I don’t agree with this… I use Govee everything and control it through Google … I can’t imagine forgetting a Google password. I don’t care much about privacy on my lighting control. Yes everything is over complicated but pick a brand and a control device and you’re fine. Before I consolidated I had 4 different lights and controlling apps and if I messed up a stored password I could easily reset one of them using an email addy …mostly disposable ones
It’s overcomplicated because it’s not immediately easy to keep the smart functionality totally local to your own network.
Almost every company that sells an IoT product wants you to make online accounts, download their special app, sign up for subscriptions, download useless firmware updates, and have all the hardware connect externally with their mothership cloud servers in order to function, all because they want to run a data harvesting racket disguised as an “ecosystem”.
I’d use mechanical switches in the house, but at the same time, yelling at Siri to turn on my lights for the third time is the closest thing we currently have to sexbot servants. I only have so many years left on this planet, and I wish to embrace the future now.
Home Assistant + ZigBee devices.
If only ZigBee was reliable. I had to send back a wall switch because I deactivated the default on/off in favor of hassio handled response. When it lost ZigBee connectivity I couldn’t put it in pairing mode because the on/off was deactivated and holding both wasn’t recognized.
ZigBee is reliable, your specific device might not be.
I like smart tech, as long as I can make it work for me and not just another data vacuum for some faceless corporation. I’ve got Home Assistant handling a lot of my stuff now, and I’m moving things over to it and replacing corporate-app-only things with things that can work locally.
I’m interested in doing this also. Is there a guide you’re following, or would recommend?
Home assistant has been on a push to be more user friendly. It’s gotten quite good, over the last few years. It’s not quite to mass deployment levels yet, but it’s managed to wrap all the evil parts in easy to use interfaces.
The best bet, to play with it, would be a raspberry pi. There are premade images of home assistant available to install. Stick one on as SD card, and follow the prompts. You’ll be amazed at what it can just find on your home network.
Cool, I’ll throw it on my pi4. Thanks!
I will never use smart technology. I prefer analogue technology. Imagine using a subscription in your home for lights and TV and AC and heat and appliances and then boom, they decide to terminate your subscription and now your home is inaccessible for habitat.
There are ways you can set up a smart home without subscriptions, for instance using Home Assistant. But most people somehow chose to be stuck in these cloud apps with subscriptions. Ring, with a subscription for a doorbell, is wild to me.
You already have a subscription for water, electricity and heating. Your parents had and your grandparents too.
yeah, because those are necessary for survival? like, fundamental components of a comfortable modern life? being forced to subscribe to things that used to be one-and-done purchases is ridiculous attempt to make us rent our pleasures. have fun with that
They are not necessary. They are convenient. You pay for convenience.
Water?
Water what?
And they’re two different services that can’t be comparer… One for energy and other utilities, and the other a subscription to use software to turn on the lights lol
Honestly I’m fine with smart technology. As long as I can homebrew it or something ;3
!lemmysilver
!lemmysilver
!lemmysilver
My rule for smarthome stuff is that it’s self-hosted, and it has to have a low-tech way to use it. A light switch can be on Zigbee attached to my Home Assistant server, but it needs to function as just a light switch when the network is down.
Have some old stuff that doesn’t follow these rules, but I’m slowly replacing them.
I recently bought a zigbee dongle to use with a home assistant VM. Do you have any advice on products? There is alot of stuff out there and I am trying to make sure I get good stuff.
My current plan is that id buy assorted types of lights to fill the roles of actual lighting and mood lighting, and I would pair that with a 4 button switch to toggle between some different presets. Been looking at Moes for the scene switch buttons and Sengled bulbs, but i feel like i am flying blind.
IKEA has a lot of cheap, yet quality stuff you can use. The best thing for me is that they are nearby, and things like switches and buttons are super cheap.
Are you using home assistant? Their website says ikea switches arnt compatible with it.
Ikea smart home stuff uses Zigbee, and just about all of their devices are supported in Home Assistant, either with ZHA or, better, zigbee2mqtt. I have dozens of buttons, bulbs and sensors from Ikea and they are very reliable most of the time.
I’m running ZHA at the moment, but some of my devices (mainly the plant humidity sensors) keep falling off the zigbee network for hours at a time. I’ve heard zigbee2mqtt resolves a lot of issues with ZHA, would that have any effect?
Hard to tell, it may have to do with your zigbee coordinator or the number of repeater devices in your network.
Which coordinator do you use?
If the network is not well meshed then the link quality could be too low for the sensors to reliably stay online. Adding repeater devices (mains powered devices like bulbs) could help here. Or if you have too many devices your coordinator may be overloaded. I had this problem for a while where I basically had to restart the coordinator because every device was offline. This happened once or twice a month. A firmware update helped here.
Generally zigbee2mqtt is superior to ZHA in my experience, but a little more work to get running. But you will find lots of documentation and YouTube tutorials on how to set it up. Not sure if it will help if your network is “weak” though.
But even if your zigbee network is great there are some devices that are just shit. I have a few analog LED controllers that randomly drop off the network and will only rejoin after cutting power to them. Doesn’t matter how good the link quality is, they go offline sometimes.
So maybe the soil humidity sensors are just not good?
Which coordinator do you use?
Connect ZBT-1
If the network is not well meshed then the link quality could be too low for the sensors to reliably stay online. Adding repeater devices (mains powered devices like bulbs) could help here.
Running six of these over three floors (2x basement, 2x main floor, 2x upstairs): https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0DQTFM1T6
Soil sensors: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DH25W72N
One is within a few feet of the coordinator. I try to just not look at the network visualization as it just causes more headaches, but I have zero “green” connections… Maybe those plugs are just garbage though, IDK.
All fun and games when a grey hat hacker “hacks” his way into your living room through your window and starts turning on your lights without your permission.
And someone could throw a brick through my window and take all my stuff. There are some threats that we take care of by having a society where people don’t break other peoples things just because they can.
Usually it’s due to fear of repetcussions, but now anyone in a MAGA hat can throw bricks through your window and take all your stuff whenever they want
Can I program my light bulb to recite the bill of rights, so it will play at max volume once stolen?
All fun and games until you get a power outage and one of your nodes doesn’t boot properly which means no quorum to start HAOS which means no lights
But that’s what flashlights are for :p
That’s why my HAOS instance runs on bare metal 😁 (Lenovo M710q, G4560T, 4GB RAM)
Yeahh probably the smart move, I went ham acquiring some overkill hardware for relatively cheap, and now the power bill is making that evident 🫠
It has been fun playing with a setup like this, but you definitely don’t need 128gb RAM to run the measly services I’ve got, though game servers would be a blast… if I ever had time
I’m slowly converting everything to run on these little 1 liter PCs. I have three so far (four if you count the Mac Mini NAS), and an Optiplex 7050 SFF that’s been a bit hotrodded with a 300W XE3 PSU, Precision 3420 CPU cooler, & Noctua fans w/extra intake fan.
I like the Optiplex for obvious reasons, but it’s a bit of a power hog with the i7-7700 and 48GB RAM. I haven’t measured them individually, but if I had to guess, the Optiplex probably accounts for a solid 1/3 of the power usage in my entire homelab.
I’ve had my Phillips hue bulbs for over 10 years now. I own like 20 bulbs and have only had a single failure. Never had any issues with the bulbs. Google Assistant however has let itself go.
I bought Ikea bulbs and the only time I’ve ever had an issue with them is after a brownout nuked the gateway/hub device.
If you let the wireless remotes run out of battery you have to re-sync them, but beyond that they’re the easiest IoT thing I’ve ever used.
Google home assistant has gone to total shit. That new Gemini crap will not recognize commands the the old assistant has no issues with
Yea is Alexa any better than Google Assistant? It used to be great but I think they are actively making it shit to get people on Gemini? But Gemini doesn’t support smart home stuff, that why the hell do we need an LLM for assistant.
We’ve got a few Echos, but these days they are mainly used as a bluetooth speaker (bedroom), kitchen timer (kitchen), and the kids’ one (basement) is used for music… and that’s about it.
I have one in the garage, too, but I’m about to throw it against the concrete floor and run it over a few times for how often it only plays one fucking song from my Spotify playlist when I’m working on my motorcycles.
“it just works!”
I’ve had a similar setup, and bluntly, their not the brightest bulbs, and they’re not the best bulbs, but they are one of the easiest to set up and get working. They mostly just fire and forget…
I hate the saying “it just works”, but hue, despite all of its shortcomings, just works.
I’ve had at least one bulb fail outright, started illuminating “white” as an off purple color? It’s hard to describe. I have no idea why, but that went into the bin. I also had one bulb that was in-between uses, fall and smash, I think it still works but it has sharp glass on it, so that’s probably going to the bin. I have one other bulb that’s failing right now… This one is… Different. It blinks. You’ll have it at a steady, full brightness (or whatever) and the bulb will just shut off for 1/10th of a second every few seconds. No idea why. It’s probably headed to the bin. Luckily it’s in my hallway, so I don’t see the problem most of the time.
They’re expensive, and you don’t get a lot of light per bulb considering what you pay for them, but they are easy. That, in and of itself, would be the main reason I would suggest to anyone who isn’t a complete nerd, to get hue. Anyone with enough technical prowess and the willingness to set up home assistant, should probably go to different options. Anyone too busy to bother with their lights and just wants something that they can control with their Google home/Alexa/Siri… Hue is a good option.
Not saying there aren’t other good options, but hue is the one that I know and would suggest.
The flashing one sounds like a ballast issue (these are LEDs right?) and the weird purple could be caused by a dead LED in the group that if it was working would balance the color to white.
Since they’re expensive you’d hope they wouldn’t have these hardware issues… But I’m also just guessin.
To be fair, I’ve had most of the bulbs for more than 10 years. I’m pretty sure I picked them up in 2013/2014.
The first failure was about 2 years ago.
So getting 8-12 years of service isn’t bad. Most of my bulbs are white/color ambiance A19, which run around $40-75 each (currently)… So it’s about $5-10 a year per bulb. Not terrible.
Yeah you’re right, the fact they lasted that long changes my mind about their value
There’s a lot of technology that people should spend more money on, in order to save money.
Home networking, as an example. People generally won’t spend more than $100 ish, to get a wireless router that they expect will service their whole home for years and years. And in some circumstances, maybe that happens, chances are, you’re heading back to Walmart/bestbuy/wherever to pick up a new router in a couple of years.
I have business grade gear or better, and I bought most of this stuff years and years ago, and I have no stability issues nor any need to upgrade. I expect that will remain the case for many years to come. While others are out upgrading their wireless router because of one reason or another, I’m enjoying stable, and fast, network access.
The insane thing, to me is that people will spend upwards of $100 a month to have high speed Internet to their door, but then won’t spend $100 a year for a way to get that Internet into their devices. Insanity.
their not the brightest bulbs, and they’re not the best bulbs,
There is a joke there somewhere
How’s the security on those light bulbs is a weird but valid question
Depends on what aspect you’re referring to. I’m sure the online accounts are following standards, and the hue bridge can be used locally or via the cloud account. Local LAN generally doesn’t have any restrictions on usage, anyone on your net with the app can control stuff from my experience. Maybe that’s changed.
The bridge goes out to the Internet, it works without port forwards, so no exposure to the Internet there.
The last point I would think about with security is local bridge-to-bulb security which… Probably isn’t great. But someone needs to be within range with a specific skillset to take advantage of that.
I work in tech and maybe know one guy who might be able to pull that off?
Not sure, it’s ZigBee, and I don’t think they have encryption turned on at all.
Quick Google search shows that ZigBee is encrypted. So it may not be that insecure.
Yep, I see that too. Looks like it’s baked into the protocol.
Zwave will let you disable encryption or run without it. But it’s definitely still an option for zwave.
Both use AES 128, so there shouldn’t be any significant difference in security between them.
I had issues with it from the get go. It wouldn’t accept my pairing, it was blinking on and off all the time, etc. I threw it out as soon as I didn’t need it for a couple of hours. Why do they need so much info to run a bulb?
I think hue works so well because it’s based on the ZigBee standard and the hub which is a dedicated appliance for controlling the lights. WiFi and Bluetooth should be reliable but with cheap lights maybe that’s the issue.
I don’t like Wi-Fi bulbs. I work in tech and I know how much noise is associated with Wi-Fi networks. To me, it is foolish to intentionally add to that when other options exist. I’m okay with ZigBee but I’ll probably go with zwave when I replace the hue bulbs.
I just want everything off of the WiFi channels as much as possible… Except actual Wi-Fi things like TVs, laptops, phones, tablets… That sort of thing (and even then, I want the TVs to be wired of I can figure a way to do it).
It’s bad enough ZigBee overlaps with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, creating interference, Wi-Fi IoT stuff just takes it to a new level.
Anyways, I’ll get off my soap box.
Two big things, IMO, contribute to reliability issues with IoT stuff: relatively inexpensive (and pretty trash) Wi-Fi in the IoT devices, and relatively inexpensive (and also pretty trash) Wi-Fi in a lot of consumer wireless routers.
To put it bluntly: if you know enough about tech to have a network capable of hosting Wi-Fi IoT devices reliably, you probably don’t want Wi-Fi IoT devices.
Ah for me my server, desktop and movie room in the basement all have Ethernet wired so I only have mobile devices and IoT stuff on wifi.
But totally agree about trying to keep things off the wifi
The only “smart” light fixture I have has its own separate remote for switching between modes and adjusting light. I will never buy a device that either needs Bluetooth of Wi-Fi.
Just turn them on with the switch…
Mr. Bean demonstrating the principle of “it’s not stupid if it works”.
Turn it back on :P
How many Beans does it take to turn on a lamp?
Yes. Yes we have. This is why the internet isn’t fun anymore. I use YouTube like 20th century folk used TV. But at least I have control over my shit in that case.
Most people use YouTube without an addblocker. In which case, your content comes with about ten times the amount of advertisements than if you’d use a TV.
While we’re at it: I remember when opting into adds was a choice for creators on YouTube. Quite a few refused, even popular channels. Can’t imagine growing up with this shit now and thinking it’s normal.
I used both Firefox, but after foxfire had some shit with selling info I went back to using brave. Brave has the best youtube ad blocker ever.
And yes, I am aware that brave has its own info stealing shit.
I use Newpipe on mobile. The app has issues from time to time, but I’ll take those over YouTube pr*mium any day.
I was ecstatic with NewPipe for months. But now I’m getting an error message saying I must log in to YouTube to protect the community. Just me?
Newpipe is great. I rarely watch youtube on my phone any other way
Whenever NewPipe or PipePipe has an issue I switch to the other one (exporting and importing data takes 30s). Always worked so far
If it has to be smart, instead of every single bulb, wouldn’t you better have the light switch in smart?
A bulb is easy to replace by anyone. The switch isn’t.
Your point is?
If someone wants some “smart” lights but can’t do mains wiring they are going to buy the bulbs. Easy as that. Most people don’t know/care about the issues those bulbs have.
Ah, ok. Doing it easy vs. doing it right.
(Different commenter here) Except that not only does your solution not really add much benefit to the average consumer, but if there’s an issue like this with the switch, which would be using the same technology, then you can’t just change it unlike slapping in some regular lightbulbs temporarily. Sure for a cluster of 6 pot lights the switch would be great but for lamps(which may be sharing their plug with something else) or single ceiling fixtures it’s one or two bulbs vs. paying someone to install a [likely more expensive] smart switch to turn on one light. And this is a friend reporting on tech they don’t have themselves so it literally could be that the dude had a smart switch!
If you redirected the energy you used on being smug into being smart you may have gotten there on your own, but here we are.
Is that an issue?
We still have switchboards… Don’t we?
Not if you forget your password
Yes, we did.
I build my own smart lights to avoid this kind of bs. Thanks to ESPhome i didn’t even need to program them myself. Everything is in an offline VLan and connected to Homeassistant.
There must be simpler ways than every bulb having a network interface…
Maybe, if it were up to me the entire control system would be centered in my electrical panel. But doing that after the fact is quite difficult.
Why don’t just use simple lightswitches?
Because then the lights wouldn’t change brightness or color temperature with the angle of the sun, my motion sensors wouldn’t work, and the light wouldn’t turn on together with my morning alarm.
Speaking of color temp, I shift my local environment’s hue with blues in the morning to assist with alertness, and reds at night for improved low-light vision. I do it manually with an IR remote I have conveniently velcro-taped to the wall next to the light switch. I am interested in your automated setup, I could see it being useful for tying the lights to the security cameras (motion is detected, triggers main lights to full brightness, play doberman_barking.mp3).
I see you’re a person of culture. I too get flashbanged every morning by all my lights.
Everything is in an offline VLan
This is the way.
I don’t need ANYONE to control my house when not in my house, and if that means I don’t get to either, then oh well.
I find it funny how people who are not working with any kind of electronics are the ones who have smart homes, smart bulbs, smart keys, smart tv’s. People who work in it have nothing connected to the internet, except their own server with a hammer next to it.
Speak for yourself my main server is explicitly firewalled from the modem
Well, many industries seem very interested in dragging us “happy with being manual people,” kicking and screaming, into all this tech crap.
Sometimes it can make sense… other times it doesn’t. Many tech entrepreneurs want to just own shit and claim they have brains and ideas when they don’t.
Remember the juicero? A wifi connected juice press using proprietary juice bags? It was a very extremely expensive overengineered piece of junk. With features that are wholly unneeded… and what is even dumber is that the juice bags can be squeezed by hand faster and more efficiently than by the machine!
Still, the ‘inventor’ got 120 million dollars in investments. The company went under a long time ago, but he probably is still sitting on a pile of cash.
Oh, reading your reply made me feel a bit hypercritical, LOL! While I’ve never heard of the “juicero,” I do own a “Bartesian.” It’s a cocktail-making machine, where you supply the alcohol, and the various cocktail mixers come in a Keruig-like packet. You insert the packet, select the strength of beverage you want, between non-alcoholic (who does that?) to strong, place the appropriate cocktail stemware (or Soho cup) underneath, then drink away.
I’m not too hypercritical though…it works really well, and is a party hit.
That machine you described sounds a hell of a lot more practical than the juicero. I am not a fan of keruig machines because I feel they are wasteful (but that is just me. I won’t argue that they are very convenient). But a keruig machine but for cocktails sounds like a decent idea.
I have a friend who has wireless everything, and bragged he even had a wifi coffee maker.
So when I asked him for coffee, he walked to the kitchen, grabbed a cup, but it under the coffee maker, walked back, fidgeted with his phone while showing me how cool it was, walked to the coffee maker, got the cup, came back and handed it to me.
He did appreciate me asking about wireless mugs.
Oh I can control my stuff remotely. After connecting to my VPN that is.
I have been looking into this kind of thing. My impetus is wanting to connect my Android alarm clock to Home Assistant and set it to trigger my espresso machine to power on 30mins before I wake up. I saw ESPhome recommended for the smart plug. I’m sure I’ll find other uses once I set it up though, maybe even building my own light bulbs.
I use it to slowly turn the lights on 20 minutes before my alarm goes off. It’s great fun
ESPhome
First time i’m hearing about it. Sounds very cool! Would you mind sharing your setup and how it works?
I’ve got a Sever running Homeassistant with the ESPHome Addon. The Lights got a custom PCB in them using a ESP32 and a 4 channel warm/cold white led strip driver. But you can also build them using of-the-shelf parts. They are mains powered without a switch, instead i wired the switches to a sensor input. This allows me to control the light either via the switch, or Homeassistant. They even got some buttons directly on them to force them on/off if my server is down. I also got a radar in there for presence detection. Basically the same as an infrared motion sensor, but it doesn’t turn the light off while im on the toilet. Thanks to using Homeassistant, I can change the color temperature and brightness of the lights depending on the time of day. It’s really nice to have some dim and warm lights in the evening before going to bed.
But ESPHome isn’t limited to some custom build stuff. Anything that uses an ESP32* chip can be flashed to run ESPHome instead of whatever it came with. I got some sonoff relays that control my shutters and an Emporia Vue 2 to measure my power usage. Depending on the device you might be able to flash it either via Wifi or you have to disassemble it to get to the programming pins. The nice thing about the ESP32 is that a vendor cannot lock the firmware. You can always flash something custom.
ESPHome isn’t limited to Homeassistant however. You can also have each device run a web-server to control it, or connect it to MQTT.
Also i should mention some alternatives:
- Tasmota: similar to ESPHome, but while ESPHome as the configuration compiled into the firmware Tasmota can be reconfigured on the fly. Not like the update process of ESPHome is slow however.
- WLED: if you only want to control some addressable RGB led strips. It does that one job way better than ESPHome.
