Anyone else remembering when Google servers went down and people couldn’t turn their “smart” light bulbs on and off?
@Erik 😱 that was a thing that happened?
(fwiw I've always been suspicious of allegedly smart homes and this just confirmed my existing prejudice!)
I've got a few smart bulbs and outlets but only ones that could be reflashed with open-source firmware. They don't phone home to the cloud, and I pretty much control them vie their own built-in web APIs.
With lots of very nerdy effort you can make your own smart home with Siri and MQTT --- I did all this and then realized I didn't actually need it... at this point I'd actually have to go rummage around and find my old code if I wanted to tell anyone else how to do it.
Yep. I'd be delighted if there were turnkey open-source home automation solutions. Having experimented with hassio and friends, there's nothing there for the ordinary user.
I'm a very experienced netops software engineer and my reaction to these is "you've got to be kidding". They're preposterously bloated and require a huge investment of time and energy to get any work out of them.
I've done some compact and efficient work in that area for my own fun but it's not ready for prime time. Hopefully I'll get enough free time to package them well enough for others to use.
Absolutely agree with this, but 99% of consumers won’t be able to do that, which is the problem.
People want incredibly complex systems automatically do whatever they need, but don’t have the competence to set it up. We need to provide FOSS alternatives that don’t steal your data, but there’s no market in that.
I’d rather suggest consumers to not do it if they don’t understand everything they’re doing.