Homeassistant helps a lot in that respect.

Home assistant and zigbee/z-wave (also Bluetooth) resolve a lot of issues people have with smart home kit. Matter/Threads, discussed in the article, is supposed to be an open standard to make fancier kit from the big companies work together seamlessly, we just aren’t quite there yet.

See:

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I’ve got a few smart home devices (lights, plugs, weed vape, TV backlight) and literally none of it is proprietary and it all works even if my internet connection is down!

Home-Assistant.

People talk a lot about home-assistant but there is another part to that setup; the devices themselves and the firmware they run.

If you stick to ESP8266 devices mostly you can use things like Tasmota and ESPHome. Zigbee/Z-wave is good I’ve heard but nothing compares to the interoperability of good 'ol WiFi.

It costs like less than $15 for a Sonoff Basic R2, another $5 for a knock off FTDI USB programmer. With a tiny bit of soldering you can put some programming pins on the Sonoff and flash Tasmota. From there you can use Mosquitto to control it, or the HTTP API, both open and interoperable protocols.

As we had to redo all wiring anyway (renovation of a 80 y old house) and worked in stages it’s a bit difficult to do an estimation. Generally we found KNX is about +15%/+20% to comparable conventional wiring depending on the complexity (conventional wiring is cheaper for simple “one switch one light” situations but gets immensely expensive for more complexity - we found KNX was cheaper for some situations like “four different switches in four different locations all switching different combinations of lights”). In total around 40k € for a large house- that includes rerunning all wires, a few specialities due to age of the house and installation by a master sparky but no programming by them(did that myself - it’s not that difficult actually but takes a bit of time to get into).

The KNX wiring in theory could be done by a amateur as it is 24v only, but 240V needs a professional here. If we had done all KNX wiring ourself and let the sparky only do the 240V part (which in retrospect we should have done) we would have actually gotten out cheaper than conventional wiring, but I had no time to do so.

Of course the level of integration we opted for is far beyond what you normally put into a house - it’s a hobby more or less and we will not break even in terms of energy savings ever - but as we had to do something anyway why not do it right. Additionally it is heavily geared towards us getting older (e.g. we have motion detection at the ground level beside the bed - this recognises if you get up at night and now switches the bedroom lights on at 5% red so the wife does not wake up and then switches the lights on towards the loo. The whole routine is capable of recognising that someone has fallen or is unable to get off the loo)

It all depends on the brands you choose - as KNX has a huge spectrum of suppliers there is everything from cheap switches that are hardly more expensive than regular ones and top notch switches that cost 500€ each…we went with rather cheap but flexible ones.

A friend did some calculations with normal “off the shelf” smart home stuff like Hue, etc. and was 20% above what we payed for comparable level of integration.

The system environment does have radio based components - but you are right, some things cannot be achieved without deep integration with the house. But yeah, I rented for a long time and while I used radio based systems it is not as good. My hope is that it does get common enough that more and more landlords adopt it,at least for the midrange segment. We do actually provide some limited integration for a small apartment we rent out but currently it’s not something people care about tbh and the law here is a bit problematic in that regard, but that’s a very local problem.

Yes and no. Each component comes with an “app”(basically comparable with a driver for PC hardware) within the programming software that does the setup.

So you don’t have to decide what triggers what and some part of the logic behind it - but the app often does most of the work and you do just some fine tuning.

To give you an idea: I decide which switches (I always have regular switches even if the light normally goes on/off automatically) and what detection zones should trigger the light X1. I then link the “Switch Action” to the bus address of the LED controller L1. The LED Controller then gets told what to do with that information. In my case I have two different modes: Normal and Partymode (I use Day/Nightmode for that). In Normal mode the App gets told to interpret a “On” Action as “start HCL” and a “off” as a,well “turn it off,dude”. The HCL mode then is started with the HCL Settings according to the time. I can adjust the settings for the HCL mode (e.g. I want it darker in the evening) or I can just use the preset.

Now for party mode the same switch action does not mean “use HCL” as the same light that I want at 1am might be nice if I am on my way to bed but not If my guests need to find the loo or their staff when leaving. So it’s now a simple “turn the light on at 100%”.

Once that is done you commit the change by programming the module and you’re done. (The components always communicate directly without a central module that could fail)

Now the beauty of the system is that you can be as flexible as you like. You want that switch to no longer switch on the lights but rather close the blinds? Sure. Just link it to another address.

To give you another example what the app does itself: The blinds do close according to the sun’s elevation. I basically just linked the relevant module addresses to the respective sensors,told the module the size of the blind parts (used for calculating the optimal closure position) and linked it to the “veto object” that is calculated by the home Assistant and send to the bus via IP Gateway (basically a object based on the estimated weather. I live in an area with heavy temperature drops). Everything else is done by the weather sensor - raising or lowering based on temperature and of course wind speed.

Each app can be automatically loaded but you can also load it yourself if working in an offline environment - as they need to be 100% downwards compatible you can always work with your hardware even as long as you have the app. I therefore have them all saved/backuped in case some company might go bust. (In theory you then can still get them through the association but I don’t want to rely on that).

Yes, you can, but it can be a lot of effort and a lot of time spent researching and tinkering.

It’s fine if you want that to be your hobby, but it can be a heavy lift for the average person.

Good point. I was assuming that “smart home” integration would require an internet connection, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Thank you for clarifying that!

If it works for you and you’re happy with it, then ignore the haters (like me) and enjoy! 👍

I mean, I agree, but the target market of a lot of this stuff couldn’t care less. They want their hot tub synced up to their Outlook calendar or whatever, and can afford a monthly maintenance contract to keep that working.

For the rest of us, there’s this sort of odd limbo. Most people expect some kind of remote control app as part of their smart stuff, which means either going through an outside cloud service, or running your own server and contending with the fact that most of us don’t have a static IP. Of course there are services like no-ip, but again, you’re stuck using someone else’s cloud service, just for a much smaller part of the overall task.

My point at the end though is that I don’t necessarily want “all in one” control, whether open source or proprietary. I’ve seen what well-implemented smarthome looks like, and it does not (to me) seem worth the money or time. I’ll take the ecobee, maybe the security cameras, and I’ll even go though their commercial cloud to get that remote connectivity, but I’d rather keep my services separate, than go all-in on one hardware/provider/app.

Let’s not pretend open source smart homes are perfect either. I hve immense respect for the Home Assistant project, but making it all work seamlessly is a nearly impossible task.

There is a number of options, but not all hardware is flashable and some that is can be work.

What I want is autodisoverable hardware open to be flashed by owners, by law. I want it for all devices to be honest!

Regular presence detectors (MDT 4 zone presence detectors, 120€ each) for the bigger rooms with some additional single zone detectors( mostly MDT as well around 75€) for some special applications (e.g. Sofa). Used those as well for some really small rooms (loo,etc.)

For the home office rooms and general presence in the bedrooms we used Steinel True Presence (around 300€ but includes air quality sensors - in the end they aren’t much more expensive if you plan on measuring air quality there anyway). They are dumb in terms of positioning in the room but superior for detecting people who do not move for a long time.

In addition to these I have normal KNX motion detectors(mostly MDT for about 90€) for some areas (as mentioned elsewhere: Next to the bed at ground level to detect your motion when you get up at night and switch on the light with 5% red so the wife does not wake up)

In terms of how it works:

Presence detectors (excluding the Steinel) are basically pimped infrared motion detectors. They detect your signature against the background and unlike motion detectors kind of remember your signature for a while. Each one has one or more “zones” it can detect you in. The “minis” mentioned above have one, the 4 zone ones have,well,four which are aimed at 45,135,225,315 degrees in case of the MDTs. This allows the detector to basically differentiate between someone being “in my right upper corner”, “in my left lower corner” etc. (Especially as detection ranges can be varied between zones but also for various applications and even day/night mode).

With a bit of clever positioning e.g. my presence detector in the kitchen has four zones: at the stovetop, workspace one and workspace two and “entry”. The detector sits on the ceiling right where these zones meet (which is not the middle of the room in this case!)

If anyone registers a presence the normal light goes on (when it’s dark enough). If you go into workspace one (where most cutting is done) the under-kitchen-cabinet light goes on. The sensitivity for that is much smaller as I don’t want it to go on if you just pass through, though. Additionally the sensitivity of the “entry” is smaller as I don’t want the light to go on if someone just passed the kitchen in the hallway.

The Steinel works a bit different as it is radar based and has only one zone, but is therefore able to recognise ones breathing movements/minimal movement while e.g. working. Otherwise it works the same.

The additional ones I use are there to recognise people better, e.g. my living room is fairly big and I want the system to specifically recognise people being on the sofa so the mini looks straight down only - while the big 4 zone detector is only able to see if people are “in the direction of the sofa”.

Hope that describes it somewhat, let me know if you have any questions!

As far as I know z-wave has been open for years. Is there something not so about that?

I still have X10 stuff but need to move to something else at least for some things. I liked what I saw about z-wave in terms of being on another band from wifi and Bluetooth and also being more secure.

Then again I could wait some more too or just go z-wave and change later if needed.

Will Apple sell more devices if they fully support the standard?

I stand to the question. Apple is pretty famous for saying what people want to hear, and not actually doing much.

My cynical interpretation of the right-to-repair announcement is: we know Europe is gonna cram this down our throats, so let’s try and get control of the narrative while there’s still time.

Yeah, I’m going to reserve judgement, but anything to do with IoT does make me suspicious off the bat.

its also not a broadcast protocol - matter intends to connect many devices to many devices

Does it? It sounded like it was a server-client model in the blog post and a skim of the example, with devices as clients and whatever application as a server.

They said that about the usbc law, but that turned out well.