zlacker

>>pictur+(OP)
Can someone explain to me what this ecosystem is and the appeal of it?

I have nothing automated in my life, that I know of? I don't have a garage; the door to the house has a key; the lights I turn on with a switch; no Alexa, don't use Siri... I am not exactly opposed to automation, but I am hesitant to share even more demographic data to cloud services.

>>triyam+f5
The lights in my house turn on and off with the rhythm of our lives. We don’t think about turning a light on or off. They do that by themselves. My home knows when the dishwasher is done. My home can silence alerts if I’m on a zoom call. My home knows if the air quality is low and doesn’t turn on the ventilator fan.

Automation is not about having an app for your lights, it’s about not having to think of trivial stuff like turning on a light.

>>op00to+v6
I like having an app for my lights. Getting a little dark during a video call? Just turn the lights on without missing a beat. Better than the awkward "I'll be riiight back" that wastes 10 people's time.

(As for automatically turning on lights, that is also good. I have two receptacles outdoors that aren't on a switched circuit. Thanks to the magic of smart lights, they are now off during the day.)

>>jrockw+T8
I think you could probably just skip the awkward “I’ll be riiight back” stand up, flip the light switch and carry on. I mean unless the light switch is in another room you’d still hear whatever is going on and unless you are literally running the meeting I struggle to imagine what the purpose of announcing your action is.

Maybe I’ve become a crusty old man, in years gone by I would have thought that people would notice me getting up and wonder where I was going. Now though, I’ve realized that no one is really paying that much attention to anyone else, even if someone were curious about why you walked away for a moment, the room getting brighter and you sitting back down doesn’t require a brain surgeon to piece together what happened.

Once you remove the completely voluntary awkward part of that video call, fiddling with an app and flipping a switch are on a lot more equal footing.

>>ihuman+bx
Good lighting is a luxury for sure but can definitely get complicated to control properly with just switches. The other thing is, once you’re in that ecosystem, you fiddle a lot at the beginning and then you don’t. My lights get blue and bright during the day and get warmer into the evening and since I work in the living room, it’s nice to have the two setups together.

When it works, it just feels good but certainly isn’t a necessity. And of course that’s just lights. I used to have my hvac system integrated into HomeKit too and again, it was nice being able to control the thermostat in my kids room without having to go in. More recently I’ve had a neighbor that smokes a lot of weed and something about the closets being badly insulated is letting in all his smoke in my daughter’s room. Tried talking to the guy and nothing happened. Luckily, his smoking schedule is super precise and I was able to set timers for my kids air purifier to go off at his exact smoking time for 1 hour. It’s been 3 months since I’ve seen particulate matter go above 30ug/m^2…it used to get as high as 180!

Being a renter means I’m only halfway into the automation game but I gotta say, given the right product and platform I’m all in. And if something doesn’t work right then it’s time to reverse engineer it and make it behave.