What do you guys think of the idea of smart homes? I could make a basic setup using https://home-assistant.io to control my home temperature and lighting; the tools for doing this are everywhere nowadays and implementation doesn’t seem too horrific anymore.

But setting aside what I “can” do, is this something that I “should” do? How can a person implement this without connecting any devices to the internet?

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Best comment here. Smart home is lot of fun if you plan it out in advance. I jumped in with a few random purchases, but trying to cobble everything together can be difficult.

    Oh and avoid Google at all costs. It’s flashy and neat, but in 6 months they’ll cut support and you’ll have a brick. Even my Nest thermostat loses functionality fairly regularly just because reasons.

    • whofearsthenight@kbin.social
      0·
      2 years ago

      I’ll also toss out that if you privacy and non-annoyance are your goals with an out of the box voice assistant, the only real option these days is a HomePod. I built my smart home with combination of Echos throughout the house, and I pretty much regret it now. I wasn’t as worried about privacy, but these things are so fucking annoying these days. “Start a timer for 5 minutes.” “Okay, do you want to play some bullshit trivia game while you’re timer is going?” No, never. Ever. I mean, at least she’ll still turn the lights on without spouting back something dumb, but that’s just about it. Probably what I’ll be doing now is still using the Alexholes as a speaker target with the mute button on all of the time (better spotify integration) and start replacing with siri balls.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
        1·
        2 years ago

        Yeah we went with google homes early on and from what I hear they aren’t nearly as annoying - but Google is already starting to hint at dropping support for earlier models. I’ll look into HomePod, if I did any new ones I’d use something self hosted. I bet at somepoint we’ll be able to flash them.

      • DrWeevilJammer@lm.rdbt.no
        1·
        2 years ago

        Have you looked into what Home Assistant has been doing with voice lately? This is what I’ll be using to finally turn my Echos into muted speaker targets:

        https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/using_voice_assistants_overview/

        You can even turn old analog phones into HA “microphones” - just pick up the BatPhone/hamburger/banana phone, say “It’s movie time” and hang up, and HA will convert your voice to text and run your “movie time” automation.

        It’s not a jetpack, but it certainly FEELS like living in the future…