On the other hand, this seems to provide a really good opportunity to hobbyists, if they can get the ball rolling quickly enough. If the problem with smart-hom

On the other hand, this seems to provide a really good opportunity to hobbyists, if they can get the ball rolling quickly enough. If the problem with smart-home devices is their over-reliance on the cloud, the best solution would be to create a self-hosted system. Expensive, powerful, otherwise-bricked devices provide a great incentive to create such a system. As inspiration I am thinking of the Pogoplug devices that seem to be littered around thrift stores and "sold-as-is" bins. Without a connection to the previous owner they are bricks - the default web interface doesn't even come up if there is a registered user, and they can't be de-authed without the original user signing in. But they have multicore ARM CPUs, a decent amount of RAM, multiple USB ports, and even SATA ports. Canny users have found ways of popping a shell, rooting them, and turning them into home servers to do myriad tasks (there are versions of both Arch and Debian targeted at many versions of the Pogoplug). I don't own any smart home devices, and I'm sure it would require a non-trivial amount of work to get a self-hosted system running, but it would be great as a platform for hobbyist experimentation. Particularly these Revolv devices which contain radios to communicate on multiple protocols.