A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb.
Self-hosted is the only acceptable alternative here where even the raspberry pi has more processing power to run hundreds of homes.
A simple service to route mobile apps through the potential NAT is the only thing the cloud should be needed for. Obviously downloading "drivers"/configurations are a valid user case but that's part of the setup-process.
Not saying that everyone should tinkle with a RPI but it is trivial to create a more user friendly device. The fact that Amazon, Google, Apple etc. don't even attempt this is just a consequence of them being hell bent on making money from crap.
A raspberry pi has more processing power than's needed to search and store email. ... etc etc
This trope is absolute bullshit. What people want is for stuff to work and, if stuff doesn't work, for it to be someone else's fault and/or be easy to fix.
Self-hosting fails massively at the second criterion there. Right now, if a cellphone breaks, you can just get a new one and your contacts, messages, apps, etc all sync back to it. Done, you're back on your feet.
If you have self-hosted email or smart-home-stuff, the failure modes are much worse, and you're far less likely to have someone else to blame.
Also, a raspberry pi does not have enough power to do good voice recognition, not to the level of siri/alexa/google.
It also doesn't have enough storage to cache all your music, videos you may wish to play on the TV, etc, so some external cloud integration will be needed regardless.
Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora.
> it is trivial to create a more user friendly device
This is obviously false or else devices like this would have been trivial to make and seen some success... but things like sandstorm.io, yunohost, and others have been incredibly complex projects and have not really succeeded. It's clearly not trivial since those people have collectively thrown millions of dollars and dozens of man-years at the problem with no glimmer of hope.
The closest we have to success in this space, I'd say, is NASs which ship owncloud... and those have not caught in for the average household at all.
It's understandable and acceptable that my message that I'm sending to somewhere else doesn't work unless my link to somewhere else is working.
It's not understandable nor acceptable if my appliance within my home with no inherent external dependencies doesn't work unless that link to somewhere else is working.
> This is obviously false or else devices like this would have been trivial to make and seen some success...
Rubbish. There's simply more economic incentive for companies to create devices which siphon off usage data for them to sell.
Are you really arguing that it’s not easier for the company supporting these products to deploy their software as a service in the cloud?
I’ll buy cynicism around the data collection aspects of these things but one only need to look to the desktop application marketplace to see the broader trend.
I’ve supported both self hosted & cloud hosted products for money. I know which one I prefer to work on and I’m surprised anyone in tech would disagree.
All of these solutions I've seen still have manual override.
If my nest isn't connected to the internet, I can still go over to it and turn it and the heat will come on (or go off). If my smoke detectors can't talk to the internet, they'll still work like a regular smoke detector. And even control my Nest through it's own mesh network (If I want them to). I can't speak from experience, but I'd bet that my garage door remote will still operate the door even without a wifi network to sell my open/close times to the highest bidder.
Regardless, I don't think Craftsman is interested in my garage door habits; they're interested in selling me a new garage door that I otherwise wouldn't think I'd need to upgrade. Smart home functionality is just one way to get that sale in. And it apparently works.
> Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora.
None of these things will kill you if they happen not to work or have serious drawbacks.
I think the proposition of death is a bit of a stretch. Definitely inconvenient, though.
FWIW, dumb appliances could have done the same thing.
A furnace that stops working in the dead of winter while away can still burst your pipes if they get cold enough, a broken appliance (and an operator unwillingly to change the situation) can still cause someone to freeze the death or suffer from a deadly heatstroke.
This particular issue cited first probably has mostly to do with the fact that nest really wants you to have a 24V power source for the thermostat (A "C" or "Common Wire"). They've figured out how to make it work without for most systems, but that relies on an internal battery.
Sure, there are still other failure modes for a furnace and you can still freeze to death without a Nest. But now you can encounter similar situations because of a software bug.
Wasn’t that C wire issue causing Nests to continuously turn on the furnace causing homes to get too hot?
Self-hosting doesn't impose a ban on having the ability to create an optional account on the manufacturer (or your own!) servers and to do an automatic cloud backup of that config file.
Spotify is a good example of something that could work identically to what it does today self-hosted. No change anywhere, no extra setup at all, except for the fact that storing the entire spotify library is impractical.
When I talked about a more user-friendly device I meant something of a smart-home controller. Not a general purpose script that glues together some open source packages that each require a weekend of setup from an enthusiast... No, that none of those has taken off doesn't surprise me the least (that doesn't mean they are useful or that I could see myself using one, but it is not for average Joe).
In rural Vermont, which is clearly not where most people live, we lose power for hours or days (or even weeks) every year. I imagine there are many communities throughout the world with similar types of power interruptions. Anything that is "mission critical" for survival (heat, water, and the ability to enter our home) must be as reliable and robust as possible. The idea of replacing the perfectly functional metal-key technology, for example, with some door-lock device that depended on a temperamental electrical grid would be a strategically unwise decision. Big risks, little rewards. What is the fail-safe plan for these sorts of smart home devices when there's an earthquake or hurricane or something?
It should be totally possible to run a door-lock controller with minimal power consumption to make it last months on a relatively small battery without constant connection to the grid. You could even harvest energy from the door knob to make it completely independent from external power.
Of course the average "smart" lock is unlikely to be engineered with such considerations in mind and I doubt that the extra effort would pay off financially, but it isn't completely impossible.
The combination locks on individual rack cabinets at a data center I used to visit frequently were powered by the rotation of the front dial. Basically, you twisted the dial back and forth several times to charge it up, then pressed the buttons on the keypad, and a green LED lit and the bar retracted (or else a red LED lit and nothing happened).
This allowed them to (a) not run a power wire to every door; (b) use a long (12 digits) passcode; (c) reprogram passcodes in a few seconds; (d) immediately give feedback on whether you had typed in the right code or not.
IIRC they cost upwards of $500 each. Given that there was already a 24/7 human guard to check you in and out, I'm not sure that they made a smart decision over physical metal keys.
Meanwhile, I have a non-networked, non-wireless electronic combo lock on the front door of my house. It's not hackable without physical contact; if you want to break in, smashing a window is a better route. It's powered by a 9-volt battery and lasts about 4 years per battery.
The big win is never forgetting to carry a key, with a smaller bonus of being able to give friends individually revocable passcodes.
Personally I don't see much use in smart locks for my home, but if I did have one I imagine I'd still use a regular key and carry it with me all the time. The smart lock could still provide benefits such as allowing visiting friends to enter without key etc.
Being able to remotely control and monitor the heat and water is awesome for the vacation house, but that is only in addition to using the physical knobs. It should not increase the risk (but in practice the security in such devices are terrible and you need to be somewhat knowledgeable to even assess the risk introduced).
> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb.
You are completely correct. But 99% of people don't know / can't be bothered to host their own. Googlezonbook will create a near frictionless experience and suddenly you'll need an internet connection to open your front door.
A self-hosted solution is easier to setup than a cloud-setup... The only difference is that you don't need internet access.
You still need to connect the power cord and connect to ethernet or wifi (end regardless of whether it is a cloud device or self-hosted device you can configure wifi from your smartphone like the chromecast).
A smart-home-controller is a physical device. You buy it, you provide power and connect ethernet and configure wifi. Now, either the controller relies on the cloud or it doesn't.
If it is completely reliant on the cloud you will have to muck about with registering, if it is completely self-hosted you don't. Simple as that.
I keep thinking about a future retirement business: a mom and pop electronics hardware store, stocking the widest variety of maker goodies and serious bench tools, the kind that are very much try before you buy, if a private buyer - in my ideal world - and my USP would be providing a RPi distro I'll while away my final years polishing the autoconfig for all the home automation kit I can manage to disconnect from the cloud.
EDITED REMOVING A REVERIE TO MY PROFILE, my apologies, often carried away when I'm enjoying the topics here, it's not my wish to spoil the flow as I almost did.
This said, I will surely be delighted to hear from anyone regarding my rather wistful wishes, to which I applied months of health enforced downtime last year. I still think the qualified opportunity isn't a total wash and would be willing to invest in a no tears no recriminations study, later in the year.
About the necessity of a WAN and firmware etc updating your home automation system: are we not in cities now at sufficient density where peer to peer hops in a as hoc network, has become a technical possibility that maybe lacks a sufficient motivation?
> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb.
As opposed to ordinary users running their own services?
The only reason I don't see more routers with default passwords is that people will use whatever comcast and the like provide to them, and that provider will randomize passwords.
If people cannot even configure their router, how are they going to configure self-hosted solutions?
I think this is why we see hubs in this space. Like Insteon, etc. AFAIK, these allow for a local network to be created so that control/connection can still happen at a local level. If that's not the case then why the hell am I required to connect all my switches/outlets to a hub?
It makes total sense to go with a local solution like yours, however when all the control is done through the cloud (http://home.nest.com, Siri, Alexa), it kinda negates the usefulness of it, except for momentary internet connection loss. And it makes it 12x more complicated for the Average Joe ("What's a Raspberry Pie?", "Local network configurations?", "I don't even know my router's password...").
I explicitly said that the RPI wasn't suitable... But listed it as an example of a way too powerful device that is still cheap. Just to emphasize that you don't need expensive hardware.
Yes, but the SD card may have a short life if the system writes a lot on it - so far that is the common failure mode of RPi, which are otherwise reliable.
Various smart features should fail safe anyway, if that is true then "reliable enough" doesn't have to be all that high a bar. Of course most people won't put up with rebooting their house once a week, so it isn't that low of a bar either.
> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb.
It probably already relies on the “electric cloud” and perhaps the “ gas cloud” already so what makes a dependency on a “computing cloud”any different?
Chance of my house having a working electricity supply for the next 10 years, free from major defects and security holes, given that I pay my bills and live in a major metropolitan area: 99.99%
Chance of a Revolv IOT Home Hub working for the next 5 years: 0.000% this has literally already been shut down.
No disagreement with you, but note that electricity used to be that way everywhere and still is in some places. People adapt their level of technology dependence around it. Over time reliability increases dramatically. Likewise early smart phones used crummy network capabilities, but a feedback mechanism drove improvement in the network which drove increased dependence which drove improvements in the network... the same will happen on the home networks.
It's not like we'll all wake up Jan 1 2019 and have nothing but cloud-connected home appliances. It'll be an iterative process, and slower than phone/VCR adoption because fridges and the like are slowly-replaced so-called "white goods".
Cloud IS dumb. That's why it works. Most people don't know how their toaster works, let alone a Raspberry Pi. They just want their home automation to work.
You can't troubleshoot problems in every single person's home, but you can troubleshoot problems in the cloud.
"Most people in the UK have an electric kettle, but that's not true in the USA"
This has two causes: the prevalence of tea and the availability of 220V 10A kettles in the UK vs 115V 13A kettles in the States. Almost double the power means a boil in little more than half the time, making the electric kettle insanely useful.
New kitchens in the States generally have 20A outlets[1] so why won't anybody sell me a 115V 18A kettle? Make one for me, I will give you lots of money! The fact that it will have a funny plug is a feature to help you sell it by emphasizing its uniqueness and help you sell it, not an obstacle!
Maybe because 20A is absolutely nothing to fuck with and while it's great for an electric hob since it's probably hard wired by an electrician, the concept of a kettle using 20 amps is terrifying to me.
I can't say I've ever heard of any issues. In a British plug, the contacts are mechanically hidden until the earth pin has already made contact. There's also a fuse in the plug itself that prevents each appliance from drawing too much power.
Every time i go to north america I'm bemused by the time it takes a kettle to boil. To be fair though most of the people I talk to just put a pot of filter coffee on instead of using a kettle so vOv
I have read two anecdotes online, but would it be possible to order an outlet or 'socket' from the UK Amazon, along w/ a kettle, and wire it into its own dedicated 20A 220v US circuit?
Electrical code becomes an issue; afaik the NEC doesn't have provision for UK plugs, and you'd have to wire it up with both legs of your residential service. That's a layer cake of failed inspection. You may not care, but any future home buyer might, and your insurance company very well may too, should your house ever burn.
My issue with smart homes is that they seem to provide few tangible benefits compared to earlier inventions, such as those that are mentioned in the article. An electric whisk will save you several minutes if you're whipping up some cream (more if you're old or disabled), and there are practically no disadvantages. If it breaks, you can simply use a manual whisk.
Smart locks, smart lighting, smart ovens etc may save you seconds at best, and redundancy (code/physical key access, backup light switches etc) are much less obvious, and may make the product less aesthetically appealing, not to mention the privacy/security issues that have been plaguing the IoT market. Perhaps we are, as the author suggests, yet to discover the areas where smart devices will eventually become successful and ubiquitous, but using his approach of finding such areas fails me.
I used to be skeptical about that as well. However, in the Netherlands, where paying by card is ubiquitous, we recently got the ability to simply hold those cards near the machine (contactless) rather than inserting it and having to enter a code. Saves you mere seconds, yet it's a massively better experience that quickly saw mass adoption.
Having used contactless cards, I'm not sure if I agree with the comparison. Contactless cards don't save you just seconds, since people in front of you in the line use them also. It quickly adds up to minutes every time you make a purchase. This type of benefit can't be directly inferred from smart locks or smart lighting.
> My issue with smart homes is that they seem to provide few tangible benefits compared to earlier inventions
> Smart locks, smart lighting, smart ovens etc may save you seconds at best
It's not necessarily about saving seconds but making these things easier to use. I liked the article's example of using a smart oven because everyone I know has a digital programmable oven but none of them ever use the extra features. I love setting up my oven to cook something while I'm gone, timed to finish around the time I'll arrive home. Make that feature easier to discover / use and perhaps more people will experience the same joy.
I've found smart lighting to be far more practical than it sounds at first glance. I can't get too excited about having lights do things when people come or go, tho I do use those features... but having bulbs individually controllable lets me create "scenes" to provide the ideal lighting for the activity taking place. My TV Viewing scene turns off all the bulbs that reflect on the screen and dim the rest -- a feat that I could not accomplish without re-wiring every fixture in the room, adding dimmers, etc. For the kids at night we turn off most of their bulbs but have a few color-changing bulbs that turn red and go dim as night lights. Etc.
And speaking of kids, when Alexa says it's time to shut off the electronics and go do some chore they actually go do it without the whining and complaining!
> Perhaps we are, as the author suggests, yet to discover the areas where smart devices will eventually become successful and ubiquitous, but using his approach of finding such areas fails me.
IoT today is like the tablet market pre-Ipad. Eventually, a big company (maybe like Ikea, their new smart bulbs are very good and cheap) will figure out a proper skookum IoT thing that actually solves a real problem.
I can see a smart lock being quite useful, though I don't trust any current implementations. I use my front door multiple times a day, have to unlock it first to go out then lock it up again. I can't let my girlfriend in without me being there. When it's cold or I have things in my hands, fishing my keys out of my pocket becomes downright difficult. Taking out the trash involves navigating three doors and two locks, while carrying garbage - I'd love to eliminate even just one of those. And if I could not bring my keys with me while running, I'd be happy. I grew up in a place where we never locked the house or cars.
But the lock doesn't have to be super smart to fix these things, or at least most of them.
An electric whisk isn't any faster than a good egg beater for whipping cream, in my experience.
Another good example is electric windows in a car. They're slower than manual cranks, break down far more often, yet electric windows have become ubiquitous in cars.
And when you have kids the utility of electric windows becomes obvious.
But the point is that this is the same as the IOT market: at first glance the drawbacks seem to be worse than the benefits so there are lots of naysayers. Yet there are benefits, and stuff sells.
> And when you have kids the utility of electric windows becomes obvious.
How?
My kid is too young to open car windows as it is but I grew up with parents who owned a car without electric windows, and the next version of their car had electric windows (both Saab 900). I could open the back window in both cars, but only slightly (mechanically very limited; see pictures).
Now, kids can't control the front seat windows either way. If you close the back seat windows while they hold their hand out, it gets crushed. If you tell your child they may open or must close the window then you give them responsibility. If they don't take that responsibility you can act upon it with consequences (I suggest minor consequences at first sight though). So I think it very much depends on the implementation of the back seat windows.
As for IoT/smarthome market, when Nest (= Google) acquired Revolv they disabled the $300 hardware soon afterwards [1]. That serves as a warning what cloud computing does for you when the overlords decide they no longer want to support your product. At the very least you need an offline backup. Same with smarthome depending on an Internet connection or wireless connectivity (I wonder if vulnerable to KRACK, too).
> [W]hen I go into my bathroom, do I want the light turned on? The answer is always yes, so why do I have to press the light switch?
I have some battery-powered PIR LED lights in my bathroom that turn on automatically. Very useful (especially at night), they don't need to be connected to the internet, and you can buy them right now.
This is an interesting article in what respects the making of an important question: will this step simplify anything? I usually think that most "smart" solutions are gimmicks for true believers. I am not a technophobe or a luddite, but sometimes the old fashioned, manual solution is the best. Sometimes I think people confuse practical with lazy.
For example, automating an irrigation/fertilization system in our small backyard garden for those summer days we're away seems a pretty good idea. But, at least for me, caring for a garden asks for a little more that keeping it alive automatically. Of course, that not maybe the case for many people and this is a grey area. But why automate, say, the toilet flush or soap dispenser unless you're in a hospital or such environment?
Many of these solutions sound like the next startup pushing something in the hopes of leveraging a hype into profit.
And I also find it a little uncanny that this kind of articles make no mention of security or privacy concerns.
I find it weird that the metaphor here is that smart devices will become as ubiquituous as electric peelers, which I have never seen in my life :-? I still peel my fruit by hand - if that - and I have never seen anyone do otherwise
The author never mentioned an electric peeler. The author talked about people using a peeler rather than a knife to peel fruit. (ie. the peeler is a "smart knife").
"Many of the things that get a connection or become 'smart' in some way will seem silly to us, just as many things that got 'electrified' would seem silly to our grandparents - tell them that you have a button to adjust the mirrors on your car, or a machine to chop vegetables, and they'd think you were soft in the head, but that's how the deployment of the technology happened, and how it will happen again."
There is a relevant difference though. The button to adjust the mirrors in my car carry no significant disadvantages, other than a very nebulous and easily-dischargeable moral hazard. (That is, even if you are worried about the "laziness" of using a button to set your mirrors, you can easily negate this simply by using the time or effort saved on some other worthy goal; even my great-grandpa couldn't really argue with that.)
But a lot of these "smart" devices carry several non-trivial disadvantages: Almost every one of them is actively spying on you; a non-trivial number of them are smart for the sole purpose of spying on you because there is no other current economic reason for the device to be smart. They generally add a dependency to an external cloud service, which in many cases has a shorter expected life span than the device itself. I'd submit that corporations would be far less enthusiastic about "smart devices" if they were not planning on abandoning them after a couple of years, and instead had to book a 10-20 year liability on to the books to account for future support, even just security updates for any network-attached devices that don't hook to a "cloud". They add interface complexity to what is often a relatively simple device, at least prior to its smartification. Some people may love their "smart lightswitches" but there's just no way to beat the light switch in terms of complexity.
I don't think the "you're just the old fogey of the future" argument here, along with frankly being a bit audience-hostile, works. I'd submit as further evidence for this that a lot of us who are most worried about all the smart devices and most resistant are the neophiles who have been surfing the cutting edge for a long time. I've been a neophile for a long time, and I can present evidence that I'm still a neophile in other contexts, but whoa, nelly, I'm not filling my house with this stuff. Even my phone and I have an uneasy relationship at times.
(I used to be excited about the thought of having a home robot for various tasks. But now I can expect that home robot to be hooked to the cloud, and literally spying on everything its sensors can get at, which is everything in my house, and turning the full "nudging" power of every company involved into manipulating me and sucking dollars out of my wallet with every scuzzy trick anyone has ever thought up. It'll bring the non-ad-blocked browser experience into the real world. I'm much less excited now. Perhaps I'll be able to afford to pay extra for the ones that don't do that, but we're still talking a social problem here for those who can't.)
Let me end with a re-iteration of the fact that the whole industry excitement about "smart" is almost certainly entirely predicated on those industry's fully-justified belief that they can toss a product out into the world, and abandon it the instant it ceases to be useful for milking their userbase of advertising dollars, which is "immediately" for some things like light bulbs. If the industry had to account for long-term support, the industries would be singing a completely different tune... how could a smart lightbulb carrying 10- or 20-year liabilities, often with a non-trivial black swan chance (think Mirai here) of requiring very swift and very serious reworking of the firmware, possibly compete with a dumb lightbulb where the companies only carry very calculable and relatively brief warrantee obligations? There's a non-trivial way in which this excitement about smart devices is predicated on screwing customers naive enough to buy these things.
Self-hosted is the only acceptable alternative here where even the raspberry pi has more processing power to run hundreds of homes.
A simple service to route mobile apps through the potential NAT is the only thing the cloud should be needed for. Obviously downloading "drivers"/configurations are a valid user case but that's part of the setup-process.
Not saying that everyone should tinkle with a RPI but it is trivial to create a more user friendly device. The fact that Amazon, Google, Apple etc. don't even attempt this is just a consequence of them being hell bent on making money from crap.