No no, frick all this relying on 3rd party services that might go away tomorrow crap.

It takes more effort in most cases (and in some cases a LOT more effort), but I highly recommend using open source software whenever possible in your home automation setup. Run as many services on YOUR hardware as you can. And make as much of your hardware YOURS as you can. That means don't buy hubs that you can't upgrade the hardware/software yourself. Build your own hub with an RPi, HomeAssistant, and whatever wireless dongles you need. Don't buy lights, sensors, or other IoT items that you can't integrate with HomeAssistant (or other open source software). Hell, make your own sensors.

The current phase of commercial IoT stuff focuses on making things easy for the masses. That's important, but it usually comes at the expense of your setup is not YOUR setup. The open source hardware and software community has some catching up to do as far as ease of use and setup, but you can't beat the fact that your stuff is going to work until it physically breaks, in which case you know enough about it to fix it. It's not just going to stop working because some bean counter decided it's not profitable.

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Posted by CAD703X

Liberty Island

Member since Jul 2008

78754 posts

Posted on 4/9/19 at 12:43 am to Korkstand

i dont disagree. i hate wifi and APIs for HA. i was on the zwave train from day 1 but the biggest advantage seems to be the one fricked up the most...local control.

sure alexa is great to tell her what to do but both wink and ST failed to deliver local control of zwave & zigbee. nobody needs a cloud for an on/off switch command.

i know about HA and raspberry pie zwave dongles but i'm too old to sit down & reprogram 100+ smart devices. i hoped and prayed a decent hub would appear that would prioritize local control but its the opposite..everybody wants alexa convenience and they're willing to buy nothing but wifi-crap so they can get it.

its cute that alexa tells me my doors are unlocked at night and offers to lock them for me..but its a good 10 second count at a minimum before i hear them locking.

it sucks. google and amazon are going to win here and of course the cloud is the basis for everything they do so frick the consumer. lets all go buy $15 wifi bulbs now.

eta i was digging stringify because it did allow you to connect websites to lightbulbs and garage doors and weather reports & shite but now even that is fricked. seriously disappointed in where we are 5 years after all this shite was supposed to be taking off.

This post was edited on 4/9/19 at 12:46 am

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