#smart-home

2025 review — Edge drivers local, robots choreographed

“Seven and a half of eight on last year's forecasts — but the most useful line is the one I got wrong twice and finally reversed: the solar math, which I'd said no to three years running, flipped to yes.”

Thirteen years on — the long-arc smart-home retrospective

“The smart home I have now isn't a continuous evolution of the one I started with. It's three architectures stacked on top of each other, the seams still visible if you look. That's not a failure. It's the most honest thing in the house.”

Robots in the routine — Roomba + Braava choreography

“The Roomba doesn't make the floor cleaner than I would. It makes the floor cleaner more often. Frequency beats thoroughness for whole-house hygiene.”

Frame TV + kitchen appliance sync — when the kitchen talks

“A connected oven by itself is a gimmick. The thing worth paying for is the collective behavior: the kitchen knowing what's cooking and putting that on whatever screen you're nearest to.”

SmartThings Edge drivers — Samsung goes local-first

“The reason I migrated off SmartThings in 2017 was the cloud round trip. Edge drivers remove it. The platform finally executes where the devices are.”

2024 review — Bespoke kitchen, Frame TV, Matter bridges

“6/8 on last year's forecasts. The two I missed were both AI-on-camera bets — and that's the honest pattern: the hardware lands on schedule, the intelligence layer keeps slipping a year.”

Bringing legacy Zigbee + Z-Wave devices onto Matter — the bridges

“The point of Matter in my house isn't the replacement layer. It's the cross-ecosystem layer. Keep what works; let one device be visible to every controller at once.”

Frame TV as household display — art, dashboards, hub

“The Frame TV's killer feature isn't 4K HDR or the matte screen. It's that it's a SmartThings hub + Thread Border Router + the largest display in the house, all in one device. The fact that it's also a great TV is a bonus.”

Samsung Bespoke oven + dishwasher + washer/dryer

“An induction oven that texts you when the roast hits 145°F is useful. A washer that texts you when the cycle ends is useful. The collective 'kitchen + laundry as one system' is what changes how you use the appliances.”

2023 review — built the house, kitchen has an OS

“Looking back: 6.5/8 on 2022's forecasts, ~85%. The new house transformed the smart home from 'a layer on top of a house' to 'the house was designed for this.' Different rules apply now.”

First Samsung Family Hub fridge — kitchen has an OS

“The fridge is now a SmartThings hub, a display, a camera, a calendar surface, and a recipe-search tool. It's also a fridge. It does all six things well enough that the kitchen actually got more functional.”

Structured wiring + conduit + PoE backbone for framing

“Forty-two Cat6 drops, twelve conduit runs, six exterior camera locations, and one mailbox sensor signal pair. The single buildable-once moment in the house's life ended this afternoon.”

Designing the new build for the wires, from day one

“Cat6 in the walls during framing costs $40 a drop. The same Cat6 after drywall costs $400. Everything is a retrofit eventually — so plan everything you might possibly want before the studs are covered.”

2022 review — Matter shipped, the LoRa garden worked

“5.5 of 8 on last year's forecast — about 70%. Matter hit on schedule, ESPHome kept exploding, HA Yellow shipped. The honest miss: I scored myself a Powerwall and then talked myself out of it.”

Matter 1.0 ships — the protocol primer ten years late

“Matter solves vendor-to-vendor commissioning. It does not solve the multi-hub problem, the privacy problem, or the API-versioning problem. It's the foundation, not the building.”

Frigate + Coral cookbook — eight months of tuning

“The difference between a useful Frigate setup and a noise-fountain isn't the model. It's the masks and the thresholds. The model is the easy part; the YAML is the work.”

Outdoor watering automation — the LoRa-and-rain story

“The sprinkler runs only when soil is dry AND no rain is expected in the next 6 hours. Sounds simple. Took three iterations and two soaked planters before the algorithm was actually right.”

2021 in review — cameras everywhere, Coral landed. 2022 forecast.

“Five of eight on 2020's forecasts, ~69%. Cameras, ESP DIY, and the garage controller all hit; the misses were timing — cross-camera tracking and Wink's actual death are both still 'next year,' and Matter is still a spec without a single product.”

Wireless cameras and bandwidth — when WiFi cams work

“PoE is structurally better for cameras. WiFi cameras are a pragmatic 'good enough' when running Cat6 isn't an option. The bandwidth math is the constraint that decides.”

Doorbell camera on the Google Home Hub display

“Seven local systems — camera, person detection, hub, displays, voice, phones, NAS — all triggered by one button press, none of them phoning a vendor cloud. That's the smart-home magic that justifies all the YAML.”

PoE cameras + Frigate NVR — local object detection

“Cloud camera services charge $5-15/mo per camera. Frigate + a Coral USB does the same object detection locally for $75 of one-time hardware. The cost-per-camera-month asymptote is zero.”

2020 review — local-first arrived early, alarm landed

“Looking back: ~7/8 on 2019's forecasts, the best year since I started scoring. Smart lock and the Coral hit; Wink pivoted to a ransom-note subscription instead of folding; the Z-Wave rewrite is right on the doorstep but not quite shipped. The pandemic compressed two years of smart-home maturation into nine months.”

Building the security alarm panel in Home Assistant

“An arm/disarm state machine isn't optional once the sensor count crosses a threshold. With 14 security sensors and 3 modes, the alarm-panel abstraction is the only way the family can use the system without me on call.”

Picking the Zigbee stack — Zigbee2MQTT vs deCONZ vs ZHA

“If you're starting fresh in 2020: a CC2652 stick + Zigbee2MQTT. If you want a UI included: ConBee II + deCONZ. If you want zero add-ons: any supported stick + ZHA. The three are within 10% of each other on reliability; they differ on ergonomics.”

Ripping out vendor clouds — going local-first on Home Assistant

“When the internet went out during a March storm and the family's school + work calls all dropped, the lights, locks, and security alarm kept running. Local-first was an architectural opinion until the pandemic; now it's a requirement.”

2019 review — local-first arrives, security maturing

“Looking back: 5.5/8 on 2018's forecasts. ~73%. The miss was Frigate's maturity — running on a Pi without a Coral, the detection was too slow.”

Humidity-triggered bathroom fans — the daily automation

“Most bathroom fan switches are dumb timers. The fan needs to run until humidity is below the bedroom's level — not for a fixed 15 minutes. Dewpoint-targeting beats time-based by every measure.”

MQTT as the house's nervous system — one broker, every device

“When every device speaks to one broker instead of to each other, killing a vendor's cloud API stops being a catastrophe and becomes a footnote. You lose one device's features, not the web. That's the whole point of a nervous system — you can lose a finger without losing the hand.”

Glass-break and vibration sensors — the second-layer security

“Door sensors catch the opening. Glass-break sensors catch the breaking. The second one matters because the first one assumes the intruder walks in like a guest.”

Works with Nest is dead — platform risk, made real

“The cloud integration you built your morning routine on is a feature someone else can delete in a blog post. Works with Nest didn't break. It was withdrawn. That's a different kind of failure, and you can't engineer around a business decision — only around the dependency.”

BLE presence detection — iBeacons, room by room

“Room-level presence isn't 'where is the phone.' It's 'is a human here right now.' That distinction is what makes an automation feel intentional instead of creepy — and it's also where the tech is shakiest.”

2018 review — quiet year, Zigbee goes local, the doorbell got scary

“A quiet year on the blog was a busy year in the closet. Three posts, but the architecture moved further toward local-first in 2018 than in the three years before it combined.”

2018 review — Lovelace, leak shutoff, smoke + CO

“Looking back: 6.5/8 on 2017's forecasts. ~81%. Better than 2016 (64%) and 2015 (71%), worse than 2013 (83%). The arc seems to be: my confidence calibration is improving; my Apple-timing intuition is not.”

Smoke detector integration — alerts that actually matter

“Smoke is the one device class where every clever automation hangs off a single signal you cannot afford to miss. The integration matters; the alert's dependence on the network does not. Standalone buzzer first; Home Assistant second.”

ConBee + deCONZ — taking Zigbee off the SmartThings hub

“A radio you don't control isn't local-first, no matter where the automation logic runs. The SmartThings hub was a cloud account wearing a Zigbee antenna. The ConBee is just an antenna.”

Water leak sensors + automatic shutoff

“Every other piece of smart-home gear is a quality-of-life argument. Leak detection plus main-valve shutoff is an insurance argument — and that makes it the one piece I'd hand a non-enthusiast first.”

Home Assistant Lovelace — building the kitchen wall display

“The dashboard isn't a control surface, it's the front end of the smart home — the thing the family sees instead of the YAML. Build it for the five-year-old, not for yourself.”

Amazon buys Ring — what a surveillance doorbell does to the threat model

“A cloud camera is a camera you've agreed to let someone else watch. The footage is useful exactly because it's always recording — which is also precisely the problem. The threat model isn't the burglar; it's the terms of service.”

Node-RED for the automations YAML couldn't handle

“YAML describes state well and logic badly. The moment an automation has to remember what happened five minutes ago, you want a flow you can watch execute — not a nested template you read like assembly.”

2017 review — Home Assistant lands, cheap Zigbee opens

“Looking back: 5/8 on 2016's forecasts. ~64% — my worst year so far. Two of the misses were timing (Apple HomePod slipped, Echo Show shipped earlier than I expected). The big call I got right: Home Assistant is the unifier I'd been waiting for since 2013.”

2017 review — Home Assistant arrives, and the journal goes quiet

“Local-first isn't a philosophy until the day the cloud you depend on has an outage and your lights still work. 2017 was the year I stopped trusting someone else's servers to run my house.”

Aqara Zigbee door/window sensors at scale

“Aqara door sensors are a third the size of a SmartThings Multipurpose, run two years on a single CR1632 button cell, and cost nine dollars each. The catch: they speak a slightly-off interpretation of the Zigbee HA spec, so the consumer hubs choke on them.”

Migrating the SmartThings security automation to Home Assistant

“Same automation. Sub-second latency instead of three seconds. Runs when the internet is down. Cost: a $50 Z-Wave stick and a Saturday afternoon.”

First Home Assistant install — YAML and local-first

“The pitch: everything you've been running through SmartThings's cloud now runs on a $35 board in your closet. Tonight I'm finding out if the pitch is true.”

2016 review — Google Home, HomeKit, Hue automation

“Grading the 2015 forecast honestly lands me at 69%, not the 88% I'd hoped — and the miss is the same one every year: Apple's rumored smart speaker that keeps not shipping. The pattern is that I forecast Apple on a calendar, and Apple ships when Apple ships.”

Google Home — two voice assistants, one house

“Two voice assistants in one house means two wake words, two skill ecosystems, two integration accounts. The 'unified smart home' was supposed to solve this. It made it worse.”

Hue Motion sensor — Hue's first native automation device

“A motion sensor that's actually paired to its bulb ecosystem reacts in under 200 ms. Cross-ecosystem (SmartThings → Hue cloud → bulb) is 2-3 seconds. The difference is between 'magic' and 'frustrating'.”

HomeKit and the MFi chip moat — the hardware tax

“Every HomeKit device costs $2-5 of BOM for an Apple-licensed authentication chip. The chip is the wall. Inside the wall, the security model is the best in the industry. Outside, you don't exist.”

2015 review — voice + HomeKit land. Security starts

“Looking back at the 2014 forecast: 5/7 hit, 2 missed. ~71% accurate. Worse than 2013's 83% — partly because I was more confident this year, partly because Apple and Google moved at different speeds than I predicted.”

Aeotec Multisensor 6 — six sensors in one Z-Wave device

“Six sensors in one device on one Z-Wave node means six new automations are one device install away. Cost per sensor reading drops by a factor of six.”

Z-Wave vs Zigbee vs WiFi — a year on SmartThings

“Z-Wave for sensors, Zigbee for lights, WiFi for cameras. If you can't remember anything else from this post, remember that.”

First security automation — door/window + presence

“The Arrival Sensor is a Bluetooth dongle the size of a key fob with a CR2450 battery. It's also unreliable enough that I'm already planning to replace it with phone-based presence.”

2014 review — SmartThings + Alexa change everything

“Looking back at the 2013 forecast: hub-as-unifier (✓), Amazon voice (✓), HomeKit announcement (✓), Zigbee 3.0 (just-barely ✓). Net forecast accuracy: 83%.”

Amazon Echo arrives — Alexa, lights, first voice automation

“Voice as a control surface fundamentally changes what 'smart home' means. The pain point was never the protocol; it was getting your phone out.”

SmartThings starter kit unboxing — first credible hub

“A hub with two radios, a rules engine, and a Groovy SmartApp platform is the first thing that makes a multi-vendor smart home tractable. Eighteen months overdue, finally here.”

Light switches — Wemo failed, and the no-neutral problem

“An old house with no neutral wire in the switch box rules out most smart switches on the market. The ones that work without a neutral are about to earn their premium.”

2013 review — three vendors, one annoyed homeowner

“Voice control is the inflection point. Whoever wins voice in 2014 owns the smart-home conversation for the next decade.”

IFTTT — first cross-vendor automation attempt

“5-15 second latency on a cross-vendor automation is the lower bound of 'I would not have noticed myself'. It is not the lower bound of 'good UX'.”

Wemo plugs and the multi-vendor app problem

“Three apps open just to turn off the kitchen lights and the coffee maker. There's a startup waiting for the unification problem.”

WiFi as smart-home transport — the always-on tax

“A 15-device WiFi smart home draws 22 watts before you turn anything on. That's $30/year in electricity to power the radios that command the radios.”

Bluetooth Low Energy 4.0 in the smart home — the protocol primer

“BLE solves one specific problem: a peripheral that runs for a year on a coin cell while still being discoverable by your phone. That constraint shapes everything else about the protocol.”

Hue scenes and the local REST API — first Python automation

“The bridge's local REST API has no authentication beyond one button-press token. That's fine on a trusted LAN today. The day Philips puts the bridge on the public internet, that same unhardened endpoint stops being fine.”

Philips Hue is here — I turned my dining room blue from my phone

“I just changed the color of my dining-room pendant by tapping a phone screen. The closest analogue I have is the first time I saw streaming video work.”