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Luckily, not everything uses WiFi. There are tons of Zigbee and Z-Wave devices which physically don't have a WiFi chip. Of course, you should build your own br
by jannes 6y ago
Luckily, not everything uses WiFi. There are tons of Zigbee and Z-Wave devices which physically don't have a WiFi chip.
Of course, you should build your own bridge to connect them to (rather than using the bridge of a big tech company).
For Zigbee you can use the Conbee [0] and for Z-Wave you can use the Z-Stick [1] to build your own bridge.
Furthermore, some of the cheaper WiFi devices that are based on the ESP8266 chip can be flashed with a custom firmware called Tasmota [2] to make them cloud-free.
[0]: https://www.phoscon.de/en/conbee2 https://www.phoscon.de/en/conbee2
[1]: https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick/ https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick/
[2]: https://github.com/arendst/tasmota/#readme https://github.com/arendst/tasmota/#readme
- kaszanka 6y agoA ZigBee or Z-Wave stick + Home Assistant (or openHAB, Domoticz, others) gets you more reliable operation and no notifying $MEGACORP every time you flick a light switch (or something equally dumb). Devices based on the popular ESP8266 can also frequently be freed from their cloud overlords with community-made firmware [0], [1] and used as proper Intra-o-T devices. I decided a while back that I would have no part in this Inter-o-T madness and I think it was a good choice. [0]: https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota [1]: https://esphome.io/ https://esphome.io/ Heh, just noticed you linked Tasmota as well while I was writing this. Good project, I use it too!
- thrashh 6y agoTrading cloud provided services with your own home grown systems just trades unreliability in one way with its own sets of maintenance and reliability problems, plus a lot of complexity that is out of reach for most people. Smart home technology is a mess and someone that cares enough needs to design an open, reliable, future secure, and user friendly system that can work wired and wireless.
- cookiecaper 6y agoDo note that you can unintentionally expose data to the BigCo too -- Home-Assistant and I'm sure the other platforms can export all local devices to Google/Amazon to allow control via Assistant/Echo and will send entity state updates to facilitate that.
- paledot 6y agoEveryone has their own threat model, but I'm more comfortable with Google knowing when my light switch is on than I am with their outage or service deprecation preventing me from turning it off.
- pantalaimon 6y agoJust because you have WiFi doesn't mean all communication must happen over the Internet. If both the phone and the device are in the same network, they can communicate just fine.