alt Hacker NewsI was (naively, looking back) pretty bullish on smart home devices. Automating schedules, presence detection, etc. Every time I looked to invest more into it, the marketplace felt like a minefield of e(ventual)-waste and headache.
I still struggle with it. It feels like a missed opportunity these days, but I just don’t trust companies to treat me or my devices with respect. I’ve ultimately boomeranged back to “no (cloud) smart devices.”
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Yep I have 4 different presence detectors. A few units of each. None of them work in a way that satisfies my requirements.
Smart light bulbs are another minefield of low-CRI, bad connectivity, worse firmwares, nerfed local featureset, etc.
I still have a lot of the same stuff I bought, which falls into two main categories:
* Hue bulbs, which get active updates and are still maintained by Philips, and honestly are pretty good, if insanely overpriced, especially the HomeKit bridge
* "iHome" smart outlets which I belieeeeeeeve were once upon a time made by Belkin? They've ended support but the outlets themselves are very reliable, and pairable/managable entirely within the Home app so I barely noticed when they were discontinued. Picked up a 4-pack of them on fleabay recently for $20 and they work great still.
Mind you I'm not saying I'm great at this, if anything I'm lucky in that I really haven't had any smart home tech go poorly for me, apart from some other outlets that were some no-name brand. They're still kicking around my house but they need power cycles far more often than the iHome ones.
When I had to get a lot of work done on my house after a kitchen fire (appliance but not a smart one), I told pretty much everyone involved "nothing smart." (OK, the new dryer has a moisture sensor but that's it. Didn't have much that was smart anyway aside from a couple of Alexas that I use rarely.
I think there was also a novelty around a lot of smart devices that just didn't translate to much real world benefit. And in my case here, there was also the matter of having more pressing issues than fussing with smart lights and the like--like rewiring a substantial portion of the house when various walls were open..