Belkin Bricks Most Wemo Smart Home Devices, Again Demonstrating You Don’t Own What You Buy
Belkin Bricks Most Wemo Smart Home Devices, Again Demonstrating You Don’t Own What You Buy
The Home Assistant community has a good reputation of routing around that kind of bullshit. There's enough users that I predict a homegrown module will pop up in the next few months.
I love my Ratgdo garage door unit, routing around the bullshit proprietary LiftMaster APIs that want you to download some stupid phone app. No, fuck you. I hard-wire that shit into my garage door opener and get an API that works like a dream.
Sometimes, trying to integrate smart home devices can be a pain, but the Home Assistant core makes the integration much much easier. Please don't like shit like this to detract from a future smart home project for your house. I would encourage you to just start it, if you're wanting to get into it and willing to learn some things.
Why do you need your house connected to the internet at all? Honest question; I'm kind of not understanding the hype around connecting everything in life to the internet.
It's not really "your house connected to the Internet" as much as just connecting it together to a central hub. My lights dim and turn off at set times of the day using scenes, including a more dynamic sunrise/sunset time. If it's stormy weather during the day, the front porch light comes on. I have a few colored lights that change colors with the seasons. Home Assistant brings down the garage door at night, if I forget. If the garage sensor is tripped, the garage light comes on. I have dumber motion sensors for locations where it makes sense, like pantries or closets.
I can control all of my interfaces from my phone. It can hook into local cameras, so that everything is centralized. HA can hook into any of the voice assistant systems, like Alexa. There are so many little conditions and automated switches I could create, based on either outside stimuli (like the weather) or internal sensors.
I remember my parents got some Philips lightbulbs years ago, I set it up for them. They never used any of the functionality after the first month. They were just normal white lightbulbs that got turned off by a light switch.
Realistically, most of this stuff is just an excuse to harvest people’s data and up charge them for appliances.
It’s fine for hobbyists who can set up all this stuff properly and find use to it, but the vast vast majority of people who have this stuff aren’t hobbyists, won’t set it up properly or keep it up to date, and will never actually find utility in it. It’ll just sit there doing the same thing as a normal equivalent for twice the price and while being a massive liability.
One of the many reasons I will never integrate smart home stuff into my house.
My light switches still work because they're powered by my finger instead of the "cloud".
Meh, I have a crap ton of smart home stuff and zero of it relies on the cloud. I think I only have one switch that even has the ability to "phone home" and I've blocked its access to the internet. It's like anything else, you just have to be smart about what you buy, and the good stuff has a higher learning curve.
It is very possible to have a full smart home setup with zero dependence on Teh Cloudz, with fallback to physical dumb switches when something goes wrong, but from what I've seen it's far less effort to have one that depends on external stuff