I don’t disagree that wi-fi within the home has potential, but home automation just cannot be cloud dependent. Things have to happen instantaneously and also work when there is no Internet connectivity.
I’m fine using cloud for home assistant intelligence, geofencing, getting data/news/etc., but when it comes to turning on the overhead light as soon as I enter the hallway, or sounding an alarm when someone smashes a window in the middle of the night, requiring anything off-premises to respond just isn’t practical.
The latency to the cloud and back for control is less than a second. That could be a problem for industrial process control, but is not significant to a home consumer.
I’m using Alexa to control several home devices with the cloud… it’s pretty instantaneous. I can’t think of anything where faster response would make a difference.
If your focus is voice control using Alexa or similar, sure, that’s fine to involve the cloud. But to me, voice control is just an insignificant and limited part of home automation. It’s fun to say “Alexa, turn on the light” but it’s arguably no easier than flipping the switch. Alexa routines have very little power at this point, so isn’t going to be part of true home automation solutions for some time to come. I had hoped that Amazon would make some big announcements at CES (such as as home control hub of their own), but that didn’t happen. And since the Echo Plus hub doesn’t support Z-Wave, one wonders what they are up to.
My home automation system that I’ve had for more than 20 years allows me to set it up so that if I walk into the foyer after sunset on a day when I’ve received no phone calls and the garage door recently opened, it will turn the volume down on the receiver and turn on the hall light. Not intended to be a practical example, but just an illustration of what I mean when referring to home automation. It’s everything.
Yes, a cloud based UI for the control system and remote access makes perfect sense, but at the end of the day, the operations part of it needs to be independent of external systems.
Many fortune 500 companies are investing heavily into the cloud for business critical applications because it is more reliable. Outsourcing reliable data centers make a lot more sense than trying to bring that kind of expertise in house.
Actually they’re not investing in the cloud because it’s more reliable, they’re investing in the cloud because it’s cheaper in the short-term – no large capital expenses up front to get a whole lot of processing power and storage. They can plan for the shorter-term and easily upgrade later as their needs grow. You can also have an on-premises cloud, which really means a few servers with a bunch of virtual machines with cloud-like hot-swap capabilities.
Most home users don’t have the budget of an IT department to ensure that their wires are connected 99.999% of the time. Also that cloud is much more secure than “the cloud” service you might get with your “security camera”.
Also in case of a home user, it’s more expensive to use the cloud, because of recurring monthly charges. My cameras are recording to a hidden drive on the local network for free. And nobody else has access to them.
I can tell you our business is investing in cloud for reliability. We simply can’t maintain a data center as well as a company that specializes in maximizing redundancy. To think that we could run a data center with more up time than Azure or AWS would be absurd. On the other hand it is pretty easy to get multiple WAN connections with redundant paths.
That’s interesting you mention that cloud is expensive for the home user. I think its pretty affordable. I am using ring door bell as an example and it works great for me financially. It costs $30 a year, all the videos are stored in the cloud and easy accessed, I don’t spend a second of my time configuring or maintaining hardware, and no hardware to buy other than the camera. This business model seems to be getting very popular so presumably the consumer prefers the convienence. I suppose if you have lots of cameras then having a DVR might make more sense.
Anybody using an open-source digital assistant ? I’m not interested in having everything I do, say, ask, or buy being tracked, cataloged, stored, and marketed.
You can have security cams with ups backup and wifi via a wifi hotspot so no external cable and your whole day is going to be ruined when some crook shows up with a $20 widespread wifi jammer that not only blocks the internet but your wifi network as well (along with all your neighbors just in case they had camera’s too).
The only things that saves us is the average crook isn’t smart enough to build/acquire wifi jammers or even understand what they are. For them it’s easier to skip your house and break into your neighbor’s. I never liked that guy anyway.
To those who’s logitech hubs are getting bricked…I use broadlink RM PRo’s…you can get them for around $30 or less on amazon. They broadcast both IR and RF and using an app called RMBridge which is free you get an api that will respond to http get or put lines to control on or off. This can probably be used as a replacement and it doesn’t use the cloud at all. If you want external control of it however rmbridge is going to have to be exposed to the net somehow. In my case I run a homebridge server that is tied into alexa(free while home assistant costs a monthly fee). It’s able to receive a command (from my home or on my phone when away) and then issue a local command to the always on Android device running RMBridge at my house which sends the command to the Broadlinks. There are pay apps which simplify the process some but do so by introducing more cloud dependencies which I wanted to avoid. The RF portion of the broadlinks is great for buying “dumb” smart switches that operate on 433 or 315mhz…nowadays it would be just as cheap to buy wifi smart switches but at the time I was setting this up one smart switch cost $35 and I could get a 5 pack of the 433mhz etekcity wifi outlets for $22 so it was worth some effort. My plan was to transition over to smart wifi outlets as the etekcity ones died but they just WILL NOT die…their one negative is they don’t report their state so apps can’t determine if a device is on or off but in a normal situation this is a non issue since they have unique on and off commands…doesn’t matter if it sends an off command to an already off device…ditto for on…now for the devices like my remote control fan in the exercise room where the same command is used for on/off it’s more of an issue…ditto for tv’s unless they have unique on/off. Those however are IR so merely an example…there are some RF outlets that work the same way so I avoid those.
The only one that I’ve tried, and returned, is the iRobot 981. The lesson learned from it - I want/need a unit that maps the entire floor so that it doesn’t spend a significant portion of its 90min battery learning where to vacuum. If you just want it for one very large room, and that room is well lit, then it would be outstanding. It cleans the areas that it gets to thoroughly, including hardwood, tile, and thick berber.
