5 ms·

At some point a company is going to start making hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price tag, a

At some point a company is going to start making hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price tag, and they’re going to be fabulously wealthy, commanding higher margins than the others. At least, that’s what I like to tell myself.

balloob 1y ago
There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. These are all smart home standards that are fully local and devices will be able to be set up and used even when the company goes out of business. You are however limited to the things that are standardized. If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable. (disclosure: I am the president of the Open Home Foundation and ESPHome is one of our projects and I am also a board member of the Z-Wave alliance)
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  > There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet. Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future. IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best. Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today! > If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable. Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions. One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable? Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.
  - balloob 1y ago
    Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but check out the Shelly BLU Button1. It's a BLE button with a long battery life. It sends out BLE packets when pressed, which can be picked up by Home Assistant via a Bluetooth adapter or using a Bluetooth Proxy. You can make the latter with any ESP32 and https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth
    - hardwaresofton 1y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation! This definitely makes it easier. IIRC BLE power mode + wake on BLE + wifi would probably work for easy use! Sounds like a far off weekend project
    - hardwaresofton 1y ago
      BTW, just bought a bunch of Shelly stuff. Looks like that project might happen sooner than I thought! The Shelly 1 also looked like a good option :) Thanks again for the rec.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    With Thread+WiFi, can devices talk to the internet? Because denying them that ability is a lot of why I like Zigbee/Z-Wave.
    - balloob 1y ago
      Wifi yes. Thread depends on the settings on the Thread Border Router. Ours defaults to no internet access.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - hardwaresofton 1y ago
      I’m sure I’m speaking to the choir here but access to Wifi != access to the internet! Why I’m excited about thread over wifi is that I don’t need any extra specialized gear and possibility one device could run by itself
baby_souffle 1y ago
The number of companies that does this _is_ growing. Shelly was early, the cheep chineese stuff was easy to hack but they eventually moved to cheaper and more esoteric chips where custom firmware is non existent or not as mature. This is changing back, though! The number of ESP-32 powered LED light controllers that I've seen on Ali that feature a USB port for reprogramming / have all the GPIO labeled ... even have a HA/ESP-Home/WLED logo on them is infinitely more than I saw in years past (a few is infinitely more than zero, right?)
- dns_snek 1y ago
  Buyer beware - There's a mountain of products on the market that are advertised as "open source" which lures many of us in, but many of those products have poor quality hardware. My heuristic for anything operating at mains voltages is "If I can find a product that looks just like this on Temu/Aliexpress, I'm not buying it". They're probably white label products sourced from the same factories and suffer from the same quality issues. Relays found in smart plugs are often sketchy in my experience. About half of the ones I bought or set up for others make unsettling noises that made me worried about poor electrical connections and risk of fire. I only have two Shelly plugs but those don't suffer from these issues.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    Tuya and their rebranded versions fall into that area too. Their power switches die early and they actually went from easily reprogrammable to hostile firmware. They have own cloud service you can't leave, only get an access code to - and the firmware prevents downgrades. Terrible company.
    - dns_snek 1y ago
      Tuya is just an IoT platform used by many cheap devices but I agree, it's low cost and cloud based which is a terrible combination. I wouldn't touch it.
    - darkwater 1y ago
      Just buy the ZigBee versions, they work beautifully with HA
rstuart4133 1y ago
The article does mention https://refoss.net/ https://refoss.net/, quote: There is a crucial difference here, though: the Home-Assistant integration for Refoss devices, which interfaces directly with the monitor and needs no cloud connectivity, is written and provided by Refoss itself. Home-Assistant compatibility is the first bullet item on the above-linked product page.
05 1y ago
Lots of “smart” products come with BK7231x chips that are flashable to esphome, nobody needs another custom protocol (even if open) since esphome currently supports local encrypted transport that’s going to be better than 99% of what the Chinese (or even western) companies are going to design for local communication. Oh, and hobbyists mostly aren’t going to pay premium for those either, unless those come preflashed with esphome and sponsor hass project, and even then 90% people are still going to buy the cheapest option on the market:)
Aurornis 1y ago
> hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price This business model doesn’t work. Many have had this idea. They all run into the same problem: The target audience for hackable home automation devices doesn’t like paying a premium for anything they think they could DIY. If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy? If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option.
- umbra07 1y ago
  Isn't that kind of what GL.inet does? They seem pretty successful.
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  > If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy? I agree with you that targeting devs/people with an under-developed sense of buy/build doesn't work! I'm hoping that the devs with money/slightly more accomplished who don't have time to mess with stuff would pick it up. A bit of a jump but I think this was one of the big strategic mistakes of products like FirefoxOS -- aiming for the dev with money who can afford a $600 I-support-foss-and-mozilla signaling device that also happens to be a phone they can hack on may have worked better than targeting $60 feature phones. > If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option. I think that's OK! It's similar to HN dropbox effect. IMO you actually want those people to find the cheaper option, those are bad customers for a premium brand. The product has to actually be noticably better/more consistent/etc than the cheaper option though. And IMO there is a large subset of nerds that don't actually want to write 5 files and flash an OS to do smart home stuff -- they want to play at the application layer. A good counter example might be the NAS industry. This is all theoretical of course, so... We're just armchairing at this point.
russdill 1y ago
How is that not exactly zigbee and matter?

balloob 1y ago

There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. These are all smart home standards that are fully local and devices will be able to be set up and used even when the company goes out of business. You are however limited to the things that are standardized. If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable. (disclosure: I am the president of the Open Home Foundation and ESPHome is one of our projects and I am also a board member of the Z-Wave alliance)

hardwaresofton 1y ago
> There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet. Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future. IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best. Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today! > If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable. Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions. One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable? Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.
- balloob 1y ago
  Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but check out the Shelly BLU Button1. It's a BLE button with a long battery life. It sends out BLE packets when pressed, which can be picked up by Home Assistant via a Bluetooth adapter or using a Bluetooth Proxy. You can make the latter with any ESP32 and https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth
  - hardwaresofton 1y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation! This definitely makes it easier. IIRC BLE power mode + wake on BLE + wifi would probably work for easy use! Sounds like a far off weekend project
  - hardwaresofton 1y ago
    BTW, just bought a bunch of Shelly stuff. Looks like that project might happen sooner than I thought! The Shelly 1 also looked like a good option :) Thanks again for the rec.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  With Thread+WiFi, can devices talk to the internet? Because denying them that ability is a lot of why I like Zigbee/Z-Wave.
  - balloob 1y ago
    Wifi yes. Thread depends on the settings on the Thread Border Router. Ours defaults to no internet access.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - hardwaresofton 1y ago
    I’m sure I’m speaking to the choir here but access to Wifi != access to the internet! Why I’m excited about thread over wifi is that I don’t need any extra specialized gear and possibility one device could run by itself

baby_souffle 1y ago

The number of companies that does this _is_ growing. Shelly was early, the cheep chineese stuff was easy to hack but they eventually moved to cheaper and more esoteric chips where custom firmware is non existent or not as mature. This is changing back, though! The number of ESP-32 powered LED light controllers that I've seen on Ali that feature a USB port for reprogramming / have all the GPIO labeled ... even have a HA/ESP-Home/WLED logo on them is infinitely more than I saw in years past (a few is infinitely more than zero, right?)

dns_snek 1y ago
Buyer beware - There's a mountain of products on the market that are advertised as "open source" which lures many of us in, but many of those products have poor quality hardware. My heuristic for anything operating at mains voltages is "If I can find a product that looks just like this on Temu/Aliexpress, I'm not buying it". They're probably white label products sourced from the same factories and suffer from the same quality issues. Relays found in smart plugs are often sketchy in my experience. About half of the ones I bought or set up for others make unsettling noises that made me worried about poor electrical connections and risk of fire. I only have two Shelly plugs but those don't suffer from these issues.
- viraptor 1y ago
  Tuya and their rebranded versions fall into that area too. Their power switches die early and they actually went from easily reprogrammable to hostile firmware. They have own cloud service you can't leave, only get an access code to - and the firmware prevents downgrades. Terrible company.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    Tuya is just an IoT platform used by many cheap devices but I agree, it's low cost and cloud based which is a terrible combination. I wouldn't touch it.
  - darkwater 1y ago
    Just buy the ZigBee versions, they work beautifully with HA

rstuart4133 1y ago

The article does mention https://refoss.net/ https://refoss.net/, quote: There is a crucial difference here, though: the Home-Assistant integration for Refoss devices, which interfaces directly with the monitor and needs no cloud connectivity, is written and provided by Refoss itself. Home-Assistant compatibility is the first bullet item on the above-linked product page.

05 1y ago

Lots of “smart” products come with BK7231x chips that are flashable to esphome, nobody needs another custom protocol (even if open) since esphome currently supports local encrypted transport that’s going to be better than 99% of what the Chinese (or even western) companies are going to design for local communication. Oh, and hobbyists mostly aren’t going to pay premium for those either, unless those come preflashed with esphome and sponsor hass project, and even then 90% people are still going to buy the cheapest option on the market:)

Aurornis 1y ago

> hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price This business model doesn’t work. Many have had this idea. They all run into the same problem: The target audience for hackable home automation devices doesn’t like paying a premium for anything they think they could DIY. If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy? If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option.

umbra07 1y ago
Isn't that kind of what GL.inet does? They seem pretty successful.
hardwaresofton 1y ago
> If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy? I agree with you that targeting devs/people with an under-developed sense of buy/build doesn't work! I'm hoping that the devs with money/slightly more accomplished who don't have time to mess with stuff would pick it up. A bit of a jump but I think this was one of the big strategic mistakes of products like FirefoxOS -- aiming for the dev with money who can afford a $600 I-support-foss-and-mozilla signaling device that also happens to be a phone they can hack on may have worked better than targeting $60 feature phones. > If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option. I think that's OK! It's similar to HN dropbox effect. IMO you actually want those people to find the cheaper option, those are bad customers for a premium brand. The product has to actually be noticably better/more consistent/etc than the cheaper option though. And IMO there is a large subset of nerds that don't actually want to write 5 files and flash an OS to do smart home stuff -- they want to play at the application layer. A good counter example might be the NAS industry. This is all theoretical of course, so... We're just armchairing at this point.

russdill 1y ago

How is that not exactly zigbee and matter?