2020 review — local-first arrived early, alarm landed
2020 done. Pattern.
Scoring the 2019 forecast
| Prediction | Confidence | Outcome | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matter / CHIP makes serious progress | 60% | First spec drafts; no products | ✓ (partial) |
| Apple Watch as control surface | 70% | Companion App watch support shipped in June | ✓ |
| Smart lock | 90% | Yale Assure Z-Wave installed (March) | ✓ |
| Frigate matures with Coral | 75% | Bought a Coral USB in May; Frigate 0.8 + person detection working | ✓ |
| HA Z-Wave overhaul | 80% | OpenZWave 1.6 beta in flight; the Z-Wave JS rewrite is imminent but not shipped as an HA integration yet | ✓ (partial — landing early next year) |
| Z-Wave 700-series in real products | 65% | Aeotec shipped the first 700-series units — Z-Stick 7, Door/Range Extender 7 | ✓ |
| Wink folds or subscribes | 60% | Wink dropped a surprise $5/mo subscription in May — pay up or your hub bricks. Bleeding users | ✓ |
| Coordinated WFH automations | 50% | The "in-meeting → flip desk light red" automation became real for me + 4 friends | ✓ |
Six clean hits plus two partials — call it 7/8, ~88%. Best year since I started keeping score.
The pandemic did that: when the internet going down meant the kids' school and both our jobs dropped at once, every reason to pull the house local stopped being theoretical.
What got added this year
- Yale Assure Lock Z-Wave + ZW3 module (March). Replaces the brass deadbolt; auto-locks after geofence-leave.
- Coral USB Accelerator + Frigate 0.8 (May). Object detection on PoE cameras, person/car/dog classification at 10 fps per stream.
- Zooz ZEN15 plugs (3×) (April). Replaced the last Wemos.
- DIY ESP-based temperature/humidity sensors in 8 rooms (Oct-Dec). ESPHome firmware, MQTT to HA, $6 per sensor in parts.
- Pi 4 4GB + SSD-via-USB3 (June). Migrated HA off the Pi 3 + microSD. Massive performance bump.
- The alarm panel (November). Auto-arms via geofence.
- Roomba i7+ with self-emptying base (December — Christmas to ourselves).
What worked this year
- Local-first. Survived four internet outages during the year (cable, fiber, both) with no smart-home degradation beyond push notifications queueing.
- Frigate. Person-vs-car-vs-dog object detection on the porch cam means push notifications only fire for actual people, not for the mail carrier's truck. False positive rate dropped from ~10/day to ~1/week.
- Auto-arming alarm. Family hasn't manually armed in 6 weeks. Just works.
- Yale lock auto-locking. Front door locks itself 5 minutes after the last person leaves the geofence. Wife loves this — she used to worry whether she'd locked the door.
What didn't
- Voice assistants for control during the workday. Both Echo and Google Home picked up enough TV / Zoom audio that they fired false-positive wake-words almost daily. Wife's coworker once heard "Alexa, set timer 5 minutes" in the background of a Zoom call. The Echoes got muted.
- Apple HomePod (refurbished, bought July). Still a great speaker. Siri still fumbles smart-home commands. Sold it October.
Forecast for 2021
1. Frigate + multi-camera person-tracking. (Confidence: 80%) Frigate 0.10+ rumored to support cross-camera identity tracking (person enters porch cam → recognized as the same person when they enter the side-yard cam).
2. Matter / CHIP first dev spec released. (Confidence: 80%) CSA's been steady; Q1 2021 likely. No consumer products in 2021 — those are 2022.
3. The "Aqara hub" replacement story. (Confidence: 65%) Aqara keeps hinting at Matter-readiness. A future Aqara hub that speaks Matter natively could shift the cheap-Zigbee ecosystem. Rumored; nothing concrete yet.
4. ESPHome on a dozen more DIY devices. (Confidence: 90%) The bathroom SHT31 was a one-off; ESPHome made me realize how cheap and easy DIY is. Plant moisture, garage temperature, mailbox door — all coming.
5. The Aeotec Heavy Duty Switch finally goes on the garage door. (Confidence: 75%) Z-Wave-controlled relay + Hall-effect sensor for "is the garage door open?" — finally automate this.
6. A second PoE camera + a fourth — front, back, side, driveway. (Confidence: 85%) Going to spec a 4-channel PoE system in early 2021.
7. Voice assistant fatigue gets formalized. (Confidence: 60%) Either Alexa/Google add a "Zoom mode" mic-off, or they bleed users. WFH households are tired of accidental triggers.
8. Wink finally fully collapses. (Confidence: 70%) They've been on life support for years. The $5/month subscription bought them a year. 2021 is the year.
What I'm buying in 2021
- 3× Reolink RLC-820A PoE cameras (4K, person detection on-device backup to Frigate).
- ESP32-based DIY ambient + moisture sensors for ~12 locations.
- A spare CC2652-based Zigbee coordinator (a second slaesh stick) as a cold backup for the Z2M setup.
- A Zooz garage door controller for the actual garage automation.