I've been into the home automation thing since before forever. There have been many periods of excitement over the years. They come and go. As a result I have to admit to a high level of skepticism about the current period.
The companies that generate and are influenced by this excitement tend to make two main errors.
1. They don't understand that without an open standard for controls and sensors they are just fooling themselves. No one is going to permanently install something in their house that is sure to be useless in 10 years.
2. They don't understand that people don't want to control everything ... they instead want to not have to control everything. Being able to control a light from your phone is not really any better than being able to do it from the light switch. People instead want the light to just do the right thing without having to think about it. They don't want a thermostat controllable from a phone. They want a thermostat that makes it so they are comfortable and not paying any extra money they don't have to. As a result, the home automation people actually want is a much harder problem than what everyone always seems to assume.
#3 Home automation devices that require communication with the vendor's servers in order to setup and or operate.
Vendors come and go, but if I've bought a product, I expect it to work until the product dies. And I don't consider the vendor going out of business to be a valid product death. Not to mention if I'm paying a one-time-fee, and this thing requires communication with vendor servers, that's a service. Who's paying for the servers?
I agree, current user interfaces suck, but I think at least for some vendors that may miss the point. If they publish a full-featured API you could write your own interface, and or integrate it with your home automation control system. I agree, standards need to exist, but I try to reward the vendors who provide an API over the ones who don't cause at least I can work with an API.
And honestly, looking at the result of vendors trying to produce "smart" TVs, I don't want them writing the software that runs my home automation system. I'd prefer a FOSS home automation solution over a vendor one any day, and wouldn't buy one that didn't at a minimum include the source code.
Offline products without subscriptions go against two base principles of the current tech investment boom (bubble?).
The first the that recurring revenue is strictly better than one-off sales. That means VCs aren't interested in business models that don't end in "aaS".
The second is the emphasis on iteration - making users connect back regularly allows for automatic updates that allow you to ship buggy software and fix it later.
I would understand if they did offer a service that you could subscribe to, but I've seen devices that are one off purchases that require live server access. That just doesn't make sense to me aside from your point about updates.
One of my biggest problems is the all-too-pervasive attitude that #2 means that users shouldn't be able to control things that "do the right thing", rather than that the device defaults to doing the right thing. I find myself all too often in "edge case" situations that would be very easy to fix manually if I could dig around in some settings panel, but modern design philosophy seems to consider including a setting like that to be a design failure in some way.
One example is a lack of any kind of manual focus on any phone cameras. If I'm taking a picture of a person or a cat or something the autofocus does the job right almost every time, but try taking a picture of a small shiny button or something - it's a nightmare. If I could press up-down-up-down-A-B-A-B-start-select and get a manual focus slider, I'd be happy all the time, but instead my few salient memories of fighting with the autofocus have soured me on the whole experience.
I don't, but good on Apple for exposing that functionality. My understanding last time I looked was that in Android it's not even exposed to developers (though I didn't look too deeply into it - there may just be no native API functions for manual focus).
As far as I know, if you're in the stock camera app, you can tap a portion of the screen for the camera to focus on that area. My girlfriend has an Android phone and can do the same.
Open standards are a real issues in the industry. I find it ridiculous that you often have to pay thousands of dollars for software that simply understands those protocols. Not only that, it requires you to jump through ridiculous hoops to do stuff that you could easily do with a reasonably simple Python script. (Look up Niagara AX as an example.)
Another problem is APIs and connectivity. Tuning a light on or off should be doable with a simple POST call to a RESTful service somewhere. Instead, we are sold dubious phone apps for everything.
Right, open standards. I think there's an XKCD comic about this...
There's no "open standard for wireless control of a light", because there's not one standard way to do it. For a dollar in parts, I can build a wireless light switch that uses 433 MHz, just like your wireless doorbell.
Oh, you wanted a network of addressable lights? Well now it's a dollar fifty. We'll move to 900 MHz and switch to a ZigBee radio.
Oh, you wanted to address them through WiFi? Well, here's the problem. Light bulb's don't have keyboards to enter your AP+Key. You could try and use WPS with a fixed pin code, but there's another issue. Putting an embedded Linux device that handles POST requests in a lightbulb is rather silly. We'll keep the ZigBee radios, and build a crossover "base station" that has a RESTful XML based JSON buzzword complaint interface.
Did I mention my ZigBee radio only talks with my brand of ZigBee radios?
The problem in making a standard comes down to the radios in the lightbulb. That interface will likely always be proprietary. Even if you get a standardized web interface, no one will be able to make a universal base station for all "smart" electronics. Wink is trying to do that, best of luck to them. I don't see it happening.
You would be surprised, but there are already standards for automation of almost anything you can think of. The problem is not with the lack of standards or network-enabled devices. The problem is with them being proprietary and tied to software that costs thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Some of that software is licensed in such a way that you cannot even install it without being an "authorized" vendor with an established relationship with the manufacturer/provider.
This is what I do as well. One raspberry pi with all the required connections (Z-Wave USB controller, IR emitter and a wire to my PC) with an extremely simple node application that serves urls like /lights/on, /curtains/open and /computer/power. My phone running Tasker to trigger the various appliances. Add some buttons to the homescreen for direct control over everything. The real added value comes from a trigger from the wakeup-alarm app that runs a Tasker script, turning on the lights, waiting 5 minutes and opening the curtains.
I haven't found an all-in-one solution to do all this. Then again, I haven't looked for anything else once I got my curtains going through Tasker. An open standard would've made the process much simpler though.
Hah, I ended up with a very similar system: raspberry pi plus a razberry z-wave controller[1], IR receiver and cheap universal remote, and a node app that exposes a simple API as well as a simple UI. stunnel plus port forwarding on my router so I can access it securely from anywhere. Trigger on my phone for geo-fencing to turn off lights when I leave and turn them on when I get home (only if it's dark out). (Cheap PIR sensors are the next project.)
Overall I've found that z-wave is quite reliable. It never loses commands and latency is good enough. The protocol supports just about any kind of device or signaling you might want, in theory, though it can't really do high-bandwidth things. The problem is that devices are relatively expensive (compared to the cost of the components) because the protocol is quasi-proprietary. Zigbee is "open" and extremely flexible, but as a result, zigbee devices from different vendors often can't talk to each other. I'll take the more limited but working thing, thanks.
(The Trigger app's geofencing is pretty unreliable, though. Has anyone found an android app that can reliably do http requests when crossing a geofence?)
I had some luck awhile ago with an INSTEON setup using their SmartLinc central controller---but only because the SmartLinc itself had a sniffable HTTP protocol for its "phone control." So basically it was ideal for me, as long as I completely bypassed all the crap software that came with it (I ended up writing a small server app that read my Google Calendar for "light on / light off" commands and sent the appropriate HTTP commands to the SmartLinc to fool it into doing the actions).
Unfortunately, the setup stopped working and I don't have useful tools to debug it; no way to know why an INSTEON controller can't see another component, only that it can't. Plus, I'd like to move away from systems that want to use the house wiring at all (INSTEON is hybrid x10 / radio) because I don't want an errant power surge blowing my $100+ of equipment.
> 2. They don't understand that people don't want to control everything ... they instead want to not have to control everything. Being able to control a light from your phone is not really any better than being able to do it from the light switch.
This. I keep seeing devices that make me do more manual work to control things around me. These devices make my world more complex, while I need it to be simpler.
It's why I started working on my own system to control lighting at home.
The problem is, that they want sell you something that you have to pay again and again -> vendor lock, you must use their tools / services / clouds / whatever.
Things that just work for 10 or more years, omg! ;)
But you are absolutely right!. I did not automate anything at home with separate hard/software, because currently it solves no problem for me.
We need not a smart home, we need an intelligent home without controlling or programming everything.
A house/appartment has to recognize if nobody is at home and turn off the light or heating. I dont wanna do that with my smartphone and i dont want controll everything.
There is the KNX standard, but it's to home automation what the USB standard is to PC expandability. Yes, there's a standard, but saying that you're going to build a KNX installation is like saying you're going to build a USB installation. It can do anything, but anything you want it to do requires specific software, and the software in the KNX ecosystem is either a proprietary lock-in or just plain horrible.
Sounds like my experience with Nest last summer. Got the thermostat, can't get it connected to my wireless. Support basically tells me to get bent until I go into full IT guy mode and prove its an issue with the unit. Replacement unit comes, doesn't work at all (first one was at least a nice looking thermostat with no connected features). Third unit comes and it's been fine ever since.
For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to get their smoke detector. One day it randomly detects smoke and will not shut the hell up about it even after resetting, replacing batteries, etc. Nest offered to replace it - I just put my old "dumb" detector back up.
I will say it's pretty damn embarrassing to buy this stuff and have it fail so spectacularly, at least my roommate wasn't here to see me seriously losing my mind trying to shut up the Protect.
Perhaps as a PSA, I wanted to point out that there are two types of smoke detector technologies: ionization and photoelectric. Ionization detectors are more sensitive to flaming fires. Photoelectric are more sensitive to smoldering fires. As my friend whose house had an in-wall smoldering fire for four hours before the ionization alarms went off now knows, it's important to have both types of smoke detectors throughout your house.
The Nest appears to only be a photoelectric smoke detector based on a quick googling right now.
In my house, I have 5 photoelectric alarms that are hooked up to my central alarm system that is centrally monitored. I also have 4 ionization alarms that are hard wired together such that if one goes off they all go off. The ionization are not hooked up to the central alarm system because they have a reputation of having more false alarms. I have never experienced a false alarm in 5 years, but that is their reputation so many experts recommend not making them hooked up to a system that alerts a central monitoring service.
Knowing that pretty much all software is buggy and Nest and Wink are pretty new to market, do you want to depend on them with your life?
In the northeast US this weekend we will be having a high temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit in some areas. I don't want to rely on a flaky device determining if the heat should be on. What happens if the temp drops really low, like with a power failure? Did they test that?
Same can be said for smoke detectors. A lot of new construction houses have all the smoke detectors wired by electricity with 9v battery backup. One goes off, they all go off. Sure there can be device failures, but you're talking about something that has been around for a long time with a proven track record.
If anything, maybe keep the old tech devices running and use the new tech along side it to see how it works.
If the power is off, no thermostat will be able to start your furnace.
What's scarier is the thermostat going down at inopportune times. Last January Nest pushed a firmware update that bricked some units...right during the coldest night of the year for us. My early adopter neighbor was up at 2am rewiring his old Honeywell dial to keep his family warm.
As a counter-anecdote, I have been very grateful for my Nest during these especially cold days. It takes the weather outside into account, and does a much better job keeping my house in a comfortable temperature range.
Outdoor temperature reset has been a feature on furnace controllers for a long time (also called modulating aquastat).
(so there is a sense in which it isn't necessarily a smart home type of feature, it doesn't need a great deal of integration or whatever, and will work with any dumb thermostat)
Maybe I'm becoming more of a luddite or cranky old-man, approaching my mid-30's, but I don't see any benefit at all to using the Nest smoke alarm. I'm replacing tried and true, simple, technologies, with a new device that seems way more complicated than it needs to be.
There's a difference between "there's no benefit at all" and "the benefits don't outweigh the downsides." There are many benefits of the Nest smoke detector. Easier to test. Easier to silence a false alarm. Less likely to wake you up in the middle of the night with a battery warning. Built-in night light. Integration with the thermostat home/away features. Notifications of an alarm when you're not home. Easy identification of which room the alarm is from when you have multiple interconnected alarms. Etc., etc., etc. Now, are those benefits enough to justify the cost and to outweigh the problems? I dunno. Do you care about those benefits? It's up to you. But there are clearly benefits.
The difference between real & perceived value is only a price tag away. Be wary when seemingly trivial choices with potentially fatal consequences are made based upon marketing trends and convenience. Perhaps these systems will mature & increase their reliability, but remember that 'latest, greatest' gadget is still just a useful toy...and revenue/data stream for the supplier.
*I work with commercial building automation controls, it's pretty useful tech, but nothing I would ever risk my welfare on.
You're completely right. My original comment wasn't really fair to the Nest alarm device. It clearly does have it's benefits, but not enough for me to overcome the potential issues with the device. I don't think the cost is that terrible, but I don't entirely trust its reliability and durability. A $100 smoke detector is fine if I don't have to worry about buying another smoke detector for a long time, but I don't trust the Nest to provide that longevity.
It's easier to turn off in a false alarm. It can warn you ahead of time when the batteries are getting low. It can alert you over the internet if your house is maybe on fire. Not sure if that's worth the price premium, but there are some benefits.
I like the theory of it integrating with the thermostat's auto away feature, so it can detect you even if you're not in the same room as the tstat for a while. It needs to be connected to mains for it to work in real time though, so that combined with all of the problems it has working as a smoke detector convinced me to not get one.
Dumb detectors can have the same problems. I'm not sure if they get contaminated or suffer some kind of other breakdown, but I had to switch out two smoke detectors in recent time due to their propensity for going off on a whim. Of course, normal smoke detectors don't come with the Nest's hefty price tag...
Where were your faulty detectors? My ex-girlfriend's dad used to do testing for a smoke alarm company a while ago. I learned an interesting thing from that. You know what they use to simulate smoke when they test smoke detectors? Hair spray. The fine mist is actually pretty good at tricking the sensor into thinking there are smoke particulates in the air. This also leads to an interesting failure scenario for many home smoke alarms: those close to bathrooms or in women's bedrooms tend to get gunked up with hairspray.
Hairspray is a bad idea IMO. It will leave residue behind. There are cans of fake smoke you can get at the hardware store. I worked on ships and tested smoke alarms that way.
There are different detectors for different applications. Usually the issue with false alarms is the wrong alarm + poor placement.
Ionization smoke detectors have a high false-positive rate in areas like kitchens where you have a lot of particulate matter. Use a photoelectric there.
I have a similar problem with Chromecast and Youtube. My friends literally cannot understand why I would rather use the YouTube client built into the TV and control it with the TV remote, rather than cast to chromecast and control with my phone. Controlling the TV with my phone is cumbersome. It takes time to unlock it,to find the app, to send the command and have chromecast react. What if someone rings and I want to pause the video before answering the call? Doable,but more complex than it needs to be. What if I leave the room but someone else wants to pause, skip or whatever, but their phone is not connected to my chromecast? In comparison, TV remote is always in front of my TV. Using it is dead simple,doesn't require pairing,and it's instantaneous. It doesn't leave the room when I go to the kitchen, and I can use it while I am on my phone. I feel like controlling lights with your phone is a similar gimmick. It doesn't make it easier or faster - it's just gimmicky, that's all.
This isn't as much of a problem if you use Chromecast with a tablet. Also, you can actually connect multiple devices with a Chromecast.
I think it's better to think of Chromecast as a wireless display device for your {smartphone,tablet,browser} than a displayless smart-TV. It's just a tool to turn your TV into a dumb client for your smart device of choice.
If you want something that extends your TV rather than something that lets you use your TV to extend other devices, you're better off with an Amazon Fire box or equivalent.
I really don't grok why I should want to use my smartphone to move up and down my wifi connected blinders. Yet that's all I see when all of this is pictured: gimmicks.
I want to see a demo of a room alarm clock: with rising light (in brightness and temperature), birds chirping, room getting warmer, music/radio a while later.. and the same for going to bed.
I set up my house such that when I unlock the front door using my code, the downstairs lights come on if it's after sundown. I also have a camera capture the first few minutes of the door changing state. I get alerts if the door is opened outside of normal away hours (8-4 on weekdays). I also have a vacation mode that will control various lights in the house to simulate occupancy. I also set up a nightlight mode that will detect motion after dark and turn lights on and off as you pass through the house. This was all done with off-the-shelf components and minimal Lua scripting. Admittedly not life-changing, but more useful than moving blinds up and down!
I used a Schlage Z-wave compatible door lock, a VeraLite smart home controller, and a handful of generic Z-wave devices (sensors, outlets, switches). I also have a Nest thermostat. The package cost me about $200 bucks (not counting the Nest).
Problem of that, and that of the author is that you are entering the world of programming.
You need to be able to enumerate all the possible scenario in your head in order to make a script that looks intelligent. eg: ok I want the light to start when I'm entering and switch them off when I leave. Well unless there is somebody inside (another sensor), unless I just pick the mail (a timer). How do I communicate my intention to come back, so the house does not switch off my netflix download ? If the lock is unlocked, but then shouldn't that generate an alert instead ?
That's hopeless for regular user and even for developer that is too much effort for too little benefit.
The other approach is Nest, that is trying to guess. So your home would monitor what you do and try to replicate it. I'm not confident - take an application like Word, they are still irritating after decades of intellisense and a somewhat controlled and restricted environment.
The only one that could work I think would be an Apple bludgeon approach. Your front door and lights and heater work all together nicely following 1 strict scenario. You either adapt to it or don't buy their product at all ( so if Apple decide that morning means raising the blinder and you would rather let them down in order to get clothed, you better learn to have to change your clothes in the bathroom )
You make a good point about the logic of such problems, and that certainly is a pain-point of these systems. I agree wholeheartedly.
However, having used Wink devices and being a minor-league programmer, I can tell you that the crux of the author's issue should not be mistaken to be a misunderstanding of how to 'program' actions on the device. The logic is there - it just often simply does not work correctly due to various issues; some obvious, some not.
For instance, geofencing on Wink simply does not work reliably, as mentioned in the article. No matter how you set up your routines, location-based events won't work if the app does not correctly gauge/communicate your location.
Also problematic is that your routines are stored on your phone - not on the Wink Hub (basically a 'dumb' radio) - so if you set a timed event but your phone is off or you have no service, the event does not trigger.
Everything is further complicated by the fact that your commands are not sent from the app to your device - they are sent from your phone to Wink servers, and then to your device. If their servers are down, experiencing latency, or your home connection is fubar, or your cell service is slow, or your DNS won't allow you to tunnel out and back in with your phone on wireless, or packets are dropped somewhere en route - it is simply not going to work.
Finally, there is a ridiculous lack of information in error-handling. Sometimes the hub just does not want to work. With no web-based GUI, inconsistent alert LEDs that simply mean 'something is wrong', and even a reset button that does not actually perform a reset, even the most avid DIY-er is at a loss. Case in point: to truly reset your hub's network settings, Wink recommends that you change your home wifi network's name so that the hub will not be able to reconnect and will eventually reset itself. The inset 'reset' button only power-cycles the device.
With problems like the above, understanding the logic behind your comings and goings is a moot point - you can spend hours working with the thing and, as mentioned by the author, suddenly start to appreciate your light switches.
>I want to see a demo of a room alarm clock: with rising light (in brightness and temperature), birds chirping, room getting warmer, music/radio a while later.. and the same for going to bed.
There's one of those in the latest Black Mirror. I won't tell you the stomach-knotting twist in the tale ;)
I suppose if you have a lot of remote controlled stuff in your house, the phone can act as the single control for all of it, eliminating the need for so many controls.
Those smartphone-connected blinds bother me far less than using your phone as a light switch.
If you're in bed, how do you know those lights are on?
Also, why wouldn't you turn the light off as you left the room?
Most of these "smart home" devices really do seem like a gimmick at this point. Maybe in the future, they'll be well enough debugged and refined to be useful, but for now, I just don't see a benefit in a normal* home. My dad uses Nests, "smart" locks, and remote cameras alarms (off-season) on his beach house - that makes sense, as he's a 5 hour drive from the house.
* normal for the US: 1970s 4-bedroom, 1800sqft, 2 level, no basement. I can walk across the house in the time it takes me to get my cell phone off the hall table (where I leave it to charge). The house a single thermostat, so I can't heat/cool zones, and the existing thermostat is programmable by day and time.
I live with my wife and two kids, and I'm the only one that cares about the size of the heat and electric bill. I know the lights are on because they've been left on every night since we've lived there, and if I don't walk around the house every night before bed and shut off the lights, they're still on in the morning.
I don't know a single person with kids that doesn't have to do this wonderful nighttime ritual - visit every room in the house and set the electronics to the correct setting. It's very simple and I believe a computer would do it better and faster.
I agree - all this automatic light dimming for movies and "scenes" seems like a gimmick. But I'd love to have a button on my phone that switched every light in my house off as if I had flipped a switch.
Fair enough. My "kid" is fast approaching 21, so it's been a while since I had to follow him around turning off lights (and picking up toys, and wiping up smeared food, and ...).
Good questions, our house isn't huge (smaller than "normal" it according to that def) so light travels. We usually DO turn lights off before getting in bed but sometimes we are tired and forget, and it's not obvious until our eyes adjust. It's a little childish but it's like "ugh I don't want to get up"
We really only use lamps and sunlight aside from the kitchen so we're mostly using the plug-in switches, so it really is nice turning off lamps in 3 bedrooms + living + den in a few taps.
Might as well turn this comment into a little review of my Vivint setup. These are controlled via the console in the house, the web and the app:
- Alarm
This is nice because you can enable it after you leave the house, which is nice if you are in a hurry or just simply forget. Maybe not a killer feature.
- Front door lock
Same deal here, but it also lets me open the door for people remotely or grant them temporary access. It's a little janky, I imagine that the Lockitron is better. My main concern is battery life, which it alerts me about long before the batteries (4 AA) die. My second concern is that the gears inside will wear out, though it has lasted for ~3 years so far.
- Thermostat
Super convenient for Florida. We travel a lot so it's nice to kill the AC before we leave and still have a cool house half an hour before we get back home. There is an automated "Nest-like" web interface for this but I don't really trust it. Scheduling works great.
- Pan & tilt camera
This is more of a toy but it's cool, the other day we saw our dog tearing up the trash can in the living room so we ran home and stopped her (and put the can in the garage).
None of this stuff is perfect, and you are probably better off (quality and price wise) by going with Nest + Wemo + Lockitron + some alarm company, but we're still happy with it all.
Some of this becomes painfully apparent after you give these systems a shot, especially inexpensive half-baked solutions like Wink.
However it can be nice to schedule lighting changes (I live in a high-crime area), have your porch light come on when you roll up in the driveway, etc. I find myself primarily using it as a dimmer, but in a rental property being able to install a few $15 25-year LED bulbs and a smartphone app to get some of these features does not feel wholly ridiculous to me.
Having each light bulb intelligent seems like overkill, I can see a per circuit setup where you replace the light switch. First off its not going to go bad like a bulb which will be replaced eventually; even LEDs which still die too soon. Really, who came up with this light bulb idea...its just daft.
Security motion detectors can be used to double effect here as well, you would naturally have them facing doors so they could activate wireless or through signals across existing wires. All sorts of options.
Having each light bulb intelligent seems like overkill, I can see a per circuit setup where you replace the light switch.
We have Hue and I don't agree. Setup is now zero effort, you just replace bulbs and you are ready to go. Since the light bulbs form a mesh network, the distance from the hub is not a problem as long as a light can connect to another. I would have never switched if we had to replace each light socket, even more because we are renting our house. Also, the expected lifetime is 15 years, so I am not sure how much of a problem it is.
<ot>
In general, we are pretty happy with it, especially since its color is much nicer and more natural than previous LED lights we tried (which were awful). The Android app is a bit flakey at times, especially when the home Wifi signal is weak (we don't use the geofencing options). The feature we use most is different light settings, e.g. relatively warm & low light at night (e.g. when we have to feed our toddler).
Of course, it isn't life-changing. And I would recommend most people to wait until prices go down. </ot>
Current circuit layouts are wasteful, you have to run enormous amounts of wire between the outlets and the switches, just to be able to control the lights. Much better to just run power directly to the outlets.
The control logic should ideally go into the socket, but with 50k hour lifetimes of LED bulbs, the lost efficiently of putting it in one over the other place is trivial. Also remember that putting the controls on the bulb makes it a trivially user-serviceable part, where putting it in the socket technically requires a electrician to install it (you and I are probably comfortable servicing domestic electrical installations, the average consumer isn't, and shouldn't be) - especially in these early days, when neither standards, features or protocols are anywhere near finalised, investing a couple of hundred dollars in bulbs is much better than investing thousands in electricians fees.
LEDs may have 50k hour lifetimes, but that's very far from true of the constant current drivers. I've had several expensive (Phillips/GE) LED bulbs fail after a year of sparse usage. That's more like 1.5k hours. The cheap chinese ones I also tried lasted on average four months (I bought 8 bulbs), all of them blew up electrolytic capacitors on the buckpucks (with release of magic smoke).
As for the needing an electrician part: remote socket receivers are a well proven, cheap and safe technology requiring no electrician to install it. IMO, the Telldus offerings are the best solution for wireless/smart light controls.
You might want to check the electrical setup at your home. A friend had issues with incandescent light bulbs going out every few months, he replaced them with LEDs, and they still crapped out too quickly. I'm not well versed on electrical problems, but I'd guess that this was related to brown-outs or a dirty power supply.
Personally at my home, I can't recall a single LED bulb failing since installing some of the first ones in 2010/11 (and these were dirt cheap ones from Lidl). We've also bought some decent e27 8w ones from Aliexpress in ~2011, and of the 6 I bought, they all still work (apart form the cold white one which I took apart). Throughout the past two years I installed a bunch of LED strips around the house, ~20m of which stay on at low power all the time, and I've virtually had zero failures (there may have been a 3cm segment that died, but that's it).
50k hours is probably ambitious for some, but not too far off the mark. The Achilles' heel here is the capacitors, they are the weakest link. 10k hours is easy, and they should never fail before that absent some design or manufacturer defect, or atypically high ambient temperatures.
>I've had several expensive (Phillips/GE) LED bulbs fail after a year of sparse usage.
You have an electrical problem in your home. Perhaps a poor connection on the neutral leg of the circuit. It is even potentially unsafe, as in a possible arcing condition.
When we moved in two years ago there was an intermittent earth fault, so we had everything checked then. They found the earth fault, it was a loose connector inside a T junction I believe.
I'm more inclined to believe it is caused by the crappy wiring system that is standard in my country, where there is not a neutral lead and a live one, but two live ones with a phase shift.
>When we moved in two years ago there was an intermittent earth fault, so we had everything checked then. They found the earth fault, it was a loose connector inside a T junction I believe.
If there was one, there may be others. I've located several loose junctions in my attic (on my bathroom electric strip heaters). They were easy to spot because of the discolored insulation. At my own home my connection to the electrical grid also had such a fault (a corroded junction on one phase). It was an intermittent but persistent fault and I am surprised that I didn't ruin more electrical stuff before I found it.
>I'm more inclined to believe it is caused by the crappy wiring system that is standard in my country, where there is not a neutral lead and a live one, but two live ones with a phase shift.
Sorry, I shouldn't have assumed you were in North America.
Circuit layouts are only wasteful in some circumstances. For the majority of new homes they are just fine, with room switches controlling exactly what one would expect. Must greater finesse over lighting can come from using proper lights, can lights you can aim can make a room completely different from simple ceiling lamps, ditto for table lamps.
Plus you can do wonders using in house wiring for having various items talk to each other. Wireless seems overkill to individual items.
>I can see a per circuit setup where you replace the light switch.
Agree with this completely. As the article mentions, with a wireless bulb the wall switch actually becomes a point-of-user-failure and he wound up taping them 'on'.
I have a WeMo brand wall switch (actually a button) on my front porch light which solves this elegantly. Porch light goes on and off timed with sunrise and sunset (it updates its schedule over wifi) and if need be I can control it manually from the wall switch or the app.
I wouldn't replace every circuit in my house with one, but in the right application it's golden.
Well Phillips pushing the Hue is pretty far from daft in their perspective. Get people to shell out hundreds to replace bulbs instead of a 1/10th of that.
Remember, Phillips is the reason incandescent bulbs had their lifespans intentionally cut in half for planned obsolescence.[1]
You know, the hotter incandescent bulbs consume less energy, saving much more than their more usual replacement cost. Added to that, they are cheaper to make. But let's not disrupt a good conspiracy theory (who was Philips conspiring with, by the way?).
If Philips simply launched a bulb that lasted less, with no advantages, people would buy from other manufacturer, and Philips wouldn't be here anymore. They even took a huge risk launching it, because despite it being cheaper to use, people do not like changing bulbs.
Did you even read the article? They got with other manufacturers and agreed to put an age limit on the bulbs. Anyone that violates the pact was fined by the others? That is exactly what a conspiracy is and is one of the reasons we have anti trust laws now.
They didn't make any publicly documented steps. Saying that they're still doing something because they did it almost a century ago isn't really honest.
The Spectrum article was very informative. Thomas Pynchon riffed on this story extensively with his iconic (for geeks) 1974 novel "Gravity's Rainbow" in the tale of "Byron the Bulb". Another of Pynchon's prescient fantasy creations that is breaking into reality, the sentient light bulbs are self aware and communicate with each other.
Well it's all definitely overkill. But on the plus side, you can sell these bulbs to people who can plug them in without needing to re-wire their house.
that being said, the intelligent light bulb approach has its advantages:
I can take a handful of lightbulbs with me to other room/apartment in a heartbeat. And the problem of getting dimmable LEDs out of an AC source is not easy, you are going to end with electronics in each led bulb anyways.
At the very least they could have separated the intelligence and the bulb so the bulb could be replaced independently. But yes the intelligence should really go in the circuit.
Automated building systems are hard to get right even in the commercial space where the specifiers, installers, and operators are professionals and end users are given dummy thermostats to make them feel better or just outright locked out of controls and windows are inoperable.
Even then it all depends on dedicated circuitry: webs of low voltage wires for power and signaling snaking from control panels in closets. Sure Wifi is capturing some corner cases, but NFPA isn't going to allow its use for fire alarms any time soon. Those systems need to be reliable. Or people die.
The smart home won't be based on a wireless bus. Wall warts show that we're already at the point where a standard low voltage power bus makes sense. More wires and a case for surface mounting is the way electrification goes historically.
The current approach to smart homes is equivalent to configuring a new network, hooking up a dozen different 80's dot matrix printers, and then writing drivers for them...using a smartphone touchscreen keyboard. Except instead of technical support you get consumer services.
Adding a touch screen and 802.11 doesn't make getting a system working or geewhiz configured easier than X10. It just makes it look simpler and cleaner and more likely that the end user will blame themselves for not being able to use a smartphone.
The obsession over Bluetooth-this and WiFi-that continually drives me crazy. Home automation companies aren't investing in the sort of technologies we NEED because they're more focused on the sort of technologies they can SELL.
There's a few 'handy' things I'd like to do - for example, I am considering replacing my basic central heating/hot water controller with a Raspberry Pi and having features such as a low-heat, vacation mode where the system knows I am 'x' miles away from coming home (tied to my phone's location) and it will fire up everything again.
Although I'd consider doing more (ESP8266 modules with MQTT looks interesting, albeit in its infancy), the proliferation of 'standards' (properitary and otherwise) is offputting. Then there's the standards designed to interface between all the different standards...rinse...repeat.
Edit: Spelling - I have a dodgy laptop keyboard with melted keys due to a motherboard failure!! Waiting for Dell to come back again and change it!
I think one of the big problems with the whole "smart home" idea is that people don't consider the use cases. As the article mentions but doesn't really follow through the logic of, trading a light switch flip for a smart phone fumble just isn't a win.
But remote access is one of those cases that is a win. I have a relative that spends a lot of time about 1000 miles away for business and he's gotten some mileage out of his remote furnace control. Access for people with physical issues also makes sense, but relative to what I think the market is "expected" to be for this stuff, that's still quite a small niche too. (Large in absolute terms, that is, but nowhere near "we're going to have one of these in every house!")
Beyond that, though, what's the best case scenario in practice? I spend perhaps a minute during the day tops flipping light switches... if you 100% eliminate that I will, frankly, not particularly notice. My heater already has a standard modern (and therefore a bit featureful) electronic control and I already don't use its sophisticated features.
This isn't one of those cases where technical advances just made home automation possible, like the way tablets were a joke until all the pieces came together for the iPad and gave us a practical device for the first time. The tech has been here for decades, and it has never taken off, even among the geek set. I think the problem is there just isn't a use case here.
At the risk of sounding simply contrarian, I'm still not convinced the whole "Internet of Things" isn't going to fizzle out the same way. It's a basic principle of good software engineering that it isn't enough to just throw code at people and hope; you need a use case that makes sense. There will be some use cases here and use cases there, but I'm not convinced there's a massive new market that deserves a new moniker so much as "use cases here and there".
I think the main thing that's lacking is good AI for these devices to work well together. The Nest does it pretty well, but the rest of these devices clearly don't.
As an example, I'd love blinds that knew my phone's alarm time and started letting in more light shortly before then, so that I can wake up then, without being woken up well before then.
I've already made windows that open and close based on the outdoor temp and forecast, to store up thermal energy (or lack of) in anticipation of the highs/lows later that day. These could work with blinds to let in/keep out sunlight, depending on the system's thermal needs. You could also tie in awnings.
Between these, you could have self regulating temperature with much less energy use than depending on a traditional HVAC system.
I think as soon as there is a comm protocol that is worth calling a winner (works well, widely supported), it will quickly become the case that LED bulbs and fixtures will come with it built in. A while after that, whole home lighting control is a $100 feature that you expect in every house (or less for smaller places), not a $500 or $1000 feature that doesn't work very well in houses where the owner really pursued it.
I don't expect there will ever be such protocol though, there is too much competition already and everyone wants to be the "platform", because no-one actually has any idea of what gadgets would be useful. Even if we just look at the low level, there already is a war between grid powered vs battery powered, which then influences the war between BTLE, WIFI and ZigBee. There are inherently very different architectures, I don't see a change for convergence. But then probably when everything has been already done Apple will invent THE Apple Home which will be (as always) the first of it's kind :)
Could be. There is some chance that hubs like Wink (which supports ~6 protocols) will encourage manufacturers to choose the ones that work well. Then someone just needs to make a similar hub that isn't architecturally tied to the internet.
To kill legionella you need to water at 140 F (60 C) or over, for more than 30 minutes. That temperature will cause a full thickness ("3rd degree") burn in less than a second in children and old people, and less than 5 seconds in adults.
It's best to set the water temperature to no more than 50 C. This is still potentially harmful, but takes a bit longer.
Or set the tank temperature high and have some safety feature at the point of delivery.
Scalds hospitalise many people, killing some of them. Legionella, not so many.
We're talking about people that turn their water heaters down during inactive periods or completely off because of a "smart" system that tries to save electricity.
Legionellae grow from 68 to 122F (20 to 50C). If you're letting the temperature of the tank drop into that range for a period of time and then running a shower before it's fully heated, you run the risk of aerosolizing the bacteria and contracting the disease.
Wireless, battery-free buttons that you can put anywhere you like. I keep one of them on my night stand. Rest of the switches look and work just like regular light switches.
Except the switches are connected to the system, so I can activate pre-defined scenes with one click of a button. No need to use a smartphone. The scenes are configured through a multi-platform web client.
The client, by the way, uses a regular REST API so I can control my lights with cURL too. Over the internet :)
Maybe I'm just not getting it, but why would I want a "Smart Home"? It seems to be a little like a Smart TV, everyone wants more features, but really they're newer going to use the built in voice control or install any apps. We need a few basic feature and the rest just sits their, unused, contributing to the complexity of the device.
I have yet to see an intelligent house feature I would like. I understand that some want a better climate control interface, like the Nest. But I have yet to see a house that have central climate/heating control, and I don't miss it in my own home.
Is it really such an inconvenience to get up to turn on the light or turn the blinders?
Is it really such an inconvenience to get up to turn on the light or turn the blinders?
It can be; if you're incapacitated, for example. But automated lights and blinders also offer other possibilities besides remote interfaces, like waking you up with sunlight instead of an alarm clock.
In any case, I agree with you, for now; I do want a smart home, but the current implementations provide very little utility for me. I want a smart home if it can do actual work, like cleaning itself.
Turning on your lights with a phone app (routinely) is obviously terrible.
But I would like to be able to turn on my outdoor front door light from outside when I get home after dark. And I'd like to be able to grant access to people remotely.
We have a Nest. It was a gift. Is it useful? Sure, it's way better than our old thermostat, and it's nice that usually it sets the temperature to what we want without our explicit intervention. Is it worth the price? Well, no. But it will presumably get cheaper.
I think those aren't the killer use cases driving this. We've had a rash of home burglaries and car break-ins around the surrounding neighborhoods over the past few months, including burglaries where the thieves first broke into a car and then used the garage door opener to get into the house. I am planning an HA system that includes alerting when doors are opened, as well as motion cameras ... being able to also turn on lights and execute IFTTT/Tasker jobs is icing on the cake, but secondary to my primary goal of knowing who's moving around my house and getting them on camera. ADT/CPI type active monitoring services are largely useless in preventing typically break-ins, and the monthly service fees mount quickly.
There are potential security applications for things like that. For instance, a randomized on-off pattern for lights in your house to help throw off casual thieves. Or, tying the system to the burglar alarm so that all the lights come on and the blinds open when the alarm goes off in order to bring more unwanted attention to the thieves.
As others have mentioned, there is also the light-sensitive timer use case.
I have had auto blinders, lights, and day alarm (courtesy of an old projector) for years. It's all controlled by some random netbook I got for $30, picaxe micros, and xbees (the xbees are admittedly overkill).
This is the sort of thing you build, rather than buy, since it will only ever fit the person who designed it.
Some dream features I'd like personally in a smart home:
* TV-aware lights - lights dim/turn off according to a preset pattern when the tv comes on
* Voice control - saying "Bed time" would turn off all lights & heating, other commands off the top of my head- "I'm home" (turn on hall lights & heating if its below a certain temperature) or "leaving home"- turn off everything
* Low power screen in the hall, like e-ink, where I can have an electronic To Do list easily available, or warnings to bring an umbrella/coat today, or reminders for today from my smartphone calendar
For me, having to whip out a phone to do stuff like turn off lights is pointless. A smart home should be context-aware, e.g. home temperature, time of day, doing an activity like TV, or needing cold bedroom for sleep (open window, turn off heating).
If a smart home system isn't more convenient than the low tech version, then there is no point.
The way it works is, it's all xbee based (largely because I had a bunch of short-range xbees around when Serious Business decided to get longer range ones).
There's a remote that's a picaxe 28 (remember those?), plus a xbee, plus buttons.
There's an old netbook that also runs my projector, mostly netflix/youtube. It has a xbee and a few lines of python.
There's the light controllers which are just a USB charger, a relay, a picaxe 8, and a xbee.
The blinds have a tamiya motor and a L298 instead of the relay.
Both the remote and the laptop get to send commands to the other nodes, the remote also turns the projector on and off (by serial port).
Nothing to write home about really. It mostly got done because there was an excess of xbees.
The "serial protocol" is just sending two characters (0-9 digits) to address the picaxe, and then a one-letter command.
Not sure I agree with the article's title. He's basically bad mouthing the entire smart home industry when this really seems like more of a Quirky/GE/Wink mess up. Literally every single product he tested is by them.
I actually LOVE all of the stuff in my smart home! All I have is 6 hue bulbs, a Nest, and an Amazon Echo that I've programmed to control everything with my voice with the help of a Raspberry Pi.
Nothing feels better than walking in after a long day and saying:
"Alexa, turn on all the lights, color blue, brightness 9"
"Alexa set nest to 72"
Then sitting down on the couch and saying:
"Alexa play some jazz music"
pours bourbon
If you're interested in this, check out my Alexa Home project alexaho.me or the YouTube video below) . I'm turning Amazon Echo into a smart home controller and people seem to be pretty jazzed about it. Frankly, if we can get stuff to work like this where it doesn't rely on your smartphone, people will use it a lot more. I also have a small switch next to my bed that turns on and off the overhead light and desk lamp in my room for when I don't have my phone on me.
I think success in the home automation biz is going to be all about untying it from your smartphone...
Are you the only one using the system? That seems to be the big barrier to greater acceptance. Convincing everyone who lives in a house to not use the wall light switches is pretty hard. Heck, we basically leave our AV receiver on all the time because requiring someone to turn it on to watch TV is too big a step.
Yes, my roommate uses it too! But he's also in tech. I completely agree with you. We need more really cheap IoT light switches so everyone can easily get on board!
I know our generation is the one longing for the concept of a smart-home that we see in sci-fi movies, but until we reach a stage where we can actually give contextual voice commands that our "home" can understand I'm not convinced this is worth spending a dime on. Not even in the "to promote research in that direction" kind of way, because all I am seeing now are people taking advantage of our high dollar whims and are missing hard.
I feel like there's some kind of rush to become the box/service that runs your smart home. None of these vertically integrated solutions is going to cover all of the use-cases or user desires, yet it seems that everyone want to be the one that sells you their proprietary (and bug-ridden) box.
It would be much easier if most of this stuff could be shipped as software that you can install (somehow) into a box of your choosing and pull together components for your home as you see fit. This field isn't ready for consumers per se but those with a more hacky mindset would probably uncover the useful bits, which could later be picked up as integrated solutions. The only thing I've come across that's like this is openHAB (http://www.openhab.org)
You really should check out Telldus (http://www.telldus.se). Their Tellstick Net is simple enough that my father installed his own setup at the summer house, where he has a thermo sensor and two heaters plugged in to remote socket receivers. So when my parents are going there for the weekend, he checks the app on his phone before leaving to see how cold it is, turns on one or both heaters from the app, and the place is warm when they arrive. All of this is available in brick-and-mortar stores in Europe, total cost is something like $200.
My main issue with my wink is that it has to go all the way across the internet to connect to the box 10ft away from me. A much "smarter" system would simply connect directly over my home wifi and avoid most of the lag and connectivity issues.
I understand WHY they did it this way (because they don't want to support an open device/protocol for interacting with the hub...) but it seems really short-sighted in terms of the user experience.
I've already rooted my wink hub and fully intend to implement this myself just to reduce the annoyance.
Homeboy cameras are the one thing in my setup that work perfectly. I wish more products could be so well integrated with the cloud and the phone. I have them set up to send pictures to Dropbox via IFTT, and it all works perfectly, recording only when there's motion, and only when we are not home (it uses your cell phone location).
Tried a Quirky Spotter, and it does detect things like motion, but it doesn't know to send just one push notification; instead it sends a continuous stream of them while motion is happening, which is irksome.
This article made me think about these idea for a bit. I thought of something that may not be very practical right now, but could be a way forward for these things. I think what a really good home automation system ought to do is a bigger version of what the Nest does.
All of the light switches, blinds, alarms, climate control, music, TVs, etc could be manually controlled at first, but there's a system that watches how you change all of them and coordinates it with your location and the time. It could look for patterns of doing several things in a row or doing them at the same time, and either offer to or just start doing them all together for you. Like you normally turn on lights 1, 2, and 3 when you walk in the door from work, so it notices and starts turning them on for you just from opening the door. Or you normally turn off lights 2 and 3 and turn on the DVD player within 5 minutes of each other, so it starts just turning off those lights when you turn on the DVD player.
Basically, something that notices what you already do and tries to do it for you, without you having to program things in with a smartphone or something. I bet normal people would love that. As long as it wasn't laggy and buggy, of course, which could be easier said than done.
There are house-integrated things that are cool, but they rarely require integration. CO2 and humidity-controlled ventilation is really nice, as is whole-house sound systems. But why should they be connected to each other?
Maybe if you used some machine learning algorithms and made the house actually intelligent, so it could anticipate what you wanted. Other than that I don't really see the use.
I think a big part of the problem is that integration is hard, and that the companies more or less resist it (I guess because they think keeping people in their garden is a good strategy).
It's also easy to oversell (to yourself) the value of a room having a movie mode. Most smart home features are 'nice to have', not worth a lot of messing around and cash.
> It's also easy to oversell (to yourself) the value of a room having a movie mode. Most smart home features are 'nice to have', not worth a lot of messing around and cash.
My girlfriend used to occasionally watch a show about house-buying (House Hunters). In general the show wasn't terribly interesting, but the real estate agents featured sometimes had some interesting tips.
One of those tips was to carefully consider not just how you will use a feature of a house (like a pool, or guest bedroom), but how often you will use it. Apparently people spring for expensive extras like pools and outdoor living spaces because they imagine how great it will be to have family and friends over for picnics, etc. But then they do it once, and never again because it is a huge inconvenience. Same goes for "mother-in-law suites" and spare bedrooms. People tell themselves it will be wonderful to have family stay with them, but the family members only visit once a year (if that), so a hotel is actually more economical (or just have someone sleep on the couch).
I tend to think of "smart house" features in this way. Every once in awhile I would appreciate having my living space adapt to my needs or respond to remote commands, but 99.99% of the time, it just doesn't matter. The light switch is right next to the door, I can stand up to close the shades, and thermostats have been programmable for decades now.
Eventually we'll probably come up with something that works even better (just like the programmable thermostats were a strict improvement upon their predecessors). But things like converting the light switch to an "app" or controlling the AC with a rudimentary geo-fence aren't it.
I tend to think of "smart house" features in this way. Every once in awhile I would appreciate having my living space adapt to my needs or respond to remote commands, but 99.99% of the time, it just doesn't matter.
I find there is only a tiny overlap between the many modern technologies I would like to have in a new home and the many so-called smart home features that are aggressively advertised. There are plenty of new systems I think I would find valuable, and quite a few of them distribute some function throughout the house but could usefully be controlled from a single location, but I've never seen much advantage in controlling everything together. That just seems to create one more point of failure, not to mention glaring security/privacy issues if any of the control systems are remotely accessible, which almost all of the major suppliers of home automation control systems proudly claim to be.
I've heard that the best ROI comes from upgrading (1) kitchens and (2) bathrooms. Why? These are the rooms where people spend a lot of time. The trend for many years has been for big, open kitchens because they are used day to day, and during special occasions (parties, etc) everyone gravitates toward the kitchen anyway.
My new home came with "smart features", like heaters controlled by a smart central hub with remote sensors, remote light dimming etc.
Took more than 3 months to have all the annoying gadgets replaced by dependable, manual solutions.
For me this stuff is not even "nice to have". It's more like "dear god, why would I want an extra layer of complexity?". The fewer moving pieces, the better.
But then again, I'm a developer, so dependable simplicity is my modus operandi. Different people seek different things.
Sure, the complexity and fragility aren't nice to have, that wasn't what I meant. I meant that something like a movie mode isn't worth much (it's merely nice to have), so it better not cost a lot or be fiddly.
There's a general pattern of trying to dumb things down to a simple, inflexible interface, too often with half-baked "AI" bolted on. Good products still need attentive human supervision.
I installed Insteon motion detectors and webcams after a robbery, but the included software was such undependable and inflexible garbage that I replaced it all with a simple Misterhouse-based Perl script that sends texts via email.
If I see another tech product ad aimed at millenials featuring bright easter colors and indiepop music pitched by Steve Jobs wannabes who are unable to get any angry nerds to make their products actually work, I might snap.
So-called "smart home" devices are certainly new and imperfect but the story told at the beginning of the article is also not necessarily representative.
He describes months of setup, unlocking his phone, scrolling through apps, finding the right screen, drilling through menus, and then not having it work. In my limited experience with similar setups (a few Philips Hue bulbs, IP camera, and a Nest thermostat) I haven't really run into anything that obnoxious.
When I want to kick on the "mood lighting" for a movie or a party or whatever, I just wake my phone and tap one of several presets on the homescreen widget. Setting up those presets took maybe 10 minutes and I can always mess with the lamps manually or create more if I feel like it. Otherwise the handful of IFTTT recipes I set up and geofencing keeps the lights under control the majority of the time without any input from me.
Nest is similar. It's reasonably good at learning my patterns and if I want to tweak the temp or change something, I just open an app and the image on the screen matches the display of the physical thermostat.
These are certainly early implementations of connected/smart devices but compared to the state of "professional" integrated systems, they're just fine with me. Just read up on Crestron programming if you want to learn how complicated the enterprise solutions can be. And if you don't want to spend months learning their wacky programming tools and procedures you can spend thousands on hiring certified techs to do it for you.
The thing I'm most excited about is for more standardized and interoperable devices to start overtaking the pricey "pro" options for at least the lower level stuff in enterprise and education. As it stands now, a lot of the Crestron stuff is not much more than a glorified universal remote. The faster the consumer/DIY stuff improves, the sooner it will be able to replace the ridiculous "pro" stuff that's been the only option for years.
I am now on my 4 controller "Smartthings (ST)" after dumping Nexia my 1st and for many reasons such as compatibility and monthly costs et cetera, then Micasa Verde whcih was okay but not the creates their tech support sucks and more incompatibility issues, then Indigo6 which was okay for a year but they drove me nuts refusing to speak to my doors locks (schlarge) and had to use vera bridge which couldn't keep proper track of the state of the doors.
All the while I was researching a stand alone controller backed by a big company like google, apple or samsung. Then I found ST backed by Samsung.
So here we are. migrated and all. Learning how to deal with MODES OMG. No variables I can set to do things.
When you use a smart phone as a remote control, it's just a slow and inconvenient remote control device. If the lights don't dim by voice command, it should be by your regular smart remote or the switch.
"I unlocked my phone. I found the right home screen. I opened the Wink app. I navigated to the Lights section. I toggled over to the sets of light bulbs that I'd painstakingly grouped and labeled. I tapped "Living Room"—this was it—and the icon went from bright to dark. (Okay, so that was like six taps.)"
Am I the only confused by the crazy delay mentioned in the article from the "Robots"? The processing can't be all that intensive, and I can't imagine a setup where communicating simple on/off commands to specific devices should be so costly as tens of seconds. I would understand a general delay from sensing the triggering event (i.e. opening the door), but that hardly explains the delay in between all the lights as shown in the gif.
Any time there's a significant buzz around home automation, opportunists with marketing skills and no appreciation for latency and UX flock to the scene, drowning out the technically superior but underfunded and poorly represented.
The best 'consumer facing' demos of these involve the "I'm leaving home" or "I'm coming home" activities. Aggregate functions, think IFTTT.
For much of these devices today, the experience is so fragmented that only a tech savvy customer can figure them out.
Also, yes, it's not helpful when I have to take out my phone, put in the password, open the app, and click 'off' when I could just get up and press the switch much faster.
Home automation is not something you can install yourself, unless you are a full stack programmer, and with full stack I mean also PCB's and micro-controllers.
Surprisingly there's a lot of cheap consumer stuff out there, witch can easily be modified to do what you want. Some of them are "unhackable" though.
The trick is to make everything automated. And use a high level language like JS to make it smart. Yes, I write my home automation in JavaScript :P
It seems like the vast majority of the issues with the current generation of products on the market has to do with speed & reliability; thus hardwired is the only way to guarantee those 2 work all the time. Also by going the hardwired route, the sensors and controls will be vendor neutral; thus ensuring that it will be future proof.
After doing a bunch of research the conclusion I came to was Opto-isolated relays [1] are the way to go for lighting control [2]. This allows for simple logic boards to control line voltage things without the risk of the line voltage killing your logic board. Best way to do this style of home automation would be in new construction, as retrofitting it would be hard to do if the house is more than 1 story tall as you need access above and below. Would be labor intensive as well. Will also allow for manual control because you'd put a current sensor on the wire so the hardware can tell when the circuit is on/off.
I would also want to put in some thermal cameras, as motion sensors are not as useful when your sitting on the couch, to tell when you enter/exit a room for auto lighting control. Put temperature sensors in every room and have motorized dampers & air flow sensor allowing for the control of the temperature in every room. Now your lighting and hvac can be manually or automatically controlled. Wire all the sensors and controls to a hardware/software brain that can be upgraded at any time. If that hardware/software brain is disconnected, all the light switches will still work and the normal hvac system will still work; just less efficiently.
Have the thermostat be controllable from the panel when the house is occupied (thermal camera) and auto controllable when vacant.
All of the above is possible right now; it just would cost a lot of money. Every relay/current sensor is $80 bucks; every damper control is $100; every thermal camera is $500; add it all together and you got one very expensive home automation system. But it will work right now without a lot of user frustration.
Home security too. Finding an HD, outdoor camera system that has smartphone and web functionality is very difficult. All the NVRs are horribly insecure. It's strange that a (physical) security product completely neglects software security. The more modern companies seem focused on indoor cameras with only one or two variants and not much by ways of optical zoom lenses.
One comparison to this is the big push to get in car navigation and smarts developed by the tech sector. There is a reason radios and stuff work year after year through heat and cold and the like.
they may not be pretty, but it (usually) does what its suppose to even after years of use.
I think part of the problem is that frequently/mostly, I want a dedicated input device like a switch or a dial, not my iPhone to control stuff like lights.
Nest has an app but primary interaction is with dedicated UI widgets.
What is the power limit of POE? I don't see a reason to try to dim LEDs on AC or a reason to keep converting DC/AC/DC/AC so often. Wouldn't POE or a similar standard be better?
I have a setup at my house, but the light switches stopped talking to the SmartLinc and I can't get them to re-pair. And without any debugging options, I'm feeling a bit sunk.
The companies that generate and are influenced by this excitement tend to make two main errors.
1. They don't understand that without an open standard for controls and sensors they are just fooling themselves. No one is going to permanently install something in their house that is sure to be useless in 10 years.
2. They don't understand that people don't want to control everything ... they instead want to not have to control everything. Being able to control a light from your phone is not really any better than being able to do it from the light switch. People instead want the light to just do the right thing without having to think about it. They don't want a thermostat controllable from a phone. They want a thermostat that makes it so they are comfortable and not paying any extra money they don't have to. As a result, the home automation people actually want is a much harder problem than what everyone always seems to assume.