Does Zwave and Zigbee with Matter on the way at some point. HomeKit integration is in beta right now.
My fear is that Philips will do something stupid by pushing a firmware to the bulbs to lock folks into only using their hubs. Or maybe change colour reporting to some annoying method that won’t allow for accurate colour on a non-Hue hub.
The enshittification continues.
the problem with home assistant is that it's easy enough to have a computer on and run the docker container. but then you have to either open ports in your firewall or use some sort of proxy in order to have outside network internet access, and then maybe your computer goes down for whatever reason. it's kind of a hassle unless you're already running a server for other things imo (and I say this as someone who runs my own surveillance with blue iris and poe cameras)
I get why there are people that don’t like how some installers do this, but this trope is really turning into the “but I don’t even own a TV” of OSS commentary.
Just use the Docker image if you don’t like it. Or get their appliance which actually supports ongoing development.
It is a shame Phillips Hue has gone down this path as I would have seriously considered their gear otherwise.
Maybe I'm a luddite but I can't see any advantage installing with gear reliant on cloud access.
Buying hardware that can run open firmware is nice for future proofing in case the vendor goes sideways with their firmware. I do the same for routers with OpenWRT.
I've seen a few recommendations now for the Ikea Dirigera hub, so fine. I've ordered one. Assuming it works as expected, I'll migrate everything next week. So long, Philips. I liked your stuff, but why'd you have to get greedy? Was being twice the price of your competition not enough?
Have you been watching the minimum daily ration of "news", Citizen? Can't leave 'til you do...
Smart Home 2023Q3 status: still for hackers only if you want more than a few lightswitches that you can just toggle from your phone, and even if you do want that, stick to one vendor + system only.
Unfortunately, to get there most out of it you have to go to AliExpress to have a selection of modules, but I made it a journey, rather than a project
Other examples are: Wahoo, who locked the control of their products behind an account and login requirement for devices which had been working perfectly fine for years prior.
Roche, who killed their blood glucose app at the start of 2023 and forced all their users to move to a third party app, developed by one of their subsidiaries, which requires you to accept a data exfiltration clause, if they wish to continue the automagic on-device logging.
So I’d install dimmers and lights as normal and retrofit maybe some smart stuff later.
From the moment I first saw the notice, I started wondering if I'll have to find a new app. But because "soon" has not arrived, I just have been ignoring it. I hope when "soon" arrives it will be a weekend so I have plenty of time to deal with 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.
That's... not true. There are many items of the Tuya ecosystem resistant to flashing with another firmware.
Highly recommended: Shelly gear, it is easy to configure and seems to be rock solid, I've got a bunch of their remote control radiator valves, several remote control relays and a tri-phase consumption/production meter. It all worked flawlessly since installation. And instead of a regular Pi I got one that was built into a keyboard. It was mostly because I couldn't get a bare one but in the end I think this was the better option.
Problem is, it comes with a ton of headaches.
The cloud is a problem, as you noted, but also a bunch of fiddily, unreliable software, firmware updates that go haywire, and apps that are tied to iOS and will stop working with my physically installed home hardware if the manufacturer ever stops treading water and fails to update for the latest breaking iOS update.
Home automation could be simple, reliable, and future-proof. It’s really not, though.
I only set mine to warm, cold and purple/blue but I don't have room for three lamps.
Stuff like the sunrise timer, switching lights on when you're on holiday, and out of home control are just gimmicks though.
Hm, no not really. I have a bunch of remote controlled sockets that can't be reflashed with Tasmota and that require a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through to access including enabling 'developer mode' and access from a bunch of IPs in China. No thanks... really annoying because it was exactly one of those comments that caused me to buy them in the first place.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#all
...including all the big names like Hue. Nest. Ring. Yale. Schlage. Ikea. HomeKit. Plex. Sonos. Alexa. Sure, you can integrate arbitrary digital/MQTT/Zigbee/BLE stuff you find on AliExpress for pennies, or you can buy the name-brand stuff from big box stores.
You're not locked into just the Hue ecosystem just because you have their bulbs. I don't understand why HomeKit doesn't just talk to the bulbs instead of allowing Phillips to force you to go through their hub. This is on Apple for not supporting the lights directly.
Philips is a lying corporation as far as I can tell.
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.
But if you don’t personally need it, you also don’t really need to drop in and bash the concept. It is useful for lots of folks and it’s just a fun game for lots of other folks. And most people can just ignore it.
Thread/matter promise to put this garbage to sleep, finally. The smart-home offerings from the major vendors allow all devices, without vendorlock (so far).
I’ve never dealt with Matter, though.
They've been around since 2006.
Other than that, I just enjoy having the remote ability of turning lights on/off from my couch. I don't even have mine accessible via WAN, so it's not like "oh I forgot to turn off the lights" after leaving the house. they're LEDs, so I don't care!
But we'll generally have very very dim lights on throughout the early evening into bed time which makes it much easier for me to fall asleep.
Waking up to office-white-lights will also really wake you up.
Also: parties. It's fun to be able to do nice pink and blue lights or a low-lit candle-like scenario, depending on the vibe.
I haven’t gone in much for home automation so can’t speak to how well it integrates with anything else, but this thing at least works great.
I bought a "Cync" bulb from GE and had to reset it, I couldn't for the life of me. This is their official video on how to do it:
You have to repeat a sequence with near perfect timing, that takes about a minute straight. Since we moved, I had to do this for 4 lights and wanted to tear my hair out, lol.
I've found that for whatever reason, "smart home" stuff is some of the worst designed and managed products out there.
I bought a SkyConnect adapter to support HAOS, but it's probably going to be unused for at least another year.
Everyone is chasing the lowest price, and it has to compete with existing solutions that are cheap, like just putting a filter on a white bulb, or installing a dimmer switch. What these products are offering is convenience, but not fundamentally new life experiences. So they can't charge a lot.
Meanwhile, they have to interact with an absolutely enourmous range of interfaces. The wi-fi router, the phone, the electric service itself, etc. And the user has high expectations for ease of use (after all, it is a light bulb, it should be simple!) while needing good security (it is your home after all, if you can't be safe in your home then where can you be safe?)
A simple experience with a wide range of interfaces at low cost has almost never been successfully done. Even Apple can't do it; they offer ease of use, but in a limited ecosystem and at a premium price.
So these products are fundamentally flawed and they probably can never be fixed. This industry is fundamentally not viable until someone comes along and solves the interface issue or until people accept paying a lot of money for these kinds of things, and even in that case it would probably be a reseller performing a home install then providing API access to these services, which is only one step away from home-as-a-service.
And I personally do not think I could tolerate a home-as-a-service. But many young people or students might like that just fine.
Frankly, being anything other than super paranoid is almost a little reckless.
Also, shit-talking Home Assistant is a pretty weird take. I wouldn't write it in Python configured half in YAML and half in SQLite either, but ... not having to write it myself was the fun part.
Too many companies are finally realizing that thanks to matter their products are basically going to become commodities. No longer is there an advantage to sticking within a single platform to avoid hubs (ok so maybe "no longer" is jumping forward a few years but still, the steps are happening now).
The part that really frustrates me, my Hue devices are the most reliable devices in my home automation behind my HomePods. On a fairly regular basis my other home automation devices will just randomly not work, loose connection, or just generally have issues. I am not exactly itching move away from that reliability and I feel like Phillips Hue likely knows this.
This includes Ikea when I tried their smart tech just a couple years ago. It was incredibly unreliable and I do question actually recommending it (that being said, maybe they have gotten better and I would love for someone here to tell me has... it seems kind against Ikea for them to go down a locking down approach?)
Even Microsoft has this published for the dotnet install tool:
curl -sSL https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh | bash /dev/stdin <additional install-script args>
A couple months later Logitech shitcanned the entire product line (which I had already returned after discovering their scam), and screwed all the apologists. I wonder what they think today... if they even do.
Don't underestimate the cognitive dissonance (and resulting apologism and shilling) that you'll face when you call out defects and scams in someone's pet product or belief system. And yes, it happens right here on HN too often as well.
I walk into a room, I turn the lights on. I leave the room, I turn the lights off. I have no need to operate lights in rooms that I'm not in.
2. Since different people are different, it makes no sense to handicap everyone just because some people have a hard time reading text that is wider than a narrow column. Make the text fill most of the window, and that way people can have the window sized to whatever their comfort level is.
This trend of super narrow columns of text is making the web worse. It needs to die.
I periodically get told that a published browser userscript of mine is malicious or suspicious in emails simply because of the cautions and wording around the userscript installers themselves (it's just a css tweak, a theme), meanwhile the executables I have in the wild have generated zero similar feedback.
my theory is that since the script is more easily read that it attracts people to read it without any theory or knowledge of what they're even looking at .
(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.)
The first is, my mailbox is across the street, and I'd like to know when the mail comes. So I have a Z-wave door sensor in the mailbox to send me a notification to my phone when the mailbox is opened.
The other is to nag us to move laundry to the dryer. I have a Z-wave power meter that my washing machine plugs in to, and another Z-wave door sensor on the door. When the power meter detects the washing machine stop using power, it waits a few minutes and sends a notification to unload every few minutes, until the door is opened.
tiny_installer.sh
#! /bin/bash
curl www.url-you-didnt-check.dev/the-real-installer.sh | sudo bash -Here's my current setup (multiple narrow columns—the OP fits entirely in one screen, looks like a newspaper).
No let me stop you right there. All the good Hue stuff works with Zigbee so you can (and should) totally just run your own hub and bypass all of this; yes with home assistant!
That's really the best solution. You can just control the lights directly how you see fit without even talking to Phillips.
Maybe they could even come up with a "Respects Your Freedom" certification program for hardware that won't screw you over.
This would achieve "freedom 4: The freedom to turn on the light".
[1] (so that they don't have to arrive there by deduction and observation)
--
Today, even my parents know that "you need an app to use this" is equivalent of "beware, you'll soon be screwed by this".
Maybe it's good news? To me it sounds as illegal as a car manufacturer requiring you to use Shell vpower in order for you to not void the warranty, and doing so after you bought the car.
Maybe the EU could then deal with this and ask the important question: Are they even allowed to link the functionality of IoT devices to an online account?
My reason for buying all Phillips was that their system was relatively open, that the gateway could be accessed and controlled via HTTP and put behind a firewall without access to and from the internet. And the ability to use 3rd party apps.
I've moved over to using Zigbee2MQTT together with a Zigbee USB 3.0 Dongle and all controlled from a custom Python based server on a Raspberry Pi, which made me lose all the access via the apps (I'm not into Home Assistant), but it's now all automated and controllable via dimmers and other events so that in my case the Phillips gateway has become obsolete.
But it was a great entry into the ecosystem, just because it was simply usable via HTTP, which allowed the best of both worlds: the apps and the ability to tinker with it all. The only thing which was missing was the real-time access to events.
Sad to see that they are turning their back on us, but let's hope that the EU notices and creates some new laws, even if it's in 10 years.
At the time, other main brand hubs didn't want to do ZWave.
I stopped following the dumpster fire after that and now I just turn my lights on and off like a plebe with my fingers.
Then Miku sold to another company (they either filed or were planning on filing for bankruptcy), and the first thing the new company did was send a letter demanding $10 a month to keep using most of the monitor’s features.
Anyone who really complains about curl | sudo is just doing it for nerd points, because I guarantee you they happily install all sorts of other software without "vetting" it.
And if someone caught someone doing trickery it'd be big news.
Plus, they just pushed a Matter update which I think allows for local control. This seems like a good way to get people to sign in to setup matter and then never open the Hue app again.
They're 2.4G Wifi, but I can't get too bothered about that. I've optimized my coverage with multiple, decent APs, so it seems silly not to use it. I'm jaded on Z-Wave after I had multiple GE Z-Wave switches just burn out on me after a couple years. I've also retired my Samsung Smartthings and Hue hub, and I don't want to buy another hub for a few lights. I also can't see paying $30+ for a light switch; the Kasa units are frequently on sale for a reasonable $10.
You also can't get a software update without installing their terrible mobile app (and logging in), so I take it to the dealer and make them do it.
Hopefully I can just block my Hueshit at the router and they'll keep doing what they do, otherwise off to goodwill.
Dose anyone else just feel embarrassed reading articles like this (especially on the top of HN)? We really are having the best of times in 2023 when not able to changing the colors of light bulbs w/o logging in is a, seemingly, big deal. Or it really is just the end game before the collapse.
Back then, we thought legal questions about discrimination silly - if the baker won't bake cakes for lesbians, who cares, there are dozens of bakers in town who are not silly, why fight with the one who is, especially since the only recourse you will get is a birthday cake.
But now with the app monopolies it's different. If Lyft bans you over a justified chargeback and Uber bans you over another justified chargeback you are going to have a problem.
$ curl https://whatever/foo.sh > foo.sh
$ sh foo.sh
After
$ curl https://whatever/foo.sh | sh
$ curl https://whatever/foo.sh > foo.sh
Since it takes an insignificant amount of effort to defend against this why not get in the habit of doing it?
[1] >>17636032
I used to be a massive technophile but now I have the dumbest home of all my family and friends and I wouldn't change it for the world.
Then what?
"real" protocols like Zigbee and friends seem to work well.
I'll be moving to matter blubs (whatever brand strikes the best balance between price and quality) in the future and only using Hue bulbs when its necessary for features that aren't supported with Matter (like Hue Sync).
Amazon did lock the guys account for the report from their driver. That did lock him out of his other IoT devices.
Are account requirements from some companies better than other?
Zigbee2mqtt adapter picked them up right away, I tossed the hue bridge, and got rid of few cables. Amazing that it just worked. Just didn't get the hue remote to work yet because I'm lazy, worst case I can literally program anything else to interact with the lights now through HA
I'm using SONOFF Zigbee USB Dongle Plus with Z-Stack 3.x.0 Coordinator Firmware that plugs directly into RPI
If the answer to cloud enshittification is “I know! I’ll use a different company’s solution instead of this open source project because I want to make an outdated stand against curl|bash” then I think the thought process is misguided.
Rachel is usually spot on, but dogma won the day today. Home assistant is great, and I’ll go one step further: I don’t care a bit what language a tool is written in. Plenty of insecure and malicious C in the world.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/11/19/the-jim-saga.-...
And having it extend to have to piss by the light of your cell phone (just before you drop it in the toilet) because you're groggy and can't remember the right incantation to get lights on ...
it's like a portmanteau between clown + cloud, because most of these cloud things I swear are led by clowns. I like it a lot!!
the appeal is technology as hedonistic consumption. People just love spending money on 'tech', even if it actually costs them more time and money, which is fundamentally the opposite of what technology is supposed to accomplish.
So in this sense it isn't even automation, it's anti-automation because just about every person I've met who is into home automation spends significant amounts of resources on things like flipping a light switch on.
Sure, don't do that as is - But it's not hard to just curl the script, read it to confirm it looks okay, then run it.
One of them broke, and there was a button in the app to report it. I kid you not, a replacement arrived the second day, free of charge.
Depending on your definition of future it's very possible. Find some devices classified as "Local Push" or "Local Polling" https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th.... Make a VLAN with no internet access in your router and put them (and HA) on it. Never update the firmware (why would you, they work don't they?), connect them to HA and pin the version of it and your plug-ins. Don't let the devices talk directly to HA if you're extra paranoid.
Update at your leisure or never.
Whenever buying a "smart" light/switch/outlet, I always make sure it can be flashed to Tasmota so I can keep my home automation as self-hosted as possible.
Hue's descent was inevitable and lights/switches/outlets have long life spans. Don't trust your smart devices to corporate whims.
Philips just introduced Matter support which requires local access, and continues to support Apple Home as well. There are dozens of apps which can manage their hubs. ( FWIW I use iConnectHue. )
Philips also just introduced cameras, which did require them to update their EULA.
The HDMI audio Sync box is a PITA that doesn't work well and doesn't support many lights. It's a $300 paperweight.
There was a periodic bug where lights would turn back on after commanded to turn off, and wouldn't stay off. That happened maybe 1% of the time but hasn't happened lately.
I also have no-brand, BT-based I2C silicone ARGB "rope" that requires an I2C fan-out repeater because only about 12 feet / 4 m could be powered serially.
"Hue" accounts have no other purpose, so zero people already have one.
Now please wait whilst I reboot my lightbulbs and apply a firmware update to my toilet.
Counter-intuitively, the closed standard, Z-Wave, operates more like an open ecosystem. My Z-Wave Thermostat (ACD-2000, nearly the only Z-Wave thermostat that doesn't look like it hails from the 90s) swears that it requires the Alarm.com ecosystem on the store page - but the simple truth is that it wouldn't be Z-Wave compliant (and therefore couldn't be sold) if it didn't work with any hub (Aoetec in my setup - they are particularly friendly with the HA community). Compare this with an Ecobee: a Zigbee device which requires their hub (and other Zigbee devices are unlikely to work with the Ecobee hub, so I'm sure you get the idea).
Hue bulbs are one firmware update away from the same situation, even though Philips have "promised" not to.
I'm not sure what the situation is with Matter/Thread - my Google fu isn't strong enough to determine whether it will go the way of Zigbee (which it's based on, but merely as a channel) or Z-Wave.
As for LEDs and the rest? ESPHome. I do have some Hues, but that hub will go in the trash once all the bulbs burn out.
People can and SHOULD return this garbage to the retail store the minute they get home and realized it's encumbered in this way.
> To keep your accounts and products secure and ensure you get the most out of your system, you’ll need to create a Philips Hue account soon.
To make sure my account is secure, I’ll be required to have an account. Cool.
Where something that can be verified gets more scrutiny than something that can’t.
Maybe someone else knows.
I live in an old house. 80% of the lights in my house are operated by walking up to them and twisting the stem. The remaining 20% are switched.
To properly turn the lights on in my living room, I have to visit four separate lamps and turn each one on. The dining room has three lamps, bedroom has three, office has three, etc. When it's time for bed, I have to walk around the house turning each lamp off. If I want them dim, no luck. To do that would require either all new lamp fixtures, or rewiring the house with new dimmer switches.
Or, that was how it was before I did the Zigbee/HomeAssistant thing. Now I just hit that master switch on my nightstand and all the lights turn off. My whole house changes into "Night Mode". The thermostat will widen the setpoints. The doors lock if they weren't already. If I happen to get up at 3AM to take a piss or get a glass of water, the lights all know to come on at minimum brightness, and to turn off shortly thereafter.
My front door lock used to be a pain in the ass when I had my hands full of groceries. Or my coffee and the mail. Now my door unlocks automatically when I walk up to it. It's a small joy, but it reliably makes me smile each time. (And I don't have an ugly keypad, and still have a standard key slot if I need it).
I have an ancient stove and oven. No electronics at all. So I wrote a simple automation to alert me if the kitchen motion sensor's temperature rises 10°F more than the rest of the house, for longer than 30 minutes. This has saved me a couple of times now when I forgot to turn the oven off. (It takes a good hour for that temp sensor to reach the threshold as well. I wrote that automation after discovering that my oven had been on for hours. When I looked through the temp logs, I saw a clear signal I could use in the future.)
I also put a remote temp sensor in one of my HVAC registers. Comparing its reading to the ambient reading gives me a ΔT on my air conditioner, and a couple years ago the steadily-declining value of that delta alerted me to a refrigerant leak weeks before it would have been large enough to notice otherwise. I was able to get that repaired in the spring rather than in the heat of summer. This isn't something I would have done with a regular thermometer; having to remember to check it every so often and do the math taking into account the humidity and the elapsed time since the start of the cycle. But seeing all that temp data logged over many weeks makes the pattern easy to spot.
In the den I sometimes want it to be bright enough to read or do detailed work, and other times I want it dim so there's no glare while watching TV. Before, that meant I would have to buy lamps with a dimmer on them, then dim each one and go flip the ceiling fan light off. Now when I click the switch[1] to turn the TV/stereo combo on, it automatically dims the lights at either end of the couch, and turns the overhead light off.
Color temperature! That's another thing that isn't possible without some smartness in the bulbs. At night my whole house is as close to 2200K as possible. I really like that kind of light. But in the middle of the day, my kitchen lights are closer to 3300K.
My porch light turns on 30 minutes after sunset and off before sunrise. It's under a roof so I would have needed to either replace the switch with one of those fancy ones, or installed a photocell somewhere else. But it was just a couple automations added to the config file to get that functionality.
[1] I originally put a Tasmota wall relay in to save the 20W (!) of idle power my old stereo receiver was constantly drawing. When I realized I always fiddled with the lights whenever I turn the TV/stereo on, I just automated that away.
There are other doorbell choices, like Eufy by Anker. The one this man used.
A notable flow on effect is both of these products had helped with the management and improvement of my health, and these changes have had a measurable negative impact since I’ve been unable to use them.
I deal with shitty technology products every day. Bugs out the ass, terrible UX. When I report the bugs or point out how horrible they are to use, I'm either ignored, or told it's my problem. Do I complain? No, because I've learned that a horrible experience is what I should expect from technology. A shit experience is par for the course. I should really be happy that my phone has not killed me yet. Though seeing as cars are increasingly becoming very large smartphones, that might not last long... If you only knew how horrifying the software for chargers is, you wouldn't walk near one.
Last I checked, the bare metal pip3 method was "always" going to be supported. So the "Just use Docker" comments ignore this.
The author complains about a lack of product leadership at Phillips, but HA has always been renown for ignoring their users.
https://www.sevarg.net/tag/lights/
What's the old joke about technology?
Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.
Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.I'll take a properly curated package in flatpak Fedora repos over a random script downloaded and piped into a root shell any day
The web ... is not that.
Fucking planet is heating it's not okay fucking lightbulb remote control and blood pressure measurement should be local and easy. It's about how we do digitalization.
Having said that - I also think I don't need that stuff and I don't have it so it's a first world problem. The display shows the blood pressure - Bluetooth is not needed and I've already thought led lightbulbs are to expensive and I'm far too poor to buy some internet connected expensive stuff.
I'm embarrassed at that cheap take at home assistant which seems to be some kind of free open-source version?
On the other hand it's a rant I really can't blame the article it's good at what it does and doesn't want to solve the world's problems. It's just pure frustration about a product that used to work without some shitty cloud and we should collectively fight that we can use and buy stuff without any shitty cloud. It's important. Because it will be everywhere - or already is.
And sure there is an imperialist war going , people don't get healthcare and are still enslaved. It's very first world middle class or even upper middle class privileged problem.
The lesson that it drives home to me is that if a company can force updates to your device, it doesn’t matter what the terms of service are or how much you trust the company.
They can go bankrupt, sell off the assets, and some new vampire company can come along and remove your ability to use your product.
I think it's unhelpful to think about the management of these companies this way. In my experience, assigning the most evil possible motivation to someone else is dangerous as it blinds us to the possibility that even non-evil motivations can lead to undesirable results.
Won't they charge you through the nose for this? We recently went to a Lexus dealer for something random but specific on an old Lexus, and they did basic service like an oil change. When we stepped inside, it was like a 5 star hotel lobby with ordurves and fancy hosts a bunch of weird junk.
We got the bill, and never even considered going back.
My kitchen, for example, has 4 separate light circuits for tasks: under cabinet lights, 2 cans with spotlight LEDs over the sink, multiple can lights around the perimeter, and 3 over the kitchen table. They're all on Kasa switches and hooked to Alexa for voice control. So, you can turn on the sink lights to wash dishes without touching anything and lights can be turned on/off in groups no matter where you are standing.
Other living areas use a combo of table and floor lamps at multiple locations/outlets, so it's nice to be able to turn everything on together by room with a voice command. These rooms have a switched outlet, but that's a single location, and in one room, the switch is not positioned well.
I had something similar. Rock solid. Wired back haul. Nice manual. I knew it wouldn’t add $$$ to the house but I was a little surprised to find out it actually put a lot of people off. It had negative value as I had to rip it out and go analog.
Even nerds looking at the house wanted to do their own thing not maintain someone else's ideal and normies refused to spend ANY mental energy on understanding it.
Was eye opening!
"Oh, that path is actually not a temp directory and requires permissions different than the user account?" - sudo
"Oh your firewall blocks my outgoing telemetry data?" - sudo
"Oh your firewall blocks my localhost request but I don't actually realize that's what happens but when I try it with sudo it just works everywhere?" - sudo
There are myriad reasons apps want root access, and almost none of them are good reasons, but that doesn't mean it's not simpler for them to get sudo from a user than it is to get dev eyes addressing (let alone understanding) the nuance.
However I think the Ikea hub I had was ethernet only so not sure if that's the entire answer.
But maybe I just triggered something in Hue for those ...
It’s good practice to check anything that you’ll pipe to `sudo`, but this article’s level of paranoia is kind of self-defeating, no?
At some point, we all trust the things we run on our machines. We rely on communities — and our participation in them — to vet installations.
There is no perfect solution. Someone will always be misled.
In reality, on each new iOS device, Apple forces you to use the current version of the app in the App Store now, and your old version apps are not included in backups or able to be transferred to new devices.
You are eventually forced to use the latest version of the app by Apple.
The latest version of the app will require the latest firmware or will modal lock you out until you upgrade the device.
Blame Apple for not letting you preserve your old versions of working apps between backups and devices, and blame Apple for allowing time bomb expiring apps like Signal and Chase Mobile into the App Store.
Further blame Apple for not having an iOS "internet access" permission per app that would prevent these apps from learning that there are new, unwanted firmware updates available when all you want to do is local operations.
Finally, any product that requires that you "sign up/log in" on the first screen and can't be used otherwise without PII should go straight back into the box to be returned.
And the option is what, buy a Zigbee dongle and a raspberry pi run some code written by unpaid enthusiasts? 3D print a case for it and mount it on the wall, running updates and fixing it ever few months when some package update breaks it?
I like the concept of lights that run from an app. I don’t have any of the physical Hue switches for my system and it’s fine. But I do not want an app that abuses me, and I do not want to maintain some fragile project made from slapped together code. I want robust open hardware with open source software.
I’m convinced that we can achieve this, but it won’t be with the current model of business and engineering we have today.
Sometimes people get into niche communities and get really obsessive in a ridiculous way, like spending inordinate amounts of time defending a junky Logitech software suite.
I know, because it has happened to me. I see it happen with particular frequency in Discord.
I am not a psychologist, but it seems like a trap humans are predisposed to fall into.
Worse, if your device requires remote services then they can control access to those. Stallman was right.
I'm claiming it and hereby releasing it into the public domain! :D
As far as I'm concerned these companies should get hit with deceptive advertising charges. Yes, I realize that buried somewhere two or three hundred paragraphs deep in the TOS I "agreed" to let them do this. Then again maybe I didn't, because I also likely "agreed" to have the TOS changed at any time for any reason without warning. That is key here.
IMO These companies get away with this because they can toss out one of the basics of contract law. It is unconscionable that one party can _unilaterally_ change the terms of the contact (the "terms of service") without prior warning or input from the other party (me, as the purchaser of said device/service).
Basic contract law should apply here. What _tangible_ benefits are there to me
Keep that same mindset with any whizbang tech, and you'll mostly be alright. Cheap build quality is something else to watch out for, but that infects "dumb" devices just as much.
If every experience with Tesla was like the initial buying experience I’d recommend it to anyone, however, let me assure anyone interested the honeymoon phase definitely ends.
I intentionally buy switches not bulbs or more complex gear. Then you plug your dirt cheap LED dumb bulb into the lamp and have it turn on and off with your voice. Much cheaper to replace when the bulb eventually burns too.
Its stupid simple, just make sure everything connects to your assistant of choice (Hey Google / Alexa / Siri - maybe?) OR just stay in one company's walled garden and you're fine. Personally I'm a fan of Wyze's hardware but don't use their apps or more complex cameras.
Their model is shipping ESP devices flashed with open source firmwares. They still go on their own firewalled wifi network, but this is about as future-proof as I can imagine: the software is open source, the updates can be run locally, the parts they're made of are actually pretty simple PCBs you could get a fab run of your own done if you wanted to.
In terms of "future" proofing, everything I've installed I've been putting in accessible junction boxes well labelled - electricity isn't going to change, so as long as it fits in a box, I'll always have the option to replace the hardware (if you have light switches with a neutral wire then you're basically set).
I wouldn't say "simple" per se but that's really more on the "you need a box running some type of home automation stuff". I suspect simple enough for the consumer would be something which came with it's own wifi AP and pre-configured mesh routers so the IoT network would start out intrinsically separated.
[1]: https://kaufha.com
Google wants to have a word with you about some of the products it's sold and quickly killed.
Are they losing sales? Making money from the login somehow?
Is whoever made this decision getting patted on the back, even though its tanking sales? I think that's probably the case, otherwise they would have rolled it back some.
I'm running the docker container (since I already had a home server running docker containers), but a NUC with HAOS for my folks has been working great.
Honestly, I'd blame Wall Street here more than the tech companies, but it's really everyone's fault. Tech compensates people with stock, so everyone is incentivized to make the stock go up. That's not always doing what's best for the customer.
But also running a hardware business where every customer buys something once is a tough low margin business. New players don't want to get into the game and old players have to placate Wall Street. Even Apple is shifting more and more into services, but they can vertically integrate and are already "upscale". No one can pull of being an upscale light switch.
Honestly I think open source is the only thing that will save us here, but sadly there isn't a lot of money in that either.
Then they went public. This attracted a lot of new managers and ladder hoppers.
As a public company, the board, the C-Suite, the immense layers of management all were incentivized to boost stock prices to boost their own compensation.
They did this ethically during the low interest rate environment. But with higher interest rates, the only way to maintain growth is via scummy nickel and diming.
So execs and all the management layers do nothing but enshittify the product so that the gravy train can continue for at least a few more quarters.
Thus, customers are left hanging with shitty products.
Imo, the solution is to never buy long-term subscriptions from public companies with listed stocks, if possible.
Some off-the-cuff ideas of how:
1. Make our own purchases "on principle", and hope that enough other techies do that, that economic pressure is applied to brands.
2. Make our own non-purchase technology adoptions "on principle".
3. Inform other techies, both on specifics of individual devices/architectures/vendors/etc., and to bring everyone up to speed on the basics (e.g., reasons for open standards, user-oriented products/services, avoiding lock-in, privacy-respecting, responsible security, etc.).
4. Inform non-techies, such as by pointing them at solutions in their interest, and in the interest of society.
5. Advise lawmakers, to complement whatever they're hearing from lobbyists.
6. Contribute code and other effort to open platforms, and actually use them.
7. Be careful about helping to prop up society-hostile platforms, such as by using them to the exclusion of something else, making them more palatable to the exclusion of something better, implicitly endorsing them, etc.
8. Keep principles a factor in who we go to work for, how we work while there, and whether we stay there.
"Running a software installer" in general seems just as insecure as "sudo | curl" whatever.
Well, I got 4 ocular migraines in less than 3 days. Packed them all up and sent them back. If anyone has recommendations for LEDs that don't trigger migraines let me know. Or else I guess I'm buying a lifetime supply of incandescents and a storage unit for lightbulbs /s.
Honestly, the whole thing sort of seems like focusing on the wrong things. I've never owned a car, am vegetarian, have never lived in more than 1000 sq ft as an adult, and walk/take public transit in NYC daily. Not sure the 2 incandescent lightbulbs I use in my living room are really causing climate change.
I do get your point though. Fixing the lack of a privacy focused option that works well for people who aren't familiar with systems administration would be nice.
But every single other reply seems to be either “well yeah obviously read the script first” or “how dumb, just use docker,” so like I said, maybe I’m the dumb one.
But your point is well taken and I'll be sure to introduce the subject at the handover if it ever comes to that.
Completely useless comment.
Where are all of the businesses with values that put humans first? Is it just necessary to be so ruthlessly destructive to make it at all?
Her. Rachel is a woman. Pretty knowledgeable and experienced, too, so I would at least consider what she's saying.
That’s the other (mostly) good thing about… they’re Wi-Fi native and don’t use any sort of hub.
Their iOS app is reasonably decent, and there are honesceeen widgets.
Easy to build fairly advanced automations… for instance I have a rule that turns my bedside fan off and turns the bedroom lights on that runs 5 minutes before my alarm goes off, weekdays only.
Most of what I use are their bulbs, which are both relatively cheap ($30 for a 4 pack), with excellent CRI, variable color temp (including a nightshirt style automation that goes whiter during the day, and both warmer and dimmer at night), and full RGB color.
I probably wouldn’t recommend them for a whole home setup (you’d need pretty serious Wi-Fi routers) but for a case like mine where I’m only using it in a few rooms, it’s great.
In a vacuum, having more features is good. But simplicity itself is a feature. Simple things don't break as often, it's easier to fix when they do, and they're more predictable, meaning it's easier to plan your life around them.
Energy efficiency was my main goal too but no one gives a fuck about that here either so it’s a different market.
Or they could just charge more for new bulbs as the bulbs burn out. Why ruin the user experience? Just charge me an extra dollar and move on.
Is there any effect if you aren’t using the Hue app? Or reason not to drop it (the hue app) for HomeKit?
There are actual standards for this, but they're more like recommendations, and ironically https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-cont... recommends "Width is no more than 80 characters or glyphs (40 if CJK)." while the first line of the paragraph explaining why is 112 characters wide and looks pretty much fine / comfortable to read on my screens.
While there are psychological reasons to use shorter line lengths, as this SO answer details the whole 80 column width thing goes all the way back to punchcards in 1928 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1486...
Edit: here's what HN comments would look like with 65-70chr per line: https://i.imgur.com/yeMF6IY.png vs default with 1215px per the news.css rule: https://i.imgur.com/IXNyhfL.png .
Philips’ “managers” are screwing up many of their historic product lines and then discontinuing them when the margins go negative.
There are hundreds of people on this site that can begin creating a competing company/product line starting tomorrow if they care to.
It's exceptionally difficult, expensive, with a high risk of failure. And it'll properly take years of your life even if it fails. No small order for sure.
> Where are all of the businesses with values that put humans first?
A lot of them start out that way, while they're still founder owned/controlled. The enshittification is a market opening, if someone dares to pursue it.
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
That's risking losing you as a customer. Turns out, a lot of customers think our services are already too expensive.
Most basic is shifting from 5000k white to 3500k white in the evening. Color scenes are nice too.
What also helps is that the whole system runs without any user intervention. The manual is mostly aimed at people hired to add stuff at some point in the future, or in case something breaks.
The execs could easily argue that in their business judgement it’s in the shareholders best interests if they make a long term play, and chose to forego maximizing profits in the short term, and instead maintain positive customer goodwill in the interests of maximizing profits over a longer time span.
As long as they can provide some plausible reasoning behind their decision, they’re safe.
So, the “I have to maximize shareholder value” argument is… on the surface true, but hides a ton of autonomy and decision making power that the executives have.
Not sure what the author is playing at here.
You can run HA as a Docker container, and I'm pretty sure Hue is a built-in integration.
All of the integrations are open source, so if someone flicking your lights on and off while you're baking cookies or something is a concern, others would have spotted it.
I thought HA was difficult since that's the vibe it gets. It was crazy easy to get going with. Took me a few hours to get all 30+ of my bulbs (different vendors too), locks, cameras, etc. baked in and working with HomeKit.
Ring took a little longer because Amazon, but I got it done.
Where do you shop for light bulbs? I don’t think I’ve seen an incandescent on a store shelf for the better part of a decade now.
The projected growth of revenue is not likely to materialize with higher interest rates. Investors will not invest in the stock as compared to the risk free 5% from US treasuries. So the stock will likely not grow any longer. More likely to flatline or collapse.
This makes the paper billionaire CEO a mere hundred millionaire, which is unacceptable.
Exactly. People who have to work for a living are not wasting time or money on the unregulated, abusive, intrusive, deceptive, under-delivering shit show that home automation has become. They just like, hit the light switch. People of normal means do not have time for all this sillyness.
Do you realize how insane this sounds for non-technical people who want to turn on a light in their livingroom?
You don't need the app if you're using Home Assistant, py-Kasa or something like that since the devices create their own WiFi network on first boot and you can program them from there.
I run 30+ Wi-Fi bulbs on an eero mesh. These devices are noisy but they are responsive (slower than zigbee). Only disadvantage is that they live or die by DHCP. If they can't renew their lease, it can take a while for them to come back online.
Analog light timer and fake TV for vacations are now the extent of my need for home automation.
My Samsung Galaxy S8+ had those sensors and I used them often for many years. The results were interesting and useful, and graphed with history in the Samsung app which shipped on the device.
Then one day they changed the terms so you had to create and sign into a Samsung account, and upload your health data, to continue using the sensors.
I didn't accept those terms so I wasn't able to use those health monitoring functions on my expensive device any more.
Interestingly, most articles I saw about the change portrayed it as a good thing, that you could now have consistent healrh sensor records across your devices and other good cloud features, even portraying it as an oddity that Samsung Health didn't require Samsung cloud integration all along and that they had finally caught up to the times. But it already had those features before the change! The only visible change was to to remove the choice to opt out of uploading your personal data.
I never got home assistant working, so got myself Hubitat hub (C7), which supports both Zigbee and Zwave radios and now exports them as HomeKit devices. So cheap sensors easy to pickup now are exposed to my HomeKit setup. That Hue motion sensor now directly connected to the the Hubitat and Hue bridge is somewhere in the box.
But at the time of setup, I was surprised that Hue Bridge didn't have an account. Didn't think about this until recent articles saying that account is now going to be mandatory.
Don’t tell me she still manually SSHes to each box to run the apps in the background using nohup?!
> starting April 8, 2024 support will stop for Nest Secure
> stop support for Dropcam starting April 8, 2024.
> we will officially end Works with Nest as of September 29, 2023.
https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Blog/An-update-for-ou...
The government is not better at this than the market.
I did buy a large supply of incandescents some 15years ago, now running out of them and starting to consider alternatives.
Every plugin that is in that store must have a custom_components folder.
Drop that into the bind-mounted volume holding HA's configuration.yaml and restart. HA will pick it up automatically, and you'll be able to install it in Integrations and Devices.
The home automation that requires one to sign in is next level, of course.
however, mine is much more caveman like. during the day, the sun is up. at night, it is not, so it is dark and cold. man made fire. fire is good. fire is warm. light from fire is orange. man evolve using warm light at night. industry brings us blue light at night. blue light strange. makes things look harsh, unpleasant. caveman pushes button on magic rock that makes light back to warm color. caveman happy again.
This is a lie.
Absolutely true. The more successful they are, the more likely they'll abuse their influence
All that being said, I find it a little odd that this article is somehow decrying HAOS as a worse alternative to a proprietary, anti-user black box developed by companies trying to squeeze more profit, just because they played fast-and-loose with some shell scripts at some point. (Aside: I just installed Homebrew on a new Mac today, and it's still just a curl | sh)
Most of the major consumer IoT vendors have had major security incidents (Wyze, Hue, Nest, Arlo, many others), and if nothing else, my little HAOS Rpi gets a little obscurity compared to the big names getting hit by script kiddies. Not to mention it's easy for me to keep it local-only and just join it to my Tailscale network.
But given all the allusions to HomeKit, I suspect the author has total faith in Apple to do it right (not a wholly misplaced assumption) and wants everything to just talk HomeKit.
Which we might actually get (in practice) as Matter makes inroads! Hell, I'd love for everything to talk HomeKit because HA can emulate a HomeKit Controller, and that means less cloud APIs. Win for everyone!
An example that comes to mind is how if you get banned from Steam, you typically still retain the ability to access your past purchases, you just lose multiplayer, purchasing new content etc.
Similarly, companies should not be able to unilaterally discard the responsibilities they take on when they sell people things that require continuous service to operate.
This should be especially relevant in cases like with Philips Hue, now that they've chosen to bear the burden of even previous Hue owners' smart homes, they should not be able to willy nilly shed that in a way that renders the system non-functional. Any bans they make should just leave the hardware usable in the way that it already was.
Hue is only a good product, because of the Lutron Aurora switches that I added on.
I'm convinced it's more practical over the long term to rip out all of my hue products and replace them with Lutron physical switches and normal lighting. Then your light fixtures don't have to adapt to hue, all your lighting controls work on a single platform, and Lutron is a great company that always has made great products.
I mean, ideally you buy a thing, connect it to your existing controller and never see anything with the company logo or their app.
(Not you and me, though, we have principles, right?)
Tim Cook got visibly angry at them, and told them that it was a core principle, and there was no way that Apple would compromise on it.
Say what you will about him, but he has personal reasons for valuing privacy, and he knows that compromising one core principle, in favor of profit, will inevitably lead to compromising customer information.
Looks like he made the right call. Apple is closing in on $3T.
(I have a Lifx Day and Dusk in the bedroom lamp, not a Hue.)
Zigbee/Z-Wave plugs have been rock solid reliable.
And yeah, it'll be another year or two before Matter/Threads really starts picking up steam. I'll just pick up a new dongle when there's 10 of 'em in that same timeframe.
(Disclaimer: my house is 800 sqft and I don't share any walls with neighbors. Zigbee is SUPPOSED to be mesh and Just Work assuming you have enough devices, but I can't speak from experience on that front.)
[1] >>37667266
I have it connected to Homekit via an Apple TV.
My main complaint is how big their outlets are.
I love Home Assistant, but I regularly find myself opening the Hue and Lutron apps anyway. And I’m someone who runs a NUC. I don’t mind administration, but I don’t want to HAVE to do that when I’ve already paid for a thing that supposedly does most of that.
Solution: Hue lights that I can control from Alexa. If I'm dozing off while reading on the couch before bed, I can turn the lights off without having to wake up enough to actually go reach a switch.
All my locks are normal locks that use normal keys (although they are actually called "SmartKey" locks, but that just refers to the clever way they can be rekeyed [1], which is entirely mechanical). I have considered getting one smart lock that has voice and app control because I live alone.
The idea there is that if I have a medical emergency that incapacitates me so that I cannot unlock a door but doesn't incapacitate me so much that I can't call 911, I can unlock a door so when the ambulance arrives they don't have to break in to get me.
[1] The way you rekey them is you put in your current key, turn 90 degrees clockwise, insert a tool they provide into a hole that is next to the keyway to press a release in the back of the hole, remove that tool, and you can then remove the current key (carefully leaving the cylinder rotated 90 degrees). At that point you can put a different key in, and then turn the cylinder 180 degrees counterclockwise. The lock is now keyed to that key instead of the key you started with.
I still have one of the original hubs and I definitely have more than 5 devices (light bulbs and outlets) working without problem.
> I bought one of the wireless physical switches which seemed like it would come in handy, but the battery died pretty quick
I have at least 3 physical switches in use and they’ve lasted at least 2 years so far.
The exact same thing you're complaining about :)
The alternative could be investors investing their capital responsibly, in companies with competent C-suites. That would be a nice trend to see. And I have some hope we might.
Actual reputable engineers leading engineering companies, doctors leading medical start-ups, career drivers leading car manufacturers, and so on. That is sustainable. I don’t get the infatuation investors have with the business class where even the most incompetent CEO with experience is often preferred to real competence of a specialist. That experience is available (and much cheaper!) through consulting contracts.
Investing in enshittification schemes is known in some circles as “shitting where you eat”, pardon the strong idiom. It harms the industry they’re trying to exploit for profit. It’s not only parasitic, but self-destructive.
When it's hot, I put a window fan in my bedroom in the evenings. I have it plugged into a smart switch. The google routine turns it off around 2am automatically. I sometimes adjust the time depending on season.
I haven't rewired the light switches in the house because it's not that important to me, but it would be nice to be able to say "hey google, turn off all the lights" when I go out instead of running around flipping switches.
I honestly don't care if someone in China knows if my lights are on.
I wonder if Tim Cook could get away with it if margins were slimmer, and Apple wasn't the most ludicrous cash making machine since Standard Oil.
Thats my worry, when Apple (and they very well may, who knows) takes a dive, eventually, at some point in the future, will they start selling off the farm?
USB is not the poster child for successful industry-led standards.
That was me, a few years ago. Now I love them (I use IKEA bulbs and outlets) and would hate to go back. Being about to control my lights from anywhere is just convenient. Now when I climb into bed and wonder if I’ve turned off the light in the basement (a frequent issue), I can just use my phone, not descend three flights and causing noise for others.
I like IKEA’s implementation because the cloud service for me is really Apple HomeKit, which I trust more than others.
Or if you are disabled, maybe PIR sensors like they had in the 90s.
But what we need is stronger consumer law. You should be able to buy something from a hardware store and trust it works and won't fuck with you.
Talk of running Docker in other comments is like saying "yeah you need to chemically test that cement you purchased, or go to the mine yourself, because some outlets are dodgy and the is the way it is"
We talked about it when I was a student, more than 20 years ago, and it was always he same story: attempts at vendor lock down, a lack of standards, potential customers unconvinced.
Sometimes, exceptionally, something not too bad comes out, but it never lasts. I ended up installing regular light bulbs with regular light switches connected to the breaker panel.
Anything that makes life a little easier is good for anyone with marginal capabilities, which is like millions of people and eventually everyone if they manage to live long enough.
I realize wifi might be the best of several bad options though.
the typical solution using wifi connected arduino servos seems like overkill.
That definitely exists and happens all the time
?? Driving around a lot doesn’t mean you know anything about manufacturing cars. You may have good inputs on what the interior design should be, but getting a team to build a million mile engine requires a different skill set.
https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/LI/consCheck.cfm?...
That will never happen, the influence of money is always corrupting. There is no free market solution, these are things that have to be enforced by law.
I have a simpler solution. Take all this home automation stuff and throw it out. Replace it with non tech equivalents. Observe your stress and care melt away. Spend your energy on endeavors that matter, like family, friends, and Nintendo Switch emulators.
I have had IKEA bulbs and outlets for over two years (adding to it over that time) and have great experiences and high reliability.
Power delivery is wonky, but it’s pretty rare, bordering on never for me anyway, to plug in a peripheral and not have it just work.
The smart plugs that I use for fans have a physical push button
https://community.hubitat.com/t/release-2-3-6-available/1247...
Every day billions of devices use USB for charging and data transfer and work just fine.. was there some government intervention that jumped in to make that work that I am unfamiliar with?
However the sausage was made.. and is still being made... may be imperfect and ugly but USB seems pretty darn successful!
Bluetooth too!
To those who do find value in WiFi-connected bulbs: what makes them worth it to you? I'm genuinely curious, because if Home Depot's lightbulb aisle is any indication I'm the odd one.
I had the opposite. I had significantly fewer migraines after switching (originally) to GE LEDs from incandescent. I forget which product line, but they were the daylight ones and expensive.
> Honestly, the whole thing sort of seems like focusing on the wrong things. I've never owned a car, am vegetarian, have never lived in more than 1000 sq ft as an adult, and walk/take public transit in NYC daily. Not sure the 2 incandescent lightbulbs I use in my living room are really causing climate change.
I can confidently say that the general public laws about light bulb choices are not written for people who match this description.
What about someone in China using your devices as part of their botnet to DDoS someone?
That said, when I set up Home Assistant, it was not without the need for some hobbyist motivation, but it wasn't too bad. That was over a year ago, and I have only gone into it since then to add a couple extra lights and set up a Christmas mode.
As far as the 'why', I can put the light switches where I want them, and have them do exactly what I want. I don't use voice or phone control, I have physical switches, but they're just exactly where it makes sense. An example is that in my living room I have a switch remote on the coffee table that lets me turn on or off all lights in view (kitchen, hallway, living room) and two different light scenes for reading or watching TV.
To me, it's actually simpler than flipping the 5 or 6 switches I would have to otherwise.
I do think the 1st party Google Home stuff is supported well enough, and I don't think any of Google's competitors in the smarthome space are really offering anything that's obviously more compelling. I mostly recommend people either go with big brands or something that can be flashed with tasmota, pick your poison.
Some of my smart bulbs support multiple colors. I can use the Daylight setting during the day, Sunset setting in the evening (for a warmer light) and Red for late night so I don't kill my night vision.
Also it's just fun to play with the colors.
As for the rest of my lights it's nice to be able to turn everything off and on all at once. Sometimes my kids leave lights on when they go to bed, I don't have to wander around turning them off (no, I'm not going to wake them up to do it). I can turn on my outside lights and scare off any skunks really quickly when one of my dogs needs to go out at night.
So on and so forth.
"security" indeed.
Is it essential? Absolutely not. But it's definitely more convenient and it's hard to go back once you get used to it.
My go-to example to explain the convenience aspect is dishwasher. I'm from a country where dishwasher isn't common. And I personally never find the appeal of it especially when I live alone (i.e. very few dishes). I wash my pot/skillet immediately after cooking, and wash my dishes in less than 1 minute immediately after eating. It never occurred to me that how you need a machine to do such simple task, nor that it's easier to load up the dishes in it than just wash it. And when I say it, most of my (Western) friends look me as an alien. So I understand this (IMO very small increase of convenience) is important to people. Same principle applies to the smart bulbs.
Do other people not struggle with apps the way I do?
also, caveman employer not like caveman. replace caveman with Flo since grug feng shui is so easy, even caveman can do it
I use a lamp by my bed for this, though I can see how that'd be harder in some layouts.
Look at how well DNS, or TCP/IP is maintained, or Wikimedia is run
We recommend counting with Mississippi (1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, etc.).
Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds.
1. Turn on for 8 seconds
2. Turn off for 2 seconds
3. Turn on for 8 seconds
4. Turn off for 2 seconds
5. Turn on for 8 seconds
6. Turn off for 2 seconds
7. Turn on for 8 seconds
8. Turn off for 2 seconds
9. Turn on for 8 seconds
10. Turn off for 2 seconds
If the factory reset above was unsuccessful, you might have an older version of the C by GE bulb. Please follow the instructions below to reset.
Bulb Reset Sequence – for firmware version 2.7 or earlier:
We recommend counting with Mississippi (1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, etc.).
Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds.
1. Turn on for 8 seconds
2. Turn off for 2 seconds
3. Turn on for 2 seconds
4. Power off for 2 seconds
5. Turn on for 2 seconds
6. Power off for 2 seconds
7. Turn on for 2 seconds
8. Power off for 2 seconds
9. Turn on for 8 seconds
10. Power off for 2 seconds
11. Turn on for 8 seconds
12. Power off for 2 secondsI have a bunch of smart bulbs and switches. When I watch a movie, I want complete darkness. My TV is located in a place where light from 7 different rooms/areas can interfere. I would have to make sure I manually turn all of them off. Now I simply tell Google Home to turn them off. This is an almost daily use case.
An even simpler one: Having certain lights come on at sunset and turn off around midnight (assuming I don't manually turn them off). When you live in the north, the sun sets early, and it sucks to come home to complete darkness. Ensuring a few key lights are on when you come home makes a significant difference.
Oh, and I like 2700K, and my wife likes 5000K. We can both have what we want. Marriage saved.
I don't have any bulbs, I have been replacing light switches instead since that seemed easier to me.
I like being able to remotely turn them off. Yes I turn off lights as I go but there are others in the household and they don't necessarily listen to my preferences on that lol.
Plenty of companies do this. I'd wager most of the world economy consists of steady-state Mittelstand-esque firms that put out a good product with pride.
The problem is Silicon Valley's growth mindset was emulated broadly at a time when business history familiarity fell. (In part due to lower-level folks in Silicon Valley having a knee-jerk reaction to MBAs. In part due to said MBA programs deciding studying cases from a hundred years ago wasn't cutting edge.)
Growth is good. But trying to whip a business–that on its own will grow 2 or 3% a year and, with effort, 5 or 6%–to do 10 or 20% top-line YoY ruins it. The same way taking a growth business that could grow at 5 or 6% with effort, and instead committing to cutting its costs at 5% a year (the way one would do with a business that is in structural decline at a rate of 3 to 4% p.a.), is terrible strategy.
This is garbage management. It's bad for customers. It's bad for shareholders. It's bad for the societies whose technical knowledge is being eroded. It's good for a set of managers whose behavior veers between stupid and corrupt. I don't know the solution. But it's not as radical as overhauling corporate America in its entirety.
Apple’s Lightning has some of the worst connectors ever. I have about 5 USB-C cables and about 10 Lightning cables in my home. Each Lightning cable cost me more than 2x rhe most expensive USB-C cable bought from a convenience store and yet 4/5 of the Lightning cables have their wiring inside exposed while the USB-C ones could pass off as new.
The only issue I’ve ever had with a device on the USB-C side is 1 cable that is incapable of charging my wife’s macbook.
Guess how many of my Apple made Lightning cables are capable of charging my wife’s MacBook.
Under a certain angle, it's a win-win proposition!
I use a connected smart bulb, that has color changing. During bed time, I use it for reading books, and before sleeping, change it to a night light. I use it as a soft light when watching movies on my laptop. This is a convenience for me.
I also use smart lights to automatically turn on and off inside my home, and outside, in the portico.
I use automated socket outlets to turn on / off the water heater in my bath, on a schedule.
A lot of advantages in these things is in the option to schedule them, or make them act on the input of a sensor (movement, light, etc)
Our Miku's use a Novelda (fka Xethru) UWB sensor SoC, specifically designed for human presence monitoring and, drumroll, breathing and heartbeat. Specifically they use an X4: https://novelda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/x4_datasheet_...
I likely won't have time, what with the kids and all, but I'm going to give it the old college try to tear into this thing and craft some firmware so we can actually keep things from being a paperweight. It blows my mind this isn't just table stakes with IoT crap these days, but here we are.
We've got some colored lighting in the form of plain old LED strips with wired controllers, we've had a couple old fashioned single color bulbs at times, and there are other options like this: https://www.amazon.com/GE-Lighting-93100205-Replacement-Spec...
I'd really like to see something like openrgb (openrgb.org) for light bulbs though.
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.
In general it’s getting harder and harder to avoid devices where this is possible. The obvious answer is regulation.
I like that I can control things without needing to get up again if required (as mobility is quite difficult for me) but I also make use of motion sensors/schedules and stuff to ensure as much as possible that the areas i'm in are lit without me having to mess around with switches and stuff which can often be difficult with a cane in one hand, if I want to do literally anything else with the other.
It may well be a first world problem for some, but for me, it is simply a problem full stop and some basic home automation stuff has been a big help.
Also, there are tons of cheap colored lightbulbs controlled directly by an infrared remote. Example: https://www.amazon.com/Light-Color-Changing-2700K-White/dp/B...
I find the moralizing of these actions quite frustrating because they seem to indicate people don’t actually understand why things work the way do.
The C-suite aren’t corrupt. They have a job to do and they’re doing their job. Their job is to maximize returns on the investors’ investments. That’s it. It’s absolutely moral for them to do that job.
One might complain that their actions focus too much on the short term rather than the long term, and that would be a legitimate complaint. But only if it means they’re losing money in the long term. Enshittification usually makes money both in the short and long terms.
Once we recognize that people aren’t being “corrupt” but actually doing the job they’re being paid to do by maximizing their profits, one can focus on how to provide incentives to maximize profits without making things worse. And profit maximization inevitably leads to making things worse because it requires minimizing what you’re giving the customer and maximizing what you’re getting from them.
The free market check on this is competition. But competition only works if it’s a genuinely competitive market, and there are clear signals to the customer who is educated in understanding and valuing those signals, regarding the quality of products.
This used to be much easier earlier where products were simpler, but it’s much harder now. The vast majority of the market will have no ability to evaluate the risk of needing an online account to switch on your light bulb. And so a company which provides the no login option will be less competitive because it won’t be able to make money off your data and it will have to support an additional workflow.
In the absence of customer knowledge and visibility we only really have standards.
Ideally you start with standards provided by industry trade bodies. However, those are ripe for corruption and as a result there’s hardly any such successful standards.
Which leads you to the final option which is govt standards that are either highly encouraged by the threat of possibly instituting firmer regulations or just plain and simple regulated with the threat of fines and jail.
(Opinion) the only common denominator remaining is the underlying economic system.
Cloud servers cost money to run. Security updates cost money. Firmware updates cost money. Mobile apps have ongoing costs, you can't just release an app into the stores and have it keep working, Google and Apple keep demanding updates.
One time fees on low margin consumer electronics is not a sustainable model.
My hue bulbs pair so aggressively to my zigbee hub that I have to block pairing on it to get new ones on the hue hub!
They may already be paired and you just never realized.
Because imo... that is the answer. We have seen so many stupid closed ecosystems of home automation stuff come and go, I dunno why you'd mess with anything else at this point. In fact I just got another email reminder that Google is turning off the old Works with Nest stack. Remember Nest? Yeah...
I don’t get the mood lighting. And really, if I lived alone I would just keep the shades up all the time and forgo the electric shades as well (but given my wife they are indispensable).
I want to understand this reference but I just don't. Can someone help me out here?
Smart thermostats are nice when you want to adjust things from all over the house or keep a schedule relatively easily. I also like knowing if my basement sump pump isn't keeping up with rain water and flooding things.
In general, it's nice to be able to monitor things and control them across the house, and the Lutron setup has been pretty painless.
This guy didn't care about his location data going to google either: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...
He got screwed over big time. Thousands of dollars, just to avoid a jail cell.
There are uses of personal data that can be harmless, but once that data is in the hands of someone else you don't have any say in how it is used (harmless or otherwise) and even if the people using your data today aren't doing anything abusive with it, that data will live forever and you never know who will end up with it in the future or what they will do with it.
If the alternative is a subscription (assuming that actually means your data is not handed over to someone else) then at least you'll know what the cost of a product/service is, and you'll only pay for it while you're subscribed.
If you pay with your data, once it's out of your hands it can be used against you again and again at any time so you never get to stop "paying" and can never know what it will ultimately cost you.
As another example of getting screwed over, I've got a family member who bought a bluray of some movie in a shop, and then when she got home to play it found that her player refused because of DRM. The player wasn't connected to the internet and it needed to connect to a remote server in order to get permission to play her legally purchased media on her legally purchased player. She didn't understand what was happening and called me. The player didn't have wifi. The company sold a special USB wifi adapter at an insane price, otherwise she'd either have to move her furniture to take the player upstairs next to her modem and connect it physically, or run a very very long cable across her entire house.
The next time she needed a bluray player, she avoided the old brand, but didn't even check to see if it had wifi capability before buying (she got lucky and it did).
I totally get how that's off-putting, but the real recommended way to run home assistant is to install Home Assistant OS on dedicated hardware. Which also can be off-putting.
Either way, it's my favourite software that I regularly interact with (unless you count Linux).
I have lived in America my entire life, a relatively comfortable life, and this sentence makes me feel extremely alienated from first world culture.
I think the issue is more the attitude towards security and system stability that is implied by such installation methods, which is apaprently endemic to the entire "JS ecosystem". That attitude being "who cares about security or stability?"
When It's my system and I don't want to mess with it, just set stuff up and have it run trouble free and do the things I want (and only I want), then I do care about such things and agree that JS has no place other than sacrificial toy boxes that get insulated from "real" computing like they was a modem with its phone number posted at the payphones by the 2600 meetup.
* Turn the light red in my laundry room when a load is done
* Turn all my lights off when I set my alarm at night
* Slowly turn light on before my alarm goes off in the morning
* Turn off lights when I leave the house, then turn on the one by my front door if I get home after dark
None of these are life changing, but they're all marginally useful. And for me, half the fun is the sense of accomplishment getting these automations to work
If I don't trust the website to do curl | sudo bash then why do I trust the software that I would eventually install?
Even the old argument of "middleware devices modified the script en-route" is mostly removed by HTTPS everywhere.
And there are people like you who actually look at the script (and the compiled code, too!) to find things, because if they do find something in a script as big as HomeAssitant, they'll be famous.
I am genuinely upset, as up until now, their lighting products have been excellent, easily better quality over alternatives in terms of physical build and capabilities. I have been a staunch Hue supporter since I first bought one of their products.
Some of the better functionality, such as the ease-in and ease-out instead of a hard on/off as well as the gradual dimming —> off for motion-sensor controlled lamps are really hard, if not impossible, to manage with the various 3rd party tools. Node-red can do a mostly-decent job, but that requires a level of work that few people are willing to invest, for results that are still not that great.
It is a real pity, but i’ll be looking for alternatives now.
that said, useful in this case means saving a bit of money by adjusting its settings. a manual (non cloud) thermostat would work too.
I only have them for that and I love to adjust the mood via lighting. I don't care about any further automation. I also don't care much if it was Philips or someone else that gave me light bulbs.
Read as much into that statement as you want.
I do wish they were brighter.
This is effectively enshittification.
With Apple TV + a home pod I also get a fair bit of TV control with my voice which is nice.
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.
They provide a pretty locked down image that also loads a ton of plugins in dockers. It's nice and well designed. And you don't have to expose it to the internet if you don't have to.
The installation described is legacy and only supported for historical purposes.
I agree that Hue has totally gone down the toilet but the criticism of Home Assistant isn't justified. And if you go for the Ikea one as recommended in the article, it's just going to be a matter of time until their shareholders will want to see those sweet recurring bucks too. You need a truly open ecosystem to avoid that from happening.
Sonos is the eiptome of enshittification. Pretty good hardware screwed over by bad software, growth marketing, and middle-finger to UX.
I have half-a-dozen devices at my home--almost 10 years old. I do not use the app, I do not do updates.
My hack: Use them with Echo dot. Apparently the backdoor Sonos team has overlooked so far.
The "Supervised" installation (i.e. installing Home Assistant on top of an existing Linux install) is doable, but not preferred.
It's similar to one of those George Carlin bits where putting a curse word in the middle of an ordinary word changes the power of the word. incredible -> infuckingcredible absolutely -> absofuckinglutely
I just don't know what enification means.
You don't give it root on your desktop linux system you do all your sensitive stuff on of course. That makes zero sense. Home assistant really runs great even on a cheap raspberry pi if you don't have a VM- or dockerserver.
- schedule
- motion sensing
- voice
- routines / iftt (if it's a cloudy day, and zoom is open, then set brightness to x, maybe even open the shades)
What equipment did you use for your lock? Is it an off-the-shelf or roll-your-own setup? I'd like something like this but so far all the consumer-oriented smart locks give me very little confidence.
They're not. Longevity, small profit margins, ease of entry, and bedding-down with electric franchises, all rolled into lobbying that changed politician's minds.
What happens when the electric companies here in the US see reduction in use? Profits lower, but that's okay, because they'll just petition the boards that run those energy monopolies, and our rates go up.
And they take compatibility seriously. I’m a refugee from home assistant from 5 years ago, when each major update would break part of my automations because they deprecated some API. No such thing with Hubitat.
It probably is important to note that like many modern tech systems, they aren't "hands free" automation. Patches come out, things desync from the network, etc.
I use: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N106YN7 then connect the Leviton dimmer to Google Assistant for voice routines crossing different app gardens.
I don't use colored lights, but you could use smart bulbs or fixed colored lights controlled via smart plugs depending on your use case. Or just get something with built in multi color, like LED strips.
There are some LED strips that maintain programming thru powering off, just like how oil radiators with physical switches maintain settings thru powering off. These devices work great with smart plugs, and in the case of an oil radiator can be hooked up to a smart thermostat for a cheap man's smart home, fully portable for moving or apartment swapping.
I can do a longer write up if you're curious.
Couldn’t be happier and my nearly decade old hue bulbs will continue to work
Tapping that option should bring up a dialogue that lets you migrate to a different channel with a warning about how some devices may not automatically migrate and will need to be removed and re-added if so.
Citation needed
I'm not sure why I'm getting downvotes here... is there some cult of people who love installing apps with root privileges?
1. Buy something dumb, non-smart, non-cloud
2. Build it myself
3. Buy something that can be hacked and used with my own infrastructure
The problem isn't even their infrastructure, it is that they decide when they want to change it. Even if it was all good faith changes, that could be a reliability issue and force me to dedicate time to the issue on their whim. I don't like that. If I run such things myself I can decide myself when to update and how much time I want to invest when (provided the system is decoupled from the public internet).
And this point isn't even about any single company trading the good will of their customers bit by bit — it is just about me not having to jump when their service changes or ends for whatever reason (and there are many).
They are available for residential installs too, but for a new build you are talking about paying the price of a car (and not a Dacia) on top of what you'd pay for a standard lighting installation, so it's only a thing in luxury homes. For that you end up with truly automatic lighting (controlling lights with your phone is not home automation), variable colour temperature and much higher quality lighting.
But the average consumer doesn't care. A lot of the time they can't even replace a bulb in a set with the same colour temperature.
also, your faith in "VM" insulation appaears greater than mine. if i dont trust a VM i dont trust the host running the VM.
others have different opinions and that's ok. my systems run to my standards, however quirky they may be. im stating opinion here, not attempting to inscribe Sysadmin Commandments. them's written on the wall of the bathroom stall.
edit: just for reference, the last cpu i could say i trusted was before speculative execution was a feature. since then its more about risk mitigation. i'm not paranoid, there's people worse than me, and they're nuts. I'm just cautious and lazy.
It's hardly a bulletproof solution but it's better than the old solution of, "Oh shit, I think I left X running… welp, time to waste 40 minutes driving back and forth."
Eww, that's gross, especially for all the migrating birds and wildlife, just so you can have a terrible light on outside when you don't need it at all.
Basically you're harming wildlife https://birdcast.info/
And you're worsening the environment with needless and completely unutilized light pollution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution
Wow.
New joke: How many engineers does it take to enable a light bulb to turn on?
I see we've made overall progress.. 120 years should do that.
It's gotten to the point to where when I visit someone and they have a warm-colored light I compliment them on the fact. It's so rare.
However... in some rooms (office and board game room), I do like having the option for cool white during the day, and warm white at night. So I like having Hues there.
So, while Casetas are good for automating a single color, you still need bulb-level automation for anything involving multiple colors.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004718007133.html
One of many products speaking both protocols for just 10/20$
Did OP even read what they wrote? OP is collapsing into stupidity along with the IoT market.
No, don't buy Ikea smart lights: just buy a mechanical light switch from the 1920's and drop the whole idea of smart automation of every goddamn thing.
The second best use I could think of was automatically controlling outdoor lights in the evening, given that my front lights are on a different floor than my main living area. But I never really bothered with that.
I never said it’s Silicon Valley’s fault. It’s the fault of managers emulating Silicon Valley in businesses that lack the underlying growth drivers.
> only common denominator remaining is the underlying economic system
If you ignore the corpus of counterfactuals I mentioned, sure. Blaming the entire economic system is a great way to stop marginal reforms. Perfect is the enemy of the good. (And in this case, it’s not perfection—it’s a utopia borne out of misreading the current economy as well as its history.)
I think a term that doesn't slide off the tongue actually captures some of the feeling of what enshitification is.
Don’t like it don’t buy it isn’t a good attitude to have anymore, otherwise we as consumers will lose more and more rights to privacy infringing companies with infinite resources and market reach.
Companies are always going to want more and enshittification is pretty much inevitable.
The reason Ikea isn't in such a hurry because their Tradfri range is a very minor part of their business whereas for Signify (not Philips! They sold it years ago) Hue is their bread and butter product.
Yes but it's nice to have extra functionality.
I use the wireless Hue dimmer switches, the batteries last a long time. I have one on my coffee table... it's nice to dim lights for multiple lamps from the couch, or adjust the colour temperature. My wall switches have no dimming dial, nor do my lamps. I can't go back to non-dimmable lamps.
Real virtualization is a bit more airtight, though. There have been some escape exploits but they all abused drivers that you wouldn't use heedless (shared folders, VGA, PCIe passthrough), not the virtualization layer. But that's a distinction without a different, really, so good on you for being careful!
It’s not hard if you know a little programming and electronics.
I assume that any smart devices that I can buy are just money machines, made to spy on me, or both.
You have my interest: what marginal reforms would prevent a multinational conglomerate from enshittifying lightbulbs? Would you change the management structure? The ownership structure? You’d think an huge institution with the momentum Philips has would be able to resist the kind of “growth hacking” this article is complaining about, but that’s empirically not the case. If you were god for a day how would you restructure Philips Hue? (I’m digging for a heartfelt rant because I really don’t have a good answer here.)
Not only when, but the changes they make are almost universally a rewriting of the assumptions at time of purchase, where you lose.
And surely an app can keep working with minimal updates, I don't see that as a huge expense for Hue.
If you don't need 'em or like the idea, don't spend $75 per switch. I got into smart lights because my apartment was apparently wired by a madman; the switch for my desk lights are right outside the bathroom. (Different circuit though!) I was very tired of walking that far to turn them on and off. I then replaced every other switch the week after, and have no regrets whatsoever, except maybe not having white tint adjustment. (I just have regular old LED bulbs. The switches are smart, not the bulbs.)
Once I was fully invested, I got a wall mount remote control that fits into a dual-gang faceplate (but only needs a single gang box), so I can control all of my lights when arriving or leaving. Very convenient.
Like others, I agree that automations are also nice. I have two fixtures outside that are unswitched. They turn on at sunset and off at sunrise now. No wasted electricity trying to overpower the sun. (Those are smart bulbs, of course.)
This isn't some binary you downloaded from a Russian forum. VM isolation is more than enough.
I know I'm part of a dwindling customer base that still uses separate A/V gear and not just built-in streaming apps and a soundbar, but it seems like there would have still been a market for competent universal remotes that you could customize.
I hated how almost every generation of their remotes got harder to use and program compared to pre-Logitech Harmony. The Touch remotes were practically unusable because you had frequently used buttons in poor locations and a touch screen that you had to scroll through to find the correct soft touch button for that wasn't especially responsive, the old models with all hard buttons were vastly more usable.
So far Genio is cheaper and works at least as well as the rest.
I now have two hue hubs, and a zigbee 3.0 controller with over 120 devices.
Easily run 8m of the best (high density, super bright which is actually too bright) RGB CCT rope light from a single zigbee controller. Perhaps its the controller and power supply you are using?
They do another one on a different chipset too; the EZSP one is the newer hotness, and so far unlike the older model, there's no firmware update to flash.
https://sonoff.tech/product/gateway-and-sensors/sonoff-zigbe...
Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account - >>37594377 - Sept 2023 (314 comments)
I performed this ritual last weekend, and followed up by filing a bug report about what a shitshow the whole thing was from the feedback option in the app. I got a very nice message back from Samsung telling me my message had come to the wrong place and that I should do something different if I wanted to give feedback about the app. FFS.
Yes there are security concerns with any home automation system, but if you run HA locally and only access it via a VPN like Tailscale you're probably safer than if you used any of the big name cloud first smart home providers. Even if you access it over the Nabu Casa site, because everything is ostensibly Local first your attack surface is always going to be quite minimal.
Very few grow lights that have ever hit my hands came close to their advertised power rating. One company sold me a 50w, 135w, and 300w light set. the 50w was 45 at the wall, 135 was 75, 300 was 150.
And that's because their thermal designs are utter garbage. They can't run at full power. Most UFO lights are literally bolted to a plate, no fins of any sort, and a fan set blows down on it to cool the LEDs. If you get a rectangular panel, odds are you might get one undersized heat sink that doesn't cover the entire LED array (just the array, not the whole panel)
Most efficiency specs are garbage, too, measured with non-calibrated COTS light meters. I can toss most lights in my integrated sphere and I'll see way different from what is claimed.
Very few companies can actually be trusted. I have yet to find one with 100% honesty.
I understand there are people who like to fiddle with this stuff but mostly I don’t get the attraction.
It seems like they now support HomeKit scenes for waking up and going to bed, but full use of scene automations (like getting lights to fade in) requires setting up a Home Hub via something like an Apple TV or HomePod.
As user cricalix points out, there's also a version with an EFR32MG21, I'm not sure how they compare nowadays, see discussion on GitHub: https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/discussions/14261
“Could get away with it” in terms of “would he be liable for a lawsuit for failing to meet the duty to shareholders”, probably not as long as he could article a reasonably justifiable reason his actions were in the shareholder interests, that isn’t directly contradicted by evidence.
“Could he get away with it” in terms of “would shareholders fire him?” maybe not. Depends on the shareholders, I guess.
But screw it. On the rare occasion I watch something that's not on my Shield (whose remote can control my receiver's volume with CEC), I just adjust the volume manually.
But let's not even get started on the pathetic state of the A/V receiver market, where you can't even get a receiver with A/B/C sets of speakers... despite advertising three zones.
There is very little loyalty to the customer from the manufacturers, and so customers are now weary and loosing their loyalty for brands in the way consumers traditionally did.
Verschlimmbesserung could be translated as imworsement maybe?
I am using Adaptive Lighting with Home Assistant & Zigbee2MQTT + Hue bulbs.
My home has never felt this "smart" before. Every time my lights turns on I find the color and brightness to be perfect.
But aside from that, do you have issues with Face ID in the dark? For me it works in pitch darkness. It sends out some laser light when scanning your face and hopefully not frying your eyes.
It turns out that they are hard to find and very expensive ($30) for what they are. Even if you can find them it's hard to tell if its an original unit or some super cheap knockoff that might burn your house down. :(
Some of these districts _do_ have inspectors anyways, and they will issue permits, but the county itself does not require you to do this. As I said though, you will certainly be unable to insure anything you've built without a permit in these places. Aside from that, you can build what you want however you want.
I like to dim and make the color warm at night too. But every already said that hundred times.
But this is absolutely not "consumer" by any means. If my grandmother can't do it, you failed the simplicity test. This is exactly why we end up with cloud services for everything. Because real-world integration with the entire fleet of possibilities for consumer interaction is by definition an open-ended problem that can never be finished.
This is a trivial wiring change, and a run-on timer from a local hardware or electrical store from a reputable brand is $25.
I understand small mains wiring jobs like this probably beyond some peoples ability or desire, but the benifits are:
One off up front cost
Probably never fail
No possibility of the product vendor having any impact on the products ever, other than the possibility of a product recall due to safety.
It's just a different type of consumer luxury or hobby, unnecessary but also fun and rewarding.
I do hardware modifications and small electrical upgrades / changes myself, it's cheaper and I find it enjoyable and rewarding. Most recently I fit a dimmer to a high velocity ducted workshop fan, so now it has full variable speed control, as it's quite powerful and all the CFM isn't always required or desirable.
In the later evening in our house we switch to all lamp-only lighting, as I find over head lights offensive in at least some time period immediately prior to going to bed.
(although to be fair I would ditch everything written in JavaScript if there were suitable replacements - alas, there aren’t)
Other than that, I’ve been very careful to only pick ZigBee devices that would work with an OSS coordinator and that would either bridge automatically to HomeKit or that I could translate events for via Node-RED (over the years Node-RED has become more of a dashboard than a translator, which is great).
yes they are zigbee, yes they work better with the Hue Hub (e.g. colour transitions). Phillips is significantly reducing the usability and value of their own products with this shitty decision.
Second is more common, but also makes me happy every time: I put a contact sensor on the interior door to the attached garage that when opened quickly turns on the light to the garage, and turns it off a few minutes after that door next closes. It sure beats walking into a dark garage to fumble for a switch.
Source? Phillips/Signify seems to have been very happy to sell expensive but great light bulbs for many years. Why do you think that's not profitable?
er...why are you whinging and being mean about them? it is you who has made their home annoying. you should fix it or get rid of all the things that are making their lives annoying.
It might not be happening at a large scale, but we are moving in that direction in recent years.
Fully local solution with no 3rd party clouds, EULAs, proprietary hubs or propruetary apps or restrictions. Compatible with almost any zigbee device. A subset of tested and well-known devices is listed at their website https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/.
Recommending to everyone. It can be set up as 3 docker containers (zigbee2mqtt, mosquitto, home assistant), for example in docker compose. Or there are also ready-made images of Home Assistant with Supervisor GUI management for people not wanting to fiddle with that manually.
Node-Red is another great addon to the setup if you want to configure automations graphically by joining nodes together. Far more powerful than any proprietary solutions.
It's a little like buying some networking device that suppports only proprietary protocols and then complain it doesn't support TCP/IP.
My go to configuration is IKEA Trådfri + Home Assistant.
First with IKEA when they changed the lights on-power-up behavior on upgrade. This resulted in a hub becoming a 25 euro cc2531 stick on raspberry pi + Zigbee2mqtt and HomeBridge for integration with HomeKit.
And the past February Apple decided my Apple TV 3 was not good enough for being a home hub, and botched the entire home in the process, while I was away.
So now the whole HomeKit nonsense is out and instead there is a lightweight Rust app with a simple text file config doing both the orchestration and providing the light html UI.
https://github.com/ayourtch/homegui - in case anybody finds it useful.
As a bonus the users in the household praise the new system being much more responsive..
I am missing “turn all the lights off when last person leaves”, and full editing the colors via GUI, but not enough to bother to implement it :-)
As for "curl | sudo sh", yeah it looks scary, but it is not worse than downloading a .deb and then doing "sudo dpkg -i your.deb", or installing any downloaded binary on your machine for that matter. You may say something about signatures, but often, the public key you have to trust is on the same website you downloaded the .deb. In all these cases, TLS is the only thing protecting you. Going through a file you don't audit doesn't change anything, and in practice, almost no one does the audit, and few linux boxes have AV scanners.
Don't trust it? Run it a VM, container, or dedicated hardware, this is actually what they are suggesting.
Like the places that might do it can't afford it.
The mention of JavaScript is just the usual programming language elitism. JavaScript started as a language for web programming (technically it was first used for server-side scripting before being implemented in browsers) so it's "not a real programming language" and therefore "not used by real programmers" so software using it is bad.
Of course there are alternatives to Home Assistant, like OpenHAB, which is written in Java and comes with all the UX typically associated with Java projects. It's not necessarily worse but most people would probably prefer HA's auto-discovery over OpenHAB's approach of granularly defining every single property
I'd prefer completely open, but I haven't found anything as well made and inexpensive that's also open.
Or maybe the downvotes are because everything I was saying was conjecture / hypothetical anyway, and you're now asking a more specific question to the general question being answered.
I thought the question was "why do apps that don't need sudo request sudo?" And my answer was "perhaps because it's easier to fix permissions problems by getting permission for everything than it is to get them by understanding why your app is getting blocked by them in the first place." Whether it's inbound or outbound or taking video surreptitiously doesn't really answer the question of "why, if the app doesn't actually need it?"
At any rate, I don't actually know why because I don't ask for permissions that I don't need. I also don't know why you're getting downvotes as I didn't downvote you: this answer, like my previous one, is speculative, as is somewhat inevitable when trying to answer "why" questions that relate to the motivations of others.
And there’s nothing wrong with using port 80 security wise. Binding a port doesn’t mean you’re opening it on the firewall for the world to see. Plus if you’re opening some port on the firewall, what port you use doesn’t matter - it’ll be scanned by an automated scanner shortly regardless of port.
1) You will need to sign in with your Hue account even when using the app locally and
2) This will store (a copy of) all metadata in their cloud to enable you to use remote access.
Arguably this is moot if you're already using remote access but it means the Hue app and bridge will be unusuable for anyone who chose Hue because it does not store your data in the cloud. I also believe this is an attempt at consolidation to make it easier for them to support cloud-storage cameras as part of the same platform. It's still understandable why some users might object to this, especially if they have no interest in using any of the cloud features or new devices that will require it. Amazon Echo requires local access too but that doesn't mean you can opt out of Amazon storing your (meta)data in the cloud if you want to use your Echo to control Zigbee devices.
They won't announce it today, and any bad press they get this week will be long forgotten, but someday they'll come back around with some bright executive saying "You know, we could extract more value out of these lightbulb users, they've invested hundreds of dollars in our ecosystem, what're they going to do throw them all out instead of paying us $5/month?"
"Alexa turn off all lights"
Step 0A- Realize that most mature industries are incestuous. They share the same consultants, they swap employees, they compete for the same market with the same group-think mindset, etc. They all have the same incentives and paradigm for success and thus often act in murmuration'ing way. That is, they're too big and too risk-adverse to consider innovation so they feign being competitive and milk the market the best they can.
Step 0B - Realize that for the most part the gov - via Cronie Capitalism - will not protect consumers, and will put the thumb on the scale for the largest players. Your rights and privacy - in the context of Surveillance Capitalism (which the gov benefits from) - are more myth than they are real.
Step 0C - Realize that all the steps follow are rarely successful. Sure, you can try but the odds are not in your favor. You end up paying the subscription and/or having your usage data sold in some black box cyber back room.
Maybe more interestingly: I do think that the motivations of others are totally calculable. Society is an autocomplete. One big honkin LLM replete with all the hallucinations. Pretending to be a member of this society is to pretend that I wish to better understand why I'd be downvoted for a thought - to pretend that it's just me, a neuron, looking for back propagation. Yay for the neuron.
Nevermind, it's not important anyway. (Life).
1. browsers don't even attempt encryption,
2. the port could be open to the world, and
3. lots of people are already running more meaningful shit on port 80.
Seriously, you want to sell me a lightbulb that needs root access and then opens an unencrypted port and then makes outbound calls...? Are you nuts? That's beyond lazy design. It's almost like an intentional insult.
[edit] If you set up a home service on your local network, surely you can also bookmark the obscure port number next to the 128/ address in front of it. The only purpose served by turning your light bulbs into a beacon from hell on port 80 would be letting strangers totally penetrate your house. What happens if you start up a webserver? Do the lights go off?
What kind of schmuck does this to his house??
so thanks for keeping it around :)
HA is one guy's pet project to goof around with the latest and greatest technologies.
It’s creepy af
Huh? I have the Homeassiant app on my phone and I proxy the web interface to a VPC so it's accessible to me everywhere.
This was never intended to be a solution for your grandpa. This is a solution for nerds who want to build a future proof setup with consumer equipment (Phillips smart bulbs vs. commercial lighting like https://www.crestronlighting.com/)
I’d remove sovereignty over the system from Philips. Consider mp3 or Arm. A balance of power. There the balance is between suppliers.
But let’s take the toughest case: you want to launch a system that users can trust long term, but you don’t have peer-level partners. (You also have executive authority at Philips.) First: divide standards writing from your corporate interests. You still want significant influence over the standard. But you want to remove the ability to make further changes unilaterally from your reports and successors. Universities are a natural partner in this; perhaps, also, a consumer-advocacy group. Second: give users clearly-defined and easily-marketed legal rights in respect of their devices.
The first added a public component to a limited section of your architecture. You’re not giving up profit, just control. (And future control, at that.) The second does threaten profits, but only in the long term; you’re leaning into management’s short-term profit incentives in both cases. Finally, to guard against the legal rights being curtailed by a future executive, build in a poison pill: if they’re reduced within certain parameters, certain IP becomes freely licenseable for repairs, et cetera. (I’d also add in engineering representation at the subsidiary’s Board level, perhaps with a separate ESOP package or whatever, but that’s likely more trouble than it’s worth.)
The above recapitulates the history of enlightened despots. Using absolute power to limit successors while giving balancing voices at the table. In Philips case, there was no ecosystem. No third-party developers of note. Users in insufficient numbers and organisation to pressure management. Betting on humans being good for goodness’ sake is a terrible philosophy, irrespective of how they’re organised.
And dare I say, had they done the above and created an ecosystem where they were a major—but not the dominant—player, there is a good chance I’d have their product in my house right now. By choosing a non-aligned model, Philips lost long-term value, both by sacrificing revenue and assuming the entire network’s development cost.
And then suddenly that last company finds itself successful and needs a plan to actually stay in business, so they update their EULA and start pushing a subscription service.
Or, more commonly, they just go out of business.
Cost to build, around $7. Retail price, over $30. Profit for the company, around $3.
Distributors and retailers took the remaining.
Selling stuff in physical stores is a nasty business. I remember these numbers whenever I see people complain about app stores taking a 30% cut.
Finally I got smart and changed my wifi password so the thermostat couldn't talk to the Internet any more, at which point I had a very elegant, unconnected thermostat that eventually became unreliable because it couldn't draw enough current from my two-wire system to keep itself reliably charged up. I tossed it in the recycle bin and bought a $25 dumb thermostat to replace it and I couldn't be happier.
Some general notes to the idiots in C-suites at every company making home automation devices:
1. I don't work for you.
2. You have competitors.
3. You do not get to make demands on my time to re-learn your UI, download software updates, advertise things to me, or sign new EULAs whenever you so desire. I have a life and it doesn't revolve around your company.
4. You do not get to spy on me with your device and sell information about my personal habits.
5. You do not get to use your cloud connectivity to force me into a recurring payment plan just to continue to use your device.
6. If you disagree with any of the above, I would ask that you carefully reread (1) and (2). Misbehavior on your part will result in your product being thrown in the trash, no further purchases from me, and my social network being immediately warned to avoid your company like the plague.
The so-called "forced" update on the Bridge is to upgrade older Bridges that are as old as 2011 or 2015. The upgrade allows this ancient hardware to leverage features of the newer generations of bulbs.
So it's a compatibility update for old hardware. So that you can buy any generation of bulb and use it with any Bridge. If anything, it shows commitment to longevity, customer convenience and the prevention of waste.
But if you're not into that, the update is triggered by means of the official Hue app, which is the sole reliable touch point by which the company can enforce/communicate anything because they have no other way of reaching you. Use any of the 100+ other apps and they will not force you to update the Bridge. And if even that isn't solid enough for you, disconnect the Bridge from the internet. Everything you own works and keeps working.
As for the upcoming update triggering you to create an account: this is because too many people have shitty network setups, connect their Bridge to the internet and then complain that their lights are hacked. Whilst this account is created online, that interaction is one-time only. What it does is to create a username and cryptographic key on the Bridge after which that authentication is fully local. Which is the exact same mechanism in use by 3rd party Hue apps for over a decade now. Many people already are using an account because this is needed for some advanced use cases like syncing with Spotify or with your TV. Not to mention that it prevents "funny" house guests from messing with your lights.
The idea that your hardware is unsafe and might be rendered useless in the future is completely unwarranted and pure misinformation. Any Bridge, any bulb, no matter how old, will keep working until the hardware itself fails. This system is a shining example of longevity.
12 years of full compatibility, an open API, hundreds of 3rd party apps, ground level Zigbee compatibility, meaningful security updates, if this is a "collapse", what would you call other systems?
And no, I do not work for Philips or Signify. But I did build software on top of their system.
What is especially interesting is how a poorly researched article has an entire community nodding along. Immediate consensus on something blatantly false.
That said if you're up for fiddling, something like https://www.amazon.ca/Waveshare-VisionFive2-Processor-Integr... will provide much more oopmh (and it's RISC-V) with 4GB ram and m2 slot, at $100 CAD, with mainline kernel support (so any USB devices will just work). Grab a zigbee USB + SBC like that, and you'd be able to run much more on your hub that just a gateway for your devices.
She dismisses Home Assistant for silly reasons, but then fully acknowledges that the IKEA thing doesn't actually work properly with the Hue kit, and worries that IKEA is going to pull some garbage in the future anyway.
It's a shame that solutions like openHAB and Home Assistant aren't dead-simple for the average person to set up, and they have a bunch of usability issues. But if you're the kind of person who is sick of companies enshittifying the things you've already bought and were happy with, you have to actually own the experience, and openHAB or HA is the only way to do that.
I've been running openHAB for 3+ years now, and while it hasn't been perfect, it does what I want and need, and I never worry about some company updating things and breaking my experience. I update when I want to, and can roll it back it the update causes problems.
What you claimed was a lot more specific than that. Do you have any actual examples of the specific sequence of events you claimed?
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Ie instead of sending a "home_button_clicked" event, it has to work with: button_click=none -> button_click=home -> delay() -> button_click=none. Just a ridiculous architecture.
Obvious thing is to make it completely event based where certain events change state, ie discrete event=home_button_clicked which has the side-effect of setting event_last_button_clicked when that event is triggered.
They've done it completely the wrong way around and it annoys the hecky out of me.
Motion sensing can be solved with Passive Infrared sensing light switches, it works great for my laundry, closets, and pantry.
Here's another one: why question if something is actually "progress", when change is progress and progress is always good so change is good.
I also like that if I did want functionality enough (Eg: graph of temperature) I could probably figure out how to write a plugin.
What I think is that there's going to be a fundamental flaw in the device's security, and before there's any update from the manufacturer, word will get out in the criminal underworld that you just need to install such-and-such app on your phone and load a data file and then you can make all locks from Company X pop open just by walking down the street.
You can extend the container image with your own Dockerfile.
One assumption I've made is that people just have much better and responsive phones than I do: I regularly wait 2-4 seconds for even the simplest things to happen on mine and it's overall a terrible experience. Overall I would say most phones I've had were like this at some point in their lifetime (often the majority of the lifetime), including a latest model Samsung phone that arguably was ahead of most available phones at the time.
I'm not sure what to think: I think it's just a matter of being used to a certain way of interacting with things in the end. Nothing's been able to replace a computer program for me, whether it be CLI, TUI or GUI.
As for home automation with apps vs. traditional switches and stuff I've always assumed that most of the stuff is done for coolness sake and because it's fun. Certainly what draws me to some of these things (though I haven't pulled the trigger on any of it) is that I could actually interface with the rest of the world from my computer, which I just think is a fun idea.
2. If that's the case you have major issues going on which are irrelevant to the port chosen
3. On a single IP - so what? Every device can open it's own port 80 on your LAN without any conflict
> Seriously, you want to sell me a lightbulb that needs root access and then opens an unencrypted port and then makes outbound calls...? Are you nuts? That's beyond lazy design. It's almost like an intentional insult.
This doesn't make any sense. Are you talking about a single light bulb or actual orchestration software? Both need to communicate to actually do anything.
> edit] If you set up a home service on your local network, surely you can also bookmark the obscure port number next to the 128/ address in front of it. The only purpose served by turning your light bulbs into a beacon from hell on port 80 would be letting strangers totally penetrate your house.
This also doesn't make any sense. There is no reason a device on your local network listening on port 80 makes it a 'beacon from hell' - because again, listening on LAN & WAN are 2 very different things. And the port it's using has 0 bearing on security.
> What happens if you start up a webserver? Do the lights go off?
Absolutely nothing - because again there is no conflict with different devices on your LAN using the same ports to listen on.
You're mixing up a number of different things here & making issues where there aren't any. A device on your network opening port 80 doesn't magically make it accessible to the world for poking & prodding or result in any conflicts that cause things to stop working.
And when it comes to orchestrators like Home Assistant - you can choose any port you so desire. But changing the port doesn't make it any less or more secure.
..
And, thinking about it now, sadly you're probably right! Especially their newer stuff.