5 ms·

A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. Self-hosted is the only acceptable alternative here where even the raspberry pi has more processing power to

by tjoff 9y ago

A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. Self-hosted is the only acceptable alternative here where even the raspberry pi has more processing power to run hundreds of homes. A simple service to route mobile apps through the potential NAT is the only thing the cloud should be needed for. Obviously downloading "drivers"/configurations are a valid user case but that's part of the setup-process. Not saying that everyone should tinkle with a RPI but it is trivial to create a more user friendly device. The fact that Amazon, Google, Apple etc. don't even attempt this is just a consequence of them being hell bent on making money from crap.

retube 9y ago
> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. You are completely correct. But 99% of people don't know / can't be bothered to host their own. Googlezonbook will create a near frictionless experience and suddenly you'll need an internet connection to open your front door.
- tjoff 9y ago
  A self-hosted solution is easier to setup than a cloud-setup... The only difference is that you don't need internet access. You still need to connect the power cord and connect to ethernet or wifi (end regardless of whether it is a cloud device or self-hosted device you can configure wifi from your smartphone like the chromecast).
  - EADGBE 9y ago
    I've never seen a build-your-own solution be easier than "Register Here/Get Started".
    - tjoff 9y ago
      Build-your-own? A smart-home-controller is a physical device. You buy it, you provide power and connect ethernet and configure wifi. Now, either the controller relies on the cloud or it doesn't. If it is completely reliant on the cloud you will have to muck about with registering, if it is completely self-hosted you don't. Simple as that.
- amygdyl 9y ago
  I keep thinking about a future retirement business: a mom and pop electronics hardware store, stocking the widest variety of maker goodies and serious bench tools, the kind that are very much try before you buy, if a private buyer - in my ideal world - and my USP would be providing a RPi distro I'll while away my final years polishing the autoconfig for all the home automation kit I can manage to disconnect from the cloud. EDITED REMOVING A REVERIE TO MY PROFILE, my apologies, often carried away when I'm enjoying the topics here, it's not my wish to spoil the flow as I almost did. This said, I will surely be delighted to hear from anyone regarding my rather wistful wishes, to which I applied months of health enforced downtime last year. I still think the qualified opportunity isn't a total wash and would be willing to invest in a no tears no recriminations study, later in the year. About the necessity of a WAN and firmware etc updating your home automation system: are we not in cities now at sufficient density where peer to peer hops in a as hoc network, has become a technical possibility that maybe lacks a sufficient motivation?
hollerith 9y ago
No offense, but is a RPI reliable enough for this application?
- liotier 9y ago
  Yes, but the SD card may have a short life if the system writes a lot on it - so far that is the common failure mode of RPi, which are otherwise reliable.
- tjoff 9y ago
  I explicitly said that the RPI wasn't suitable... But listed it as an example of a way too powerful device that is still cheap. Just to emphasize that you don't need expensive hardware.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  What sort of reliability? Various smart features should fail safe anyway, if that is true then "reliable enough" doesn't have to be all that high a bar. Of course most people won't put up with rebooting their house once a week, so it isn't that low of a bar either.
neikos 9y ago
That sounds like it has been tried to be solved, a quick google gives me: https://home-assistant.io/ https://home-assistant.io/
TheDong 9y ago
Email that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. A raspberry pi has more processing power than's needed to search and store email. ... etc etc This trope is absolute bullshit. What people want is for stuff to work and, if stuff doesn't work, for it to be someone else's fault and/or be easy to fix. Self-hosting fails massively at the second criterion there. Right now, if a cellphone breaks, you can just get a new one and your contacts, messages, apps, etc all sync back to it. Done, you're back on your feet. If you have self-hosted email or smart-home-stuff, the failure modes are much worse, and you're far less likely to have someone else to blame. Also, a raspberry pi does not have enough power to do good voice recognition, not to the level of siri/alexa/google. It also doesn't have enough storage to cache all your music, videos you may wish to play on the TV, etc, so some external cloud integration will be needed regardless. Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora. > it is trivial to create a more user friendly device This is obviously false or else devices like this would have been trivial to make and seen some success... but things like sandstorm.io, yunohost, and others have been incredibly complex projects and have not really succeeded. It's clearly not trivial since those people have collectively thrown millions of dollars and dozens of man-years at the problem with no glimmer of hope. The closest we have to success in this space, I'd say, is NASs which ship owncloud... and those have not caught in for the average household at all.
- 2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
  > Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora. None of these things will kill you if they happen not to work or have serious drawbacks. Software update to Nest could have literally killed people and caused thousands of dollars of property damage. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-glitch-battery-dies-software-freeze.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g... Or maybe everything you say is being recorded and sent to Google all the time. http://bgr.com/2017/10/11/google-home-mini-spying-on-user-fix/ http://bgr.com/2017/10/11/google-home-mini-spying-on-user-fi... I'll stick with my dumb appliances thanks.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
douglaswlance 9y ago
Cloud IS dumb. That's why it works. Most people don't know how their toaster works, let alone a Raspberry Pi. They just want their home automation to work. You can't troubleshoot problems in every single person's home, but you can troubleshoot problems in the cloud.
EADGBE 9y ago
I think this is why we see hubs in this space. Like Insteon, etc. AFAIK, these allow for a local network to be created so that control/connection can still happen at a local level. If that's not the case then why the hell am I required to connect all my switches/outlets to a hub? It makes total sense to go with a local solution like yours, however when all the control is done through the cloud (http://home.nest.com http://home.nest.com, Siri, Alexa), it kinda negates the usefulness of it, except for momentary internet connection loss. And it makes it 12x more complicated for the Average Joe ("What's a Raspberry Pie?", "Local network configurations?", "I don't even know my router's password...").
gumby 9y ago
> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. It probably already relies on the “electric cloud” and perhaps the “ gas cloud” already so what makes a dependency on a “computing cloud”any different?
- kardos 9y ago
  If the electricity or gas has an outage, I'm not locked out (or in).
  - gumby 9y ago
    You can still get that hidden key and unlock the door, right? You can still press the light switch if the net goes out.
- michaelt 9y ago
  Chance of my house having a working electricity supply for the next 10 years, free from major defects and security holes, given that I pay my bills and live in a major metropolitan area: 99.99% Chance of a Revolv IOT Home Hub working for the next 5 years: 0.000% this has literally already been shut down. Caveat emptor.
  - gumby 9y ago
    No disagreement with you, but note that electricity used to be that way everywhere and still is in some places. People adapt their level of technology dependence around it. Over time reliability increases dramatically. Likewise early smart phones used crummy network capabilities, but a feedback mechanism drove improvement in the network which drove increased dependence which drove improvements in the network... the same will happen on the home networks. It's not like we'll all wake up Jan 1 2019 and have nothing but cloud-connected home appliances. It'll be an iterative process, and slower than phone/VCR adoption because fridges and the like are slowly-replaced so-called "white goods".
outworlder 9y ago
> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. As opposed to ordinary users running their own services? The only reason I don't see more routers with default passwords is that people will use whatever comcast and the like provide to them, and that provider will randomize passwords. If people cannot even configure their router, how are they going to configure self-hosted solutions?

by tjoff 9y ago

retube 9y ago

> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. You are completely correct. But 99% of people don't know / can't be bothered to host their own. Googlezonbook will create a near frictionless experience and suddenly you'll need an internet connection to open your front door.

tjoff 9y ago
A self-hosted solution is easier to setup than a cloud-setup... The only difference is that you don't need internet access. You still need to connect the power cord and connect to ethernet or wifi (end regardless of whether it is a cloud device or self-hosted device you can configure wifi from your smartphone like the chromecast).
- EADGBE 9y ago
  I've never seen a build-your-own solution be easier than "Register Here/Get Started".
  - tjoff 9y ago
    Build-your-own? A smart-home-controller is a physical device. You buy it, you provide power and connect ethernet and configure wifi. Now, either the controller relies on the cloud or it doesn't. If it is completely reliant on the cloud you will have to muck about with registering, if it is completely self-hosted you don't. Simple as that.
amygdyl 9y ago
I keep thinking about a future retirement business: a mom and pop electronics hardware store, stocking the widest variety of maker goodies and serious bench tools, the kind that are very much try before you buy, if a private buyer - in my ideal world - and my USP would be providing a RPi distro I'll while away my final years polishing the autoconfig for all the home automation kit I can manage to disconnect from the cloud. EDITED REMOVING A REVERIE TO MY PROFILE, my apologies, often carried away when I'm enjoying the topics here, it's not my wish to spoil the flow as I almost did. This said, I will surely be delighted to hear from anyone regarding my rather wistful wishes, to which I applied months of health enforced downtime last year. I still think the qualified opportunity isn't a total wash and would be willing to invest in a no tears no recriminations study, later in the year. About the necessity of a WAN and firmware etc updating your home automation system: are we not in cities now at sufficient density where peer to peer hops in a as hoc network, has become a technical possibility that maybe lacks a sufficient motivation?

hollerith 9y ago

No offense, but is a RPI reliable enough for this application?

liotier 9y ago
Yes, but the SD card may have a short life if the system writes a lot on it - so far that is the common failure mode of RPi, which are otherwise reliable.
tjoff 9y ago
I explicitly said that the RPI wasn't suitable... But listed it as an example of a way too powerful device that is still cheap. Just to emphasize that you don't need expensive hardware.
maxerickson 9y ago
What sort of reliability? Various smart features should fail safe anyway, if that is true then "reliable enough" doesn't have to be all that high a bar. Of course most people won't put up with rebooting their house once a week, so it isn't that low of a bar either.

neikos 9y ago

That sounds like it has been tried to be solved, a quick google gives me: https://home-assistant.io/ https://home-assistant.io/

TheDong 9y ago

Email that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. A raspberry pi has more processing power than's needed to search and store email. ... etc etc This trope is absolute bullshit. What people want is for stuff to work and, if stuff doesn't work, for it to be someone else's fault and/or be easy to fix. Self-hosting fails massively at the second criterion there. Right now, if a cellphone breaks, you can just get a new one and your contacts, messages, apps, etc all sync back to it. Done, you're back on your feet. If you have self-hosted email or smart-home-stuff, the failure modes are much worse, and you're far less likely to have someone else to blame. Also, a raspberry pi does not have enough power to do good voice recognition, not to the level of siri/alexa/google. It also doesn't have enough storage to cache all your music, videos you may wish to play on the TV, etc, so some external cloud integration will be needed regardless. Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora. > it is trivial to create a more user friendly device This is obviously false or else devices like this would have been trivial to make and seen some success... but things like sandstorm.io, yunohost, and others have been incredibly complex projects and have not really succeeded. It's clearly not trivial since those people have collectively thrown millions of dollars and dozens of man-years at the problem with no glimmer of hope. The closest we have to success in this space, I'd say, is NASs which ship owncloud... and those have not caught in for the average household at all.

2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
> Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora. None of these things will kill you if they happen not to work or have serious drawbacks. Software update to Nest could have literally killed people and caused thousands of dollars of property damage. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-glitch-battery-dies-software-freeze.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g... Or maybe everything you say is being recorded and sent to Google all the time. http://bgr.com/2017/10/11/google-home-mini-spying-on-user-fix/ http://bgr.com/2017/10/11/google-home-mini-spying-on-user-fi... I'll stick with my dumb appliances thanks.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

douglaswlance 9y ago

Cloud IS dumb. That's why it works. Most people don't know how their toaster works, let alone a Raspberry Pi. They just want their home automation to work. You can't troubleshoot problems in every single person's home, but you can troubleshoot problems in the cloud.

EADGBE 9y ago

I think this is why we see hubs in this space. Like Insteon, etc. AFAIK, these allow for a local network to be created so that control/connection can still happen at a local level. If that's not the case then why the hell am I required to connect all my switches/outlets to a hub? It makes total sense to go with a local solution like yours, however when all the control is done through the cloud (http://home.nest.com http://home.nest.com, Siri, Alexa), it kinda negates the usefulness of it, except for momentary internet connection loss. And it makes it 12x more complicated for the Average Joe ("What's a Raspberry Pie?", "Local network configurations?", "I don't even know my router's password...").

gumby 9y ago

> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. It probably already relies on the “electric cloud” and perhaps the “ gas cloud” already so what makes a dependency on a “computing cloud”any different?

kardos 9y ago
If the electricity or gas has an outage, I'm not locked out (or in).
- gumby 9y ago
  You can still get that hidden key and unlock the door, right? You can still press the light switch if the net goes out.
michaelt 9y ago
Chance of my house having a working electricity supply for the next 10 years, free from major defects and security holes, given that I pay my bills and live in a major metropolitan area: 99.99% Chance of a Revolv IOT Home Hub working for the next 5 years: 0.000% this has literally already been shut down. Caveat emptor.
- gumby 9y ago
  No disagreement with you, but note that electricity used to be that way everywhere and still is in some places. People adapt their level of technology dependence around it. Over time reliability increases dramatically. Likewise early smart phones used crummy network capabilities, but a feedback mechanism drove improvement in the network which drove increased dependence which drove improvements in the network... the same will happen on the home networks. It's not like we'll all wake up Jan 1 2019 and have nothing but cloud-connected home appliances. It'll be an iterative process, and slower than phone/VCR adoption because fridges and the like are slowly-replaced so-called "white goods".

outworlder 9y ago

> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. As opposed to ordinary users running their own services? The only reason I don't see more routers with default passwords is that people will use whatever comcast and the like provide to them, and that provider will randomize passwords. If people cannot even configure their router, how are they going to configure self-hosted solutions?