So, I’m doing this research thing on what people want in smart home tech, and I’d love to hear what you think. Could you spare a few minutes to fill out this quick questionnaire? Your input would be super helpful!
What devices do you currently have in your home that are not “smart,” but you would like to see made smart? (e.g., lights, thermostats, security cameras, etc.)
Why would you like to make these devices “smart”? What do you hope it will add to your daily life or convenience?
Do you have any experience with smart home technologies? If yes, which devices do you use and what are your experiences with them?
Are there specific features or capabilities you would like to see in smart home devices?
Thank you for sharing your insights and experiences .
Who are you?
Why should I give you any info?
If I gave you info, why should I tell the truth?
Even cross-posting on as many platforms as I see that you are doing, how do you expect to get any kind of meaningful sample?
Personally, my issue/wish-list isn’t with missing devices that I wish were smart. There are ways to do everything I can think of at this point. Instead, the issue is that so few of the devices are truly local, and instead work by sending their data to servers where my information is harvested and bundled for who knows what purpose. I want a damn light switch, not a light switch management subscription service. (Shelly and a few others provide this, but too many do not.)
Absolutely! And I use Shelly, Z-Wave and other local-control devices wherever possible. I was just responding to the OP that the home automation market in general still has too many devices that don’t allow this.
Op, at the end of the day vendors want to try and squeeze out every extra dollar of ‘value’ from a product. They just see the smart plug as a cheap product so they should be able to monetize the data and increase thier margins. Who cares? Right?
We (consumers) see this with the fight with Matter and the commodity smartplug manufacturers like Wemo, Belkin, TPLink, etc. Some companies (I’ll refrain from naming because I don’t want to accidentally get it wrong) are avoiding making plugs matter compliant because they lose the ability to ‘differentiate’ (read: lock in to our cloud so we can sell the data, because c’mon what’s different about a metering smartplug these days?)
They win if we don’t stop buying the ones that are locked in to thier cloud. If we (consumers) buy the open standard not vendor locked in device every time, corporations eventually (albeit slowly) learn that they need to find a different place to try to squeeze us.
What do I want from a ‘smart’ product? I want it to do what I want
when I want it to
every time
without maintenance,
be secure
(always without me ever having to update it) big dramatic inhale
and without reporting to someone every time I do something.
(yeah I realize I won’t ever get ALL of this - especially the security - but I try and it’s the basic decision tree for all my purchases.)
Homeassistant + open standards (listed above) helps me do that to the best of my ability.
The problem is, those of us on this forum aren’t the typical consumer.
People want a plug-and-play, no thought required solution. Buy it from someone who will worry about all that technical stuff for me. The only way to offer that is to totally control the entire ecosystem. Oh, and by the way, they can also mine and sell personal data for fun and profit. I don’t really see this changing
We (DIY’ers) will forever be a niche market. Fortunately we seem to be a large enough niche that some manufacturers are willing to offer us products we seek. Mostly smaller ones.
To the OP, the best I can offer is that there are probably as many ways to use “smart home” technology as there are members on this forum. Everyone wants something different. I got into it for monitoring of critical systems in my home while I’m away. Others love voice control. Some want everything automated, no pressing buttons or even speaking. Still more are looking at energy production and use, either to monitor, control or automate. Then there are the audio and video media enthusiasts. Home security. I’m sure I missed a few other big categories.
(tho I do have a lot of lights I still manually control - WAF and organic limitations makes them hard if not impossible to fully automate)
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But to the OP, I think you see the trend.
everything we all want here needs to be as local as possible.
I think the only thing that I would like to see smartened up that isn’t currently is my stove. And again it has to be local or I’m not interested at all.
TL;DR: Consumer devices running ESPHome (some exists). That will make it both easy to integrate and flexible to change (no hidden backdoors, etc.). Personally I use a lot of Shelly products.
That’s pure right-wing BS. What data can the cloud services harvest?
Your email?
What makes you so special that anyone would be interested in your cloud data?
Vendors squeeze dollars by locking you into their platform. I have no doubts that they will find a way to do the same with Matter-compatible devices. For example, your switch may be Matter-compatible and work with any matter hub to turn lights on or off. But if you want dimming and scenes, you have to buy their hub.
Marketing data Stephen. You’d be amazed what I can tell about buying habits from DNS queries alone.
I agree most companies won’t realize that value but when people are paying thousands for a marketing list ND billions for rights to scrape a web property (reddit) user data is monetarily important and worth protecting.
I have both helped setup analytics for and services to protect such databases. They do exist. Some of the things being done with the data is downright… Well ask GM why they had to stop sharing OnStar usage data…
I have also done pcap on specific devices (Wemo light switches) sending data to servers in a different country. They were not cloud connected! The data was encrypted but it was regularly sending this data without my permission. I put a firewall rule in place to stop that.
So, there are more ways to collect data than just the cloud.
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