I was binge listening to some back episodes of the Clockwise podcast this week and came across this discussion on the smart home that struck a chord.
Use the media player below and listen from around 16:30 (or take in the entire episode). Some quotes from the Kelly Guimont may sound familiar to you, for example…
“I don’t recommend actual home automation to anybody”
“I don’t think most peoples idea of a fun Saturday night is sitting at home trouble shooting your network”
“I just want to have the VHS Betamax war between all the protocols and find out what the one is that everybody’s going to use”
“I’m really tired of having to buy it, then buy a new one” [new Philips Hue hub required for HomeKit compatibility]
“Everything comes with a little box that you have to plug into an Ethernet cable”
“Nothing works quite right and nothing works with anything else”
“Everything needs it own app….I have a folder on my phone with three solid pages of every different app I need to do a thing that’s in my house”
So are you suffering the same smart home trauma, or are things OK in your house? Perhaps you’re content with your dumb home and a more simple existence? Let us know.
I’ve been running SmartThings for almost 2 years with no problem. Each version improves over the last one. I run it all with Alexa voice commands. I like it.
Yes, I am suffering from suffering the same smart home trauma and things are not ok in my house?
IMHO automation is about *not* following the latest tech fashion, because most homes don’t fit product lifecycles in any meaningful way. If you go open source, then you have control of it, but unfortunately this implies you’re likely to have to do some programming. These guys talk about it being “super wonderful in 10 years and everything will talk together”. Yup, they said that 5, 10, 15, 20… years ago too, but human nature doesn’t change so much. Developers are often a bit naive, and keep abandoning perfectly serviceable technologies instead of building on them in a layered way. For example, xPL and xAP are effectively dead, but look under the hood at something like OSC or any JSON or XML based automation “protocols” and you’ll they do much the same, struggle with all the same issues, and are perhaps even more noddy in some ways, and will eventually be superseded when they get too unwieldy. What we need is a super easy programming language for all this stuff, so people can wrest control themselves. Perhaps we should do everything in Scratch? /rant.
we did a selfbuild & included HA – if we do another build, we’d include it again …
things are evolving, of course, and there are occasional trip-ups …
like a lot of things, looking back the leap doesn’t seem so great, but go back and it would be missed …
imagine going back to B&W TV … imagine going back to a car without microprocessors … to a world without Internet, or mobile ‘phones …