smart homes are cool

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > smart homes are cool

newreply.php: Dec 24, 2009; Pillbug

Visual GNUdio posted:

I'll shamefully admit to having a boatload of smart home things in my house.

Here's the general overall synopsis:

It's poo poo.

The biggest issue is that there's a lot of different protocols from a lot of different vendors. Historically this wasn't the case. When you bought a Leviton system, you had to pay out the rear end for everything to be Leviton branded because that's all it would work with. If you were a zillionaire you'd go w/ Crestron or AMX but I'm going to leave dealer installed options out of the discussion. None of this poo poo would talk to each other across systems, but when you had an all Insteon system that you bought from the one company that makes that poo poo, it'd all generally work the way you'd expect it to. It was expensive-ish and limited in capability but it worked.

Then some jackass got it in their head that the way forward was to make a hub that would control all sorts of stuff. Instead of one expensive vendor that sold a bunch of poo poo that would pretty much work together, you have vendors trying to orchestrate a mismatched shitpile of things that each individually are unreliable, so the only thing certain about the system is that at any given time some part of it is sure not to be working.

Exhibit A: I currently cannot control my home office lights with the switch on the wall. Why? A CLOUD SERVICE hosed up a couple hours ago and is misinterpreting the action that should be taken when pressing butans. It did this once before and the problem magically went away a few hours later so I'll just hang here in the dark until THE CLOUD decides to stop making GBS threads on my stupid face.

STUPID poo poo I'M CURRENTLY PUNISHING MY FAMILY WITH

5 Assorted Sonos speakers (not poo poo, Sonos own zone)
3 Harmony Hub Remotes (mostly not poo poo)
ecobee3 smart themostat (expensive, but gently caress if it doesn't own and kicks the poo poo out of Nest)
3 Hue bulbs + 2 Hue Iris things (not individually poo poo, but poo poo as a group)
GE Link bulbs (hue compatible, no color change just dimming. see poo poo rating above)
Handful of Z-Wave dimmers and switches (individually work great, control system is still garbage)
Z-Wave multisensors (detects motion/temp/humidty/light. motion detect works, temp and humidity is hilariously inaccurate, have no use for light sensor)
Z-Wave door contact (still can't quit get it to line up right on my gate, have now resulted to 3d printing a replacement magnet thing in order to get it to work)
Z-Wave wall scene controller (see Exhibit A above)
Some random IP camera (mostly useless due to installation issues)
SmartThings hub (total garbage, cloud everything, read exhibit A above for why)

The Thing To Do these days is to buy one of the hubs and then buy a bunch of compatible poo poo and then hope for the best. To help you out I've created this handy list:

SmartThings - Z-Wave, Zigbee, WiFi - Kickstarter thing then purchased by Samsung. Big money means they might stick around for a year or two. I know the most about this one because it's what I'm currently running at home. Open web-based IDE but lol it's all some hacked up version of Java called Groovy. Developer friendly platform with a lot of developers which means a bunch of shoehorning poorly programmed things together in awkward ways until you get something to work. The worst part about SmartThings is that it's all in the cloud. Every command your system receives gets sent to the cloud for processing. Want to turn on a light? Press button, wait for it to go to cloud, decide what should be done, packet is sent back to the hub and only then does the hub go and do something. It might turn on right away or it might turn on in 5 seconds or never. It's like a roulette wheel of fun for everything you do!

MiCasaVerde line - Z-Wave, WiFi - These guys have a few different models. The newest model is cloud based (see above) but the rest handle processing locally. Fully scriptable by the user with Lua. By all accounts the development environment is an ever changing target and generally a mess to work with. A new OS (UI7) has been in beta for nearly a year and it's still a mess. Upgrades are painful and break everything.

Revolv hub - Z-Wave, WiFi, Insteon - This looked like a very promising device with loads of radios and powerful hardware so a bunch of people bought them and then... Google bought the company, shut everything down and bailed on all the users. Rumor has it they were after a couple of the RF engineers and bought the company just to get them to work on their next Nest thing. Get used to this story. Spend hundreds (thousands) of dollars on a home automation system just to find that it disappears one day in a headhunting exercise.

OpenHab - Z-Wave, WiFi - OpenHab is a linux thing that lets you turn a PC into a hub of sorts. It can interface with other hubs to let you control Insteon and some older protocols. To my knowledge there's no ZigBee binding working yet. In general, the platform is linux as gently caress, poorly supported by a bunch of german neckbeards. The standard UI comes straight out of IOS 2. Like most things lunix all support happens by way of a mailing list that's nearly unusable. There's also a forum for support, but it's all in german. Good luck with this option.

Staples Connect, Wink Hub, Lowes Iris, PEQ - Assorted poo poo, typically some combination of Z-Wave, ZigBee, and WiFi - Home Depot and Lowes and fuckin Staples don't want to be left out in the cold (that's for dumb homes) so they either bought or partnered with somebody to get in on the hot hot action. Some of these are bad, some are OK. All of them are closed systems so they support whatever they support and that's the end of the list. Hopefully Staples or whomever doesn't get out of the home automation business because if they do you're hosed, there is zero way to interact with their system except through their app, and there's no good way for third parties to interface their things with these hubs.

lmao owned

# ¿ Mar 3, 2015 14:31

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 18:18

newreply.php: Dec 24, 2009; Pillbug

itt people who have experienced cartoonesque mishaps with smart home devices recommend us all to buy smart home devices, as well

# ¿ Mar 3, 2015 18:23

newreply.php: Dec 24, 2009; Pillbug

if you click the ? next to visual GNUdios username this thread reads like that ted the caver story except with a guy who reports increasingly weird home automation mishaps until all of a sudden the posting stops

# ¿ Mar 5, 2015 13:19