What do you guys think of the idea of smart homes? I could make a basic setup using https://home-assistant.io to control my home temperature and lighting; the tools for doing this are everywhere nowadays and implementation doesn’t seem too horrific anymore.
But setting aside what I “can” do, is this something that I “should” do? How can a person implement this without connecting any devices to the internet?
Buddy of mine moved into a new apartment and they have a couple of “smart features”: Temp, blinds, lights. No cameras (except the front door) or other fancy stuff.
However the apartment can be reached from any browser with a hash. So if you know the hash, you can easily access his apartment controls. Not password, 2FA or anything necessary to identify him.
When he told me I was looking at him with wide eyes and he just laughed and said “Yeah, I know.”.
I mean, you’d have to guess it and that’s the hard part, but if you can, you can probably also guess the hash of all other apartments. Unless they add some random string into the hashable info, you can guess your own hash with your own apartment info (every apartment has a house ID and apartment ID etc.).
Would be a funny weekend project to see if we could get anywhere with it. He could turn down the heat from his neighbors.
I’ve been using smarthome stuff for quite a while now, and my conclusion is this:
You absolutely have to stay local. Home Assistant is the only software I know that can pull that off at the moment, but never ever use commercial devices that have to talk to their servers. Once the servers are down or your internet connection is down, those devices are just bricks, and you don’t want that at home.
The setup is only really usable by the person who set it up. If you’re living alone that’s fine, but anybody else will have a hard time tapping in your secret code to turn on the lights. All trained behavior like pushing a light switch to turn the lights on and off are violated in a smart home, even if it’s just because the delay between pushing the button and the lights going on is increased by 100ms.
You have to monitor battery levels of sensors and replace them to keep the system working. There are dozens of coin cells in your home, they are going to run out eventually (after a few months).
Have a fallback mechanism when the network goes down. It’s not great when you can’t turn on the lights to check why the WiFi router isn’t responding.
All trained behavior like pushing a light switch to turn the lights on and off are violated in a smart home, even if it’s just because the delay between pushing the button and the lights going on is increased by 100ms.
This is only true if you’re controlling bulbs instead of switches. Virtually all of my lights are on z-wave switches that work almost exactly the same as regular switches, the only difference being that the switch paddle doesn’t stick in an on or off position. Smart control is strictly in addition to the primary control.
Completely agreed on your other points, though. Absolutely no chance I’d use anything other that a local Home Assistant server that handles all processing locally.
I’ve installed an Aqara wall switch in a public room, and people are complaining that it doesn’t feel as well as a regular light switch. It’s really hard to get it right.
Yeah, unfortunately there’s not much that can be done there, at least not without adding little motors to the switch so it can match state with whatever it’s controlling. My experience has been that there’s an adjustment period, but eventually it’s not a big deal. Sort of like switching to paddle switches from toggle switches; at first it’s different, and people don’t like different when it comes to things they don’t think about, like light switches. But eventually the new thing becomes normal, and it’s not a problem anymore.
That said, the z-wave toggle switches are garbage, it’s much easier to adjust to paddles.
HA is pretty nice, but has a pretty big learning curve.
As for avoiding turning your internet into a IoT botnet, you need network gear that can segregate clients and prevent internet access, and to pick devices that have a local-only API which is not something everything has.
The real question - and this is coming from someone who spent way more time than I’d like to admit with HA automating things - is what you’re expecting. I absolutely wouldn’t bother doing a setup again because once the shiny wore off, all I use this for is setting a temperature and turning lights on and off: two things the hardware vendor apps does just fine.
It’s great, unless for some reason it doesn’t work, and that’s kinda an unfortunate state of things for what is still pretty early software. Matter should help simplify things since it’ll be less 100 vendors, 100 APIs you have to support which is kinda the state of being right now.
Also don’t buy anything from Belkin, screw those guys.
I have a smart home. I run Unraid OS on my server and among a ton of dockers, I run my own VM with home assistant. Been doing my own DNS, network wide ad blocking, media server, home automation stuff for years now. Always will to help answer any questions.
I’m also disabled so the smart home really helps me.
As a fellow disabled person, so much this. Being able to automate things or access them with a simple voice command (or on my phone) takes a lot of weight off my shoulders.
Smarthome well done is good and I think it will be necessary to tackle some challenges of the future - we need smart solutions to use ressources much more efficiently.
But: 85% of all smart home products are neither smart nor good. They are glorified remote controls. Nothing more.
AMAZON ALEXA IS NOT A SMART HOME PRODUCT.
A smart house doesn’t need you to use your phone/voice/etc. to turn down the blinds or switch on a light. It knows when the blinds need to be where depending on your location, the weather (blind based cooling in summer, heating in winter), the time, etc.
It inherently doesn’t need a internet connection to control itself - it only does need the internet to expand its knowledge of the outside world,e.g. by getting disaster alerts, weather forecasts or off-site-location. When done this way there isn’t much “hacking” that can be done. There aren’t many components that can turn into botnets.
This is all possible for ages and it is all easily achieved - KNX and other systems are good examples. Matter can possibly achieve that. But currently it’s the big hype to call everything that can be voice controlled smart.
For fucks sake. It takes me longer to say “Alexa turn on the living room lights” than to do it myself or use a Clapping sensor from the 80ies.
I have always been pretty anti-smart homes. But it’s scope crept up on me. Often I wanted more manual automation. Christmas lights were on a light sensor timer power strip, lights going to the garage etc are on old school motion sensors so we didn’t trip.
The one thing I did do was a thermostat, specifically a Honeywell. It was nice for scheduling and remotely cooling the house when on returning from vacation (or shutting it off if I forgot.)
Then I got a wifi window ac for my office.
Then I added some wifi mouse traps to prevent me from having to crawl under the house to check them.
Then someone gave us a Weber iGrill sensor that was a pain to swap between phones.
Next thing I knew I had 5-6 apps. So I setup homeassistant to consolidate it. The Weber iGrill was the hardest but I had a pi in the kitchen running a calendar so I took a wekend and got it working in homeassitsnt.
Since then I have added some tplink kasa plugs and switches. The plugs are for Christmas lights this year. And one in the kitchen that we can plug a crock pot etc into and remotely start it while at work. The switches work just like a dumb one too. And are all locally controlled.
Finally I got a robot vac which is nice.
I still don’t have Alexa etc or cameras or mics in the house. And anything I do add needs to be only smart as a value add. IE: it should function as normal even without internet.
But yeah. I guess I have a smart home now.
My advice on HomeAssistsnt is make sure you products are supported if you go that route. Stay local only whenver possible. But it is nice. One app controls all. Again for me they all must function as a dumb device as well.
I’ve gone the same route. HA is amazing, but also a rabbit hole.
The family likes eg the motion enabled lights and the thermostats to control the heating in their rooms. I share your opinion that it must bring benefit.
Is a robot vac worth it? I’m worried that our young cat will destroy it, or that I have to empty it daily.
Well realistically I got a cheap ass one on an amazon fire sale to see if my wife would like it. She did and was spending time building barriers with shoes and shit to get it to vacuum one area. So THEN I got the super expensive one, specifically a Roborock s7 max v.
We don’t really vacuum anymore. Just use that. It’s pretty good about avoiding most obstacles but isn’t perfect. Nerf darts and kids markers are it’s Achilles heal. It also sucks on shag/thick rugs.
I empty the dust bin here and there. Same with water. But it is quite easy to take apart and clean up, both the vacuum and the station itself. Probably one of the better value adds we have had to be honest.
The rate at which the go obsolete is my issue. If you invest in a system, just be prepared to replace everything every five years, and there is almost nothing yoiu can ‘fix’…it is all disposable.
Yeah the main problem is that companies that do this kind of thing want you to subscribe to a recurring payment and if you find something that works “offline” it’s codged together and quite fragile. So you either pay and upgrade when companies say so (see: Arlo cameras) or you spend lots of time trying to fix stuff.
I’m leaning towards the second option, having been burned already by subscription models, but at the moment I don’t have any of the smart stuff and I’m waiting for wife to forget the fiasco…
Not all of them! I really like my athom smart home gear, everything they sell runs on FOSS firmware and they even have github repos to host any device-specific modifications! As long as WLED and EspHome continue supporting the ESP8266 my devices should keep getting updates!
As others have said, you can sequester IoT devices to a VLAN that has no internet access. Most of the common devices (lights, switches, sensors) added to smart homes work perfectly fine without access to the internet. Voice assistants are the biggest security/privacy hole since all commercial options are from big tech companies and phone home constantly. If you set up a local homeassistant instance you can get a ton of functionality out of smart devices with no direct connection to the internet. You need to decide how you handle accessing homeassistant from outside your home if that’s something you want but there are plenty of options to choose from for that.
One thing I will say that I refuse to add to my home is any kind of smart locks. No matter how much I trust my security setup, I don’t trust it with the ability to unlock my doors. If there was one that could only lock them electronically but required being manually unlocked, them maybe. But I haven’t seen a lock like that out there.
I just wanted to add that I’m very glad smart locks exist. My friend with cerebral palsy can now secure his home with a lock and be able to get back in independently.
In general, smart devices are huge for him, and others with physical disabilities.
Also, I should say that I really enjoy the convenience of having Google Assistant in the house. Verbal timers, alarms, reminders, podcasts, and music mostly. Those and the pirate FireTV Stick are our only devices to date. I just don’t care enough to put the legwork in to getting IoT set up. Switches are fine.
That’s great that they help your friend like that! As someone that doesn’t face any kind of accessibility issues myself, it’s easy to overlook those kinds of benefits that these devices can provide. In situations like your friend’s, I’d agree that any potential security cons are outweighed by the pros (especially if the alternative before was having to leave the doors unlocked anyways).
Agree on the convenience of voice assistants. I’ve got various models of Google homes in my house that I use for voice controls on anything I don’t have a good way to truly automate. Different people will have different tolerances for how okay they are with the data things like that can gather. One day I might try to set up one of the local network voice assistants but those can take a lot of work to get just right. Always a tradeoff of convenience and privacy.
Oh that’s interesting. Does Google Home work on an unconnected VLAN for lights? I use it for lights and kitchen timers. I don’t see myself adding anything more complicated or invasive though.
I don’t think Google home would work without an internet connection. I believe google devices and the google home app expect a connection to Google’s servers.
I personally use homeassistant to control everything without an external internet connection and I know you can lock Philips Hue lights off from the internet and the official Hue app will still work.
I really like this statement I heard recently, which I think came from the YouTube Adventurous Way - “Dumb Control, Smart Monitoring”. Make sure that any devices you install have failure models that make sense - you should still be able to control your appliances when the network is down.
That said, the option to remotely control lights, etc is fantastic. I also recommend setting up some temperature sensors in various places - I have quite a few ESP33 boards scattered around with sensors (and and one with an IR blaster) attached.
Making sure you are still able to control everything when the network is down seems like a good idea.
In our house, the smart plugs have a physical button that can be used to toggle them on or off. The lights are still connected to a physical power switch, so they can be reset by flipping the switch a few times, in which case they will probably just act as a normal light. Air conditioning units have an IR remote.
All important automations should run fully locally. I also find that focused and simple automations are often most useful. When I say simple I mean in terms of automation logic, not necessarily in terms of interfacing devices, which can be tricky at times. Example of simple automations I like most would be switching amplifiers on/off based on audio state changes, switching lights on/off relative to sunset, and switching electric water and floor heating elements on/off depending on energy price.
I agree, I also make sure everything is fully local. I have separate subnets for the server that runs home assistant, the IoT devices, and the trusted home network. Then I have some firewall rules that ensure that the IoT network cannot communicate with the WAN or the trusted LAN network at all, only with home assistant.
We have some simple automations at home to turn on the boiler in the afternoon when we have an abundance of solar power, and some basic automation to turn off aquarium lights at night such that the fish can sleep. Anything more complex just becomes unreliable and annoying.
One of the biggest improvements I noticed after switching to smart lights and home assistant was how much better my sleep got when I used a circadian light cycle. I don’t think we realize how important the gradual shift is in triggering the release of sleep chemicals (not my field lol, just my experience).
Just a fun aside take a look at WLED for LED controls. My use case is not particularly practical but they are pretty cheap and lots of fun. That said I bet some smart folk have probably used it for various sorts of indicator lights.
You can connect devices locally now. Eg. Zigbee/Z-wave network protocol without the need to use the internet. I know some builders started to implement smart devices for Apartments in the city which is easy to set the standards but for individual homes, would be harder to sell as it’s costly…
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Buddy of mine moved into a new apartment and they have a couple of “smart features”: Temp, blinds, lights. No cameras (except the front door) or other fancy stuff.
However the apartment can be reached from any browser with a hash. So if you know the hash, you can easily access his apartment controls. Not password, 2FA or anything necessary to identify him.
When he told me I was looking at him with wide eyes and he just laughed and said “Yeah, I know.”.
Soo…what’s the hash?
I mean, you’d have to guess it and that’s the hard part, but if you can, you can probably also guess the hash of all other apartments. Unless they add some random string into the hashable info, you can guess your own hash with your own apartment info (every apartment has a house ID and apartment ID etc.).
Would be a funny weekend project to see if we could get anywhere with it. He could turn down the heat from his neighbors.
If you are at least familiar with technology and search engines you can find pretty much any smart device on shodan.io
I’ve been using smarthome stuff for quite a while now, and my conclusion is this:
This is only true if you’re controlling bulbs instead of switches. Virtually all of my lights are on z-wave switches that work almost exactly the same as regular switches, the only difference being that the switch paddle doesn’t stick in an on or off position. Smart control is strictly in addition to the primary control.
Completely agreed on your other points, though. Absolutely no chance I’d use anything other that a local Home Assistant server that handles all processing locally.
I’ve installed an Aqara wall switch in a public room, and people are complaining that it doesn’t feel as well as a regular light switch. It’s really hard to get it right.
Yeah, unfortunately there’s not much that can be done there, at least not without adding little motors to the switch so it can match state with whatever it’s controlling. My experience has been that there’s an adjustment period, but eventually it’s not a big deal. Sort of like switching to paddle switches from toggle switches; at first it’s different, and people don’t like different when it comes to things they don’t think about, like light switches. But eventually the new thing becomes normal, and it’s not a problem anymore.
That said, the z-wave toggle switches are garbage, it’s much easier to adjust to paddles.
HA is pretty nice, but has a pretty big learning curve.
As for avoiding turning your internet into a IoT botnet, you need network gear that can segregate clients and prevent internet access, and to pick devices that have a local-only API which is not something everything has.
The real question - and this is coming from someone who spent way more time than I’d like to admit with HA automating things - is what you’re expecting. I absolutely wouldn’t bother doing a setup again because once the shiny wore off, all I use this for is setting a temperature and turning lights on and off: two things the hardware vendor apps does just fine.
It’s great, unless for some reason it doesn’t work, and that’s kinda an unfortunate state of things for what is still pretty early software. Matter should help simplify things since it’ll be less 100 vendors, 100 APIs you have to support which is kinda the state of being right now.
Also don’t buy anything from Belkin, screw those guys.
I have a smart home. I run Unraid OS on my server and among a ton of dockers, I run my own VM with home assistant. Been doing my own DNS, network wide ad blocking, media server, home automation stuff for years now. Always will to help answer any questions.
I’m also disabled so the smart home really helps me.
As a fellow disabled person, so much this. Being able to automate things or access them with a simple voice command (or on my phone) takes a lot of weight off my shoulders.
AIRGAP EVERYTHING.
In theory it’s awesome, but in practice it’s a Black Hat heaven
Smarthome well done is good and I think it will be necessary to tackle some challenges of the future - we need smart solutions to use ressources much more efficiently.
But: 85% of all smart home products are neither smart nor good. They are glorified remote controls. Nothing more.
AMAZON ALEXA IS NOT A SMART HOME PRODUCT.
A smart house doesn’t need you to use your phone/voice/etc. to turn down the blinds or switch on a light. It knows when the blinds need to be where depending on your location, the weather (blind based cooling in summer, heating in winter), the time, etc. It inherently doesn’t need a internet connection to control itself - it only does need the internet to expand its knowledge of the outside world,e.g. by getting disaster alerts, weather forecasts or off-site-location. When done this way there isn’t much “hacking” that can be done. There aren’t many components that can turn into botnets.
This is all possible for ages and it is all easily achieved - KNX and other systems are good examples. Matter can possibly achieve that. But currently it’s the big hype to call everything that can be voice controlled smart.
For fucks sake. It takes me longer to say “Alexa turn on the living room lights” than to do it myself or use a Clapping sensor from the 80ies.
An absolute nightmare for security and privacy. Just say no.
Not necessarily. If you use eg zigbee devices, they are only accessible locally.
But you’re right. Most smart devices connect to the cloud.
I have always been pretty anti-smart homes. But it’s scope crept up on me. Often I wanted more manual automation. Christmas lights were on a light sensor timer power strip, lights going to the garage etc are on old school motion sensors so we didn’t trip.
The one thing I did do was a thermostat, specifically a Honeywell. It was nice for scheduling and remotely cooling the house when on returning from vacation (or shutting it off if I forgot.)
Then I got a wifi window ac for my office.
Then I added some wifi mouse traps to prevent me from having to crawl under the house to check them.
Then someone gave us a Weber iGrill sensor that was a pain to swap between phones.
Next thing I knew I had 5-6 apps. So I setup homeassistant to consolidate it. The Weber iGrill was the hardest but I had a pi in the kitchen running a calendar so I took a wekend and got it working in homeassitsnt.
Since then I have added some tplink kasa plugs and switches. The plugs are for Christmas lights this year. And one in the kitchen that we can plug a crock pot etc into and remotely start it while at work. The switches work just like a dumb one too. And are all locally controlled.
Finally I got a robot vac which is nice.
I still don’t have Alexa etc or cameras or mics in the house. And anything I do add needs to be only smart as a value add. IE: it should function as normal even without internet.
But yeah. I guess I have a smart home now.
My advice on HomeAssistsnt is make sure you products are supported if you go that route. Stay local only whenver possible. But it is nice. One app controls all. Again for me they all must function as a dumb device as well.
I’ve gone the same route. HA is amazing, but also a rabbit hole.
The family likes eg the motion enabled lights and the thermostats to control the heating in their rooms. I share your opinion that it must bring benefit.
Is a robot vac worth it? I’m worried that our young cat will destroy it, or that I have to empty it daily.
So I got the expensive model.
Well realistically I got a cheap ass one on an amazon fire sale to see if my wife would like it. She did and was spending time building barriers with shoes and shit to get it to vacuum one area. So THEN I got the super expensive one, specifically a Roborock s7 max v.
We don’t really vacuum anymore. Just use that. It’s pretty good about avoiding most obstacles but isn’t perfect. Nerf darts and kids markers are it’s Achilles heal. It also sucks on shag/thick rugs.
I empty the dust bin here and there. Same with water. But it is quite easy to take apart and clean up, both the vacuum and the station itself. Probably one of the better value adds we have had to be honest.
Awesome thanks for the tips!
The rate at which the go obsolete is my issue. If you invest in a system, just be prepared to replace everything every five years, and there is almost nothing yoiu can ‘fix’…it is all disposable.
Yeah the main problem is that companies that do this kind of thing want you to subscribe to a recurring payment and if you find something that works “offline” it’s codged together and quite fragile. So you either pay and upgrade when companies say so (see: Arlo cameras) or you spend lots of time trying to fix stuff.
I’m leaning towards the second option, having been burned already by subscription models, but at the moment I don’t have any of the smart stuff and I’m waiting for wife to forget the fiasco…
Not all of them! I really like my athom smart home gear, everything they sell runs on FOSS firmware and they even have github repos to host any device-specific modifications! As long as WLED and EspHome continue supporting the ESP8266 my devices should keep getting updates!
As others have said, you can sequester IoT devices to a VLAN that has no internet access. Most of the common devices (lights, switches, sensors) added to smart homes work perfectly fine without access to the internet. Voice assistants are the biggest security/privacy hole since all commercial options are from big tech companies and phone home constantly. If you set up a local homeassistant instance you can get a ton of functionality out of smart devices with no direct connection to the internet. You need to decide how you handle accessing homeassistant from outside your home if that’s something you want but there are plenty of options to choose from for that.
One thing I will say that I refuse to add to my home is any kind of smart locks. No matter how much I trust my security setup, I don’t trust it with the ability to unlock my doors. If there was one that could only lock them electronically but required being manually unlocked, them maybe. But I haven’t seen a lock like that out there.
Or better yet: only use zigbee devices which work offline without the need to access your wifi network.
Agreed on all points.
I just wanted to add that I’m very glad smart locks exist. My friend with cerebral palsy can now secure his home with a lock and be able to get back in independently.
In general, smart devices are huge for him, and others with physical disabilities.
Also, I should say that I really enjoy the convenience of having Google Assistant in the house. Verbal timers, alarms, reminders, podcasts, and music mostly. Those and the pirate FireTV Stick are our only devices to date. I just don’t care enough to put the legwork in to getting IoT set up. Switches are fine.
That’s great that they help your friend like that! As someone that doesn’t face any kind of accessibility issues myself, it’s easy to overlook those kinds of benefits that these devices can provide. In situations like your friend’s, I’d agree that any potential security cons are outweighed by the pros (especially if the alternative before was having to leave the doors unlocked anyways).
Agree on the convenience of voice assistants. I’ve got various models of Google homes in my house that I use for voice controls on anything I don’t have a good way to truly automate. Different people will have different tolerances for how okay they are with the data things like that can gather. One day I might try to set up one of the local network voice assistants but those can take a lot of work to get just right. Always a tradeoff of convenience and privacy.
Oh that’s interesting. Does Google Home work on an unconnected VLAN for lights? I use it for lights and kitchen timers. I don’t see myself adding anything more complicated or invasive though.
I don’t think Google home would work without an internet connection. I believe google devices and the google home app expect a connection to Google’s servers.
I personally use homeassistant to control everything without an external internet connection and I know you can lock Philips Hue lights off from the internet and the official Hue app will still work.
I really like this statement I heard recently, which I think came from the YouTube Adventurous Way - “Dumb Control, Smart Monitoring”. Make sure that any devices you install have failure models that make sense - you should still be able to control your appliances when the network is down.
That said, the option to remotely control lights, etc is fantastic. I also recommend setting up some temperature sensors in various places - I have quite a few ESP33 boards scattered around with sensors (and and one with an IR blaster) attached.
Making sure you are still able to control everything when the network is down seems like a good idea.
In our house, the smart plugs have a physical button that can be used to toggle them on or off. The lights are still connected to a physical power switch, so they can be reset by flipping the switch a few times, in which case they will probably just act as a normal light. Air conditioning units have an IR remote.
All important automations should run fully locally. I also find that focused and simple automations are often most useful. When I say simple I mean in terms of automation logic, not necessarily in terms of interfacing devices, which can be tricky at times. Example of simple automations I like most would be switching amplifiers on/off based on audio state changes, switching lights on/off relative to sunset, and switching electric water and floor heating elements on/off depending on energy price.
I agree, I also make sure everything is fully local. I have separate subnets for the server that runs home assistant, the IoT devices, and the trusted home network. Then I have some firewall rules that ensure that the IoT network cannot communicate with the WAN or the trusted LAN network at all, only with home assistant.
We have some simple automations at home to turn on the boiler in the afternoon when we have an abundance of solar power, and some basic automation to turn off aquarium lights at night such that the fish can sleep. Anything more complex just becomes unreliable and annoying.
One of the biggest improvements I noticed after switching to smart lights and home assistant was how much better my sleep got when I used a circadian light cycle. I don’t think we realize how important the gradual shift is in triggering the release of sleep chemicals (not my field lol, just my experience).
Just a fun aside take a look at WLED for LED controls. My use case is not particularly practical but they are pretty cheap and lots of fun. That said I bet some smart folk have probably used it for various sorts of indicator lights.
Harmful, the internet of things in general is.
You don’t need stuff that is 100% in a bot net caus its completely unsecured.
Great advice by Yoda!
𓁹‿𓁹
You can connect devices locally now. Eg. Zigbee/Z-wave network protocol without the need to use the internet. I know some builders started to implement smart devices for Apartments in the city which is easy to set the standards but for individual homes, would be harder to sell as it’s costly…