Frustrations with automation

[andrewducker]

I've been playing with home automation a bit. Partially because it's handy if we can turn the "behind the headboard" light on or off without groping around on the floor on my side of the bed for the button, and partially because I wanted Sophia to be able to turn the light on and off in her room without having to climb on something to reach the light switch.

My Setup
So I have a Govee LED strip behind our headboard and a Wiz light bulb in her room. In the living room, we mostly use two tall lamps in the corners of the room for indirect lighting, and I've got those plugged into Amazon Smart Plugs.
I then have an Amazon Echo Flex devices (about £10 each) in each room, which you can talk to, and that works pretty well. If you say "Alexa, Light On" then the lights come on instantly, and when you say "Alexa, Light Off" then the lights go off instantly. Huzzah!

Buttons are a problem
But what if I don't want to talk to Alexa to turn things on/off? What if I want to use a button? Well that's why I picked up a Flic smart button starter kit. Press the button, make a thing happen. Nice and easy. Setup was a couple of minutes, works very smoothly. Except...except that with Alexa each button press can carry out one action. And "light on" and "light off" are each an action - there's no "toggle" function!

I could set up the buttons so that "short press" turns the light on and "long press" turns the light off - but as Alexa has a "toggle" function for plugs, why on earth can't it have one for lights as well? After all, if I want this to be nice and easy for people who aren't used to tech, and having to have an instruction manual about what length of press turns the lights on/off doesn't feel nice or easy to me!

Turns out that that if I use IFTT to hook up the button to the light then *that* has a toggle function. But also takes about 3 seconds roundtrip. And 3 seconds for a button to turn a light on or off also doesn't feel like a nice solution.

Looking through the different integrations that Wiz supports, it looks like there are some other options to play with - Homey looks plausible, and there look to be some options if I fancied running this all myself on a local server (which I really don't).

Reliability
*Both the Govee and the Wiz lose their WiFi connection about once every two weeks, which is a quick on/off at the light switch for the Wiz and about 3 minutes of messing about in its app forthe Govee. The Amazon plugs are rock solid so far.

The future
I think that I'm actually coming to this stuff just a little too soon - the smart home standard Matter is just arriving this year, and with all of the big names signed up to it it'll be much easier to control everything through whatever method you fancy, which should hopefully bring a bit more competition into the automation side of things. But I'm sure I'll keep playing with things intermittently, and see when it becomes easier.

Comments

Annoying automated doors.

[bens_dad]

We had (120+) swipe-card operated doors when I worked in Cambridge (from 2000).
There was one where I could press a button to unlock the door, but I regularly pressed the button then pushed the door only to find that I had trapped the bolt before the solenoid had moved it to allow the door to open.

[channelpenguin]

I sleep in my one main room, so I have normal remote control power sockets, where you can have up to 5 on one controller. all my tv audio gear is in one multigang plugged into one, cats heat pad into another, chargers into one that is permanently on, and I have a seperate chargable hanging colour-changelight in the corner that has its own remote in lieu of a standard lamp because I dont like to watch tv in the total dark. non smart tv but with a firestick and a media box with a great big HDD and wireless keyboard. I can shut everything down and switch off without getting off the sofa bed when I wake up from falling asleep in front of the tv (my usual habit).

NONE of this requires internet or any faff*. I learned my lesson from my housmate complaining about his smart bulb thingy when the interet is dodgy.

*obvs the firestick does to get streaming, but even without internet I have the media drive :-)

[agoodwinsmith]

Until we reach a successful response to "Alexa, please clean the bathroom" I don't want any. But as a technical puzzle I will be interested to hear when you have found something acceptable.[1]


[1] - not "acceptable" it'll do, but "acceptable" you stop hunting for better

[hairyears]

I'm following your progress with equal measures of interest and fascinated horror: I would never permit anything from Amazon to listen-in on my life at home and...

I am under no illusion that I am sufficiently expert in security to set up and run home automation; and no-one I would trust to advise me and audit such a thing has done it for their own household and family.

Make of it what you will.

[channelpenguin]

I just wonder what the advantage is over the kind of un-networked remote control solutions I use. Voice control? But I bet you can do that too...

[andrewducker]

You totally can, but only very simple things, and it requires a bunch of effort to set up.

Whereas Sophia can't turn on and off her light (simple) and also ask for her favourite songs (nigh impossible).

[channelpenguin]

Ah, I don't have kids and probably don't recall what it's like to be one. I don't think we had anything except radio in the apartment we lived in until I was 5. But I could read at 2.5. So I guess I could find the right cassette tape / 8 track if I wanted a song by the time we moved and had the 8 track player in the living room.

It sounds like the networked version also requires setup. PLUS ongoing kicks up the butt (one of which sounds "not-simple"). That's the bit that I really hope they fix or most people will probably not happy. Switches are switches and they should be ultra simple!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I'm hoping that it gets simpler once the new standard gets wider adoption. It looks like buttons and lights that work with it natively are on the way. Hopefully by the end of the year it'll all be there.