A Smart Home Public Service Announcement
This won’t be a long article I just wanted to put this out there to anyone who may be concerned.
Smart Home or “IOT” devices have become very popular these last few years and there are a huge amount of options on the market, so much so that it can be intimidating when trying to decide what to buy. It is easy to just see the cheapest WiFi lightbulb on Amazon and buy it, especially if you don’t need a sophisticated setup. Well I’m here to tell you that almost everything on the market shares one important thing in common, which is that they all use cloud servers. This is a big problem, and we will get into why momentarily. However just to wrap that up you can make a smart home system that avoids all these pitfalls, you just need to know what you’re looking for!
Cloud servers create an inherent problem for your smart home
A smart home setup you need to store information about your devices and settings on a server which needs to be accessible all the time. When you select on your phone that you want to turn down the lights it is sending that signal to a cloud server somewhere and changing the state of the light there, at which point it sends back a few packets to your lightbulb telling it to turn down. Not only is this unnecessarily complex but the observant among you will immediately notice the bigger problem which is what happens if that server is shut down? After all these companies are paying every month to host your data. They subsidize that by selling IOT devices and probably selling your data. However it’s just a matter of time until one of these guys discontinues their product line and the servers will shut down. Now if you invested time and money into one of these systems that would be a disaster, as without that server or even the app you would surely be unable to use any of the equipment you bought.
I didn’t even want to get into it, but I will. The privacy! There is no doubt that data brokers are for some reason interested in when people turn their lightbulbs on and off, especially given the app ties your account to your phone which provides very granular details about your day to day life. Nevermind that people also hook up microphone enabled devices like Amazon Alexa into their system. To top it of the typically WiFi connected devices can introduce a serious vulnerability into your home internet network, granted this one is easily mitigated by making a dedicated wifi network for your smart home.
Please don’t haphazardly buy IOT devices and invite them into your home
So Kerry wanted me to buy a smart light so she could dim the lights a bit at work when there were no calls. I was already aware of the above issues so I started researching if there were open source options for a smart home server and yes there were. Several actually. The two biggest names seemed to be Home Assistant and OpenHAB. With both of these you essentially create your own server eliminating that middleman and you can actually own and control your smart home. Making your own server may sound extremely farfetched and difficult, but it’s as simple as running an old laptop somewhere in your house. Everyone has an old laptop kicking around, and they barely use any power so I highly recommend it, I will probably make a tutorial on this in the future. Now to skip ahead I ended up choosing OpenHAB because I could just run it as an app on my existing server. You can kind of do this with Home Assistant but it’s not as slick, otherwise I hear that Home Assistant is more beginner friendly but I can’t personally attest to that. Either is a much better option than letting some company host your data. From here on out I will only talk about OpenHAB as that is what I had some experience with.
So I actually didn’t know that much about smart homes but I looked online and bought a TP-Link wifi connected switch. I didn’t install it right away and by the time I did the return window had closed. While installing it I noticed a really big problem which is that this switch requires something called a neutral wire. Now pay attention if you have an older home, the neutral wire bypasses the actual lighting circuit, the smart switch taps into it to power its WiFi adapter. So this particular switch wouldn’t work for me, or anyone with an older home. Looking online there were some products designed to work around this, but the core issue is that the WiFi chip uses a decent amount of power such that you need a sizeable battery to keep the thing on even when the lighting is powered off.
I took to the OpenHAB forums which are very helpful. They seemed to really prefer this thing called Zigbee which I had literally never heard of. Here’s the scoop though, it is actually an IEEE standard like WiFi and it’s about as old as WiFi. However it specializes in low power draw where you don’t need alot of bandwidth aka IOT devices! Of the brands they recommended Sonoff sells their products on Amazon Canada so they were easy for me to get a hold of. You also need to buy a little USB dongle to create the Zigbee network, it’s like $30 so not too bad. Now because Zigbee sips power you don’t need that neutral wire, meaning it is a very simple installation.
I also bought a combination thermometer/hygrometer to measure data in the Tiny House. Now this would be an interesting test as the Tiny House is pretty far from the main house. Probably 60 feet. Initially the dongle had a very hard time getting a connection. But that dongle is just a usb connection so I got an extension wire and placed the dongle line of sight with the Tiny House. After that I had a solid connection which is impressive I think.
Anyway I will cut this short, I think I really need to make a tutorial on a basic OpenHAB setup. Main takeaway from this article though is to raise awareness that you don’t have to use proprietary solutions for your Smart Home.
