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Just follow some very simple rules of smart homes and it will be a better journey. I could make an infinitely long list. 1) things must fail to being dumb, not

Just follow some very simple rules of smart homes and it will be a better journey. I could make an infinitely long list. 1) things must fail to being dumb, not non-functioning. Dumb/old behavior must exist in parallel, Just consider selling the home or having an AirBnB guest. Would you need to write any notes with instructions for them to use the home? Then you probably failed. Typical example is the “don’t touch this switch, the bulb is smart” idiocy. Things must only be made smarter, never dumber or more cumbersome. I repeat: smart bulbs must never ever be connected to traditional switches. Just use smart switches behind your regular switches. 2) This one follows from 1: you will be required to know how to do basic electrical work safely, such as replacing switches and dimmers. You will not build anything that isn’t frustrating without knowing (or spending money on) electrical work. Manufacturers will try to sell you gadgets that make things smart without needing an electrician but ignore those. 3) Unfortunately you’ll need to know a bit about networking and computers. Don’t embark on it if you aren’t comfortable tinkering with computers. You’ll spend more time tweaking smart home things than you’ll ever save through the smarts. Remember: smart home tech is still on the level where it’s a hobby. It costs time. 4) Get things that support local-only operation. At least things that fall back to local only (e.g using a web service for extrnal access but still working local use even if the service is down). 5) Low power wireless mesh networks will fail to connect, drop nodes. Plan for it. 6) Don’t get anything that requires a subscription to function. 7) Don’t buy things from companies whose business is ads and dealing in PII, rather than building good gadgets. You know which those are. 8) Most things have no use being “smart”. Fridges, stoves, ovens etc. I’d avoid all A/V equipment too. Only connect smart things that actually make things easier with very simple means. Being able to switch of all lights in the house when you leave with a double click on the switch by the door is really convenient and saves you a lot of work (or electricity). “Dimming the lights and starting a movie” might be cool but is gimmicky and gets old quickly.

fragmede 4y ago
> Most things have no use being “smart”. Me thinks you're not the target market then. The oven is the first thing I'd want to smart-ify. Being able to check that the oven is off, remotely, is worth the world (or at least, my house not burning down). Normal people don't understand the security implications or about the dependence on a cloud service, as long as it works enough of the time.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Ovens are quite safe left on, unlike stoves, assuming electric and not gas of course. But a simple timer can do that job too for both stoves and ovens. A timed or smart circuit breaker when overheating would be a lot “smarter” than a microcontroller, Wi-Fi, app.., My smoke alarm is “smart” (notifies me). It will also tell me if I forgot something on the stove. If the alarm could shut off the stove then that would be great. But putting me + an app + some startup’s web service in between is too many moving parts in my opinion. Putting something online means it needs software patches. Which makes it a million times more complicated than it needs to be. If my fridge broke down I would like to be remotely notified, but having it online isn’t worth the risk (mostly that the manufacturer would brick it - not that I’d be hacked to be honest) and hassle, plus chances are that when it breaks down so did the notification system.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    How does the smoke alarm differentiate between "forgotten food burning on the stove" and "house is on fire" and if you aren't there to do something about it, what good does it do to notify you? Shouldn't it notify the fire department, if anything?
    - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
      I personally don't believe in having an "smart" devices in my home, but a friend of mine has a "smart" smoke alarm that sends an alert to his phone if the fire alarm is triggered and the alert includes an option to contact the fire department. Automatically contacting the fire department is not necessarily a good idea, especially since the vast majority of alerts he gets from his smart fire alarm are due to too routine emissions from his coffee maker.
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      It doesn’t differentiate. But if it goes off when I’m away I can look at the cameras, I can call a neighbor or fire department. Even if could hook this up to be automatic I wouldn’t want to.
  - 4y ago
firecall 4y ago
In Australia it's illegal to perform you own electrical or telecoms work. (things that connect to the grid or the wider telecoms network). I'd also counter that it's totally fine to replace normal bulbs with smart bulbs! It works exactly as before, but the bulb gains some useful powers! Colour temperature, RGB colours and so on, are all useful features of smart bulbs that can be used connected to a standard switch! Turning lights on and off isn't the only function, and for many not even the primary function, of smart lighting!
- alkonaut 4y ago
  > In Australia it's illegal to perform you own electrical or telecoms work. I think most countries have similar laws. Exactly what level of knowledge you need to do it legally varies. Where I live most things are off limits to non-electricians other than 1-1 replacement of existing installations. I some times use that loop hole to replace a dumb switch with a smart one, or do other such basic repairs. Other times I try to do most of the work myself but have an electrician bless my work before I power it up again. Obviously I encourage no one to do any kind of electrical work they aren't 100% comfortable doing. > I'd also counter that it's totally fine to replace normal bulbs with smart bulbs! Yes. But the point of my post wasn't that it's EASIER to make a home smart by doing that, it was that by putting a smart bulb behind a dumb switch, you have created a frustrating experience. A bulb that can be controlled from a phone but can be completely disabled by a switch somewhere, isn't really that "smart"... > It works exactly as before if you can hook it up that way, then you have made your home a little bit smarter. Just make it pass the "smart test". I.e. does the old/dumb switch work still? Can someone buy or rent the home and not need to know that a specific switch must be set to "on" for the smart feature to work? Does the app work 100% of the time to switch the light on/off regardless of any switch positions? Great, the home is smarter. If the app some times doesn't switch the light on because a switch has ben flipped to the "wrong" position? Then I'd say the home was actually smarter before. The physical switch functoining and the remote controllability/color temperature/voice command are adding less smartness than the feature "the light switches on the walls actually switch on and off the lights" were. That's what I mean by that smart things should only ADD functionality and be careful to not remove it.
wodenokoto 4y ago
> Just follow some very simple rules of smart homes and it will be a better journey. I could make an infinitely long list. Is this sarcasm? This whole post kinda reads like the "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?" quote.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  > Is this sarcasm? It definitely is not! By "very simple" I mean "this is very simple compared to actually trying to create a smart home without following these rules". Creating a smart home that goes beyond something that is either trivial or frustrating, is definitely not easy. But the rules themselves are pretty easy to understand I think. Such as "don't buy anything that needs a subscription" or "you either need to hire or be an electrician". Not sure what you think is sarcasm. I still think the post is pretty understandable?
  - wodenokoto 4y ago
    Thank you for the sincere reply. I think it’s a lot of rules - you even allude to there being infinite - and while each might be easy to understand for an IT crowd like HN, I think some of them might be hard to understand in the general population. A lot of them looks like the product of hard learned lessons too. So the sum of the whole thing doesn’t add up to simple.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      > and while each might be easy to understand for an IT crowd like HN, I think some of them might be hard to understand in the general population. I think the parent addressed this, and I agree: if you are going to do this well, then you need to be comfortable tinkering with computers and networks. I've built a smart home setup based on openHAB. It's not perfect, and it does occasionally break (fortunately rarely, and usually because I decided to update or mess with something), but I have everything in the home behind one app, and everything works predictably and consistently.

fragmede 4y ago

> Most things have no use being “smart”. Me thinks you're not the target market then. The oven is the first thing I'd want to smart-ify. Being able to check that the oven is off, remotely, is worth the world (or at least, my house not burning down). Normal people don't understand the security implications or about the dependence on a cloud service, as long as it works enough of the time.

alkonaut 4y ago
Ovens are quite safe left on, unlike stoves, assuming electric and not gas of course. But a simple timer can do that job too for both stoves and ovens. A timed or smart circuit breaker when overheating would be a lot “smarter” than a microcontroller, Wi-Fi, app.., My smoke alarm is “smart” (notifies me). It will also tell me if I forgot something on the stove. If the alarm could shut off the stove then that would be great. But putting me + an app + some startup’s web service in between is too many moving parts in my opinion. Putting something online means it needs software patches. Which makes it a million times more complicated than it needs to be. If my fridge broke down I would like to be remotely notified, but having it online isn’t worth the risk (mostly that the manufacturer would brick it - not that I’d be hacked to be honest) and hassle, plus chances are that when it breaks down so did the notification system.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  How does the smoke alarm differentiate between "forgotten food burning on the stove" and "house is on fire" and if you aren't there to do something about it, what good does it do to notify you? Shouldn't it notify the fire department, if anything?
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    I personally don't believe in having an "smart" devices in my home, but a friend of mine has a "smart" smoke alarm that sends an alert to his phone if the fire alarm is triggered and the alert includes an option to contact the fire department. Automatically contacting the fire department is not necessarily a good idea, especially since the vast majority of alerts he gets from his smart fire alarm are due to too routine emissions from his coffee maker.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    It doesn’t differentiate. But if it goes off when I’m away I can look at the cameras, I can call a neighbor or fire department. Even if could hook this up to be automatic I wouldn’t want to.
- 4y ago

firecall 4y ago

In Australia it's illegal to perform you own electrical or telecoms work. (things that connect to the grid or the wider telecoms network). I'd also counter that it's totally fine to replace normal bulbs with smart bulbs! It works exactly as before, but the bulb gains some useful powers! Colour temperature, RGB colours and so on, are all useful features of smart bulbs that can be used connected to a standard switch! Turning lights on and off isn't the only function, and for many not even the primary function, of smart lighting!

alkonaut 4y ago
> In Australia it's illegal to perform you own electrical or telecoms work. I think most countries have similar laws. Exactly what level of knowledge you need to do it legally varies. Where I live most things are off limits to non-electricians other than 1-1 replacement of existing installations. I some times use that loop hole to replace a dumb switch with a smart one, or do other such basic repairs. Other times I try to do most of the work myself but have an electrician bless my work before I power it up again. Obviously I encourage no one to do any kind of electrical work they aren't 100% comfortable doing. > I'd also counter that it's totally fine to replace normal bulbs with smart bulbs! Yes. But the point of my post wasn't that it's EASIER to make a home smart by doing that, it was that by putting a smart bulb behind a dumb switch, you have created a frustrating experience. A bulb that can be controlled from a phone but can be completely disabled by a switch somewhere, isn't really that "smart"... > It works exactly as before if you can hook it up that way, then you have made your home a little bit smarter. Just make it pass the "smart test". I.e. does the old/dumb switch work still? Can someone buy or rent the home and not need to know that a specific switch must be set to "on" for the smart feature to work? Does the app work 100% of the time to switch the light on/off regardless of any switch positions? Great, the home is smarter. If the app some times doesn't switch the light on because a switch has ben flipped to the "wrong" position? Then I'd say the home was actually smarter before. The physical switch functoining and the remote controllability/color temperature/voice command are adding less smartness than the feature "the light switches on the walls actually switch on and off the lights" were. That's what I mean by that smart things should only ADD functionality and be careful to not remove it.

wodenokoto 4y ago

> Just follow some very simple rules of smart homes and it will be a better journey. I could make an infinitely long list. Is this sarcasm? This whole post kinda reads like the "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?" quote.

alkonaut 4y ago
> Is this sarcasm? It definitely is not! By "very simple" I mean "this is very simple compared to actually trying to create a smart home without following these rules". Creating a smart home that goes beyond something that is either trivial or frustrating, is definitely not easy. But the rules themselves are pretty easy to understand I think. Such as "don't buy anything that needs a subscription" or "you either need to hire or be an electrician". Not sure what you think is sarcasm. I still think the post is pretty understandable?
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  Thank you for the sincere reply. I think it’s a lot of rules - you even allude to there being infinite - and while each might be easy to understand for an IT crowd like HN, I think some of them might be hard to understand in the general population. A lot of them looks like the product of hard learned lessons too. So the sum of the whole thing doesn’t add up to simple.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    > and while each might be easy to understand for an IT crowd like HN, I think some of them might be hard to understand in the general population. I think the parent addressed this, and I agree: if you are going to do this well, then you need to be comfortable tinkering with computers and networks. I've built a smart home setup based on openHAB. It's not perfect, and it does occasionally break (fortunately rarely, and usually because I decided to update or mess with something), but I have everything in the home behind one app, and everything works predictably and consistently.