I’ve not written anything on this blog lately, in part because I’ve not been working much on radio or electronics projects. Instead, I’ve spent a lot of my time on home automation, and I’ve now decided that it’s time to write up some thoughts on the matter.
Background
Home Automation isn’t new – I remember playing with Radio Shack Plug n’ Power (X10) devices back in the early 1990s and Insteon devices a decade and a half later.
Commercial home automation isn’t new either – companies like Crestron, Control4, Nortek, etc. have been around for quite a while, offering professionally-installed home automation and media distribution systems.
However, those early DIY technologies were limited, and the commercial systems are expensive – tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The good news is that today, in the beginning of 2020, DIY home automation is cheaper, easier, and more capable than ever before.
Easy or Good – Pick One
Broadly speaking, I consider most modern DIY technology to fall into one of two categories. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see anything on the DIY side that meets my criteria for being both Easy and Good at the same time, though the tech is getting better every day. Hopefully they’ll eventually meet in the middle somewhere.
Easy
The main advantage of this category is that it’s just that – easy to implement. This category uses off-the-shelf components with minimal setup, but relies on pre-programmed presets and cloud services to handle all of the automation and processing. This category includes things like Phillips Hue, Samsung SmartThings, devices advertised as working with Amazon Alexa/Google Home/Apple Homekit and used only with one of those systems, as well as any devices that work exclusively, or primarily, with their own mobile apps.
So why are these approaches easy? Because most of them require you to plug them in, do a little bit of configuration, and off they go. They aren’t effortless, you still need to do some research and configuration, but they require far less of your time, and far less knowledge, than the approaches in the “Good” category.
So why aren’t these devices good? Well, there are several problems:
Security
The first problem is security – this isn’t as much of a problem for devices that use ZWave, Zigbee, or proprietary protocols, but it’s a huge problem with WiFi devices in this category. Most off-the-shelf WiFi automation devices are built to talk over the internet to the manufacturer’s cloud servers, and that leaves a pathway for an intruder to hijack that connection and use it to cause all sorts of harm. Not only to that device, but possibly using it to to penetrate other systems on your home network, such as home computers. Additionally, many of these devices, especially the cheap ones, neglect security in the first place, and when security flaws are found don’t push firmware updates to the affected devices.
The cloud servers are another potential vulnerability. Especially with the cheap devices, you don’t know who’s running their servers and how good their security is.
If you take away anything from this article, please take away this: if you decide to go the easy route, stay away from WiFi devices, especially from cheap, no-name-brand manufacturers. Stick with ZWave/Zigbee/proprietary systems which suffer far less from this issue.
Privacy
The second concern is privacy. Most of the easy technologies rely heavily on cloud connections, and the companies operating those cloud servers are almost certainly collecting that data and mining it for their own purposes. I don’t just mean voice assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Home that might record you (less of a threat than many believe, but beyond the scope of this article). I mean things like learning your daily patterns, knowing when people are at home or not, etc. At best that’ll be sold to advertisers. At worst, who knows?
Again, this is more of a problem for WiFi than the other protocols, but it’s applicable to all of them. If you use your Alexa Echo Plus to control a Z-Wave switch, the Z-Wave communication is local, but Amazon still knows that you turned the switch on, as the voice command goes through the Echo, to their servers, back to the Echo, and only then transmitted to the switch over the local Z-Wave connection.
Reliability
This one is pretty straightforward – even the best Internet connections sometime fail. Any device that relies on talking to a remote server, as most of these do, becomes inoperable unless it has a physical button you can press to operate it. Assuming it does have such a button, as most do, then it becomes a plain, old, “dumb” switch.
Bricking
One of the problems we keep hearing about with IoT/Home Automation devices is companies shutting down entirely, or shutting down their product lines. When this happens to a device that relies on a remote server to function, you now have a brick. Lowes’ entire Iris product line was bricked when they decided to get out of that business. Nest bricked their Revolv hubs. A quick Google search for “IoT bricking” will find many more examples, or check out this article.
Even more insidiously, companies are sometimes able to brick individual devices. For example, a few years ago, Garadget appears to have bricked a customer’s device in retaliation for a bad on-line review.
Good
So what does it mean to me for a home automation technology to be good? It means that all, or most, of the following conditions are met: a) the processing hub of the system resides locally at your home; b) all devices communicate with the hub locally; c) the hub and all devices can operate without a connection to the Internet; d) devices and hub do not send any data outside your home unless you allow it, and only what you want them to send; e) devices will continue to work even if the manufacturers shut down.
The advantages of this are obvious: they are the absence of the problems listed above, under “easy”. The disadvantage is that this approach takes more of your time, requires more knowledge (so you either need to already have a decent techie background, or be willing to go out and do a bunch of learning), and can be more frustrating at times, especially early on.
Conclusion
As you can probably guess, “Good” is my preferred approach.
But that’s me. I like to tinker, I have a background in IT, and I’m willing to spend the time to get things to work just “right”. But this path isn’t for everyone. Many (most?) people are perfectly content to have something that just works right away. Totally fair – my naming of the categories “Easy” and “Good” isn’t meant to be disparaging. Not everyone has the time and background to get into the techie side of things, and not everyone should have to. That being said, future posts in this blog will focus on the “Good” approach. Maybe I can show you that “Good” isn’t as hard as I made it seem 🙂