The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
I just built a vacation home from the ground up and specced the &quot;smart&quot; features myself and did so very carefully. I&#x27;ve learned the hard way because I was already &quot;orphaned&quot; when I bought my current primary residence which had a high-end &#x27;state-of-the-art&#x27; home automation system that was designed into the walls by the original owner. Unfortunately, it was cutting-edge tech for 2001. The original manufacturer of the system as well as the local dealer&#x2F;installer both changed owners and product lines multiple times and were out of business over a decade ago.<p>Fortunately, the hardware was pretty well-designed industrial grade gear consisting of cards mounted to back plane slots inside wall-mounted racks in the basement and I like working on 8-bit era arcade and pinball machines which shares many similarities. The saving grace is that the system is <i>just</i> old enough to predate being internet-connected, so the firmware is in EEPROM and was designed to stand alone forever if necessary.<p>In my new place I was determined to avoid the same issues 25 years down the road so I&#x27;ve selected devices that run open source firmware on widely available, multi-source commodity hardware using long-lived open protocols. For example, the 62 in-wall dimmer switches have ESP8266 boards (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ESP8266" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ESP8266</a>) and I installed the mature Tasmota open-source firmware (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tasmota.github.io&#x2F;docs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tasmota.github.io&#x2F;docs&#x2F;</a>) in them so they don&#x27;t require cloud connection or try to phone home. They function normally as light switches with no connection of any kind but can be optionally controlled via wifi by a Raspberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant open-source software which hosts modular integrations with hundreds of different devices, protocols and standards.