What do you guys think of the idea of smart homes? I could make a basic setup using https://home-assistant.io to control my home temperature and lighting; the tools for doing this are everywhere nowadays and implementation doesn’t seem too horrific anymore.
But setting aside what I “can” do, is this something that I “should” do? How can a person implement this without connecting any devices to the internet?
Yeah the main problem is that companies that do this kind of thing want you to subscribe to a recurring payment and if you find something that works “offline” it’s codged together and quite fragile. So you either pay and upgrade when companies say so (see: Arlo cameras) or you spend lots of time trying to fix stuff.
I’m leaning towards the second option, having been burned already by subscription models, but at the moment I don’t have any of the smart stuff and I’m waiting for wife to forget the fiasco…
Not all of them! I really like my athom smart home gear, everything they sell runs on FOSS firmware and they even have github repos to host any device-specific modifications! As long as WLED and EspHome continue supporting the ESP8266 my devices should keep getting updates!