Posted by skittleson 8 hours ago
These days I mostly don't buy it if it's not Zigbee (unless I make it myself with ESPHome). Just this week we bought two panel heaters (for two rooms that need a little heating because our heat pump is mostly used for heating the living room and kitchen). They work great over Zigbee and we can have some useful automations (like automatically switching off when forgotten and there is no one in the room for more than 10 minutes).
You can connect it to any evcc endpoint like a local homeassistant, or simply leave it on all the time.
I'm not happy with guaranteeing high availability on my HA install yet (it's not as simple as my pihole which is just a simple vrrp address over the two hosts) though so I just leave it in "always on" mode, and use the timer on the car to come on at 2310 (offpeak starts at 2300 on my tarrif).
I'd be surprised if a charger is genuinely only available via an cloud service, but from asking my neighbours if it doesn't have "an app" they wouldn't buy it.
I'd rather have an API I could poll/poke for the charger rather than set the charger to connect to me, but alas it doesn't have one.
Also anyone found the fix to smart bulbs constantly “updating”?
Also aside from maintenance there's no reason your WiFi should go down, an inexpensive UPS can keep it up for hours in a power outage. Even if it can't access the outside world, local routing works fine.
My personal situation imposes even stricter versions of your #1 and #2:
1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
2. Smart functionality must not remove dumb functionality.
As one example: having a physical switch that controls a light and the switch can be operated by automation is good. Having automation control a light and the switch just tells automation what to do is bad.
This does make things hard sometimes. For instance, your sprinkler controller doesn't pass that bar. In fact the only one I've found so far that has a local API for automation plus full "dumb" on-device control (no Wi-Fi, no app) is RainMachine, and they are gone. If only OpenSprinkler hardware had a touch screen for local UI.
This is one of the reasons I love Zigbee, the device network is entirely independent of my computer network, can not directly communicate to the internet in any way, and every device I've put on the network so far can be configured to directly communicate with other devices so basic functionality remains operational even if the controller goes down.
For example, in my living room I have a Lutron Aurora dimmer dial locking a standard switch in the on position, then plugged in to the outlet that switch would normally control is a Leviton dimmer module. Both connect to the network controlled from a PoE Zigbee dongle, but have been directly paired as well so pressing the button on the dial makes it directly tell the dimmer module to turn on, rotation commands are sent direct, etc.
The controller also receives these commands when it's active and can add to the functionality for inputs like double-click, but if it's down the basic functionality still works entirely as a normal person would expect. You walk in to the room and see a knob on a switch plate, you turn the knob and the light brightness increases regardless of the state of the internet, my home server, or even my network as a whole.
The other major advantage compared to Matter/Thread is that it's not IP based so it's impossible for any Zigbee device to ever have a cloud dependency. No matter how much some marketing dingus might want to, it can not be ruined.
Specifically, I wanted the switch to turn on different lights depending on the time of day. In the evenings in early morning I wanted it to turn on the dimmer floor lamps, and during the day, I wanted it to turn on the brighter Center room light. This was not possible without turning the switch from a light turning on device, to an automation activating device.
I thought really long and hard about if I was worth the trade off, and in the end I decided that my automation server was only likely to be down for significant periods of time if the power was out and the lights weren't working anyways. If I run into a situation where this becomes a problem for me, I'll reconsider my decision. Which is a great thing about the local control. If I make a decision that I don't like I can just change it.
Unfortunately, almost no lan connected devices sport such an interface.
With another project, based on the ESP32-S3, I was able to cram grafana style scrubbable charts, full activity log, refrigerant circuit diagram, equipment topology, etc. I'm pretty excited for the ESP32-S31 since it's a nice jump up in performance.
The remote server always goes away after a couple years go by, and the radio is only capable of playing the stations that were set as presets. Then the preset radio stations go offline, or the URLs for them change.
I guess connecting to home automation would be useful for a fridge that's sufficiently out of the way that you might not hear it. But for the fridge in my kitchen the noises emitted by the fridge itself are enough for me
And if I were the king of the forest, all medium to large appliances would run a controller board that is pin compatible with either arduino or raspberry pi so that the hobbyist community can refurbish devices that experienced a short. I won’t even make everyone pick a single standard. Two or maybe even three (ESP) are fine as long as we aren’t doing all custom just to count down a timer, run a pump, and sense water levels all at the same time.
Maybe not a space heater but dishwashers for sure. I’m divided stand mixers. Someone more invested could sway me either way.