Bought our home almost 20 years ago, and the former owner (apparently) owned a now-defunct home automation business. The upside was 100% X10/Insteon power and light controls, top alarm panel, environmental controls and so on running off of a wall-mounted "SmartLinc" touch panel. I expanded the system with Axis cameras and a Mac Server running Indigo and SecuritySpy (non-subscription), which enabled remote monitoring and control, but it all operates locally.
In a moment of weakness, I bought a D-Link wireless (wifi) water detector for the sump pit (it was on clearance for $30); it relied on a D-Link Home cloud service (free) that was closed down a few years ago.
Not wanting to toss it, I repurposed a spare Chromebook 14 that I was going to recycle and turned it into a Alpine monitor for the water detector, which I'm powering from the Chromebook's USB port (if power is lost in a rainstorm, I need to know about it before the sump pit fills up).
An immediate issue was that the D-Link firmware tried to "phone home" every 24 hours and would drop from the local network, since the server was kaput, and I had no clue what response it was expecting from the server to keep it alive. Solution; "reboot" the unit by interrupting USB power (with a Pico and MOSFET) every 23 hours. There's no question that home automation should work without the internet.
Every cloud service will eventually get shut down. The problem is that nobody wants to put the effort into reverse engineering the product to fake out the cloud service until after the cloud service is gone and the reverse engineering is much more difficult.
Do we just need to establish bounties per cloud service target to reverse engineer and publish a spec, copyleft code, and reference architecture? Maybe https://www.fulu.org/ could host the results? Like OpenAI and Anthropic brute forcing math proofs, we can brute force interoperability (imho).
I haven't figured out how to recieve pings from my weather stone, I've always got to get up and look out the window, which, then I can just see the weather.
every single sentence was a level of jank that i could never imagine subjecting my parents to. could you code custom firmware for the dlink btw? your fix sounds like good ol' redneck engineering but for the smart home :p
- buy the cheapest hardware that gets the job done
- ignore negative reviews that are software related
- upon receipt of devices, ask claude for local-first cfw
- have fun for a few hours acting as a meat proxy
- boom, cheap local-only smart home is done
Use a SBC or nas for home assistant. This process worked for me for switches, a thermostat, an air quality monitor, a thermometer, and a window fan.
Would’ve paid ~2.5x for hardware that had the appropriate local-first capability out of the box. Instead this all fit within an existing $20 subscription to an inference provider. DS 4.1 running locally was on track too just more slowly.
I found a few wifi and bluetooth devices that were cheaper than or didn’t have a zigbee equivalent. Window fan and air monitor specifically.
I didn’t do an exhaustive market search, just sharing my anecdotal experience. It’s a great feeling to be able to focus on hardware capabilities and price, then will the software you envision into existence via AI accelerated RE.
We've backed ourselves into a fundamentally silly situation: inventions intended to improve convenience and save time don't do either. They work "OK" then there's an update, and then you need to figure out what changed and how. And then it breaks, and you need to go troubleshoot what still works (if anything) and what no longer works. It's not more convenient, just more complex.
Please please please use your first draft or refine it yourself without LLMs.
I managed to get to:
The cloud is the weak link
- No internet, no problem. ...
---
If you are writing for other machines to ingest it, whatever. But if you are writing for people it for me at least signals that you don't really care about the message that you want to get across, and are fine with a watered down LLM average.
I will be happy when this genre of whining fades away. Everyone has suddenly turned into the most obnoxious 7th grade English teacher imaginable. "I wanted to like your ideas, but you used lines from the reading assignment without quotes and 3 sentences had dangling participles. Plagiarism and grammar offenses, straight to jail."
If you're personally getting a headache from reading AI writing, all this does is transfer that headache to the rest of us. Thanks. /s
There's no way you're actually reading a long doc knowing it's AI-written. I refuse to believe even the most AI-using people do this, because they're probably telling their agent to summarize.
It's not missing quotes, it's "i didn't write this at all, I put zero effort into it, I don't know what it says, it may be made up". Claude is good for code, terrible at prose, it boggles my mind that people use it to write PR descriptions, let alone their own personal thoughts.
I recently had a pretty extensive home renovation don after a kitchen fire--which din't have a lot direct damage but the rouse was pretty much cleared out. I pretty much didn't have any direct "smart" stuff. A few appliances are probably enableable but they aren't.
Smart home devices should not freeze up whenever internet is down. A device like Google Nest should have the minimum decency to allow you to interact with it via local Wifi (which continues un-interrupted). It is fine if half the functionality doesn't work. It is fine if the "AI" doesn't work, but at least allow me to fcking change the temperature manually
Same thing with devices like Google Wifi which freezes up or run hot loops like headless chickens when internet is down.
1. Buy zigbee/zwave
2. Prefer things you can flash tasmota if zigbee/zwave is not possible.
2. Maybe use eMudhra for mitm and flash the unsupported devices.
I totally agree, and if you asked consumers, most would care and prefer for their smart home devices to communicate as little as possible with the outside world. And yet the market keeps offering invasive products, the discrepancy is frustrating.
There should be a system like the nutritional information on food and beverage products, as time went by most people read those and choose accordingly, which then incentivize companies to adapt their offering. We could imagine something similar which would define clearly the capabilities of the hardware or software sold, clearly labelled on the physical package or on the online shop with an easy classification for consumers to understand.
I disagree. If you asked any Random Customer they don't care if it's local first. They want it to work immediately with as little set up as possible and they want to access it from their phone.
If they could get away without even having a Wi-Fi router and just use their cellular plan they would. Why? Because there are plenty people who are happy with just whatever internet they get on their cell phone and don't want to spend extra for a router and an ISP
I wish Insteon had gotten more popular, Back in the day it was easy to get development material to write your own software or build your own devices. I really liked how the stuff all had a decent amount of capability on its own, or you could have a computer attached for more advanced automation. I still use a few Insteon things in my house, Still use a few X10 things for that matter. I really wish they had kept up their local support software.
Author here. This is ten years of home automation rules, led by one: nothing core should depend on a vendor's server. Setup core is Tasmota, MQTT and Node-RED on a Pi. I've given this talk a few times and started working on a third for the agentic era. What's the most pointless internet dependency you've found in a device?
:( Your notes are probably more fun to read than the generic AI voice. Your actual notes are fun, but seeing the ~extra cruft from an AI writer in every line irritated me enough to quit before the end.
My personal situation imposes even stricter versions of your #1 and #2:
1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
2. Smart functionality must not remove dumb functionality.
As one example: having a physical switch that controls a light and the switch can be operated by automation is good. Having automation control a light and the switch just tells automation what to do is bad.
This does make things hard sometimes. For instance, your sprinkler controller doesn't pass that bar. In fact the only one I've found so far that has a local API for automation plus full "dumb" on-device control (no Wi-Fi, no app) is RainMachine, and they are gone. If only OpenSprinkler hardware had a touch screen for local UI.
> 1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
This is one of the reasons I love Zigbee, the device network is entirely independent of my computer network, can not directly communicate to the internet in any way, and every device I've put on the network so far can be configured to directly communicate with other devices so basic functionality remains operational even if the controller goes down.
For example, in my living room I have a Lutron Aurora dimmer dial locking a standard switch in the on position, then plugged in to the outlet that switch would normally control is a Leviton dimmer module. Both connect to the network controlled from a PoE Zigbee dongle, but have been directly paired as well so pressing the button on the dial makes it directly tell the dimmer module to turn on, rotation commands are sent direct, etc.
The controller also receives these commands when it's active and can add to the functionality for inputs like double-click, but if it's down the basic functionality still works entirely as a normal person would expect. You walk in to the room and see a knob on a switch plate, you turn the knob and the light brightness increases regardless of the state of the internet, my home server, or even my network as a whole.
The other major advantage compared to Matter/Thread is that it's not IP based so it's impossible for any Zigbee device to ever have a cloud dependency. No matter how much some marketing dingus might want to, it can not be ruined.
I tried to stick to this philosophy, specifically the part about it working even if my local automation server is down, for a long time. But I finally found an automation case where I wanted functionality where I could not simultaneously have the functionality and have the switch continue working when the server was off.
Specifically, I wanted the switch to turn on different lights depending on the time of day. In the evenings in early morning I wanted it to turn on the dimmer floor lamps, and during the day, I wanted it to turn on the brighter Center room light. This was not possible without turning the switch from a light turning on device, to an automation activating device.
I thought really long and hard about if I was worth the trade off, and in the end I decided that my automation server was only likely to be down for significant periods of time if the power was out and the lights weren't working anyways. If I run into a situation where this becomes a problem for me, I'll reconsider my decision. Which is a great thing about the local control. If I make a decision that I don't like I can just change it.
I've bought multiple internet radios over the decades. The demise of them is always its dependency on a remote server which enables setting which stations you want to listen to.
The remote server always goes away after a couple years go by, and the radio is only capable of playing the stations that were set as presets. Then the preset radio stations go offline, or the URLs for them change.
Basically any appliance is completely ridiculous to require an internet connection imo. When are you going to need to use a stove or dishwasher without being home? What value do you actually get from having a smart fridge that you can view analytics about from your phone?
the only useful thing about a smart fridge is whether if it fails.... i hope it would make a noise. One trick i used was a cheap ble temp sensor in the fridge that would report to the BLE adapter of a tasmota device that sends mqtt messages to grafana. then i would get alerts if it was open or something broken. happened a few times!
My non-smart fridge makes annoying noises when the door is open too long, and slightly less annoying noises the first time you open it after a power cut causes it to get too warm (I believe it depends on interior temp when the power comes back on?). It might make noises when it breaks in other ways, that thankfully hasn't become relevant yet
I guess connecting to home automation would be useful for a fridge that's sufficiently out of the way that you might not hear it. But for the fridge in my kitchen the noises emitted by the fridge itself are enough for me
Alexa is really convenient. i still think my rules still follow as long as core systems are still controllable offline. Which I really try to achieve through use of tablet on the wall (local wifi is still offline access in my head)
ev chargers are the worst case of this imo. a lot of them only do the off-peak schedule through the vendor app, so if the cloud goes away you end up charging at peak. on some time-of-use plans that's ~$500 a year for the same car
Mine is based on a vestel evc04, and by default has a cloud option with some company saying "we'll do it, move your energy through us" etc.
You can connect it to any evcc endpoint like a local homeassistant, or simply leave it on all the time.
I'm not happy with guaranteeing high availability on my HA install yet (it's not as simple as my pihole which is just a simple vrrp address over the two hosts) though so I just leave it in "always on" mode, and use the timer on the car to come on at 2310 (offpeak starts at 2300 on my tarrif).
I'd be surprised if a charger is genuinely only available via an cloud service, but from asking my neighbours if it doesn't have "an app" they wouldn't buy it.
I'd rather have an API I could poll/poke for the charger rather than set the charger to connect to me, but alas it doesn't have one.
If they can work without the internet, how TF do I scrape your data and sell it for a hefty profit? I made the equipment cheap so that everyone wants to buy it!
Oh I also have a under-the-table contract with some intelligence community for some backdoors. You know it's a lot more expensive for them to actually send someone to test physical security, than just pay a contractor to sit before the desk collecting data, right? RIGHT??
I'm not really sure what this is doing on HN tbh, as it reads like 2018 entry-level IoT talking points, but it's 2026 now, but regardless of that.
__
I suspect that for resilience reasons alone, we might see a shift towards connecting less stuff to the public internet.
Not because consumers would complain. No one cares about consumers - including consumers themselves.
But because of the threat to the stability of the system, internet connected stuff poses.
The fridge meltdowns are an example of that, but you can equally stun an enemy economy by just messing with the smart lights in people's homes, as it is the people who work.. or don't because they're tired.
How does the WiFi wall switch work? If WiFi goes down you can still click a light on and off? This is tempting as I have to leave all my smart lights on rn but do I really need to rip out all my light switches? Ugh.
Also anyone found the fix to smart bulbs constantly “updating”?
Yes it does, smart switches have buttons that control the relay directly.
Also aside from maintenance there's no reason your WiFi should go down, an inexpensive UPS can keep it up for hours in a power outage. Even if it can't access the outside world, local routing works fine.
I just put devices like that on a wifi without internet access. Occasionally I'll need to grant internet access for setup, and then it goes back to being denied. Can't update if you can't download updates.
not all networking has to be routed publicly. many can still operate locally. the catch is, they want your subscription to them, when your devices are required to route publicly.
everything I buy will work without internet for sure, and all of the above is much better with Home Assistant at the helm controlling things (only issue is the constant updates which you have to keep on top of)
If you accept and thus consented to a computer, or a device with a computer in it, without first verifying you can write to the media of its software, control the boot process, and will have sufficient access to that software, you get what you consented to.
Not sure why people are downvoting you, this is true.
My home automation rules are even simpler: home automation devices are firewalled off the Internet. If something does not work because of this, it gets returned, period. I do my research and only buy Zigbee or WiFi devices that can be hacked, so I haven't had problems so far. I also don't want any "smart" fridge, washing machine, TV, etc.
Unless it's law or AI becomes capable of rooting every device, it will never happen, most hardware gets out of the door with minimally functional software that only covers the immediate business need.
Software stack: if you don't want to spend too much time tinkering with the software, go for something simple like HomeAssistant with nothing else around and you will be just fine. For most people any software is more hassle than they desire, all the extreme customizations are not really needed. If you feel so special, home automation is not that special, not if you want mass adoption and convenience.
The internet is not the weak link, the internet is a security nightmare. You don't want a Chinese guy shut you off because all your Tuya devices can be controlled by them. You don't even want a random hacker to set your fridge to heat, like the recent France incidents.
Also, QR codes as a good UX? I like what you are smoking, it is very effective in disconnecting from reality.
I think a smart home hub of sorts should be something you can install in any home, like a water heater or an internet router. The hub connects to your wifi and manages all of your smart devices. You register your devices with it using a web interface that is only just like configuring a router
The web interface part would be the really complex piece I think. You would have to have some way for devices to tell it what features they have, so it could dynamically produce the appropriate controls per device
I dunno if this is really feasible to actually build but it's one of the only ways I can think that would allow average non-technical people to do this without having to administrate their own hardware and network settings and such
my next iteration i talk about migration to home assistant. at the time i started this process HA was very difficult to use and not flexible enough for me. that has changed.
The amount of RAM sitting in my house unused today is enourmous compared to the amount of RAM I had available 30 years ago. My 10 year old laptop alone has 32G. That's 1000 times as much RAM as I had in my entire house in 1996, and 200,000 times as much as 1986.
In a moment of weakness, I bought a D-Link wireless (wifi) water detector for the sump pit (it was on clearance for $30); it relied on a D-Link Home cloud service (free) that was closed down a few years ago.
Not wanting to toss it, I repurposed a spare Chromebook 14 that I was going to recycle and turned it into a Alpine monitor for the water detector, which I'm powering from the Chromebook's USB port (if power is lost in a rainstorm, I need to know about it before the sump pit fills up).
An immediate issue was that the D-Link firmware tried to "phone home" every 24 hours and would drop from the local network, since the server was kaput, and I had no clue what response it was expecting from the server to keep it alive. Solution; "reboot" the unit by interrupting USB power (with a Pico and MOSFET) every 23 hours. There's no question that home automation should work without the internet.
https://github.com/morluto/rea
https://rea.tools
https://github.com/AI4AIResearch/Awesome-REA
https://awesomerea.org/
Do we just need to establish bounties per cloud service target to reverse engineer and publish a spec, copyleft code, and reference architecture? Maybe https://www.fulu.org/ could host the results? Like OpenAI and Anthropic brute forcing math proofs, we can brute force interoperability (imho).
https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties
(think in systems)
Anyone made any progress on rooting it?
I only use "Local Polling" or better, and highly prefer "Local Push".
- buy the cheapest hardware that gets the job done
- ignore negative reviews that are software related
- upon receipt of devices, ask claude for local-first cfw
- have fun for a few hours acting as a meat proxy
- boom, cheap local-only smart home is done
Use a SBC or nas for home assistant. This process worked for me for switches, a thermostat, an air quality monitor, a thermometer, and a window fan.
Would’ve paid ~2.5x for hardware that had the appropriate local-first capability out of the box. Instead this all fit within an existing $20 subscription to an inference provider. DS 4.1 running locally was on track too just more slowly.
Custom firmware?
1. buy the Zigbee version
2. boom, local only smart home is done
I guess if there's a device that's actually wi-fi only then I'll have to go through your flow but so far there's been no need.
I found a few wifi and bluetooth devices that were cheaper than or didn’t have a zigbee equivalent. Window fan and air monitor specifically.
I didn’t do an exhaustive market search, just sharing my anecdotal experience. It’s a great feeling to be able to focus on hardware capabilities and price, then will the software you envision into existence via AI accelerated RE.
These are cheap chinese adware driven sensors. Security is not their priority.
I managed to get to:
The cloud is the weak link
- No internet, no problem. ...
---
If you are writing for other machines to ingest it, whatever. But if you are writing for people it for me at least signals that you don't really care about the message that you want to get across, and are fine with a watered down LLM average.
If you're personally getting a headache from reading AI writing, all this does is transfer that headache to the rest of us. Thanks. /s
I will not be happy because we will be lost as a culture when we give up on this.
Smart home devices should not freeze up whenever internet is down. A device like Google Nest should have the minimum decency to allow you to interact with it via local Wifi (which continues un-interrupted). It is fine if half the functionality doesn't work. It is fine if the "AI" doesn't work, but at least allow me to fcking change the temperature manually
Same thing with devices like Google Wifi which freezes up or run hot loops like headless chickens when internet is down.
There should be a system like the nutritional information on food and beverage products, as time went by most people read those and choose accordingly, which then incentivize companies to adapt their offering. We could imagine something similar which would define clearly the capabilities of the hardware or software sold, clearly labelled on the physical package or on the online shop with an easy classification for consumers to understand.
If they could get away without even having a Wi-Fi router and just use their cellular plan they would. Why? Because there are plenty people who are happy with just whatever internet they get on their cell phone and don't want to spend extra for a router and an ISP
My personal situation imposes even stricter versions of your #1 and #2:
1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
2. Smart functionality must not remove dumb functionality.
As one example: having a physical switch that controls a light and the switch can be operated by automation is good. Having automation control a light and the switch just tells automation what to do is bad.
This does make things hard sometimes. For instance, your sprinkler controller doesn't pass that bar. In fact the only one I've found so far that has a local API for automation plus full "dumb" on-device control (no Wi-Fi, no app) is RainMachine, and they are gone. If only OpenSprinkler hardware had a touch screen for local UI.
This is one of the reasons I love Zigbee, the device network is entirely independent of my computer network, can not directly communicate to the internet in any way, and every device I've put on the network so far can be configured to directly communicate with other devices so basic functionality remains operational even if the controller goes down.
For example, in my living room I have a Lutron Aurora dimmer dial locking a standard switch in the on position, then plugged in to the outlet that switch would normally control is a Leviton dimmer module. Both connect to the network controlled from a PoE Zigbee dongle, but have been directly paired as well so pressing the button on the dial makes it directly tell the dimmer module to turn on, rotation commands are sent direct, etc.
The controller also receives these commands when it's active and can add to the functionality for inputs like double-click, but if it's down the basic functionality still works entirely as a normal person would expect. You walk in to the room and see a knob on a switch plate, you turn the knob and the light brightness increases regardless of the state of the internet, my home server, or even my network as a whole.
The other major advantage compared to Matter/Thread is that it's not IP based so it's impossible for any Zigbee device to ever have a cloud dependency. No matter how much some marketing dingus might want to, it can not be ruined.
Specifically, I wanted the switch to turn on different lights depending on the time of day. In the evenings in early morning I wanted it to turn on the dimmer floor lamps, and during the day, I wanted it to turn on the brighter Center room light. This was not possible without turning the switch from a light turning on device, to an automation activating device.
I thought really long and hard about if I was worth the trade off, and in the end I decided that my automation server was only likely to be down for significant periods of time if the power was out and the lights weren't working anyways. If I run into a situation where this becomes a problem for me, I'll reconsider my decision. Which is a great thing about the local control. If I make a decision that I don't like I can just change it.
Unfortunately, almost no lan connected devices sport such an interface.
The remote server always goes away after a couple years go by, and the radio is only capable of playing the stations that were set as presets. Then the preset radio stations go offline, or the URLs for them change.
I guess connecting to home automation would be useful for a fridge that's sufficiently out of the way that you might not hear it. But for the fridge in my kitchen the noises emitted by the fridge itself are enough for me
You can connect it to any evcc endpoint like a local homeassistant, or simply leave it on all the time.
I'm not happy with guaranteeing high availability on my HA install yet (it's not as simple as my pihole which is just a simple vrrp address over the two hosts) though so I just leave it in "always on" mode, and use the timer on the car to come on at 2310 (offpeak starts at 2300 on my tarrif).
I'd be surprised if a charger is genuinely only available via an cloud service, but from asking my neighbours if it doesn't have "an app" they wouldn't buy it.
I'd rather have an API I could poll/poke for the charger rather than set the charger to connect to me, but alas it doesn't have one.
Oh I also have a under-the-table contract with some intelligence community for some backdoors. You know it's a lot more expensive for them to actually send someone to test physical security, than just pay a contractor to sit before the desk collecting data, right? RIGHT??
__
I suspect that for resilience reasons alone, we might see a shift towards connecting less stuff to the public internet.
Not because consumers would complain. No one cares about consumers - including consumers themselves. But because of the threat to the stability of the system, internet connected stuff poses.
The fridge meltdowns are an example of that, but you can equally stun an enemy economy by just messing with the smart lights in people's homes, as it is the people who work.. or don't because they're tired.
Also anyone found the fix to smart bulbs constantly “updating”?
Also aside from maintenance there's no reason your WiFi should go down, an inexpensive UPS can keep it up for hours in a power outage. Even if it can't access the outside world, local routing works fine.
You were warned.
If you accept and thus consented to a computer, or a device with a computer in it, without first verifying you can write to the media of its software, control the boot process, and will have sufficient access to that software, you get what you consented to.
And, you deserve it.
My home automation rules are even simpler: home automation devices are firewalled off the Internet. If something does not work because of this, it gets returned, period. I do my research and only buy Zigbee or WiFi devices that can be hacked, so I haven't had problems so far. I also don't want any "smart" fridge, washing machine, TV, etc.
Something anyone can use.
Also, QR codes as a good UX? I like what you are smoking, it is very effective in disconnecting from reality.
The web interface part would be the really complex piece I think. You would have to have some way for devices to tell it what features they have, so it could dynamically produce the appropriate controls per device
I dunno if this is really feasible to actually build but it's one of the only ways I can think that would allow average non-technical people to do this without having to administrate their own hardware and network settings and such
I'm talking about a fully built piece of hardware that comes in every house like plumbing and wiring does
https://x.com/home_assistant/status/2115496455876038961
Thanks for sharing this, I had never heard of home assistant before
The future of smart devices is a local LLM running on every single one.