
The smart home freak show stops here - alexwoodcreates
http://www.thememo.com/2016/03/02/the-smart-home-freak-show-stops-here/
======
officialchicken
It's the surveillance home for marketing and ads. Actual smart homes need a
lot more dumb and existing technology first.

If it were really smart, I'd have a toilet and shower that uses 1/4 of the
amount water, my gas stove would not have a pilot light, and "dumb" motion
sensors for light have been around quite a while - but not ubiquitous (more
common the EU).

Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems
for a couple of decades (without thermostats but with temp sensors) so you
don't need internet for that either. And I've never seen a house with VAV's
installed in the ducts to actively heat/cool only the occupied portions of the
home. And the easiest of all before construction - just "rotate" the
foundation towards the sun to take better advantage of passive heating and
cooling, that's an easy 15% energy bill savings.

~~~
jahnu
Well put. I was even surprised that most US homes don't have an electric
kettle for boiling water but put a 'dumb' kettle on a stove!

~~~
oh_sigh
We in the USA can't get as much power out of a wall, so boiling water with an
electric kettle takes twice as long as in the UK/europe (same amp breakers,
with half the volts (115 vs 230), means half the watts.

~~~
kazinator
A typical electric kettle puts a heating coil right into the water, and is
better insulated against the escape of heat from its jacket.

~~~
hydrogen18
Thankfully this is false. This would be incredibly dangerous and unreliable.
The general design is a heating coil with an insulator that is then then
jacketed in a steel or iron sheath.

When the element on my neighbors electric stove failed, the heating coil found
its way through the insulator and the steel jacket. The electric current bored
a hole through the aluminum pot she was using.

~~~
kazinator
The entire insulated assembly consisting of a heating wire embedded in casing
is commonly called a "heating coil".

I didn't say anything about a bare, uninsulated electric coil being immersed
in water.

The point is that this assembly is immersed in water; all the heat which
escapes from it goes into the water.

This is not true of a stove top heating.

------
Malic
I worked for a short stint at a product development company that was getting
into IoT. I came to the realization that IoT products are going to be just
like the WWW in the early days - we are going to have a lot of dumb ideas
before we have some really smart ideas.

We will have to endure the Internet of Stupid Things first, sigh.

~~~
petra
One thing i wonder about - why does it take so much hardware and sales to try
out a new consumer product concept ? Isn't there a process to aim the products
better and a simpler way to verify them ? What is it, and why aren't more
companies using it ?

~~~
tsumnia
I think its to ensure that they are in the 'first to market' group with
Internet of Things. Right now, like Malic mentioned, its a gold rush of
throwing money at anyone that can hook up bluetooth to a 'dumb' device. Its
the same reason that after the Pebble was created, every consumer electronics
company started spitting out smart watches as well.

We need the IoT bubble to happen so people realize you don't need everything
controlled from a single device. I think its more of an uncanny valley of what
is wanted and what is excessive. The Roomba, for example; doesn't need to be a
wifi-enabled device, but can still have a computer inside it driving. People
are adding wifi to it, but does it was successful without it.

I think as we mature in the IoT market, the sales and hardware will drop, but
as of right now, we don't know what works and what doesn't, so we are trying
everything.

------
monitron
"No Wi-Fi, no heating" \-- this makes no sense to me. I had a Nest and when
the wireless network went away, it did the sensible thing and maintained its
current schedule. The only thing it lost was remote control/monitoring and the
ability to talk to Nest Protects.

This is not to say that Nest doesn't have problems, but there's no way I'd
have allowed it in my home if an Internet outage meant freezing my family.

~~~
jmspring
Just from January - for some reason it was unable to call home, temperatures
plummeted.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-
gl...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-glitch-
battery-dies-software-freeze.html?_r=0)

~~~
Klathmon
That wasn't because it couldn't "call home", that was because an update caused
a bug on the nest to lock up.

It might not be any "better" of an excuse, but it's not the same thing as "not
being able to call home"

------
rietta
For my home, I fully believe that if things continue this way, I will need to
have three networks at home. The household network and wifi for my wife and
our family to use, the work network (hardwired Cat6 because that's how I like
it) for my multiple work computers and NAS, and a third network with its own
wifi just if IoT. IoT devices need not have access to the other two networks.
It would be nice if this level of segmentation were to be built into the
higher end home routers.

Personally, I enjoy setting my house up "like a data center". But that is far
beyond most home owners' abilities or desires for their network.

~~~
Pxtl
Don't many wifi routers offer a "guest network" feature?

~~~
rietta
Yes, my router does have this. Which we use to have a simpler wifi password
just to give to guests. It can only access the Internet and nothing on the
LAN.

------
riffraff
I remember some years back an interview (maybe Bill Gates?) mentioning that
software have a long way to go compared to other technologies. E.g. If you
turn on the oven and it doesn't work it's baffling, while for any program to
just fail is expected.

Great to see we are fixing the gap by going in the opposite direction :)

~~~
Pxtl
> I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone;
> my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my
> telephone.

\- Bjarne Stroustrup

~~~
colordrops
Says the inventor of the language used to write most of the complicated
unstable software he was probably rethinking of.

~~~
Pxtl
I still think C++ is the best possible language that could have come out of
the constraints they'd given themselves - near-complete backwards-
compatibility with C, while adding OOP features in a style that maintains the
C ideology of being as close to assembler as possible.

------
upofadown
You can improve the reliability of stuff like this by minimizing
programmability and by using reliable parts. I have a mercury thermostat in
the basement set to 12C connected directly across the heat demand leads. So my
house is pretty much not going to freeze down no matter what the software
does.

I have a mercury thermostat upstairs set to my normal indoor temperature. It
is connected across the heat demand leads through a software controlled
switch. So no matter what the software does, the house can not get too hot or
two cold. This means that I only have two set temperatures, but in practice
that is enough. Setback occurs whenever the system detects that the alarm is
set or when I set it before I go to bed.

The alarm panel is a traditional system in a box with a separate backup
battery. It tells the automation when it is armed. It can be disarmed from the
automation with a code, which the automation has to generate as a hash from an
electronic key.

------
bitwarrior
Its an interesting point in the article about the indignity of smart TVs. I
was contemplating getting a new TV, but I felt I was getting ripped off. I
have a ton of external devices which handle providing Netflix, Hulu, Amazon
Instant, whatever. I don't want to pay a huge premium on a TV because the
manufacture thinks this is a novelty to me. As is evidenced in the article, I
also don't want my TV to have a complicated OS that can literally crash when I
attempt to change the channel.

Fundamentally, I just want my TV to be a display - an amazing display. I don't
even want or need it to have those shitty speakers TVs necessarily have - I
already have a fantastic sound system. I want as close to 100% of my money
going into the quality of the picture, not huge feature lists I have no need
for.

~~~
spyder
Then search for "Large Format Display", for example:

[http://www.newegg.com/Large-Format-
Displays/SubCategory/ID-6...](http://www.newegg.com/Large-Format-
Displays/SubCategory/ID-633)

or just big monitors:

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_hi_eb?rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_hi_eb?rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A1292115011%2Cp_n_size_browse-
bin%3A2633652011&ie=UTF8&qid=1456934293)

~~~
gthtjtkt
Main problem here seems to be a lack of reviews/testing. Every aspect of
mainstream TVs is thoroughly tested and reviewed, but with these monitors
you're basically rolling the dice. You don't know the color accuracy, viewing
angles, black uniformity, etc. until you get it back to your house. That's a
big gamble when you're spending ~$1,000 and planning to keep the device for
several years.

The DELL E5515H looks nice though. Wish they made a 60" or 65" version.

------
Loic
You can also use component following the KNX standard and build a smart home
based on a standard (with about 400 providers of appliances, switches, etc.)
and control it fully using open source software[1]. Note that the components
can be programmed to work without any cloud or centralized control system. So,
your heater will work even if your "app" to control it is not working because
of a faulty update as everything can work in "standalone" mode.

[0]: [http://knx.org/](http://knx.org/)

[1]: [http://www.openhab.org/](http://www.openhab.org/)

------
ghaff
The fundamental issue is that, if I were to put down a list of things I wish
were easier/automated around the house, there's very little that overlaps
smart home or home automation products.

\- Heat control. OK but I have a non-network connected programmable thermostat
that's really pretty effective.

\- Vacuuming. OK. Roombas are a start in this direction although how effective
they are depends a lot on your house layout.

\- Clean up dirty dishes, wipe down counters, etc. Nope, unless you count my
dishwasher.

\- General food prep. Cutting/chopping. Nope, unless you count things like my
food processor.

\- Smarter light control. Eh. A few dimmers work pretty well.

\- General dusting, bathroom cleaning, etc. Nope.

\- Laundry. Nope (other than my dumb washer & dryer).

\- Lawn cutting, general yard maintenance. Nope.

\- Water plants. One can setup complicated systems but you still need to get
water from a water source to individual pots without leaks.

The list goes on. The bottom line is that the tasks I'd like to eliminate or
streamline are largely not things that I can buy devices to help with.

~~~
pjc50
General cleaning is an amazingly hard to define problem. I think "general food
chopping" _might_ be within reach, if computer vision lives up to the AI
promises. I'm thinking of a breadbin or printer-sized object into which you
place (e.g.) an onion, a carrot, and a turnip, close the safety interlock, and
come back in a couple of minutes to diced onion, carrot batons, and cubes of
turnip. Empty the waste container and possibly change out the knife and it's
ready for re-use.

(The classic problem with kitchen labour-saving is devices that take longer to
clean than the effort they save. Dishwashers help a lot, but your device has
to be dishwashable.)

~~~
maxerickson
Precut seems to be the better solution than a machine.

It doesn't even have to be low paid humans doing the precutting, it can be a
big machine that only needs to be cleaned every 1000 potatoes or whatever.

~~~
ghaff
You're probably right. Although precut vegetables don't last nearly as long
even if you don't mind paying the premium. (And, of course, you don't have the
same degree of control.)

Generally though, in the absence of additional home automation options that
could save time and effort, the overall approach has been to do exactly as you
say. Eliminate end user work in the manufacturing process and other places.

There are lots of examples in food. Modern clothing wrinkles less (and many
people just don't care as much). Autopayments and online banking. Amazon.

------
FussyZeus
Remember the good old days when software was designed from the assumption that
Internet wouldn't be available, and then if it happened to be, it would do
some other interesting things? I get that these are connected "smart" devices,
but is it that difficult to tell the NEST thermostat that when the service is
unavailable to simply keep running whatever settings were last used and just
wait for it to come back? I cannot imagine sitting through a features meeting
where we decided if our support smart thermostat has no internet connection,
it just shuts everything the hell off.

My beefs with smart devices are numerous, but I think their most offensive
component is software that seems to have been all designed by the same kind of
moron.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's a failsafe to shut things off. If it fails on then there are disastrous
possibilities, failing off leaves more annoyances, no?

~~~
FussyZeus
Losing power is a disaster, a ruptured gas line is a disaster, and both of
those things are required to have an operating furnace. Losing Internet is not
a disaster, it's in fact a pretty much daily occurrence for I would argue the
majority of Internet users (at least here the States, where Internet sucks).
Losing the Internet shouldn't break my thermostat, much like having a clogged
toilet shouldn't cut my power. They're two entirely different systems in the
home.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
If your toilet clogs and literally floods the house then it's safer that the
power gets cut, hence circuit breakers and the like.

When you connect your thermostat to the Internet then they're no longer
entirely separate systems.

------
cptskippy
_" My Nest thermostat, which after some early teething problems I’ve come to
like, falls flat on its face when my broadband connection goes down."_

The implication here is that like the other thermostat mentioned, it doesn't
work. That's simply not true, the Nest still works albeit only from the device
itself like a traditional thermostat.

------
Udo
There have to be open protocols and control needs to happen locally (as in: on
the home network). The good news is, you can absolutely have that, today. The
bad news is, it's not as easy to set up as a Nest. People have to understand
this tradeoff.

------
talles
Software is an inconsistent thing, it takes years of effort to make it right.
With IoT we are, literally, spreading inconsistency all over the place.

I usually see industry tendencies (such as "big data" or "machine learning")
skeptically, but this one I'm just plain pessimistic. I hope I'm wrong.

------
Zigurd
The thing to realize is that outside of very simple cases like connecting your
Echo to your lighting, the smart home is a high-end product. If you can't
afford a custom installation and hands-on support, you're not a real customer
of the smart home. That means, for the 97%, it isn't a usable product.

People who can afford it can get a well-integrated smart home that works and
continues to work and isn't spying on them (to the extent that anyone with a
home security system isn't being spied on). Just don't try to do it yourself.
Sure, some people can, but it's in the same category as home-built airplanes.
For every one that flies, there are 500 sitting partially assembled in teh
garage.

------
notalaser
I have interesting tales from the trenches to tell. I used to work for a
company that did home automation devices. This was quite a few years ago, when
the whole craze was in its incipient stages, but I didn't lose contact with
it.

I could fill a small book with reasons why IoT products are so bad, but the
top reasons would have to be:

1\. There is an intense pressure of _delivering_ simply because everyone
thinks the market is ripe for the taking and being first offers some kind of
guarantee of winning it. Truth is, there is a very significant overlap between
people who are interested in this whole IoT crap and people who involved in
its development. Most products are so embarrassingly bad that no one in their
right mind would want them.

2\. Products _could_ be better, but most of them are...

2a) ...developed without any kind of vision, because the management and
product design teams don't really understand these things. The vision behind
developing most smart home appliances is "we'll make a <insert company's top
selling appliance here>, BUT ONLINE".

2b) ...developed by bad engineering teams, because projects are perceived to
be too high-risk to be worth investing much into, so they're outsourced
somewhere cheap (before you start yelling racism at me, please realize I was
one of the cheap guys these were being outsourced to.)

2c) ...seen as little more than platforms for service and/or ads delivery.
They see little investment, because management teams completely unfamiliar
with hardware design believe the vehicle through which services and/or ads are
delivered is pretty much irrelevant and/or can be easily fixed. They treat
hardware platforms for delivering ads and services much like they treat web
platforms, because that's all they ever built.

3\. Standardization in this field is... exaggerated, at best. Even platforms
that standardize things at the application layer (e.g. Z-Wave) routinely get
it wrong. 90% of the "ground-breaking" gadgets that "open up the exciting
world of <whatever> to everyone" only work with five or six phones, at best.

4\. The main challenge of every marketing department in this field is coming
up with reasons why someone would buy these things. Oftentimes that's done ad-
hoc: a device already exists because someone with C in its title had a
"strategic vision" and the device is already in beta, and now someone has to
figure out how to sell it because the money have already been spent.

5\. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually
turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should
know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need
to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but
aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated
system.

6\. Testing is virtually non-existent and safety standards are embarrassingly
lax. Half of the things that plug into a socket and do fancy Internet things
are fire hazards.

7\. Virtually every device that does fancy Internet things is a privacy and
security hazard. Companies either lack management and development teams that
realize how important these things are and know how to build them, or are
actively disinterested in fixing them because it's detrimental to their
business model.

The true "smart home" won't come until all these funky devices will be
integrated in a single system. With everyone competing and raising walled
gardens because they don't want to share profits from ads, that won't happen
until a big enough player decides to invest the huge amount of money that's
needed to create a comprehensive line of devices, that can cover everything
from thermostats to sound system.

Until that happens, "smart" homes will be so incessantly dumb and annoying
that no one who isn't paid to say they're awesome or build "smart" devices
will want one.

~~~
roymurdock
Couldn't agree with your points more.

Found this one particularly salient: 5. A lot of big names are in this game
pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why
you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things
(like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door
in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed
to provide a serious, integrated system.

Many big companies are hedging their bets and playing catch up, which is
downright dangerous when you're selling devices that scale up the threat
vector for life-critical devices such as refrigerators, security cameras, door
locks, thermostats, and cars.

I think Apple has the best shot at winning the connected home game due to
their ownership of the iPhone ecosystem (used as a remote for the smarthome),
tight product control, and their new marketing story of _we are security_ \-
and they actually do implement the most rigorous key management and
cryptography standards in the industry. I'm looking forward to their next
hardware reveal - I think a Siri-integrated router (ala Amazon Echo) would
complement their portfolio really well at the moment.

~~~
Ixiaus
Negatory on Apple winning. I think Amazon is much more likely. They're
dominating the connected home right now with the Echo; as a developer,
integrating the Echo with Plum's Lightpad _is extremely easy_ , I can't do the
same thing with Siri.

~~~
roymurdock
> They're dominating the connected home right now with the Echo

Have any numbers to back up this assertion as opposed to sales figures of
iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, Macbooks, AirPorts, etc. - all integral fixtures in
the smarthome ecosystem?

> integrating the Echo with Plum's Lightpad is extremely easy

Amazon does not have tight enough control over its smart home ecosystem. While
it may be easy for you to integrate your thoroughly designed and tested
product, it's also easy for shady vendor x to integrate their cheap, disaster
of a product, and Amazon will not expend the resources to vet it, but in the
end the user will blame Amazon when that product catches fire because they
branded it as OK to work with Amazon products.

Apple doesn't want an outside dev ecosystem building up around its products
before its in a position to tightly vet and control what engineers create to
enhance the ecosystem. Third party applications/devices are an integral part
of the user experience, and by extension, the customer's feeling towards Apple
as a brand.

~~~
Ixiaus
> Have any numbers to back up this assertion...

Nope, just anecdata (based on being a startup in the IoT space).

> Amazon does not have tight enough control over its smart home ecosystem...

I don't know that for sure, TBH, though I think the more open and universal
platform will win. Currently the Echo is that, it's not an app you have to
launch from your phone (Revolv), you just talk to it, and it does things for
you.

Echo's superbowl ad also catapulted it, we have emails from people left and
right asking for Echo integration (not Apple TV integration).

Also, why would the customer blame Amazon if their bulbs cause a fire? The
customer clearly bought the bulbs, then hooked Echo up to the bulb (in the
case of Philips Hue), I'm not saying Echo is infallible but I do think your
criticism is unfair.

------
chflags
[http://money.usnews.com/money/business-
economy/articles/1997...](http://money.usnews.com/money/business-
economy/articles/1997/11/23/xanadu-20)

Keep in mind that in the 1990's it was rare for Windows uptime to exceed 24hrs
and Microsoft demos of new features barely worked if at all. Not to mention
that "security" was not yet on the PR agenda.

Gates' home, replete with low quality software a la Microsoft, sounded silly
if not scary back then. But what do I know? Maybe it was all very stable and
reliable.

------
CaptSpify
IMO, part of this is the current "simple" systems-design that's been happening
everywhere. Instead of giving users good defaults, with the ability to
override almost any setting, we've designed things so it's "manufacturers
choice, or none at all". This used to be just web-pages, and then it started
leaking to browsers, then phones, etc.

There are a lot of other issues (security, phoning home, etc), but a lot of
these wouldn't be as noticeable if they didn't follow the "simple" design.

------
kluck
Do not automate your home itself, but let an autonomous robot automate it for
you. That way you have a hardware "fallback" that is robust, cannot be hacked
externally and can be adjusted manually. Think of R2D2 moving around the house
and taking care of adjusting the lights and temperature and stuff.
Additionally the robot can be equipped with sensors and such. Beware: the
robot should not be controllable via WLAN!

------
kbart
Following "smart" trends and countless problems it causes, I guess it's not
long before "dumb" will be the hot marketing slogan.

------
reedlaw
This is a software problem at its root. It seems software of all kinds is
struggling to keep up with the exponential gains in hardware. CPUs are cheaper
and smaller with more cores than ever before. But there is no Moore's law of
software engineering. Software quality is a more abstract metric than number
of transistors on a die.

------
restlessmedia
Am I right in thinking televisions need to be 'smart' in order to run an OS,
televisions need to run an OS to run apps therefore we need 'smart' TVs in
order to rid ourselves of these 'set top' boxes?

~~~
dsr_
Sure. Or, alternatively, you can buy a big reliable dumb TV and upgrade the
set top boxes (TiVo, Roku, AppleTV, Android-whatever) cheaply every couple of
years.

~~~
patrickk
Even better, have the set top box as a device you control, such as raspberry
pi running Kodi, so the software is flexible and less likely to become
horribly obsolete. Not a solution for the mass market however, due to the
setup work involved.

------
ape4
So much possible downside to these smart things and very little upside.

------
hydrogen18
The reason why the smart home is such a failure is because even the "smarter"
home is a total failure. I had a programmable thermostat in my residence. I
always used it in "hold" mode and just turned it off when I left for the day.
This thermostat also had the option for the power company to disable the AC
during peak load. I could care less about this as the interruption was brief.
The problem was after they re-enabled the AC, the thermostat always returned
to "program" mode. Twice this turned on the heat with a setting of 85 F in the
middle of the summer. Needless to say, that thermostat is now sitting in a
cupboard.

------
Gnarl
Air travel is safe now because people died, died and then died. IoT companies
will probably have to kill a sizeable bunch before understanding what
responsibility means.

------
jkot
Hire a maid, much smarter than all those devices :-)

------
bengale
If the WIFI goes down on the nest you just go poke the heatlink and it starts
the heating. Then sort your WIFI out.

~~~
rconti
I don't know what a heatlink is, but if I have to be physically present,
that's a non-starter for vacation homes.

~~~
_JamesA_
So it's a non-starter that you can't remotely control a Nest when the
broadband connection to your vacation home is down?

If it's that critical maybe you need to design in some network redundancy.
That's not really a Nest issue.

------
kazinator
> _My Nest thermostat, which after some early teething problems I’ve come to
> like, falls flat on its face when my broadband connection goes down. No
> wifi, no heating in the house._

Could this be due to relying on the broadband provider's box for Wi-Fi instead
of your own Wi-Fi router for running your local network?

I can still reach my webserver or printer when broadband is down. Gee, why is
that?

~~~
mikelward
You don't need any Wi-Fi to turn the dial up or down. :)

~~~
kazinator
Though that may be true of that unit, my point is that you don't need
broadband to be up to have Wi-Fi. The whole Wi-Fi based control should be
contained within your LAN, which has no reason to be down, other than a power
outage or equipment failure.

If someone's local Wi-Fi LAN dies when the broadband connection isn't up, they
should buy their own Wi-Fi router and then get some fifth grader to set it up
for them.

------
clockwerx
If you went on holiday the cat would more likely starve than roast. Australian
and many other cats also regularly endure high heat - 32 degrees C plus. The
author really should have left that out or thought it through a little more,
detracts from the argument

