The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
I have an EE degree and a CS degree. I waste an incomprehensible portion of my life fussing with the technology that runs in my home.<p>Why is it so hard to configure VLANs for my security cameras using the fancy Unifi switches I have? Why isn&#x27;t there just some <i>documented</i> JSON file somewhere that I can edit? (The key word in the previous sentence is <i>documented</i> -- I&#x27;m sure there is an XML or JSON file somewhere they just don&#x27;t tell you where it is). Why should I have to do configuration of VLANs on my iPhone? And why are you hiding the good stuff with a pretty web-based interface. I&#x27;d like to be able to manage my network even if their &quot;cloud&quot; goes down.<p>Pfsense firewall, no problem. Local ZFS file servers, no problem. Getting my upstairs thermostat (required by the the high end Lenox AC unit) to work, big problems. Again, why does it require me to have a connection to &quot;the cloud&quot; as the AC technicians say. Now I need to remember some dumb password to adjust the air upstairs on my phone.<p>Lightning hit a power transformer down the road. Everything in my home survived, except the fancy video security night-light motion detecting &quot;cloud&quot; connected doorbell. So now I have two wires sticking out of the wall by my front door with a big note on the door that says &quot;Doorbell broken, please knock&quot;. It turns out that works pretty well.<p>Thinking it was maybe time to declare technology bankruptcy and start over, my spouse and I looked at a few homes for sale. In one, we couldn&#x27;t hear one another because the &quot;background&quot; music was so loud. We wandered around looking for a way to turn it down; It emanated from speakers around the house and neither the agent nor us could figure out how to silence the infernal music. Did I have to shout out the magic word, like &quot;Alexa&quot; or &quot;Hey Google&quot; or was there a Sonos remote hidden under a cushion--who knows.<p>I&#x27;ve installed garage door openers myself, but that was before cell phones. Now, I can&#x27;t get the openers coordinated with my family&#x27;s cars. The cars have their own distinct button programming protocols quite tricky to manage. Its a bit like learning how to be a courtroom stenographer that types on the funny corded keyboard. A neighbor with an engineering degree claims to have figured out how to program the street&#x27;s gate opener to his car, but my MB and Subaru have thwarted my attempts to keep up with him.<p>I&#x27;m on my third sprinkler controller. The first had a big rotating switch with ambiguous buttons scattered around and a cryptic page of instructions on the inside of its cover: virtually impossible to figure out. Where were the man pages when I needed them. I replaced it with a &quot;modern&quot; sprinkler controller. It was, naturally, &quot;cloud&quot; connected, so the first step was to climb around in the 120 degree attic dragging cat6 and then install a POE wifi access point in the garage. I foolishly said to myself, &quot;Now I can look forward to using an iPhone app to control my sprinkler.&quot; It lasted about a year before I noticed a patches of dead grass.<p>I figured that maybe I just needed professional help with the sprinkler controller  (and I was busy inside because my spouse was complaining about all the wires everywhere--she didn&#x27;t understand that it takes time to repair a doorbell from the future and run new cat6). The professional irrigation guy was great, but he said I needed a new sprinkler controller. Now, he informed me, I would be able to control my sprinklers with my iPhone, cool, I just need to figure out which app I&#x27;m supposed to use! He needed my wifi password of course so he could work on the controller when I wasn&#x27;t home. No problem, I thought. I&#x27;ll set up a separate VLAN for IOT (internet of things) and configure it via my Pfsense firewall to be isolated from my home&#x27;s higher security subnets. At this point, I&#x27;m back at paragraph two.