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tech never works for long (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 52 points 6 months ago (20 children)

"no smart home crap" Yeah... That's just a choice. I have two homegrown smarthome solutions that are amazing and complex without creating security holes.

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  • [–] 47 points 6 months ago (16 children)

    You can tell it’s an IT guy’s home assistant if there’s no hardware that requires someone else’s cloud.

    My home automation philosophy is that everything in the house should work with or without internet. It’s going well so far.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I'll add that things should also fail gracefully. If something breaks, they should all revert back to working like the dumb equivalent. Dumb switches, dumb thermostat, etc.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    For sure. That one is a bit harder to get right, but is good to keep testing and striving for.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    My home assistant is set up that way. If I turn it all off, the house is a little less awesome, but everythiing works fine. You just have to turn on/off lights and open/close doors yourself now. you'll have to diddle with the thermostat and ceiling fans more too.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    Good recommendation for light bulbs?

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Like the other user mentioned: depends on your setup.

    I have recessed lighting throughout my house, so swapping to bulbs for all of them would have been an expensive pain. So I opted for smart switches. I got innovelli reds, because they were the best there was at the time. You can get them with any protocol you want (zigbee/zwave/wifi)

    With a smart switch, you can control lots of lights with only one device. Originally I just added Shelly relays behind each switch, but I wanted the dimming capability of the innoveli.

    If you do still want bulbs, nothing beats hue. But they are by far the most expensive.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    As an alternative, we have found bulbs that can run tasmota with the MQTT integration to be perhaps the most reliable part of our smart home (as long as the hardware already had a descent CRI). I've heard good things about ESP home too, but we have not tried it.

    If someone has some light bulbs that are laggy (due to cloud integrations) or a pain to use due to software, its worth checking out of tasmota or esp home can be installed on them to locally pair with something like home assistant. It turned a regretful purchase into a nice addition.

    With that said, we don't buy connected devices any longer without checking internet and cloud requirements first.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Tasmota is awesome. I flashed all my early Shelly devices with it. But now the native Shelly firmware is amazing, and it allows you to turn on local mqtt only. So I’ve stopped using Tasmota for everything besides the few devices flashed early and behind my wall switches. (I’m too lazy to pull them out)

    Is it hard to flash bulbs with Tasmota? Don’t you usually need access to the pins? Or have an OTA option for updating the firmware?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago*

    The ones I had you could do it over the air, but some do require access to the pins. Even with soldering experience it is not approachable as bulbs are not packaged to be opened, it is part of why I check for offline or flash compatibility before buying as even the same "model" could have different hardware revisions. No info = avoid.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    It depends on the rest of your setup, but I recommend going with zigbee or matter/thread for the connectivity. I definitely wouldn't put any "smart" devices on my general purpose wifi. That stuff is never going to be secure. Also, consider if smart switches would work for you instead. That way you don't have to pay the premium when a bulb burns out.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Yeah I'm stuck between those two options however it's for much later down the road in my case. House needs a renovation but finances don't allow just yet.

    I have a mix of TP Link wifi globes, IKEA ZigBee and Hue Zigbee throughout the house. Zigbee are controlled by a SLZB 06 and ZHA / MQTT. By far the Hue are the best I've tested and have been in service for around 10 years.

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