This content originally appeared on dbushell.com and was authored by dbushell.com
My “smart home” has gotten progressively dumber.
Can you remember a time before the AI-pocalypse? The tech trend of yesteryear was to give everything with a digital pulse an IP address and a dubious 2.4GHz radio. The “Internet of Things” is what they called it. What a heap of garbage.
Plugs and TVs
Today I decommissioned a bunch of smart plugs that were starting to fail. With those dead I no longer need the MQTT server I had running in a container. At one point I went full Prometheus and Grafana charting the energy usage of my “smart” TV. Who would have guessed that my TV uses exactly the amount of energy the sticker on the back says it would use! In all the years of using these plugs I never once turned them off remotely.
The process of flashing plug firmware was a fun project at least. I had to configure a Raspberry Pi as a Wi-Fi access point to fake a remote server for over-the-air updates. The plugs thought they were phoning home, they had no idea they were being flashed with custom compiled Tasmota open source goodness. Take that!
As for the “smart” TV, I realised that disconnecting it from the internet and refusing to agree to the EULA actually improved the user experience. The “features” I’m locked out of are dashboard ads and slower start-up times. What a shame. The OLED has some burn-in but I’m scared to buy a new TV. They’ve replaced the “smart” branding with “AI” buzz.
Buttons and Lights
The idea of smart devices was exciting. It had promise. So naturally Big Tech ruined the whole thing. Instead of open protocols and local first networking, we got proprietary cloud-based subscription services that were not smart enough without a “smart hub”.
My worst smart home purchase was a Logitech button. I chose it because as hideous branding stamps go, this was the most subtle.
It’s a big boy button at a colossal 60×60mm. It requires a hub, of course, and an Android app to program it — once you’ve logged in. They turned off the server. So my button is forever programmed to toggle a single lightbulb at a specific IP. Why this process needs a hub is beyond me. I know the button speaks to the light directly. All the hub does is ping a remote Logitech server every minute. If that ping fails the hub blinks like HAL 9000 and disables the button functionality.
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
I setup a firewalled VLAN just for this hub. It lives in its own lonely universe free to report home to the mothership on the emptiness all around it. I learned a lot about networking in OpenWRT and later Opnsense during this process.
The lightbulb the button toggles is one of five LIFX branded smart bulbs I bought for an eye-watering £50 each. I was dazzled by the rainbow colours these LEDs could radiate. After lighting up my office like a Christmas disco on day one, I set them to a warmish ~2700K and have never reconfigured them since.
Mercifully, the bulbs are hub-less, communicate without relaying to the far-east and back, and are “open” enough, i.e. unencrypted, to integrate with Home Assistant. They work a generous 90% of the time. The other 10% I use the physical wall switches to turn off and literally reboot the light. What an age we live in.
Not all Waste
Although this whole “smart home” bubble has been nothing but e-waste, I have personally found many opportunities to learn new tech skills. It led me down the self-hosted rabbit hole. I got proficient with Docker. I coded software to control USB devices via Raspberry Pi (warning: JavaScript). I’ve learnt a great deal about Linux and networking. I taught myself web sockets and some Swift building a macOS/web app. The whole smart home journey has spawned many worthwhile side projects.
I also own an oven that has an app. I can program the oven, but for obvious reasons, I have to physically turn it on. The app reports the current temperature whilst heating up, which is nice. Why the oven’s digital display cannot show the exact temperature is not explained in the manual.
The stupid button hub has proved useful as an early warning for ISP outages. If I wake up and see the telltale blinking behind my bedside table, I know the internet is down; might as well sleep in.
This content originally appeared on dbushell.com and was authored by dbushell.com
dbushell.com | Sciencx (2024-09-19T10:00:00+00:00) Dumb Home. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/09/19/dumb-home/
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