I keep telling people to quit buying this shit and stop using corporate social media. But they’re scared that lemmy is a virus (shrug) and only trust daddy google and apple
I added my heated socks to Home Assistant so I can have them turn on when getting out of bed because I have a pressure pad under my mattress to track when I get up.
Frivolous automations is the way! I have a WLED strip go on 5 pm when a wheely bin needs to go out, with colour matching next day’s bin collection.
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.
Honestly I’m fine with smart technology. As long as I can homebrew it or something ;3
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
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
They are not necessary. They are convenient. You pay for convenience.
Water?
Water what?
Yes, we did.
Just turn them on with the switch…
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!
If you ever need a smart bulb stick with one that supports Matter. Matter devices don’t need an internet connection.
Zigbee and Z-Wave, too!
Or go with WLED software on a suitable wifi connected controller (e.g. QuinLED).
Or go with a two-way switch in the wall and get off your lazy ass.
Only with smart lights can I laugh maniacally and have myself be silhouetted by flashing white-blue lights behind me. I didn’t become a mad scientist to do this stuff manually.
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 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.
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.
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.
I see you’re a person of culture. I too get flashbanged every morning by all my lights.
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 explained my setup here
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.
Oh I can control my stuff remotely. After connecting to my VPN that is.
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.
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, 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 got a single-cup Keruig for a gift, but found that when it gets used by several people in short duration, condensation builds in the electronics, and shorts it out. I returned 2 of them for replacements before figuring out what was causing the problem. My daughters like to use it for tea, so I normally use an old Corningware 6-cup percolator. We use the reusable cups…While I can certainly rationalize justification for being much less of a tree-hugger for other things, I choose to be too much of a tree hugger to enjoy the full Keruig experience.
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.
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
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
“Does the pole count as part of the traffic light…?”
Do the bulbs that are off in the picture count?
The only smartbulb feature I need is dusk-to-dawn for my porch lights, and I found lightbulbs that actually have it builtin.
Good old electronics that don’t depend on the cloud.
I do this with a USB relay, it doesn’t use any radio communication but the downside is it requires some rewiring
Fancy. I just have a dumb switch that does it offline with any bulb. No dimming, though
I did this with a string lights, a smart plug, and a home assistant ‘sun’ integration
I just have my porch lights hooked up through The Clapper and my computer uses a local weather feed to trigger sundown mode and play a clap sample through my Bluetooth speaker array.
/S, but now I kinda want to do it.
Who buys this?
IME, about 90% of the twats at Reddit/r/smarthome. They they whine when the next Sonos or such they switched to gets bricked yet again.
Why are they twats? Because you do not like smarthome devices so people who do are twats? Seems pretty shallow dude
Because they’ll buy cloud enabled devices and call you an idiot for suggesting that might be a poor long-term plan. Then they bitch and moan when their devices get bricked, yet again, and then they’re back on the cloud-device bandwagon next time.
I have literally hundreds of sensors, switches and other IOT devices I’ve either bought or built myself because nobody made one. Not a one needs an internet connection to work because I learned long ago that it doesn’t pay to rely on outside services. Hell, I only started using HA recently because I figured it was going to fade away as well. I’ve seen their commitment to keeping things self-hosted, so a few years ago I let myself get convinced to move away from NodeRed and my own codebase. But if they disappeared tomorrow I’d still be able to use my devices with a minimum of hassle.
Is this real?
It shouldn’t be. Usual smart bulbs let you use the light switch. Unless you somehow removed the analog switch, though, maybe?
But the switch needs to be in the on position all the time for the smart bulb to work. I’m pretty sure I tried turning them on like normal bulbs at my sister’s and it did not work. You need to do the “Alexa turn on x”
That’s correct, although I do like that my IKEA ones have programmable remote switches. I don’t tend to use them anyway, but my whole thinking is to Home Assistant them whenever I have time. The real dream, though, is have my house setup up detect exact location so they can fade in and out as I approach like a freaking video game, though, which is apparently possible.
But no, I just flip a switch like a person who doesn’t have time for this lol
I mean they might need to log in to reconfigure their settings, not just turn them on and off. It’s the meme made after the fact that assumes he doesn’t have a switch lol
That technology would be okay if it was 100% open source, and came with a hard-copy manual alongside purchase so I could write a Python script to control it from my PC. Then and only then would I consider deploying such a technology in my home.
You just described home assistant. The only part not open sourced is the firmware in the device you want to control.
Zigbee device + zigbee usb bridge and you can talk to the device directly or via an MQTT abstraction layer provided by another open source service. The MQTT way makes it even easier to do.Just buy ZigBee compatible bulbs, they run locally
Wow, just like my cheap LED bulbs. I even implemented some smart switches. When you press on the one side they turn of and when you press the other side they turn off. It’s like magic. I can even do it hands-free with my feet!
You can even change the brightness by flicking that switch real quickly
