The midwit home

We have a non-networked, non-remote electronic combo lock for our front door.<p>We are never locked out. There is no key under a rock. The phone cannot get unpaired, the remote cannot be intercepted and replayed. If we are on vacation, we can call up a friend and tell them a code so they can get in.<p>A 9V battery lasts about three years, then it starts flashing and beeping every time you open the door for a month before dying. If you already have the right hole in the door, it takes about 20 minutes to install.<p>And if you&#x27;re intent on breaking in, well, the windows are made of glass. Please don&#x27;t do that.

While I believe that HA is very cool and many vendors provide valuable solutions, we must consider what happens when we die.<p>This is just one anecdote, but I believe the problem is more pervasive.<p>I was called to an elderly lady&#x27;s home to &quot;un-haunt&quot; the building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done &quot;all of the cool things&quot; to make the home smart. Unfortunately too smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home.<p>She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn&#x27;t figure it out and lived like this for an entire year.<p>She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband, but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation. About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady&#x27;s lights too. In her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift.<p>I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices and, as she put it, putting in &quot;turn the light on and off again&quot; switches.<p>When choosing technology -- any technology, it&#x27;s important to consider the life of that device and the people impacted far in the future.

I 100%, absolutely sympathize with the opening there. The situation really sucks to a surprisingly great extent. At the same time though, it has to be stated that going for a &#x27;dumb, simple&#x27; Smart Lights really, really misses an enormous amount of the potential value. Nearly 100% of my smart home is about lights for now using just Philips Hue&#x2F;HomeKit, though HA remains on my list, but only a tiny percentage is about simply having switches wherever. The true value for me has been in more intelligent color lighting based on layered actions. I change the amount of blue and brightness during the course of the day, so that there&#x27;s lots in the morning and it&#x27;s dimmer and ever redder in the evening. Particularly in the winter this has been incredibly helpful for my sleep cycles. It can all be extremely transparent as well since the switches and motion sensors can have time-of-day as well as which-button and number-of-clicks categorization. So hitting the on button always turns the lights on, but the color and brightness mix of a room will be different over the course of the day. Same with outdoors, motion sensors anywhere that can have different colors and activation periods at different times has been great for massively cutting down extraneous blue light at night, which is good not just for humans but for animals and insects as well. I can wake up in the heart of winter when the sun doesn&#x27;t rise until 8 or later in the morning to a 20 minute long &quot;sunrise&quot; I created myself simulated nicely with a bunch of lights. And more complex logic like &quot;lights all come on when smoke alarm goes off or a basement flood is detected&quot; are also handy.<p>Again I&#x27;m very sympathetic to the shitty state of the ecosystems right now, frequently miserable UI&#x2F;UX, and massive heaping doses of bullshit companies are constantly trying to pull to extract more ongoing revenue from people for what should be buy-once-and-done products. But it really sucks precisely because yes: smart home features genuinely can be pretty great.

I searched the page for “Lutron” but was disappointed…<p>There is a line of lutron switches that are dead simple, no smarts, no hub … and a cute little remote that everyone in my family uses to “all off” the interior lights.<p>We have a no smart devices policy in the house and these make the cut …<p>EDIT: From my notes ... the specific product line is &quot;maestro wireless&quot; and I have MRF2-6CL switches paired with &quot;pico&quot; remotes. This is <i>as opposed to</i> the caseta line from Lutron which is quite a bit &quot;smarter&quot;.

&gt; Hauling your body across the room just to flip a switch is absurd.<p>Maybe this is a sign of getting old, but I never got why this is such a hassle. Light switches are within reach when you enter a room. Once you&#x27;re inside, you rarely have to touch them again until you exit. On the rare ocasion that I do, maybe it&#x27;s also a good time to stretch my legs, take a bathroom break, or get a snack.<p>Is that such a major inconvenience that we have to overengineer solutions using expensive and complicated ecosystems of gadgets and software?<p>Maybe I&#x27;m in the minority with this line of thinking on this forum, but I never got the smart home appeal. I want devices that I can control directly, not those that will interpret or anticipate what I want to do and, more than likely, cause frustration rather than satisfaction. The switch is the ubiquitous and perfect mechanism of control, especially if it&#x27;s directly wired to a simple state machine, and not layers of indirection and &quot;protocols&quot;. I wish more devices used dumb switches, not less.<p>Don&#x27;t get me started on the motion sensing lights TFA mentions. I curse the times I&#x27;ve entered a public bathroom that has these, only for the light to go off at the most inopportune moment. Don&#x27;t want to use a physical switch because of sanitation? That&#x27;s fine, but cheap and low-power LED lights exist for them to be always on during your service hours. You won&#x27;t save much having the light turn off, and potentially annoy your customers.

&gt;The hell? But people seem to think that Home Assistant is good. (Something about subscription fees and invasive apps and forced obsolescence?) So you search for “how to get a Home Assistant”. This reveals a recursive landscape of terror:<p>Google &quot;how to install home assistant&quot; which leads to:<p>&gt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io&#x2F;installation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io&#x2F;installation&#x2F;</a><p>&gt;If you are unsure of what to choose, follow the Raspberry Pi guide to install Home Assistant Operating System.<p>This leads to:<p>&gt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io&#x2F;installation&#x2F;raspberrypi" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io&#x2F;installation&#x2F;raspberrypi</a><p>This has a nice visual guide that requires you to know how to buy a raspberry pi, how to plug in a raspberry p, how to plug in an sd card (twice), and how to navigate to a url.

Incorrectly titled. The &quot;smart&quot; devices from the first part of the article ARE the midwit solution. The better devices in the rest of the article are the actual right-end-of-the-bell-curve solutions.

&gt; MongoChopper only works in reticulated mode, which newer Qetzl hubs don’t support.<p>False! Just use skubenjoyer64&#x27;s modded wetware, which supports most reticulated mode variants. Just set LD_SIDELOAD to your device&#x27;s beacon adapter address at decompile time, assuming you have Qetzl Hub 3.9 rev 5 or later.

My own experience , half the time Nest tells me it can&#x27;t find the lights to turn them on or off.<p>I have somehow automated some lights to come on too early in the morning but the specific task&#x2F;automation I set to do this is nowhere to be found.. I can create and remove new tasks but I&#x27;m being haunted by this old task.<p>My father has most of his home setup. Worked great until Christmas eve, when lightning hit the local exchange..

I recently picked up this rabbit hole of a hobby. It&#x27;s only when you want to get fancy, and have lots of mismatched stuff, that it gets that complicated. (Which, as nerds, we are wont to do.) If you just buy into one brands stuff, and use just that, you don&#x27;t get lost in the home assistant quagmire. There are quirks, eg Phillips Hue has a 50 device limit per hub resulting in needing multiple hubs for a complex scene, but it works for people who aren&#x27;t programmers.<p>Meanwhile, as a hardware hacker and software engineer, yeah, I&#x27;ll admit, I had to do things that look a lot like my job I&#x27;m paid very well to do in order to get my light switches to work right. No idea how people who don&#x27;t program for a living are supposed to get Home Assistant to work quite right!

The author seems unfamiliar with Radio Shack&#x27;s Plug &#x27;n Power, which was first introduced in 1979.<p>&gt;The modules were designed to respond to commands sent over the electrical wires inside the house. They could turn on or off, or in the case of a lamp, change brightness. The advantage of using a power-line communication system was that it didn’t require any additional (and costly) signal wiring.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trs-80.org&#x2F;plug-n-power&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trs-80.org&#x2F;plug-n-power&#x2F;</a>

The &quot;recursive landscape of terror&quot; doesn&#x27;t stop once you install Home Assistant, it continues during maintenance. And at that point you&#x27;re dependent on it to run the systems in your house. Thus I recently decided to get rid of my whole setup and go back to normal.<p>Further, the tinkering aspect isn&#x27;t enjoyable to me because I don&#x27;t feel like I&#x27;m learning anything useful, I&#x27;m just trying to duct tape together other people&#x27;s hobby projects that adds support for this or that bulb or radio.

I dream of setting up my home automation as if it was a starship. It doesn&#x27;t have to look like one, but it should operate like one.<p>First, it&#x27;d be self-contained, so devices don&#x27;t need to dial back up to a cloud server in order to change settings. Who&#x27;s ever heard of a starship that dials back to Starfleet headquarters to open a door?<p>HVAC, water heater, and water softener would be &quot;life support&quot;. The garage would be the shuttle bay. External cameras tracking people, cars, and planes that fly overhead would be the Sensor Array. Since houses don&#x27;t move, you could say there&#x27;s no engineering. But if I had a power generation system like a solar panel, we&#x27;ll just make that engineering. I&#x27;d be able to &quot;redirect power&quot; when we have a heat wave. Each system would have an API that reports stats that you can culminate into a daily dashboard displayed on your bathroom mirror. Of course, the Alexas would be &quot;computer&quot;, and a lounge dedicated to AR&#x2F;VR would be the &quot;Holodeck&quot;.<p>I imagine that&#x27;s what most people have in their heads, but we get lost in the weeds. In reality, I haven&#x27;t done much home automation myself. Just a few lights, ecobee thermostat, and alexa that I don&#x27;t use.<p>Having to pull out my phone just to control these things is often too much friction. Asking Alexa to do it is rather nice, but I&#x27;m not thrilled about the prospect of a company listening in (rumored to anyway). If you set it to turn off by geolocation or by time, there are edge cases that you often run into where you don&#x27;t want to turn them off.<p>I had set the lights to turn off when I left my apartment. My roommates were all sitting the living room, and I left to go grab some milk, and the lights all turned off on them when I left, and they were perplexed.<p>I even mystified myself. Sometimes, in the mornings, I would wake up and the lights would be blue, and I wouldn&#x27;t know why. But in fact, I had just forgotten I&#x27;d set up an IFTTT automation to turn the lights blue if it was going to be rainy day. I had just completely forgotten this and never could make out the pattern and association.<p>One of the problems with home automation is that the settings are hidden and not readily observable. All the problems that we have in our programming lives with observability of our production systems, we want to bring to home.

&gt; <i>Remote-controlled light bulbs. Personally, I’d never buy these, because I’m fanatical about color quality. (It’s futile to start with low-quality photons and then try to arrange matter to make them look good.)</i><p>I am about to buy several Philips Hue lights. Does this statement apply to all LED-based lights or just the cheap ones?

Definitely saved this article as a guide.<p>But in terms of light switches, specifically - is there not a simpler way to turn lights on and off while keeping the physical wall switches as the fundamental source of truth?<p>I’m thinking of a traditional physical switch that has been enhanced with an electromagnetic component that can actually physically flip that switch. A separate control line from each switch in the house goes to a separate controlling computer in the basement. This computer can then interface with Bluetooth remotes or apps on smartphones or anything else that is needed, including having its own internal scheduler for turning lights on or off, or connected to ambient light sensors near windows that could trigger threshold settings to do the same.<p>That way, no matter how you set up your basement controller, you can always go over to the wall and turn the lights on or off if you need so. And if you are going to bed, bringing up the app can tell you if you’ve left the garage lights on, so you can remotely turn them off.<p>And when you remotely turn these switches on or off, the in-wall light switch will actually be physically moved to its desired position via the electromagnet being triggered.<p>Granted, this is something that is really only doable during a new build or a frame-off rebuild of a home (I’m doing the latter and would love to implement this idea), but the point being: this would be a largely obsolescence-proof, dummy-proof and robust&#x2F;reliable way of automating a home while leaving the physical switches themselves as the ultimate source of truth: flipping the physical switch will _always_ do what is expected it will do, and the switch will always be in the position expected for the light’s current state.

1. Wear biometrics to help track and improve health and fitness.<p>2. Buy smart home products so you don&#x27;t have to get up off the couch, walk 10 feet, and flip a switch.<p>Does anyone else enjoy the irony? Disclosure: I am guilty of both of the above.

I think it&#x27;s worth taking a look back at X10 [0], the OG home automation.<p>Yes, it was primitive by today&#x27;s standards with a very limited command set, but that command set was good enough for 90% of purposes and its simplicity meant that it was trivial to implement correctly and everything interoperated.<p>It didn&#x27;t need an internet connection to function. It didn&#x27;t even need a local server. Though you could have a programmable controller, the minimum viable setup consisted of having some X10-enabled device (such as a light socket), an X10 switch, and setting some DIP switches as configuration.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;X10_(industry_standard)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;X10_(industry_standard)</a>

IoT was always a bad vision for the future. 20 years from now I don&#x27;t want a million devices in my home running software. Either they&#x27;ll all constantly be pestering me with updates that break functionality I rely on, or they&#x27;ll be out of date with bugs and security holes that last forever.<p>My vision of a good future is one where I have exactly one smart device: a robot butler which will operate all my other devices. I don&#x27;t need smart switches if my butler turns off all the lights for me. I don&#x27;t need a smart lock if the butler unlocks the door for me. I don&#x27;t need a security webcam if the butler monitors the house while I&#x27;m away. I don&#x27;t need a smart thermostat if the butler sets it for me. Etc.

I am a fan of Ikea lights. I can use normal light switches to turn the light on&#x2F;off. But I also have a remote and I can dim the lights or change the temperature. No hub needed. The price is low enough. And Ikea will probably stay in business a long time.

Home Assistant is awesome, but not ready for the mass-market. It&#x27;s a fun tech project to setup and one that will require your attention regularly forever-- but on the bright side, it isn&#x27;t constantly annoying, it works consistently, and it can all work locally so when some Chinese vendor shuts down their servers you aren&#x27;t left sitting in a dark room.<p>It&#x27;s improving at a rapid pace and I can see it being ready for your aunt to use in a couple of years. Not this year, not next.<p>I set all my relatives up with Apple HomePod Minis and HomeKit, which has expensive hardware (matter is <i>supposed</i> to fix that...) but is largely local and relatively private.

<p><pre><code> &gt; I want a variant that works like this: If the power is quickly turned off and on again, the outlet switches from powered to unpowered (or vice-versa). </code></pre> Philips has a line of bulbs called SceneSwitch that use this rapid on-off mechanism to change their brightness and color temperature to one of three levels. It’s funny because incandescent three-way bulbs and switches used to be very common. Now that everything is LED you need a complicated timer system to achieve the same result. I’m just happy to be able to dim my table lamps without a bunch of extra technology.

I was already running home server, so for me, setting up smart home was relatively simple:<p>- Buy Zigbee USB dongle - Install Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT in Docker on server - Initial configuration<p>It requires basic technical knowledge, but after initial configuration it just works.<p>There were three major pains:<p>- Configuring camera (ONVIF is pure pain) - it works initially, but I physically plug-in cameras only when I&#x27;m going on holiday - Configuring voice assistant - Finding good ZigBee remotes - Price of Hue Wall Switch (DIY approach is possible by gutting cheap button)<p>Cameras and voice assistant troubles were arguably result of my &quot;keep as much as possible within local network&quot; approach.<p>Minor pains:<p>- Binding remotes to light bulbs, so they work even if server is down - Finding instructions how to bind certain ZigBee accessories (they have &quot;just open our proprietary app and it will explain what to do&quot; manual)

That&#x27;s why I like Shelly. The stuff connects via WiFi. The protocol is MQTT or REST. Stuff I know and can understand.

I installed yale smart locks which work with Nest.<p>After going through a bunch of pain getting it to initially work, I would go away from anything smart device at all, except for maybe an electric code lock that isn&#x27;t networked.<p>It&#x27;s convenient to not have to always have my keys on me, and I got used to the tech after my previous apartment installed a similar device, but it randomly fails. Or randomly makes me log in to google again (and I have basically only minimal google usage now, no email by them). Or randomly fails when I&#x27;m 300 feet away from the house and trying to unlock.<p>But, at one point I was considering installing a compatible device for the thermostat. It has lost the appeal to me, and the nearly intractable software interface to deal with problems was a big part of it. Getting a second lock up and running took a bunch of arcane knowledge.

There&#x27;s a bias where most of the content is produced by the most hardcore group of people. This is, of course, no different with home automation. You can do Home Assistant without making it your hobby, it&#x27;s just that most of the posts you see are from people who are way too deep into it.

The most important mid-wit home automation tool is the programmable thermostat, which curiously isn&#x27;t mentioned. That will have more impact on energy use and quality of life than anything else. No remote control, no wifi needed. Just turns heat on in the morning and turns it off when things warm up, and turns the temperature setpoints lower overnight. In comparison with heat, LED light automation doesn&#x27;t matter so much. For example, this one:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.honeywellhome.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;air&#x2F;thermostats&#x2F;programmable-thermostats&#x2F;white-5-1-1-day-programmable-thermostat-rth2410b1019-e1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.honeywellhome.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;air&#x2F;thermostats...</a>

My house came with the doorbell wires buried behind the frame somewhere, so I installed a self-powered wireless doorbell. The transmitter harvests power from the user physically pressing the button, so it doesn&#x27;t need batteries. I just caulked it straight onto the brick.

I need to choose outlets and switches for a new building, and I hope to &quot;smart home&quot; it. I had started to do some reading, and while my experience wasn&#x27;t _quite_ as gruesome as the author of this article portrays it to be, I generally agree with their sentiments.<p>Still, I&#x27;m not quite ready to give up on computer-controlled automation.<p>Does anyone know of a reasonably complete guide (web site, book, whatever) that explains this well? What I&#x27;m looking for: help choosing components that will work together; not &quot;for dummies&quot;; I&#x27;m technically competent and willing to learn some stuff but don&#x27;t want to make a hobby&#x2F;profession out of this; doesn&#x27;t require buying into Google Home, Alexa, or another privacy-hostile system.<p>Thanks in advance.

Smart home is not about just turn on&#x2F;off lights remotely. It&#x27;s about do it automatically&#x2F;reponding to other interactions.<p>i.e, when sunlight is out (in HA, you can get sunset triggers), and when there are people present in living room, turn on living room lights.

This is a cool approach to an article about home automation. But for me, not only do I refuse to automate things via networking computers together, I won&#x27;t buy a product that requires me to have a new remote control either. I&#x27;m open to things like lights with motion sensors that turn on when I enter the room, but whatever marginal convenience I get from automation would be outweighed by the absurdity of having 25 different, dedicated remote controls to keep track of.<p>Another peeve is that every G-D home device now feels like it needs an LED light that is on all the time. My view is that it should be dark when the lights turn off, but that&#x27;s hard to these days.

I love this category of product and use them extensively around my small NYC apartment. Moving fairly often and valuing privacy, it is delightful to not muck around with extra networking and internet of shit. I always wonder why the category doesn&#x27;t get more love, like a nod from the wirecutter, or a big brand trying to make a slightly uscale line with a consistent deisgn language.<p>One thing I&#x27;d love to buy is a purely offline outlet control that can listen for a programmable wakeword -- a clapper that can do &quot;turn on the lights.&quot; Not sure if this much computation violates the spirit, but there&#x27;s no reason it can&#x27;t be a tidy self-contained thing.

The author’s mistake is thinking about the ”smart” lights in terms of systems, and the “midwit” lights in terms of products. If you look at smart lights starting with products, ignoring the connectivity and asking questions like will this pair well with my light fixtures and is it capable of the color changing or other tricks I want, then look into the best system to control those products, you won’t get caught in analysis paralysis so easily.<p>This advice probably doesn’t apply as much to people who want smart-everything since that can get very complicated, but if it’s mainly about lights then you’ll find compatible options for any of the major protocols.

Adding to this list the Philips sceneswitch bulbs: color changing bulbs that can be rapidly power-cycled to change color. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usa.lighting.philips.com&#x2F;consumer&#x2F;choose-a-bulb&#x2F;sceneswitch" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usa.lighting.philips.com&#x2F;consumer&#x2F;choose-a-bulb&#x2F;...</a><p>If one could trigger scheduled actions by connecting a remote control to a daily or weekly plug-in timer, that would meet virtually every use case I have for app-controlled appliances, bulbs, and locks.

This is where I landed. A couple of years ago I sold all of my Apple Surveillance Device Minis, boxed up all of my Hugh lights, and got a remote control outlet for my bedroom light and a remote control light strip for my TV&#x27;s bias lights. I still have a August lock but I don&#x27;t let it on WiFi, bluetooth only. Life is easier and I&#x27;m not feeding the megacorps with data about my comings and goings and what I do while I&#x27;m inside.

&gt; That’s basically an AND gate. But what about OR gates? [...]<p>How about a Turing-complete clap processing unit? Effectively, a language for specifying, identifying, connecting, activating, and signaling various logic gates with hand claps alone.<p>Also, come on. Is it really too much to ask for a person to know how to open a Sonoff switch, connect gator clips to its programming ports, flash it with Tasmota, and connect it to Home Assistant via MQTT? This is basic stuff..

&gt; My usual process for making tea is to walk to the kitchen and start the kettle. Then, because it takes an eternity for water to boil, I go back to my desk to wait.<p>Instead of remote controlling the kettle, get a hot water dispenser.<p>In Europe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yum-asia.com&#x2F;eu&#x2F;product-category&#x2F;instant-hot-water-heaters&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yum-asia.com&#x2F;eu&#x2F;product-category&#x2F;instant-hot-water-h...</a>

<i>&quot;Power-controlled remote pressers. This is utterly cursed, but hear me out: I want a gadget that I physically attach to a remote. When the gadget gets power, it presses the “on” button on the remote. When it loses power, it presses the “off” button.&quot;</i><p>Except that too many remotes have one button, and one signal, for both on and off. TV and cable box remotes out of sync is the most common result.

Every light switch runs an LLM which is able to submit JSON payloads of the format { &quot;on&quot;: true } to an internal HTTP server controlling the switch. The LLM is connected to a microphone and is prompted with a unique name. You can use it just by yelling &quot;turn on the lights!&quot;, or if you only want to turn on one of the lights &quot;Gary, turn on!&quot;

KNX seems like a solid solution: a single shared bus that smart devices communicate with each other over, without any need for any kind of centralized server (either on prem or not). But unfortunately AFAICT there aren&#x27;t any installers in the Bay Area, and it would cost a pretty penny to wire the house anyway.<p>Any suggestions for how to get something similar set up in the US?

I really like clappers, but if you want to read a book at night, what about just using a bedside lamp? No need for smart anything.

Regarding remote control switch pressers, I have a couple switchbots, and most of the information online talks about using things like Home Assistant, but they also respond to anything that sends them a simple bluetooth command. You can easily do a point to point thing with a bluetooth device on the other end.<p>I control mine with a little ESP32 board.

Ah. The Clapper.<p>I&#x27;ve tried to find a Clapper functionality for Alexa or Google Assistant or something, but haven&#x27;t come across it. So often I just want to turn on or off the nearest light that&#x27;s on, not try to have a conversation with some device or pull up my phone with my dry eyes in the middle of the night.

Just FYI that the link to the page about the case against ultrasonic humidifiers is broken; it&#x27;s missing the &#x2F; after the domain. I tried leaving a comment on the page, but even after creating a dummy profile it wouldn&#x27;t accept it, so hopefully you&#x27;ll see it here.

Those motion sensor light bulbs are perfect. My basement lights are all chain-pull so I got them in, and now everything is illuminated by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs.<p>I also like the IKEA tradfri stuff, since you can just pair the remote directly. No apps or internet needed.

&gt; (BTW, manufacturers, if you want to use touch sensors and you don’t want to lose the massive midwit market, make things that automatically turn on when first connected to power, without waiting for a touch.)<p>...and if you ever lose power to the house, suddenly all devices turn on.

One immediately useful thing I got from the post is the genius idea of putting the printer (that frequently needs to be restarted for some reason) on a smart outlet. It&#x27;s working around broken technology by using more technology, but I&#x27;ll take it!

I feel this sentiment deeply. I wonder how much of it is due to lack of good options, and how much is due to a hostile information space - that is, there are bandits out there who want your money and attention, and they are willing to say anything to get it.

To add to this: F&amp;(*&amp;ing manufacturers that change the internals of the IoTs silently. That worked fine, let me just hop onto Amazon click &quot;buy again&quot; to get more.<p>That said mine generally works fine. The ESPHome integration in particular is grand

Not sure what author is building with this list of keywords, smart home nuclear bomb? Because otherwise HA setup works with small subset of that. Then it&#x27;s up to you how complex you want things to get, as with any software

Simple, remote control outlets are great. We have them in most rooms in our home.<p>Another great use for them is to get the ones that look just like light switches, and hang them low enough for small children to use.

HA sounds cool to me but other than being a fun thing to work on, what&#x27;s so good about it? Can anyone &quot;sell&quot; me on it? Is it just being able to turn stuff on and off from your phone?

I think this is just a problem for tech-y nerds. Almost anyone can just buy into a specific smart home ecosystem (like Hue) and use that for everything. Never had a problem.

What if complex IT stacks didn&#x27;t exist primarily to solve problems, but to create niche domains in which Average Redditors can lord their knowledge over everyone else?

Lutron Caseta for lights. ZWave for sensors and shades. HomeKit for cameras. (I run a whole home assistant setup but I could have done everything with HomeKit natively)

This is grug tier. He&#x27;s criticizing midwit tier. Genius tier is some guy who effortlessly coded his own elegant and simple solution.

The Legrand smart lights that came with our house are pretty painless. No idea what setup is like, though, since they were preinstalled.

&gt; Mechanical outlet timers: You plug this into an outlet, it slowly spins once per day, and the pins determine is the outlet is active for each 30 minute period. [...] &gt; Many use these with light for plants. Or, it can be nice to wake up with light rather than sound. Instead of buying a light alarm clock, you can just plug a lamp into one of these.<p>Beware.<p>I bought one of these for the bedroom for precisely that purpose.<p>I accidentally got a brand that clicked audibly as it rotated.<p>I&#x27;m sure the reader can easily imagine how useful that wasn&#x27;t.

Definitely midwit tier. Getting some benefits from home automation is trivial. Now if only Alexa’s response time wasn’t trash …

A fantastic lesson on why to <i>keep it simple, stupid!</i>

Enjoyed the opening quite a bit. Very funny and relatable.