There’s an offshoot of smart device enthusiasts that insist everything is local and reproducible. But if you don’t like software, it only makes it worse to try to keep things self-hosted, not to mention the learning curve is much, much steeper.

My printer sits on an activated trapdoor above a shark tank. I’ve spent so much on printers trying to learn all the normal noises. Also sharks, turns out ink in the tank is not great for them.

I live in an elevated house, straight out the window it shall sail

And if anybody is wondering if that exists, it’s called Home Assistant.

Never connect an unattended printer.

Zwave and ZigBee baby!!! It’s been Awesome so far.

Home assistant, as a central system (it basically let’s you wire anything into anything!). The smart switches etc should be esp8266 or esp32 based. You can then flash either tasmota or esphome to them.

Since your server will likely be Linux based, it’s open source all the way to the bare metal, (or at elast as close as possible).

My current system almost doesn’t notice if the Internet dies. Also, if you nuke critical components, in the worst case, it still defaults to dumb control behaviour (physical switches still work etc).

I still know where the kill switches are however. I’ve also made sure it doesn’t have control of anything mobile, other than the robo vacs, and I’m fairly sure I could take them in a fight.

Yep.

I love tech, as long as it’s tech that I have full control over.

Home Assistant is the antithesis to this meme

There’s a difference between recognizing the risks of “smart” tech and knowing the futility of avoiding it -or- even better having the skill to mitigate as much risk as possible.

It’s also the opposite! I do a lot of self hosting at home.

But at work… Hell yeah bro wire that shit through AWS with a Google login and Microsoft platform, I don’t GAF.

The shoemaker’s children oft go barefoot.

Yup, my parents have Google Home and Alexa, and my brother has Alexa. And here I am, the only one in the family who works in tech with neither. In fact, I got a free Google Home and gave it away because I don’t want it anywhere near my home network.

One of these days I’ll figure out how to DIY it, but until then, I just use my phone (GrapheneOS, so some protections there) to play music and look stuff up.

Oh yeah what kind of phone do you have?

I do not want your stupid app.
I will not use this siloed crap.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not want this mobile spam!

When I had my bathroom done, they put some speakers in the ceiling I could connect to with bluetooth, but in order to activate that I need to use a crappy app to swap them to speaker mode and turn them on.

When I got a new phone, guess which app no longer works on versions of Android that Noah himself didn’t use to track his fucking animals?

Bonus: Every power cut causes it to enter “detuned radio mode”, requiring me to find my old phone, charge it up enough to power on, connect to the speakers and switch them off.

Never buy anything from EISSound.

Really need to get around to figuring out the spec of the speakers so I can replace the controller…

Americans have been known to throw down with a printer on occasion.

Real techies know that the only way to be sure is to use an EMP device.

But people keep insisting that I print, sign and scan documents like we are living in the stone age of computing. I literally recently got a brand new in a box printer from 2008 just so I could do exactly that.

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We only have two "smart* things: when we get up to pee at night, a motion sensor turns on a light in the living room. Much dimmer than those premade motion activated lights, so we don’t wake each other. Returning to bed and triggering the sensor again turns it off.

And when it has been raining more than a certain threshold in the past 24h, the outlet into which the pump that feeds our drip irrigation is plugged turns off, and on again when it hasn’t been raining for a while. Saves lots of water, especially when we are on vacation. (The rest of that system is " dumb", though.)

I could give you a bunch, but it would be missing the point: you should automate to fulfill a need. You don’t need automation so there’s no argument to make for it

Most rooms in my house each have at least a handful of different, indirect lighting solutions. I could pay an electrician to wire them all to a single mains switch, but then I would need them to come back whenever I want it changing. It would also be more complicated to have dimmers and set programs for different times of the day to to adjust the lighting to a number of presets.

I could just have the one or two overhead lights that these rooms came with, but that’s just an unpleasant to look at experience to my eyes all of the overhead lights got replaced with ceiling fans that have no lighting that come on when the room is occupied and over a certain temp.

You walk in the room, a bunch of lights and may be a fan come on at the right lighting for that time of the day, then they go off at a suitable period of time. I even have all my garden lighting coming on via motion despite some of it being a separate 12v system that’s battery and solar powered via a 12v zigabee multi channel relay.

The only thing I’d need to make smart is my box fan, because once I fall asleep it would be better to turn it off, but I like falling asleep with it on, and I can’t turn it off if I’m already asleep.

So I could make that a smart device.

But I got those outlet power adaptors with a mechanical switch timer that just turns the power off when the timer dial rotates. It’s got a 24 hour dial and multiple pins, so I could put my fan on a schedule if I wanted.

Cost like $5, I’ve been using them since 1995. Easy to repair and replace.

If it ain’t broke.

If you have solar panels you can turn on appliances or compute intensive tasks if they produce power.

If you have humidity problems, an alarm can remind you if aerating makes sense. If you additionally have a bad landlord you can prove you aerated three times per day and still mold did grow, so he has to fix something!

If you have a home theatre one button can dim the lights, turn on the TV, and close the blinds.

You can have your motion controlled floor lights only turn on red in the night.

Small things which are in total useful.

With HomeAssistant its easy to do without any cloud connection.

One thing I want is for my washing machine and dishwasher to coordinate with my water softener to be sure there’s enough soft water left so that no hard water will go through them and to immediately initiate a regeneration if there isn’t while the appliance waits for the regeneration to finish before starting.

My living room has no hard wired lights, and only one plug is on a switch. Only one standing lamp makes the place gloomy, but the second can’t be on a switch. Rather than turning them on and off separately, I smartified them so I can do it via voice or app. Also if I’m cooking and my hands are a mess, I can ask Google/alexa/whoever to set a timer, add something to a shopping list, or tell me what temperature something needs to be. My favorite use is casting computer audio to multiple speakers so I essentially have a home sound system. Makes cleaning more fun. Also not having to get up to turn the bedroom light off at night is transcendent.

Nothing I use smart stuff for is particularly revolutionary, but it’s handy enough that I like having it.

By a curious turn of life, I have enough technical expertise in the right areas to be able to design the software and most of the hardware turn a lot of my home smart like that in a safe way were I’m fully in control of it all (no 3rd party involved) … and I can’t be arsed, for very much those reasons.

I mean at one point when I was playing around with microcontrollers I was looking for ideas of things to do with some neat microcontrollers which are cheap and have built-in WiFi support and I just couldn’t find anything worth the trouble, for pretty much the kind of reasons you list.

Sure, lots of things can be done which are “cool ideas”, just not stuff were the whole “remote controlled from my tablet” actually significantly reduces the effort in doing something without introducing new problems (i.e. it would be a whole lot of work to get my apartment door to automatically open when my face is detected outside and then the thing has a non-zero rate of failure even I I train the AI really well, so when it fails I would be stuck outside hence I would still need to carry a key around, so in the end it’s really just less hassle not do it and to keep opening the door with my key), plus often the problem is that once you add “remote control” to a device’s design you just make it consume a lot more power, so now it has to run from mains power rather than run from some batteries that will last for a year or so.

The maximum home automation I ended up doing it is automated plant watering and that stuff has been designed without remote access exactly because it can run from 3xAAA batteries for a year even though it actually has to power a water pump which when it’s running does consume a fair bit of power (but it only runs when the soil on the vase is not humid enough, which is so seldom it averages out to very little power). Sure, it would be “cool” to read the humidity sensor from my tablet and activate watering remotely, but that doesn’t actually achieve the point of of automated plant watering - making sure my plants don’t die of thirst because I forgot to water them - whilst overall making the design worse because now it needs a lot more power and I don’t have a design anymore where I can just replace the batteries once a year or so.

doorbell cam is just about the only thing i can think of

If the sun is up past 8pm && person home close the blinds could be a reasonable example. If water is flowing to the bathroom run fan for 30 minutes could also be reasonable. If motion near front door take photo of door and email/text it to you could be a rudimentary form of security or knowing a package arrived.

We turn on our vacuum robot after we leave because the kids are scared of the sound :0) but they eagerly help press the button on the phone to turn it on

My smart home is Home Assistant hosted on a server in my house. It’s fully open source and has gone through multiple paid audits to show its security is good too. The only non-local-only integrations are the weather api’s and my thermostat (ecobee).

THIS

I work with tech; other than in my home office; there is no tech in my house.

The voice activated things…just no. I looked into Mycroft, which looks interesting, but is till a solution looking for a problem.

Hopefully with Matter becoming more popular, it’ll make it easier to standardize local IoT devices.

Check out to GDOBlaq from konnected. I have the alarm panels and they’re great.

BRB, attaching a pen to my GRBL-based CNC and looking for a PostScript to G-Code converter…

Funnily enough, not being able to modify a printer’s firmware is what turned Richard Stallman into the free software advocate.

(Well, it was more the drop that made an already very full glass overflow, but still, “the printer story” has de facto come to be known as the point where free software started.)