... Customer support is a black hole and basically every product is and has been out of stock for years, so I've no hope of any happy resolution.
They apparently used to be supported by SmartThings when it allowed custom stuff, but that's dead now too because Samsung didn't want to allow it. I even tried to use their proprietary hub which said it could connect to them, but that shit didn't work either.
If they’re SmartThings then they can probably be controlled with a Z-wave dongle and HomeAssistant
If you don't use zwave/zigbee for your smart home you're missing out.
The best smart home platform before are this was home assistant. And by gosh it still is the best by a mile. The difference in functionality home assistant has to anyone else is an ocean wide win for home assistant. It’s the only thing that even comes close to the utopia idea of a smart home so many have given up on. I love my home assistant 💜
I know someone living in a really high-end "smart" home. We're talking about a ton of hardware and proprietary software controlling practically everything in the house. From one app in a phone or iPad, you can control everything from the security cameras to the heater to the pool.
It's basically the pinnacle of what all this technology intends to achieve, and tbh, it's all a bit of a pain.
Diagnosing anything in the house has an extra layer of work. Is it the pool heater not working? Oh, no, it's the app not working. Security alert from the house? A fly walked across the camera lens. Everything acting weird all the sudden? Guess the shitty monopoly broadband cable provider in the city is having issues again.
The system only stays afloat because of a 24/7 service contract with a company that specializes in these houses. Give a few months without that support, and things will start falling apart.
I get that this is a different class from the products from Google and Amazon, or even the various open source products, but tbh, I'll take fragmented over monolithic and overarching.
I may be a bit cynical here, but to me, current smarthome systems are about two things: a) vendor lock-in, and b) holding your house hostage to push you away from one-time purchases and onto subscription services, much as is already hapening with computers/smartphones and modern cars.
From the seller's point of view, subscription services have several huge advantages: they ~~can milk you~~ have a guaranteed revenue stream for the lifetime of the system, they can collect/sell lots of data about you, and they can ram any TOS changes down your throat which you will accept as long as you care about being able to turn on the lights in your kitchen.
Interoperability is really bad for vendor lock-in, so I'm curious as to which supplier will implement it to what degree.
As for our house, it has some smart things, but none of those are connected to the internet, nor do I expect they ever will be.
For all its faults and risks, a smart home can still make your life a lot easier.
proprietary software
Found your problem.
Let's not pretend open source smart homes are perfect either. I hve immense respect for the Home Assistant project, but making it all work seamlessly is a nearly impossible task.
I mean, I agree, but the target market of a lot of this stuff couldn't care less. They want their hot tub synced up to their Outlook calendar or whatever, and can afford a monthly maintenance contract to keep that working.
For the rest of us, there's this sort of odd limbo. Most people expect some kind of remote control app as part of their smart stuff, which means either going through an outside cloud service, or running your own server and contending with the fact that most of us don't have a static IP. Of course there are services like no-ip, but again, you're stuck using someone else's cloud service, just for a much smaller part of the overall task.
My point at the end though is that I don't necessarily want "all in one" control, whether open source or proprietary. I've seen what well-implemented smarthome looks like, and it does not (to me) seem worth the money or time. I'll take the ecobee, maybe the security cameras, and I'll even go though their commercial cloud to get that remote connectivity, but I'd rather keep my services separate, than go all-in on one hardware/provider/app.
or running your own server and contending with the fact that most of us don’t have a static IP
Just buy a domain name and use dynamic DNS, it is what I do. I'd argue that what you have seen is far from well implimented, but to each their own of course.
I mean, that's basically the option. Set up a domain, set up dynamic DNS, and safely do the right port forwarding and IP reservations in your router.
Unfortunately this is not easy for a lot of people, and the overall picture of home automation requires a combination of skills that not everyone has. Then they basically get two choices: pay for a company to maintain the system, or use someone else's cloud. A lot of people will pick option 2.
Unlike a lot of DIY tasks, it's not even one that I would suggest to someone who is hesitant. It's not a "oh just try planting tomatoes this year, see how it turns out." Someone who messes up their port forwarding rules could potentially open their home network to a lot of trouble.
Will Apple sell more devices if they fully support the standard? Will Google?
If not, there's your answer.
Apple isn't really a good example, they're pushing the standard. I don't know of any smart devices they make themselves besides the homepod.
Will Apple sell more devices if they fully support the standard?
I stand to the question. Apple is pretty famous for saying what people want to hear, and not actually doing much.
My cynical interpretation of the right-to-repair announcement is: we know Europe is gonna cram this down our throats, so let's try and get control of the narrative while there's still time.
Is supporting this open a standard a law? It sounds like it could be an EU law, and it being one is the only reason companies would do it.
Hm, might make sense to make a suggestion to the Commission, think it's a good idea.
It's definitely not a law. Codifying this in law could stiffle innovation.
They said that about the usbc law, but that turned out well.
I think the major difference is that USB-C is a much more mature standard than Matter. But even then it's not perfect.
The GitHub, if you're wondering how exactly this thing works. A blog explaining it, and an example.
Is there any particular reason HTTP couldn't have done all this?
HTTPS is heavy when you’re talking about the extreme low power, bandwidth, and compute devices matter is intending to support
its also not a broadcast protocol - matter intends to connect many devices to many devices
those are off the top of my head; i’m sure there are more. HTTP is great, but new/alternate network protocols aren’t inherently bad: especially when you’re operating in a very constrained/niche environment
Yeah, I'm going to reserve judgement, but anything to do with IoT does make me suspicious off the bat.
its also not a broadcast protocol - matter intends to connect many devices to many devices
Does it? It sounded like it was a server-client model in the blog post and a skim of the example, with devices as clients and whatever application as a server.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
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A year ago at Berlin’s IFA tech trade show (think European CES), Verge reporter Jon Porter witnessed a Google Nest Hub control an Apple HomeKit smart plug.
Despite being developed by the biggest names in the industry — Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, and more — Matter has yet to deliver on its main promise.
We’re expecting news from robot vacuum giants Ecovacs and Roborock, and smaller smart home players such as Eve, Nanoleaf, SwitchBot, Aqara, Aeotec, and Yeelight are all on the show floor.
But what’s more important is the long and boring task of getting them to seamlessly work together to create a home that’s actually smart, not just a collection of disparate gadgets that solve specific problems.
The smart home standard introduces a secure, basic communication layer that allows for interoperability and local control.
It moves us away from proprietary protocols, dubious security standards, and cloud dependency to the point where — if appropriately implemented — we can feel comfortable allowing technology intimate access to our homes.
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Ah the internet of infected things. Everything a mash up of open and closed source, old and new, then abandoned by the manufacturer after a few years for the next shiny.
Probably Linux based, wait to be taken over by a few botnets...
What is needed is an open, standardized hardware platform. You should be about to flash on the IoT OS of your choice that will be kept up to date.