State of Home Automation article. Lol did I write this?

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But the longer you live in a smart home, the more you see what a convoluted, duct-taped, and bandaged ball of half-working solutions it is.

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I'm doing everything I can to be sure that my convoluted, duct-taped, bandaged ball of half-working solutions is my own doing.

These companies are never going to be fully on-board with full interoperability, there's just no money in it. They will always wrestle for control and lock-in, and we as consumers and users pay the price. And since we're paying anyway, I'm paying my time and money up-front to avoid as much of that as I can. As the article mentions, and as you know CAD, any company can shut down any service, product support, or itself entirely at any time. The only way to avoid this problem is to buy or build devices that are as open as possible. At minimum the interfaces they use should be open standards so the device can be replaced with an alternative from any manufacturer. Open source software running on the device is always preferable, especially if you are able to program/flash new software yourself. And open source hardware I guess is less important though still pretty important (at least to the extent possible given the IP involved).

I could go on for days about all this, but to sum it up I'm not buying into any "ecosystem" or even protocols and interfaces like Matter which promise interoperability. If it doesn't use real industry standard interfaces (or offer a well-documented custom one that can be modified) then I don't want it. I don't care if I have to spend a week figuring out how to get a $20 device working due to it not being particularly user-friendly. The knowledge gained can't be taken from me, and I won't have to scramble to figure out a new solution in the future.

This was published so long ago that the “secret commentary text” was:

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Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? shite.

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All I want is an outlet that doesn't consistently disconnect.

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Try Meross

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i think i have their garage door opener. i went with a little $21 wifi thingie on amazon and its actually worked very well and i'm sure that's the app name

eta i will say i updated the firmware one time on it and it crashed and stopped functioning and the only way to get it going again was to climb up on a ladder and pull the power on the little unit on top of my garage door head and plug it back in.

so far thats the only issue i've had with it; integrates w/ alexa and i find my new 'HA lite' house lifestyle requires me to do most stuff through alexa.

i gave my hubitat hardware and transferred account to the guy who bought my old house because the poor guy would havwe never gotten all that shite going again if i hadnt

new house is hue, ikea (shades) and a few wifi doodads and thats about it.

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i'm old enough to remember the meltdown each time apple changed their phone chargers.

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That one time?

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That one time

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I’m willing to go after Apple but they’ve only changed 2x (1.5 really) to where it made your previous adapter obsolete. From the 30 pin/usbA to the lightning/usbA, and from lightning/usbA standard to lighting/usbC. Removing usbA from the laptops was an unneeded dick move though. Jim and Sam Show had a hilarious monologue a few years back where Sam went and got a new iPhone, iPad, MacBook from the Apple Store in one visit and they still charged him for the USBC adaptor.

Regarding the OP, I do get the complaint. I have Wiz, Brinks, Blink, Amazon Echo, Roku, iRobot, Sonos, Trane Home, and some I’m sure I’m missing for home automation.

I know Cad won’t like hearing it, but Alexa does the best job of combining them out of all of the apps I’ve played with.

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know Cad won’t like hearing it, but Alexa does the best job of combining them out of all of the apps I’ve played with

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Especially now that some of the newer Echos handle Zigbee devices natively.

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Siri

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Probably a topic for a different thread, but I find Siri to be so dysfunctional, that I don’t even know why I bother. I don’t know if it’s just me.

I agree with the poster above who said Alexa is pretty good at managing everything, and she is pretty good at listening to commands, unlike Siri.