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.
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.
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.
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>
Here's my current setup (multiple narrow columns—the OP fits entirely in one screen, looks like a newspaper).
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.
$ 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
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 ...
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.
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.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
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 .
> 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...
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
https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/LI/consCheck.cfm?...
https://community.hubitat.com/t/release-2-3-6-available/1247...
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.
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...
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).
The "Supervised" installation (i.e. installing Home Assistant on top of an existing Linux install) is doable, but not preferred.
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.
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.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004718007133.html
One of many products speaking both protocols for just 10/20$
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)
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
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.
(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).
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.
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 :-)
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/)
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.
