The midwit home

While I believe that HA is very cool and many vendors provide valuable solutions, we must consider what happens when we die.

This is just one anecdote, but I believe the problem is more pervasive.

I was called to an elderly lady's home to "un-haunt" the building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done "all of the cool things" to make the home smart. Unfortunately too smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home.

She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn't figure it out and lived like this for an entire year.

She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband, but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation. About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady's lights too. In her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift.

I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices and, as she put it, putting in "turn the light on and off again" switches.

When choosing technology -- any technology, it's important to consider the life of that device and the people impacted far in the future.

That sounds like an old school X10 system problem, I remember issues like that.

That's why I love HomeAssistant!

I programmed a dead man's switch tied to the presence feature so if my phone or smartwatch don't show up in the house for six months, it turns on the "HAUNT FAMILY" program. There's no way I'm leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant neighbor.

That reminds me: I have to hook up the smart speaker so that it says "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DA- HONEY?" any time my partner walks up to the RaspberryPi.

Oof! Thank you for sharing that.

This is one of the reasons that smart bulbs and the like are generally bad - you never want a situation where the switch doesn't just act like a switch.

Smart houses should be designed from the perspective of remaining identical to use when the smarts go away. And if there's weird behavior it should all stop if you unplug the hub or controller.

I generally like in-wall smart switches but even there they tend to die faster than dumb switches, so you may be leaving your survivors a bunch of calls to an electrician.

Just wanna share that the sentence “There's no way I'm leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant neighbor” totally made my day.

It doesn't even have to involve death. I had a NAS that I set up and relied on, and then when it stopped working, I was so busy for the next month that I got used to living without it. (It wasn't a difficult fix, but I didn't know that, and I didn't want to even get started on it unless I had several hours at my disposal.) I eventually got it working because I absolutely needed a couple of files off of it, but after that I could never bring myself to put anything new on it, because I just don't enjoy fixing stuff like that anymore, and I often don't have the time.

Of course you can have your cake and eat it too. If you were to throw away the Raspberry Pi in my house that runs home assistant, all of the switches on the wall would continue to work. This is possible by switching in smart switches instead of smart bulbs. For RGB bulb controls, Zigbee pairing can make the operation of the remote controls independent of the hub to some degree, though I'm not 100% confident that those will function properly without the hub since then there's no coordinator (right?)

I feel like "if your internet-connected X doesn't do regular internet-less X-things without the internet, its not an X" should be the core axiom of IoT design.

Yeah these smart switches should All have backup physical buttons which I believe they all do but also a kill all automation hard switch but that would not be so simple

I visited a friend not too long ago, who had a smart speaker in the guest room mainly to control the lights. It went through a smart plug. Naturally, their internet connection went down. We had to move the bed (in the dark) in order to remove the smart plug and re-activate the regular lightswitch.

Fortunately, we're both reasonably fit people, but I know people who would've just had to give up and use a flashlight.

Actually the nice thing about all the recent advancements in machine learning and generative AI is that you can set it up to record everything you say in the house, and train itself to learn your speech patterns and voice. Then it can behave realistically when spirit mediums attempt to contact it. No more of this canned prerecorded nonsense that falls apart after a week of investigation.

The default on Hue bulbs is to reset to mid-bright white when first turned on. This means whenever you flip the switch on the light turns on, and obviously if you turn the switch off the light turns off. So, they essentially do let the switch be a switch by default.

> This is one of the reasons that smart bulbs and the like are generally bad - you never want a situation where the switch doesn't just act like a switch.

Depends on your devices, but I have (Philips?) smart bulbs that can be turned on/off "regularly", but keep it on and you can control it via google home.

80% of my lights are smart bulbs rather than switches, and I agree with your take here. In my house I have the smarts in the switch itself wherever possible, but so much of my lighting is from floor and table lamps (that aren't plugged into switched outlets). In those cases, the bulb is the only thing I can "smarten", and it still will work via the stem on the lamp itself if the HA box goes away.

The main drawback is that this means I have to have the bulbs set to light up after power is restored. A middle-of-the-night power outage is fun when the entire house lights up at 3am :)

I've done a few new installs of lighting in my garage, driveway, and patio. Because that was "greenfield" work, I got to put smart switches in. If I ever rewire this house, I'll use that opportunity to do some more.

Of course there's a similar premier in a black mirror episode. Only a bit more fleshed out.

Made a comment in the root of the article thread that is related to yours, in terms of overcoming your elderly client’s problem with something far more robust and reliable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861604

I run HA at home, and my home is an apartment. I was able to buy some zigbee switches [1] that just 'snap' over the top of traditional light switches, after adding some castellated plastic washers under the screws that hold the switch cover in place

This means that instead of a light switch, there is a button. And when I relocate, I can just remove these devices from the switches and take them with me

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08TVZK8D6

That's my plan for the house. The internet can go down and every extra controller can fry and the basic switches should still work exactly as designed. I'm going for zwave, but the same idea - smart switches with normal bulbs. Nothing talks to wifi.

Along that same line - My Home-automation setup is fairly simple using Samsung's hub and requires very little maintenance. But I do have a fairly complicated homelab and network setup. I'm in my early 50s and have considered what would my wife/children do if one day the 'internet' connection wasn't working and I'm no longer around to fix it? No way they're going to know how to log into OPNSense or Unifi controller to troubleshoot. So I bought a off the shelf router, configured with basic setup with same SSID and IP scheme. Typed up some simple instructions on a single page and attached it to the router box. The idea being that they can simply unplug the OPNSense box, plug the router into it and then power everything up. I've done a fire-drill test and had my teenage son try it. So far he seems to know exactly what to do. The rest I'm hoping he can figure it out on his own.

I might have to do this for my roommate. My homelab died while I was out of town, and they didn't have internet for a day or two

Reminds me of an old scifi short story I read years ago and can no longer find.

It outlined a future where everyone started automating elements of their messaging to each other. Simple things like automated "Happy Birthday" messages. Eventually, people started setting up auto "Thank you" replies to these messages. It only got more complex from there with increasingly elaborate conversations being automated between people.

Eventually, some calamity hits civilization and humans go extinct. But their technology is resilient and keeps running without them. The ghosts of a dead people continue talking to each other in perpetuity, long dead people cheerfully wishing each other "Happy Birthday" until the lights finally ran out.

Haunting story that I still think about from time to time. Would love it if anyone else recognizes the story and could credit it.

Yep, my goals are largely two-fold:

- "Everything 'smart' must continue to function if the internet is disconnected"

- "Everything 'smart' must fall-back to normal 'dumb' operation if the automation server is not available"

Thank you. I am not sure why so many people have this impression that if you install smart home stuff you can't have switches that Just Work. My garage door has a smart opener and also a physical switch inside the garage and a key fob remote in the kitchen drawer, they all work just fine. If the Wifi is down you can just use an old fashioned analog solution. Progressive enhancement is not that hard, you just need to do five minutes of research and pay ten extra dollars to be sure you are getting products that have physical fallback.

Have you looked at smart plugs? I have a few lamps in my home plugged into them and the automation works fine. I have a couple spares I store with the Xmas stuff so that the lights can be automated once the decorations are up.

I use Kasa (TP-Link) plugs but there are a bunch of different brands.

Yeah I've done meross homekit switches for all of our light switches. There's one that needed a reset (via the button on the outside, easy as cake). I didn't notice for weeks because it works like a switch when you tap it. Switches are the best place to add smarts and they gracefully degrade just fine. This midwit fix involving remote controls to turn on lights STINKS. Hell, our bedroom fan has that just because it's a 2 wire fan and I hate it.

We started with smart bulbs, but once we bought a house, we've been replacing them with Lutron Casita switches and adapters.

My mother called me freezing cold. Her nest thermostat had a "wifi connectivity lost" message on the screen and she couldn't (or didn't know how) to bypass it and turn up the heat.

3D-printable replacement for the plastic clips, https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6014514

Also consider what happens when you sell your home. Or be careful buying a house with a system.

A friend of mine bought a house with an expensive system, but it wasn't very useful and later had a fault. To remove it would require replacing all the switch plates - I would guess $1000 to get rid of it. He was technical so he fixed it instead.

I don't know that story, but it's a similar premise to "There Will Come Soft Rains"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2552i2Z8sNM

The owner of a custom rotating house in California cited a similar reason for moving. The video is worth watching but here is the relevant section:

"I've had 18 heart procedures. My wife is in perfect health. The odds of me outliving her are zero...We're moving back to Coronado. This is a complex house, even though I think it's simple! For her to try and teach somebody else how to run everything and do everything would be difficult if something happened to me. So we're just kind of jumping ahead."

https://youtu.be/gisdyTBMNyQ?t=383

This was a basic principle I decided on when thinking about smart switches etc. Basically they must be dumb switches first and only if HA is working are they smart. The most promising ones I find were from Shelly. They fit into normal light switches (or in the UK you probably have to put them at ceiling roses).

Then I decided I didn't really want to put electronics in my wall at all and did something more useful with my time instead.

I have, yeah. A couple years ago I got a bunch of Tasmota-flashable ones, and I use them for the coffeemaker, a couple stereos, and one table lamp. Oh yeah, and the christmas lights. :)

My issue with those is that they fail the "normal person" test. A normal person will try to turn on a lamp and it will never work because the smart plug is off. But with a smart bulb, it'll come on after they twist the stem a couple times. (And it never gets noticed! People are used to 3-way style lamp sockets needing a couple clicks to turn regular bulbs on and off, so they don't really notice that they had to double twist the stem to get the light to turn on)

Of course, now you have the opposite problem: someone turns the bulb off with the lamp knob (unaware of/irritated with its smart features), and now it's unresponsive with all smart controls.

The best compromise are smart switches. Switch still manually controls the light, and smart features are always available. The downsides are that the lamp's outlet must have switch wiring, and smart switches aren't like normal toggles: they're more like push buttons so the switch isn't in a strange physical state.

Haha, yup. No matter what method I choose, I give something up. I agree switches are usually the best, but it gets more complicated when I want to have configurable color temp and dimmability in the same fixture. Can't use a dimmer switch, because the smart bulb wants full power. Or I can use a dimmer that's operating as basically a remote for the bulb rather than a true current-interrupting switch. But now it needs to be able to fall back to real switch mode if the hub is offline.

(By the way, Philips Warm Glow bulbs are awesome for this. I use them in my dining room lamp connected to an Inovelli Z-wave dimmer. They get warmer the dimmer they go, mimicking how tungsten filaments work)

My current setup is a mix-n-match of all three types, using each one where it beats the other two for simplicity and predictability.

This is a consideration for me, since I'm in the middle of a pretty big upgrade to smart switches throughout my basement and main floor. I think this will be very appealing for the right potential buyer. I'm just curious what I'll need to do to make this a feature. Maybe de-sync it from my system and provide a Smart Things hub and get them all set up with it there so it's easy.

I'm not getting rid of the existing switches and plate covers, so at least I can more easily remediate it if the future buyers don't want the system.

> The wife could not operate the devices in her own home.

Hopefully this isn't a common situation. I know that for me, not being able to control basic things like lights/heating/cooling without calling on and waiting around for somebody else would drive me nuts and one way or another the situation would have been resolved before the only person who knew how to handle the tech had a chance to sleep let alone die.

I've known a lot of people who couldn't figure out to how to use their own TV remove for anything more advanced than getting to the point where they can watch their usual shows and change the volume, but not being able to turn off a light at night is like not knowing how to turn a TV on at all!

There's a lot of potential for posthumous practical jokes currently going unused! You want part of my estate, you better be ready for jump scares

Yeah HN is generally young people and early adopters. Most HA stuff is part of a "generation" of tech. What people don't realize is that in about 15-20 years, all buzzwords/acronyms/techstacks will likely be completely different.

Home stuff needs to generally work for 20 years, and lot of things (light switches, etc) will be even longer. Tech has no conception or demonstrated discipline for functioning that long.

HA/IOT is an interop disaster currently, and the current cacaphony of standards/acronymns guarantees it will be cycled/replaced in a decade's time.

The INTER-NET of Things doesn't have a functional INTER, nor a NET.

Inter is software, which should be mathematically doable but historically improbable.

The ubiquitous NET part basically means you buy the device, and it will work with zero-config networking that means you can find it.

And the final issue is the interface. Interfaces do NOT age gracefully either. Perhaps voice interfaces are what is needed.

Consumer IOT is yet another 10 years away.

I recommend making it a zero-effort handoff. My experience with selling houses is that I want precisely zero to do with the buyer, and them with me.

This btw is the source of the word "turnkey". You turn the key, and it works.

>- "Everything 'smart' must fall-back to normal 'dumb' operation

...immediately, every single time the occupant wants it to do that. Regardless of the state of any other component.

You are absolutely correct. It is a horrible mess.

Which is why Homeassistant is a godsend - you can add the mess and present it in a sensible way. As long as you stay the fuck away from anything cloud you are pretty much golden no matter what the parent company decides to do.

E.g. Telldus had a huge range of 433mhz things that still work IF you avoided their TelldusNet or whatever.

I love how he solved for rotating plumbing