Smart devices were supposed to make life better, but constant updates have made them worse

  • StarayoEnglish
    12•9 months ago

    If I can’t run it with home assistant, I’m buying a dumb device instead.

    Trying to buy an automated feeder for my cat was a nightmare. Why does everything have a camera and require an internet connection to China? Everything was on tuya! It’s fucking ridiculous. You don’t need cloud processing for this shit. Finding something that’s just a timer with a battery backup that wouldn’t fail to feed my cat if the power or internet briefly went out took way too much effort.

    • @herrvogelEnglish
      4•9 months ago

      Trying to set up home assistant for my parents’ house, I started seeing the point of all the cloud stuff. My dad wants to have home automation but he completely lacks the technical skills to run and maintain a home assistant instance and he’s completely unwilling to learn. Even after I’ve done all the difficult parts for him, he always manages to have trouble. The majority of those troubles could be avoided with a cloud managed service. I’m guessing there are way more people like my dad than there are who could be assed with setting up a 100% local smart home. Because that does require more than a little bit of technical inclination.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•9 months ago

        hey, I understand what you are saying. and it may be difficult for the average user to maintain an operate homeassistant. is it the same for their cloud offering, i.e. nabu casa. in case you evaluated that, i would love to hear your take on it. (i have been with homeassistant for 3 years, and totally enjoy it, but i do share the concern that it is not well suited for the non technically inclined)

      • StarayoEnglish
        1•9 months ago

        Yeah, I ended up getting a cheaper shittier one to test out if it would work out well but that’s pretty much the one I settled on upgrading to eventually. It’s a bit harder to get cheaply in Australia.