Most products out there are rubbish. Every manufacturer wants to own their customers through yet another form of cloud hosted smarts and yet another app for you

Most products out there are rubbish. Every manufacturer wants to own their customers through yet another form of cloud hosted smarts and yet another app for your smartphone. The Nest smoke alarms are a canonical example - they stop working because they want you to buy the next version. Samsung, LG, et al are all the same ... clueless. As for wireless networking, these devices need batteries, lots of them and all the time. Many won't even tell you when it is time to replace their batteries. For my home, I'm looking at using alarm cabling to every point. Using 2 cores for power and another 2 cores for data - rather like CAN-bus (which works well for cars, trucks and marine applications). I also plan to wire in quite a bit of Cat-5e/6 with PoE for security cameras, etc. For intelligence I'm using MQTT (mosquitto). Arduino, e.g. LilyPad for small devices and PocketBeagle (it supports CAN-bus) for more complex nodes. As you might guess, I'm constantly on the lookout for clever hacks of consumer devices to add into my "system" without using cloud services. Plan for on-going work-in-progress. But you'll have lots of fun. As for smart locks - they're all basically easy to defeat. You'd be better off using conventional locks with electric strikes that you can control from your system - but remember to carry your keys .... just in case. I find that keying all locks alike saves having too many keys.