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I have a tech enthusiast friend who has his whole house hooked up to be smart. His lights somehow connect to the Internet.
Pfft, most of my home is smart, but because I’m actually an IT professional none of my smart devices are allowed to call home unless I explicitly allow them to (for firmware updates). The only thing they’re allowed to talk to is my homeassistant server.
This meme is always dumb when it comes around, many of us with skills can pull off a smart home without resorting to “the cloud(s)” even if it means building our own IoT devices.
Do I trust Ring? Fuck no! Do I trust the camera doorbell I built and wrote the code with my own 2 hands and knows what it’s doing with every byte of data? Tentatively.
I’m taking things a step further and building a HAL9000 system for my house. This time with 15% less mental illness.
Just noticed, you’re the 100th commenter!
You win absolutely nothing!
proof
LMAO same, just picked up dual 3090s for a good deal for my AI smart home ambitions
Though, I’m calling it XANA…I’m sure nothing will go wrong with our chosen system names haha
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Homeassistant for the win!
I never understood why you would want anything connected to the cloud. Like if the central server goes down, you just can’t turn on the lights or open your garage door? Why do people install that garbage? It’s not even really automated, you’re just using your voice or your phone to turn it off and on.
Someone that has a homeassistant server absolutely automates their devices.
Exactly. My most recent automation is to turn on the bathroom vent fan when the humidity is 10% above the thermostat humidity, which does happen during the day (room doesn’t have good airflow)
Tons of my house is automated, and everything I have can still be used without an Internet connection.
Like I said, none of my smart devices have an Internet connection unless I explicitly allow them to have one, and Homeassistant is hosted on my own hardware.
I’ve vlanned all the iot shit to its own network. I haven’t gone to fully null routing it even though everything I have can be controlled locally with home assistant.
Yeah, I was agreeing with you. That’s the only way to do it.
It’s all about having multiple ways to control things, smart and dumb. For example, in my house:
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When I turn off the hallway lights at night, it turns all the lights off in the house. They’re still controllable by physical switch, and that one light I turn off is just a trigger for that automation
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I have a ton of windows, most of which face east. This is wonderful in winter, but turns my house into an oven early in the morning on a sunny summer day. I also like my privacy at night. So I have an automation to open the motorized shades at sunrise (fully on a cold/cloudy day, otherwise only partially) and close them at sunset. But there’s still a little button on the shades if I need to open or close one (rare)
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My wife would always forget to turn on the bathroom fan when she showered, so the bedroom turned into a sauna. So naturally I got a humidity monitor and made an automation to turn that fan on when it gets too humid (and another to kill that fan when it’s run for 10 minutes)
All of this runs on Home Assistant, which is on a Raspberry Pi I have at home. The only connection to the outside world is my weather checks
Automation doesn’t mean it has to have zero human interaction to work, just that things happen automatically somehow. My oven automatically maintains a temperature, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t set that temperature first
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Like if the central server goes down, you just can’t turn on the lights
I can walk over to the switch and turn my lights on fine without internet, which in the rural area I live, happens quite often. The same with my thermostat, no net? Change it at the thermostat. The only thing I am missing when the net goes out is my schedules.
Right, but that’s my point. Why aren’t the schedules kept locally? Why aren’t the lights automated with presence? My automated home doesn’t require a connection to anything external to keep working. I pull weather data for forecasts, but if that goes down I can still pull the temp from my sensor outside. Worst case scenario is my garden sprinkler turns on when it’s raining. Everything else functions entirely offline. Lights, music, door locks, HVAC, even the TV remote (which I don’t even use because I prefer the actual remote with physical buttons).
Like others in the thread my smart devices only talk to locally hosted home assistant. I use a few automations to make things easier. My favourite is being able to run open garage door while approaching my house. It opens the garage door and unlocks the door from the garage to the house. I could manually do these steps but it is nice to be able to carry whatever directly from the car to the house without needing to unlock the door.
The other nice one is automating the holiday lights. I would forget to turn them on or off regularly. Since adding the automation they turned on every evening and off around bedtime every night. I have used one of those light sensor units in the past, but it would often get covered in snow and stop working until I remembered to brush it off.
I have a detached garage. One of my favorite automations is when the garage door opens after sundown it turns on my back porch lights for 15 minutes. So simple, but so nice.
This is why in my setup I only install or use things that also work as usual (manual usual) when the control system is unreachable, but when it is reachable the thing is automated.
Along with blocking all external traffic unless there’s a specific reason for temporarily allowing said traffic.
I used to be a tech enthusiast. Used to.
Now if I didn’t personally audit the hardware I don’t want it on my fucking network. My smartphone, which I only use mobile data on and have the wifi disabled because reasons, is the only smart device I own connected to the internet. I also have 2 roku TVs but they’re offline (whytf does my TV need internet, it’s literally a monitor for my htpc).
IOT is not bad when you selfhost and manage all the data thats being scraped yourself. But like, fuck corporate IoT stuff
Amazon’s alexa smart speakers had a bug a while ago where it would spit out everything it heard, even stuff you didn’t say to it.
Fuck corporate IoT indeed.Bug when discussed with the government, feature when discussed with executives.
Bug when discussed with the government
unless thats the NSA, they love this sorta thing
Mechanical Windows? I still have Windows 11. How do I upgrade to mechanical Windows?
Install Linux /s
HomeAssistant, all IoT devices are on a VLAN that can only talk to HomeAssistant…HomeAssistant server only accessible via LAN or through WireGuard to my VPS (which WireGuard’s to my router, which connects to my HA server).
Not perfect, not invulnerable, but it also only controls lights and harmless switches.
Same reason why mechanics drive 25 year old crap cans
One of my bosses favorite lines on the floor at VW was “Build it like your family will be driving it”.
I wish I had video of when someone hit back with “I know how these are built, you think I’m going to let my family drive one?”
