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   Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe (gsuberland@chaos.social)'s status on Thursday, 17-Jul-2025 23:50:14 JST Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe

   the recent LTT video where he runs down all the problems with his house feels so vindicating towards my decision to never do smart control of anything in my house.

   • Rich Felker repeated this.
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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 17-Jul-2025 23:50:11 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     @gsuberland my headmate built a "smart home" network with openhab and a bunch of zigbee things (only zigbee) and although it took her a bit to set it all up, it's been working essentially perfectly for 2.5 years with no interruptions outside of brief power outages and no ongoing maintenance that we frankly have no effort to spare for

     very happy with how it works

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     Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe (gsuberland@chaos.social)'s status on Thursday, 17-Jul-2025 23:50:12 JST Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe

     in reply to

     I did try a bit of it years ago when it was just getting popular but I quickly realised how many constant little frustrations and frictions it brings. these days it's so much worse because every vendor wants to tie you into their ecosystem, so you end up having to enter into adversarial relationships with products if you want to gain local control over them.

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 17-Jul-2025 23:50:45 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     @gsuberland she used lightbulbs that treat a power cut as a command to toggle state so the lightswitches work even if the entire network is down, so everything that's safety-critical like lighting has a local override

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 17-Jul-2025 23:51:53 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     @gsuberland in retrospect and from seeing others talk about it, i think her decision to go "zigbee only, no proprietary tech, no 'hubs'" was probably what made all this shit work reliably enough that i forget it's even there

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 17-Jul-2025 23:54:31 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Ret

     @ret @gsuberland yep, one thing she learned is that openhab's builtin zigbee support is... not great, and zigbee2mqtt is 100% the way to go

     the other one is that USB isn't super reliable, and she ended up using an Ethernet Zigbee bridge. it has a really cursed chinese serial to ethernet controller in it, but despite how sketchy it looked it has a basically 100% uptime

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     Ret (ret@furry.engineer)'s status on Thursday, 17-Jul-2025 23:54:32 JST Ret

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     @whitequark @gsuberland +1 for Zigbee from this Folf. I turfed out all the Wi-Fi smart shit I had. Zigbee stuff only now. Zigbee2MQTT ftw.

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 17-Jul-2025 23:55:25 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     @gsuberland (when reading this, keep in mind that for me "standing up to flick a light-switch" can be a multi-hour process, so a smart home system isn't just a toy but something that i need on an everyday basis, and it has to be reliable too

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     Timon 🛠 (timonsku@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Jul-2025 00:04:17 JST Timon 🛠

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     @whitequark @gsuberland I have a vaguely similar setup, though I use smart bulbs only for adjusting light condition, never for the on/off state and have them set to repeat last known state on power up or default to on. Then I switch everything with Shelly wall switches which can be toggled locally with the normal light switch or via WiFi. So if everything is down except power it just works like a normal light switch.

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Jul-2025 00:11:10 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Timon 🛠

     @timonsku @gsuberland yeah there's definitely a few different ways you could approach this that result in a reliable system

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     Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange)'s status on Friday, 18-Jul-2025 00:48:49 JST Andrew Zonenberg

     in reply to

     @gsuberland If i were ever to do "smart" anything it would be proper SCADA based with DIN rail mount controllers and relay modules not consumer junk.

     And designed with careful attention to failure modes in case anything misbehaved.

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 18-Jul-2025 00:51:35 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Andrew Zonenberg
     • Phil Dennis-Jordan

     @pmdj @azonenberg @gsuberland Solenoids in the mechanical switches and nothing else. Make the "smarts" turn things on or off exactly the same way you do: flipping the switch. Fails dumb just by cutting power to the controller.

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     Phil Dennis-Jordan (pmdj@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Jul-2025 00:51:36 JST Phil Dennis-Jordan

     in reply to

     • Andrew Zonenberg

     @azonenberg @gsuberland I’ve been thinking about using bistable relays and optocouplers to determine current state. Wire the relay as just another light switch in a daisy chain. Reverting to “dumb” house mode is a matter of turning off anything that might drive the relays.

   • Embed this notice
     Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange)'s status on Friday, 18-Jul-2025 00:51:37 JST Andrew Zonenberg

     in reply to

     @gsuberland Yes. Which is why I said "careful attention to failure modes".

     For example, relay outputs for wall receptacles would be normally closed, and there would be a watchdog (or manual killswitch) that would shut down the controller on failure and make them passively turn on.

     Key lighting circuits would be 2-gang boxes with the second switch (normally left on) controlling power passively.

   • Embed this notice
     Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe (gsuberland@chaos.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Jul-2025 00:51:38 JST Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe

     in reply to

     • Andrew Zonenberg

     @azonenberg hmm, I've never liked that as a solution. I want the catastrophic failure mode to be "the house functions as a regular house".

   • Embed this notice
     Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange)'s status on Friday, 18-Jul-2025 00:51:39 JST Andrew Zonenberg

     in reply to

     @gsuberland My concept there was to have the switch just be a 12/24V GPIO into the controller.

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     Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe (gsuberland@chaos.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Jul-2025 00:51:40 JST Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe

     in reply to

     • Andrew Zonenberg

     @azonenberg I think the main gap there is light switches, where you really do need an integrated solution. but otherwise yeah, actual industrial stuff is the way to go.

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     JP (froztbyte@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Jul-2025 00:56:07 JST JP

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     @whitequark @gsuberland that thing about *specific hardware/protocol* choice makes such a hell of a difference with these things

     I’ve long been wanting to programmify at least lighting in my place but pretty much all the hw options I have locally are trash cloud offensive nonsense

     on a scale project a while back I hit Vendor Breakers and ffs.... what *could* be a limited local api just doesn’t exist, and nullifies so much usefulness :|

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Jul-2025 11:56:24 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     @leo @ret @gsuberland some aliexpress special

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     vriska, thief of light :light2: (leo@60228.dev)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Jul-2025 11:56:25 JST vriska, thief of light :light2:

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • Ret

     @whitequark @ret @gsuberland what bridge was it i'm curious, all the ones i can find use an esp32 for the networking

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Jul-2025 12:14:59 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Ret
     • vriska, thief of light :light2:

     @leo @ret @gsuberland yeah i think the chip is right

     the case for the device she got was 3d printed so it was probably a small scale run

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     vriska, thief of light :light2: (leo@60228.dev)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Jul-2025 12:15:00 JST vriska, thief of light :light2:

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • Ret

     @whitequark @ret @gsuberland those chips definitely exist though. cute https://lcsc.com/product-detail/Ethernet-Transceivers_WCH-CH9120_C2681747.html

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     vriska, thief of light :light2: (leo@60228.dev)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Jul-2025 12:15:01 JST vriska, thief of light :light2:

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • Ret

     @whitequark @ret @gsuberland all the ones available now seem to either be "actual" "products" or just an esp32 with tasmota, boring