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436 points kennedn | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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micah94 ◴[] No.45252395[source]
So we're at the point that finding hardcoded admin passwords is no big deal.
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xp84 ◴[] No.45252526[source]
I mean, given that it's updated after setup with the normal flow, I'm okay with it.

The thing I've most been convinced of in the past 5 years of building as much 'iot/smart home' stuff out as possible in my house is that nearly every vendor is selling crap that has marginal usefulness outside of a 'party trick' in isolation. Building out a whole smart home setup is frustrating unless it's all from one vendor, but there isn't one vendor which does all of it well for every need.

On my phone I have apps for: Ecobee, Lutron, Hue, 4 separate camera vendors[1], Meross, and Smart Life. Probably a couple more that I'm forgetting.

Only Lutron and Hue are reasonable in that they allow pretty comprehensive control to be done by a hub or HomeKit so I never have to use those apps.

It's been years since Matter and Thread were supposedly settled upon as the new standards for control and networking, but the market is, instead of being full of compatible devices, instead absolutely packed with cheap wi-fi devices, each of which is cloud-dependent and demands to be administered and even used day-to-day only through a pile-of-garbage mobile app whose main purpose is to upsell you on some cloud services.

[1] I admit the fact I have 4 is my fault for opportunistically buying cameras that were cheap rather than at least sticking with one vendor. But many people have a good excuse, perhaps one vendor makes the best doorbell camera, while another might make a better PTZ indoor camera.

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hleszek ◴[] No.45252622[source]
Home Assistant is making more and more sense to make your own fully local and private home automation system.
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xp84 ◴[] No.45253066[source]
I love it! But my setup has a lot of sharp edges. It's a combo of things where the "standards compatible" way to connect to HA lacks things like camera control, by dastardly vendors like Chamberlain who basically killed HA support for spite, and finally, by having to use Google or Amazon for voice assistants.

My #1 wish would be for someone to build a HA-native voice assistant speaker. I'd pay $100 each for a smart speaker of the physical quality of the $30 Google Home Mini but which integrated directly with HA and used a modern LLM to decide what the user's intent was, instead of the Google Assistant or Siri nonsense which is like playing a text adventure whose preferred syntax changes hourly. I'd pay that plus a monthly fee to have that exist and just work.

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1. projektfu ◴[] No.45253701{3}[source]
Chamberlain can't change MyQ to get around the fact that HA can operate the switch in your garage with a simple controller attached to it. It is very annoying that they are anti-hacker though.