We’ve been talking a bunch of home automation on the Podcast lately, and this week, in the Mailbag segment, a reader asked us about our setups. Neither Kristina nor I are poster children for the home automation movement: she has absolutely no smart anything because she didn’t want her data up in “the cloud”, and I have an entirely local system that’s really nothing more than a bunch of ad-hoc scripts that talk to an MQTT broker, everything fully DIY but held together with metaphorical duct tape. Neither of us are doing it right, but we’re doing it wrong in interestingly different ways.
Kristina thought, probably because of the range of commercial devices out there that tie you into using their remote data storage services, that giving up control of her data was necessary to use it. And it might be, if you insist that setting up the system be as easy as possible. But the tradeoff for this ease is a drastic reduction in simplicity. You shouldn’t need a remote server in some foreign country to turn your lights on and off. Adding “the cloud” into the mix brings a lot of complexity, mostly in the form of servers that have to be paid for somehow by whatever company is providing the service. It needs to be secure. You might even have to create accounts, remember passwords, and manage that whole deal. Sure, that’s easy enough, but it’s a lot of moving parts, and you can’t blame her for rejecting that complexity.
My system is hosted on a now-ancient OrangePi in the corner, and the network in question is an old WiFi router that it sits on. Nothing needs to leave my four walls, but actually some of it does – I bridge some of the MQTT topics out to an external server for my own amusement. There is no protocol, and no real “system” frankly. Each device in the network has its own topic, and I’m responsible for knowing what it means. The thermometer in the basement has an ESP8266 that transmits on the home/basement/temperature topic, and it puts out its temperature in degrees Celsius. It was the simplest system I could think of, but I have to write whatever software I want to log, display, or act on the data. Of course, that’s simple if you can write some four-liner scripts on the OrangePi broker, but it’s not easy enough that my wife wants to hack on it.
So if the full-buy-in commercial systems are easy but overly complex, and my DIY network is transparently simple but requires a level of hands-on that isn’t easy for “normies”, is there a middle ground? I know half of you are already screaming Home Assistant or Domoticz, and you’re also thinking of which client device libraries you like the most for all your DIY applications: ESPHome vs Tasmota, for instance. And you’re all right!
We are living the in the golden age of the home automation projects. Open-source software and firmware, combined with an abundance of online tutorials and worked examples, have made huge strides toward bridging the gap between simplicity and ease of use. You can set up a hub for everything on a single-board computer, upload the software of your choice, and you don’t need the complexity or loss-of-support liability of a cloud provider. At the same time, setup is easy enough if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves a little bit, and when it’s not, chances are good that someone else has already figured it out for you. These days, interoperability with popular commercial products is shockingly easy to boot.
I need to spend some time and rationalize my system: given the state of the art, it’s simply too simple, and taking a step into an open-source solution would make it easier to use for the rest of the family, without overly complexifying things, adding sketchy dependencies, or losing our data sovereignty. I haven’t finished exploring my options yet, but from what I can see, the community has converged on some goldilocks setups: not too simple or too easy, but rather just right. Thanks, y’all!
I only have a headless Pi3 with temperature sensors inside the house and outside, so I know better when to open all windows, especially in the summer.
No judgment from me, but home automation just seems like a nothing burger. I can’t see enough benefit to put any money toward it, much less time.
It can be well worth it if you have solar panels, feed in tarriff or not. For example a guy I know figured out that in winter it makes more sense financially to use the excess to heat his house in the day when he’s not even home, because the heat sticks around well into the evening. I think one of his heaters is a concrete block “storage heater”
The cost to achieve a similar level of evening warmth with gas fired central heating, is higher than the payout he could get from selling the daytime electricity to the grid!
Doesn’t really need home automation to do that, just a simple timer in the heating system thermostat you can switch in between summer and winter. I guess you can call that automation, but that’s not the Home Automation that this article is talking about with networked devices and whatnot.
There are some quality of life improvements with smart devices, but most of the time there’s no real point in networking them together even locally because there’s no real need to automate anything – a well designed house doesn’t need constant monitoring or adjustment.
So, most things sold as home automation are simply gadgets and nerd toys.
I miss my X10 system 😢
My lights are still operated by X10 controllers 😊
Meh. Started doing this supposed H/A stuff back in the late 1980s using current loops on twisted pairs and 8051 controllers sprinkled around my little universe.
Tried wireless for a few years, now I am back to using 20mA loops for the house, and 300/400MHz for the two greenhouses and four weather stations because I don’t wanna string cabling up and down the hills. None of this stuff uses any formal I/O spec or any of that craptastic commercial hardware.
The many published protocols, commercial modules, controllers, etc are burdened with flakiness and convoluted code. Most people do not need H/A – it just adds another layer of complexity to your life. You may require a security system, but you seldom need H/A.
I mean, there is no doing it wrong. If your system works for you, do it. I just find Home Assistant to check all the boxes for what I need, so I do it. None of my stuff is cloud-based, which is just a choice I’ve made as I integrate and build my own smart devices. It has to be able to be LAN-only or I don’t purchase. HA making it easy to have everything in one spot and have them interact is quite enjoyable when making things automate how I want them to.
I dove head-first into IoT platforms about 12 years ago, especially the ESP devices. I whipped up some test environmental monitoring, put a MQTT server on my home Linux box, put a sample webapp on my hosted webserver, flashed some SonOff devices with tasmota, etc etc. I even prototyped a whole web-based remote boat-monitoring system, til I found that another developer had gone there first and did it better.
Anyway my IoT stuff rarely went beyond experiments and proof-of-concept. I never finished a fully working home-automation system. Why? Because it’s just my wife and I, and our house is small and uncomplicated and everything is working fine. About the only time I wish for home automation is when I’m going to bed on the second floor, and I can’t remember if I switched the basement light off or not.
So this admission tarnishes my geek cred, I know. But we haven’t yet imagined a compelling reason to do more home automation and online monitoring. If anything, remote monitoring for security and to get notifications of intrusions, system failures, flooding, power-outage, etc would clearly be useful.
That’s what I use those 433MHz wireless plug adapters for. You don’t have to know whether you remembered to switch it off, you just press the “off” button and now it is. You do need a duplicate remote downstairs though, so you don’t have to run upstairs to turn it back on.
It’s not even automation, it’s just a dumb remote switch.