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Smart Homes Often Dumb, Never Simple
An anonymous reader writes: Writer Adam Estes has tested over a thousand dollars worth of smart home gear from companies like Wink, GE, Lutron, Cree, and Leviton. Most of it worked correctly out of the box — which he said was great. But almost immediately, devices stopped responding and defects manifested themselves. Even after getting replacements and reconfiguring the devices, he found himself wondering if it was worth the effort to wrestle with all these devices, and ended up appreciating the simplicity of a plain old light switch.
Estes says, "Installation woes and bugs aside, my smart home never seemed handy. I had to tape off the regular switches so that the power would stay on and the bulbs' smart features would work. Even then, I had to pull out a smartphone or a tablet any time I wanted to dim the lights. That was never convenient. I could turn the lights on from my office, but that didn't really make my life better. I could impress my friends with a stray smart home feature here and there, but more often than not, I found myself embarrassed by the glitches of my smart home gone dumb." He concludes that while many smart home products can and do work, the biggest lie their marketers tell us is that it'll be simple and easy to set up and operate all these gadgets. Those of you who have wired up parts of your home, how has it worked out so far?
Estes says, "Installation woes and bugs aside, my smart home never seemed handy. I had to tape off the regular switches so that the power would stay on and the bulbs' smart features would work. Even then, I had to pull out a smartphone or a tablet any time I wanted to dim the lights. That was never convenient. I could turn the lights on from my office, but that didn't really make my life better. I could impress my friends with a stray smart home feature here and there, but more often than not, I found myself embarrassed by the glitches of my smart home gone dumb." He concludes that while many smart home products can and do work, the biggest lie their marketers tell us is that it'll be simple and easy to set up and operate all these gadgets. Those of you who have wired up parts of your home, how has it worked out so far?
Even ignoring those in the house who don't always have a smartphone with them (young children, grandparents) and any visitor who isn't on your network, needing a smartphone to control most things is simply awkward in inefficient when compared to a dedicated remote control.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
and ended up appreciating the simplicity of a plain old light switch.
What a stunning revelation. A simple analog switch is better than hundreds of dollars of technology.
The familiar phrase rears its head again: Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I tried doing the smarthome bit about 15 years ago and it was flaky. While the technology has improved, the cost/benefit just is not there. Also, the concept never had a high WAF. How long does it take the energy savings from a nest (or similar) thermometer to recoup the investment? Will the technology/service last that long? I don't have a smart thermometer, so I'm curious.
You buy cheap stuff, you get in trouble, You can't get decent quality from those new market entries, because the market has been in place for decades, there's a lot of established and well-supported hardware out there, but... it's industry standard, and expensive. So the new entries try to bring their own standard in the home-market but with cheap gear that doesn't work well.
A colleague of mine, who is an IT architect, has designed his house from the ground up with the industry-standard switches, controllers, light, shutters etcetera. And even after 20 years the stuff he bought then is still supported and he can get upgrades and replacements for everything and it all works - all the time.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I'd really like to know how reliable the Philips Hue stuff is, because I'm seriously considering spending money on it.
One of the things I really hated about X10 was that you could send a command two or three times and still have it not get picked up... or you could send it once and it could work fine. And since the communications were unidirectional, you had no way to know what had happened. I guess X10 Pro or something is bidirectional but that stuff isn't practically free all over so I haven't messed with it.
At this point, it seems like wifi is going to win, which is ugh because security.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is one of the things my father taught me, and that's exactly the concept these companies are banking on. There are millions of people who will run out and buy this shit just because newer must be better, right? Chasing the dream of increasing their home's value and making themselves look cooler to friends and family. The sad truth is they are wasting their hard earned money and making a bunch of snake oil salesman very wealthy.
DOH! :)
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Super awesome. We use GE Jasco z-wave switches with a wink hub. The hub takes care of turning on and off the outside lights (especially helpful during christmas time). The dimmer switches are especially useful in the bedroom and theatre.
FTFY
Seriously, he "taped off the regular switches"? This is because he was setting it up himself, and not getting the actual smart switches to go with his smart relays, dimmers and sockets. The DIY stuff isn't for everyone. If you want a smart home without doing stuff yourself, DIY is not for you. It's kind of in the name.
There shouldn't be a dumb switch in a smart house. It should be a neat, programmable switch which your *CERTIFIED ELECTRICIAN AND SMART HOUSE INSTALLER* has set up to turn off all the lights in your house when you press it upon exit.
I can't speak of the claims that devices would stop responding. If it's true, it seems like that alone would be a dealbreaker.
Regarding the second half though, it sounds like he wasn't wired correctly. For example, you can easily set up two switches to control a single light. The two switches operate in such a way that it doesn't matter if one of the switches is off. Flipping the second switch will toggle the light functionality. I find it hard to believe that the smart devices he chose do not have this functionality, and even harder to believe that no smart switches AT ALL can do it. So you maintain an old "normal" dimmer/switch for legacy functionality and the smart component acts as the second component. Not rocket science.
Of course, I say you can "easily set it up". But this does not mean an average 80 year old granny is going to buy a smart home kit in the morning and have it all plugged up and ready to go by tea time. It does require a little work, but nothing an electrician or average DIY-er couldn't knock out in a day if they want it done right.
You're biggest problem is that you replaced the bulb. The Lutron switches that work with Wink work well. You can still use the switch as a switch and if you want you can use your phone. I find this convenient when I'm laying in bed and realize my wife has left every light on in the house.
Having said that I would still not recommend Wink in it's current state:
* The initial set-up is wonky, I returned one hub because it didn't work, got another, had the same issues but after fiddling, for hours it finally worked. I think the problem here is that it is highly sensitive, so if it is too close to other sources of signals, like your Wi-Fi router it just has issues. I moved it to another room and it's been running fine.
* The app is not the greatest, especially when updating the Wink Hub firmware. It has a very nice looking user experience, but sometimes it will tell you lights are on that you know are off, and vice-versa. If you try to change them the app will update with the correct information though, so that's more of just an annoyance. The geo-location settings I could never get working, I wanted a robot to turn on my lights when I got home, but it never recognized me getting home. The geo-location services are also a drain on battery life on the iPhone. So since they never worked properly for me, I just turned them off... but that was a while ago, maybe I'll give them another chance.
I installed a remote controlled light switch in a bedroom to save digging a broken cable out of the walls. Yes, it works, but in the quiet of the night I can hear inverter whine from the switch unit. Normal mains switches are of course silent when not in use.
Years ago, wired up X10 light controls, and had several lamps and other small devices controlled remotely. The convenience to be able to turn off downstairs lights that the kids would leave on was okay, until the hard wired light switches failed would randomly turn on in the middle of the night, or fail to turn off. It all sounds nice, but the 'remotes' would hide, like the tv remotes, stereo remotes and dvd remotes often will do, and end up being one more thing to maintain or fail. I also had lighting controlled by my computer, which was mostly for those weekends away, but the same issues with phantom lighting occurred. Oh, and I recently tried the Ethernet over AC boxes that plug into the wall sockets and they were equally useless. Must be the way my house is wired... :)
The big problem with SmartHomes, is that they aren't designed as Smart Homes to begin with.
There is a reason why convention centers have all these centrally-controlled lighting systems and large HVAC systems. It's a lot less work to be able to partition off parts of the convention center and disable the controls to prevent tampering with by attendee's
On a small scale, homes are often built as cheap as possible, which means the power switches actually send the 120V directly to the light fixture, and aren't low-voltate lighting controls. HVAC in homes are the same way, often sending electricity directly to electric baseboard heating, instead of being a low-voltage thermostat, or a low voltage thermostat that controls a central HVAC system.
The NEST device for example only works on low-voltate systems. So you can't use it on electric heat unless it's a central HVAC furnace. You can however use it on gas heating (eg fireplace inserts.)
But lights, we're experiencing the same problem people had back when houses didn't have electricity. People retro-fitted their houses by running the electric cables outside the walls, and many of them burned down. This is the same situation, where to make a "smart house" requires running the 120V power directly to the socket, not a mechanical switch, with a low-voltage control at the switch. This makes it dangerous should in the future someone wants to change the lighting system, since their only way of making it not-live is the breaker box.
Ultimately, Smart lighting systems need to replace the fixtures, not the bulbs. So that the fixture takes the 120 volts and has capacitors in it to run the computer circuitry while there is no power. This would also make the "bulbs" cheaper by not having to put an entire 120 volt transformer and heatsink into every bulb, it can be reduced to just the LED chips and a clamp against the heatsink and DC voltage terminal.
Last year, I picked up a Wink Hub and four "TCP Connected" brand (which is a horrible name for obvious reasons) daylight LED bulbs to see how dipping my toes into home automation would work out, and it really has been a seriously mixed result just like the author of the the original article says. I'm using a very simple setup, two lights in my home office, and one light in the rear of the living room. The only "smart" part I have set up, is a group to let me control the office lights all at once.
And it's really not all that stable. The TCP Connected bulbs actually require the use of a home gateway and online service to control, and Wink ties into that. When that service is glitchy, things will either work or not work. There's no apparent reliable activity confirmation set up in the protocols from what I can tell, so the software never knows if a device is on or off. A fairly simple schedule I have set up dims my lights for a period before bed, and then turns them off later. This usually works, but not always. It's also supposed to turn them back on, and it doesn't appear to do that about half the time.
Is the problem the TCP bulb integration? Is it Wink? Is it the signal in my house? Is it a bug? There's no way to tell for sure, and systems just aren't bulletproof enough to rely on just yet. But is it a nice step? Absolutely.
The big thing I feel that I should do in my personal case though, is replace the light switches so I don't always have to pull out a smartphone or tablet. Is it a pain to do that? Yes and no. It's more of a pain than it should be for something advertised as super simple, because of the article's mentioned process of unlocking a device, loading app, swiping to control you need, and then hitting said control.
The prices can definitely be appealing, but once you realize that a light switch is going to be $50, it adds up.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
I'm surprised that he hadn't figured this out... only thought about removing switches (or taping them down) for a few minutes.
Then I found two VERY simple solutions. GE makes a switch that is a toggle that says "in the middle" (i.e. push it up turns on, then moves back to a center position, and visa versa to turn off). It doesn't take a certified installer to figure this out. That way works for both "non-smart" use, and "smart" use (i.e. via phone, tablet, etc.)
Also, the GE smart bulbs that I got with my Wink are smart enough to reset if you turn off the power and turn it back on. Absolutely NO need to tape anything off.
I think he didn't think very much about this, or wasn't very creative... didn't take me that long to do it, and the DIY has worked well enough that it passed the "Wife doesn't want anything that is tech just for tech sake" test...
It's actually FINALLY getting to the point where the DIY person can tackle this if they don't get sucked into the hype and actually THINK about the use cases before deploying stuff willy nilly...
I have automated the well and spring pumps for my house, wired the generator into a starting relay on my inverter and my solar inverter is controlled via frequency shift from the inverter. It works perfectly. I tried to automate the lights and heating and not succeeded once. It never saved power and was way less convenient that a good thermostat and a PIR sensor for lights. I don't understand the need to control these things remotely if I'm not there, what's the point? Not everything needs another shitty web interface but even then remote switches and relays exist already without making your house too annoying
If he's such a handy guy, he could've just wirenutted the wires in the boxes and put blank plates over them. simple and neat looking! Also, i replaced my old analogue thermostat with a programmable digital one years ago and havent looked back. Lots of people use them and they are an excellent technology.
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
To turn on my lights, I use a dedicated analog controller connected via USB to a Raspberry Pi, which is wired to my home router via gigabit ethernet. It's more expensive than "do everything" smartphone controls, but much easier and more intuitive to use.
I've seen people do various attempts at smart homes, be it with X10 or wired items. The problem is that Murphy sneaks in. That bulletproof Wi-Fi network gets thrown on the floor when the neighbor turns on their baby monitor or nukes an airbag in their microwave. The wiring gets eaten by a mouse.
Even with proper wiring, connections wind up corroding because it is extremely difficult to make a crimp connection that will stand more than a few years without either using solder and shrink-wrap tubing, or a hydraulic crimp tool that costs in the thousands, but gives a 1-2 crimp sections of about 3/4 to 1 centimeters. The cheapie crimp tools only crunch the wiring fitting on in a tiny place, which winds up corroding and causing intermittent failures over time. In my experience, few people outside of marine shops and telcos actually can make proper crimp connections that can last years. Most might last six months, then corrode.
Of course, with IoT, we are seeing the same stuff come around again, except with devices sporting public Internet access. Now, we not just have issues with wire failures, but devices sitting on the Internet just waiting for any blackhat to seize control of it.
This probably will end up a subjective discussion. Some people like being able to pull out their iPhone and retract the deadbolt on their door as they are pulling up, and be loudly demanding this functionality. Others prefer manually opening their locks so they don't have to worry about them being hacked via remote.
I bought:
* Logitech Ultimate Home Control
* Logitech Home Control
* Nest
* Philips Hue Bridge
* 3 Philips Hue Luxe Bulbs
* 2 Philips Hue bulbs
* Philips Hue Light Strip
* 2 Philips Hue Taps
The Ultimate Home Control is in the living room along with the colored Philips Hue bulbs and the Light Strip. I also put one Tap in there right where the normal light switches are.
The bedroom is the regular Home Control with 3 Luxe Bulbs... again with a Tap where the normal light switches are.
Everything synced up perfectly and works perfectly. Having integration with the Logitech remotes is awesome. You just press "Watch Movie" and all of my AV gear resets for watching a movie while the lights dim: awesome! After the movie you turn the system off and the lights automatically come back on: sweet!
If you don't know what a Tap is... go check it out: http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/...
It's essentially a "light switch" that makes running the whole system super easy. Each one has 4 buttons that I've set up as different lighting combinations: Everything on, dim, dimmer, everything off... essentially. I have both set the same way in both rooms so that you can easily remember what the buttons do. Also: they don't take batteries! They're powered by the force of pressing the buttons themselves... so they are very reliable.
All of this is so dang simple and fool proof that my wife even loves it... she is a non-techie but she loves the extra flexibility with the lights. If she's reading at night she'll even pop open the Hue app on her phone and dial down all the lights except the one on her side of the bed.
My advice: don't go cheap. Buy actual name brand stuff: Hue, Logitech, Nest. Don't try to cheap out on something that you need to interact with all day every day...
Some years back, I worked in home automation. During that time, I realized that the key is not retrofitting a home (that's an invitation for trouble or gimmickry) but to build a home with smart features in mind in the first place (ex: vent airflow and temperature sensors, actuators to adjust vents, etc.) Unfortunately, house builders were not really serious about the effort at the time and resorted to gimmickry anyway, when they could (calling a movie theater room with a single light and a touch panel controller 'home automation.')
What landed me the job was my "resume" - which was a side project where I automated a window shade controller and controlled it remotely through a linux machine. I cannibalized a worm gear out of an old VCR, connected it to a rotary window shade thing. Believe I used a segment of duct tape as a rudimentary U-joint. The motor was controlled by the parallel port and an H bridge, and a cron task would open the window shades in the morning and close them in the evening.
That was my first lesson in home automation: longevity. Home automation products, being new, aren't really tested for durability. My prototype certainly wasn't. At some point the contact switches I used for measuring rotation failed, and I came home to my venerable Linux machine twisting the window shades for hours.
.
The X-10 protocol itself is not as reliable as some of the current home control protocols, but the simplicity makes up for a lot of its shortcomings.
As I type, the X-10 main control unit has turned on a light in the living room, getting ready for sunset.
Having worked in the construction field (architect/project manager) I've seen building management technology come full circle. With the 2014 code implementation building management systems are the standard. I'm referring to integrated systems such as leviton which sense and adjust light levels, window treatments, lenel for access systems, and commercial mechanical system integration. The first time I saw a phone app that could tie in to a management system for a 60K square foot LEED gold building I was impressed with the simplicity and effectiveness.
Switch pages to systems such as wink, schlages residential lock management system, or smart thermostats they all don't have a true standard allowing central control. thus instead of one robust app you have several apps still under development. In addition device to controller communication is often over wifi as opposed to commercial style implementations which are hardwired. There is a reason they exist this way.
I'm still waiting for a simple way to control my TV, and DVD player. Universal remote is a double negative (or a double positive resulting in a negative?) While it's possible to unify a TV, a receiver, an xbox, and a cable box; it is far from simple. If you need a CS degree to get your IOT house in order, I really don't see it being mainstream. So yeah, in short, the OP nailed it... never simple.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
The author actually talks about installing stuff on a live circuit while they explain how the system is terrible and doesn't work.
If you don't know enough to kill the circuit at the breaker before you start stripping wires, you are not only unqualified to do the work, you are risking injury up to and including death.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Replace the switches, don't use the damn bulbs. Problem solved.
All I need is to fool the thieves while I am gone.
My legs work, I have some fingers left, so why the automation?
The Garage light even comes on when the door opens.
What more could I need?
The only reason I would install such functionality is the one button 'theatre mode' or 'party mode' where it sets all your lights to predetermined levels, closes blinds - does a whole bunch of stuff at once. And I dont really need a remote for that (although my logitech HT remote could easily do it). The smartphone app can can honestly FOaD.
However, even that is hard to justify for a 1400 sqft home on a city lot (for me)
I've replaced all of the switches in the downstairs of my house with Leviton brand smart switches (most are dimmer switches).
I linked them to a 6 button controller that is conveniently located both near the stairs and the front door, and set up scenes for each of the buttons (like "all lights on", "movie night", etc with varying levels for each of the lights. I did this linking through the switches and 6 button controller themselves, no external controller.
Works very well, press a button on the controller and the corresponding lights come on at the preset dim level, but each lamp can be overridden with the wall switch. Another nice feature of the switches is that they can be set to turn on at a preset dim level (which can be overridden with another press of the button), I have a 5 light chandelier in the dining room which is way too bright at full light level, so I lock it at about 75% brightness by default, but can set it higher if I want to.
At night, I just hit the Off button on my way up the stairs and all the lights turn off.
I've tried a couple automation products to let me control the lights from computer and have *not* been happy with them at all -- bad UI, hard to program switches, etc. Fortunately, I don't care so much about computer control and am happy with the 6 button switch.
... will take off when robots and home automation advance enough and the price is right.
I don't know what he is on about. I got a TON of Z-Wave stuff from RadioShack when they decided they didn't want to carry it any more. 3-way switches, regular switches, outlet replacements, remote controls and plug in adapters. I bought a ZWave stick separately.
Now, 90% of my light switches are Z-Wave controlled. Sockets in the wall that previously had no way to control except for going over and pulling the string on the lamp I have a handy remote for. I can walk into a room and press the light switch, if I leave without turning it off I don't have to get up (remote control). I have the bedside light turn on every workday to get me up as an alarm. I can control my lights through the internet if need be (rare, geek cred only). I use it to turn on my Slow Cooker so it cooks for 8 hours on low, if I get delayed at work I just change the turn on time. I'm still working on connecting IFTTT to send me an email which I parse as it comes in when I enter an area so it turns on the porch light if it is dark outside when I come home, but that is more a time issue than anything else. I also use it to turn on a fan when I am on my bicycle trainer so it isn't on when i'm warming up and I don't have to stop once I do. It works well enough that I didn't even have to give my girlfriend any explanation, she pressed the buttons , saw what lights came on, and done.
wait - knowing all of that is... simple? ;-)
My condo has a long corridor that opens to a living room... all without any light switches. So to walk through my house I have to turn the kitchen light on - walk across the room - turn on the stairwell light -- walk back turn off kitchen light... you get the picture (who designs this stuff?!)
I wanted to buy a wireless switch of some kind and make a three-way system. Adding a light switch to one wall is almost impossible. I looked at battery operated systems, wall-switch like devices, and others. I couldn't find anything that was slim, or could work with an existing lamp, or the costs were $100+.
A $5 nightlight that senses darkness is my automation solution to the problem. $0.02 per year electricity and I'm all set.
I put motion sensors in the walk-in closets so the lights come on when you go in and stay on for 5 minutes. I did the same in the laundry room. The light beside my bed comes on at 10pm so I can turn off the lights on the way to bed and still have light at my destination. Automation should be for convenience. If you're living with your smartphone next to you, then maybe controlling your lights with them is fine. I put the basement lights on X10 and had a switch at the top of the stairs. Then I can do an "all lights off" before going to bed without having to go down and check them all.
I started with a few X10 components and moved to Insteon from SmartHome. My experiences and the acceptance by wife, teenage boys, and friends:
Wins:
- Control of outdoor low voltage lights. Works great, nice to have different schedules for different days of the week. No one cares but me.
- Christmas lights. Nice, but cheap timers work as well. No one cares but me.
- Combining switch locations. Our kitchen has switches in five different locations. Replaced one of the switches with a multi-button scene selector for the kitchen. Big winner with everyone.
- Panic button turning on all outside lights. Wife likes in concept, she still has not pulled out her phone to activate it if I am around.
- Indicator in kitchen that garage doors are open. Very popular
- Motion controller turning on lights when approaching front door. Popular, but cheaper to install a light with motion sensor.
- Wife wants ability to activate spa before we get home. On the list, but relatively expensive to add to Smarthome or pool controller.
Losses:
- Smart phone control of lights. I am the only family member who ever bothers to use their phone.
- Anything that changes indoor lighting unexpectedly. Startles everyone, even when they know about it.
- Even with Insteon's redundancy, I still have problems communicating with several devices. This is an ongoing debug effort.
- I am the only one in the family who can program this system. Software is almost user hostile.
- I have many systems with home control capabilities that do not interact: a satellite box, pool controller, garage door opener, Apple gear, Harmony remote, and Insteon.
This isn't a shortcoming of "smart homes", it's simply that the companies haven't understood yet that they need to make their stuff more usable.
When we built our hackerspace's light control, we had a hard requirement on functioning fixed switches from the beginning. Even beyond usability, they're implemented to keep working if the central controller (a BeagleBone Black) stops working. And truth be told, our not-so-tech-savvy guests exclusively use these, and even the tech-savvy people mostly hit the switch instead of pulling out their smartphones.
Has it failed? No. We can still control light temperature (we have 2700K, 4000K and 6500K bulbs), RGB PARs (no hard switch for these) and can bump lights without having to get up from our laptops.
I should mention though that our hard lightswitches do *not* directly control power to the lights. (They speak DALI.) Having a hard powerswitch in your light's power line is just something that needs fixing for proper smart lights. I'd recommend pulling a separate line to the bulb and wiring up the switched line to some input, so that the switch can do something useful.
Turning on the bathroom light at 1AM with a dimmer let's have just enough light to hit the toilet, but not so much that you are blinded and woken up. The porch light has one too. I have the option of lighting up the walkway like a runway when needed, but most of the time it is just bright enough to make it up the stairs without tripping and doesn't annoy the neighbors with lots of glare, nor spoil the nighttime view. The ability to adjust the lighting to the task and mood makes the house feel more responsive to our needs.
The electronic cypher door lock. I can't sing the praises of these loud enough. I carry 1 key, my truck key and that's it. My family all have their own code to get in, set to a number they can easily remember. (I live in Florida, they tend to visit a lot when it's cold.). Visitors and roommates get a code when they need it, and when they leave I delete theirs while leaving all the rest intact. We use mechanical cyphers at work and I have electronic ones at home. They both have their issues (price and batteries) but they both work fine.
My experience with all the other forms of home automation, were items installed by my brother in law. My sister, their kids, and anyone who was visiting had no clue how any of it worked, only he did. After 5 years most of it was breaking down, and the new stuff wasn't compatible with the old, so we spend this last Christmas break tearing it all out and going back to more robust proven tech. (aka standard dimmers/switches)
The only thing I see a problem with most of it is backwards compatibility and cross manufacturer compatibility. You pretty much have to commit to one set of tech from one company, and then either have to gut the whole thing 5-10 years later or live with a patch work system.
Voice control over everything
Sensors to know where you are in the house
Learning of your regular patterns of use
Central intelligent manipulation of the devices in the house
Basically an A.I. maid to take care of everything.
I think the key is that "smart" homes aren't designed for dumb people.
I use the following:
Universal Devices ISY994i INSTEON Automation Controller
http://amzn.com/B007JM29LU
with
Smarthome ToggleLinc Relay INSTEON Remote Control On/Off Switch Non-Dimming
http://amzn.com/B003ICY0M6
and
INSTEON 2635-222 ON/OFF MODULE
http://amzn.com/B00G5R6S9O
These let me control lamps and lights throughout my house with a simple web interface on my android phone. I also have a couple of the dedicated remotes that I keep by the door. These things let me do exactly what I need to do, which is turn on the lights for the pizza guy when I see him pull up on my security camera. They let me turn on my lights from my car so I don't have to fumble with a light switch when I'm carrying in groceries from the garage. They also let me turn on and off lights/lamps as I move through the house without having to bother with switches. I can also turn everything off from bed.
I have a semi-smart thermostat. (http://www.radiothermostat.com/) that uses a pretty open interface. (https://radiothermostat.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1268461-where-do-i-find-information-about-the-wifi-api-)
The free android app lets me adjust the temperature of my house from wherever I am. If I'm coming home from vacation early, I can manually set the thermostat so my house is the right temperature when I get home from the airport.
This stuff is really not hard. It's just designed to do very specific things. Some people are just too ignorant or inept to know what to expect from it and how to do it right.
I remember when one of the big selling features of a PC was you could put all your recipes in a database -- no more the mad collection of photocopied recipes, newspaper clippings, notecards from grandma, hand-scrawled copies of recipes, etc.
Except that it seemed to turn out that it was like 10 times the work to bullshit around with a computer versus a folder or even a little box with notecards if you were super motivated.
Smarthomes just seem like the same thing in many ways. 10 times the work for the same effort and way simpler solutions exist that do niche tasks just as well (eg, digital wall timers).
...and what do you expect?
If you want a proper "smart home" solution, you have to get an integrated package. Those aren't cheap and aren't things you can generally get via amazon.com.
I spent way too much on mine. But my outdoor lights turn on at 15 minutes before sunset and turn off at a random time between 10 and 11pm. I've got a couple thermostats which will warm up the first floor on weekdays to 66 degrees on weekdays half an hour before I go downstairs in the colder months. Also have a music system that can play any playlist off my server in any room of the house, or play a radio or internet radio station or even the audio of a TV station. Everything via physical switches or via a phone app.
Systems in the future will do more and cost less. Hopefully they'll be as secure and integrate as well or better than what I have now.
Is it worth it? Of course not. (Well, it may be worth it so that I don't have to turn off the outdoor lights when I'm already in bed. Because there's no way my wife's getting out of bed for that.)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Having used many of the commercial systems, their biggest downfalls are proprietary hardware and needing a certified tech to do simple maintenance and additions.
You can easily wire up an entire house with sensors and actuators using fairly inexpensive and abundantly available electronics. The problem is controlling them all, which is one of the reasons we started working on Touch Control System. TCS is a 3D game engine built for controlling electronics.
In our very first video, we mounted a touchscreen in a wall. This shows what TCS looks like in a home automation environment:
https://hyperplaneinteractive....
Lots more stuff on our blog:
https://hyperplaneinteractive....
You can download the current Alpha release from the homepage on our website, free for personal/educational use:
https://hyperplaneinteractive....
In our next release, we will have project examples for voice recognition using the Microsoft Kinect and neural networks using FANN.
Check it out!
Maybe you were hinting at this, but just in case... Given our current technology, I refuse to use any voice recognition. Samsung is sending everything you say to a 3rd party, who can do anything they want with everything captured by the TV. Siri is no better, so I refuse to use Apple's voice recognition as well. At least with Siri currently, I'd have to push a button to use the service.
If we somehow had enough processing power and software _in_ the house I'd consider it.. but that system can't be directly connected to the internet to be used and I'd have to have full access to monitor communication in my house. I have a nice soldering gun to fix unwanted web cams and microphones I don't want and can't control. I believe the 2nd amendment protects my right to use my soldering gun in my house for protection!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I too have a whole house Insteon system and pretty much concur with your wins/losses 100% with the following additions:
Wins:
-- A huge win is that outsiders need not know that the lighting is automated at all. Just use the light switch. Works pretty much like any other lighting system. In places with an 8 or 6 button switch is is still fairly obvious what button to hit to turn on the lights.
-- One button for all the kitchen lights.
-- One button for the whole main floor.
-- With my ISY994 the system smartly controls my irrigation system. It waters only when needed and avoids windy days and days with expected rain.
-- I can turn off all the lights in the house and tell the thermostat to go into setback mode with one button. I have that button programmed in the bedroom, by the front and back doors, and garage door. (programmed it to require three taps to prevent visitors from accidentally turning off the lights)
-- I have my thermostat setback when I leave the house.
-- I have my thermostat smartly look at the outside temp and adjust temperatures accordingly. Ie. it goes into setback mode if the outside temp is at all pleasant.
-- I have one button to turn on "Welcome home" mode when I enter the house.
-- I have timers to auto turn off the kids lights at night.
-- It is tied into my XBMC system and dims the lights when the movie playback starts.
-- The lights are set to come on in the case of a fire alarm trigger. (Hope I never need this).
Cons:
-- Very, very rarely (a couple times a year) there is some button press on my 6 button switches which turn on every light in the house. It is easy to turn everything back off with my all-off button but it still is weird.
-- Programming is a pain but I very very rarely change anything anymore. It just works.
-- Occasionally a program stops working right but a simple ISY reboot fixes it.
So to walk through my house I have to turn the kitchen light on - walk across the room - turn on the stairwell light -- walk back turn off kitchen light... you get the picture (who designs this stuff?!)
Who indeed? My 70s era house has switches at each end of every hallway and stairwell, and one in the middle where the stairs meet the upstairs hallway. I guess your condo builder wanted to save a dollar. (On the other hand, none of my hallways have a freaking electrical outlet, so it's a good thing my vacuum cleaner has a long cord. Who designs this stuff?)
We installed a new boiler last year and the board kept throwing error codes to the point where it would shut down.
We couldn't leave the house for more than 24 hours for fear the boiler would lock up in the middle of winter.
Coincidentally we had sprung for a Honeywell WiFi thermostat and I could manually check the setting remotely on my phone very easily.
The thermostat would also send an alert through the app if the temp exceeded parameters. This, coupled with a new DropCam aimed at the boiler's control panel (which did NOT have the ability to alert us other than throwing a code and flashing a red light) allowed us to leave for trips and contact the installer for repairs if needed and we had a neighbor let them in. Never ended up needing that as they eventually fixed the boiler.
The WiFi Thermostat has come in handy in other ways since then:
We installed one in the apartment we rent out to replace the crappy one that the tenant could never figure out how to use. Now when they call or text about issues with Heating or Cooling I can instantly check their thermostat remotely and "fix" it.
We also installed one in my MIL's home. She lives alone and keeps screwing with the thermostat. She is supposed to leave the FAN ON all the time so the humidifier runs even when the forced air heat is not supposed to come on. Instead of driving over there to check it, *again* I just check it via the app on my phone. I can turn the FAN on/off, check settings, re-do them if necessary.
No issues with reliability after more than a year of operation.
I like microcars
When my Amazon Echo arrives, I'm going to work with the API to see if I can use that as a controller for home automation. Voice control really is the only way to go for this stuff. Pushing six different buttons seems a bit silly.
Over the years, I've invested thousands of dollars in several home automation platforms. I've yet to have an experience that I'd call "good."
Candidate #1: X10. Future-tech, circa 1978.
Candidate #2: INSTEON: The Commodore Amiga of home automation.
Candidate #3: Z-Wave: The People's Home Automation Platform.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
FWIW my experience has been good. Just moved into new home that I specifically designed as a smart home.
For me the scope of "smart" is:
After living there for 4 months, I feel the most useful parts of this are:
There are other features I like, but those could mostly be attained with a combination of various retrofit solutions and don't require an integrated home controller like C4.
Dislikes:
(C) No other big ones yet, although it did take 6 weeks of life in the house to get things tuned how we wanted. Self-inflicted pain due to desire for some rather complex scenes / automation.
my wife used to use an iPad in the kitchen to display a recipe she found, then she gave up on that and just brought her laptop instead.
Then she gave up on that.
Most of the time she uses recipes she has printed out on paper and who cares if they get stuff spilled on them, she just prints out another one.
Or she drags out the "recipe book" from the top of the fridge that has all her olde recipes that she saved on a bazillion scraps of paper.
It's just easier than pulling them up on the computer or the iPad or something else.
same with most everything else around the house.
I tried using an iPhone app and a dongle to replace all the remotes for the TV and things but that ended up being more clunky than 4 remotes.
I would say it was because we are "old" but our late teen grandkids seem to have zero interest in "smart" devices other than to flip them around in the air and do "tricks" with them like "drop" them so they break.
I like microcars
The primary purpose of most current home automation systems is data harvesting about the home's occupants. The actual automation of the home is a secondary purpose designed to get the harvesting inside the home.
I too have an Insteon system.
Their customer service is absolutely awful: one of my light switches stopped working and it took a cumulative 12 hours on hold with them to get it replaced under warranty. (Thankfully I was able to semi-ignore their hold music while working.) Their "Hub" crashes about once a week and does not turn devices on and off as promised. The only thing they'll recommend is a complete factory reset which is a complete pain in the ass to re-program.
Not worth the hassle.
Oh, really? MY living room has four recessed ceiling lights at the "far end" away from the door. When you open the door, to the right there is the light switch that turns on ...two of them. The other two are controlled by a switch behind that door, so to the left. Which means you have to shut the door or walk around it to fully illuminate the room. My theory is that some electricians like to play cruel jokes on other humans.
BTW I would need some smart switches where one works locally AND can remote-control a second one. Apparently, that doesn't exist. Plenty of remote-control switches OR locally-active ones, but not combined.
So let's start with the problem statement, what problem are you trying to solve?....crickets....
Cheap And Good Enough beats State Of The Art.
If all the gadgets you install in a house need explicit controls, they're still dumb: not smart.
A truly smart device would "know" what to do and when. How it attained that knowledge - though being taught, observation, or some sort of self-learning / evolution process doesn't matter. The point is that merely swapping one sort of switch or control for another (less convenient, more complicated and dependent on a whole slew of subsidiary technology) isn't a sign of "smart".
A really smart device would, like a good butler (so I'm told), just fade into the background. It would produce just the required item or action at just the right time without the need to ask and it would just work - including handling exceptions in a "smart" way.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Or we one tmie installed some new lighting systems at work. dozens of programmable light levels, individual control over individual lights.
It was a massive failure, the users preferred the old system which hadsome banks of lights, and they just walked over to the rows of controls, and adjusted a little slider up or down until they had a light level they liked. All replaced with a system you needed an instruction manual to set and operate.
This kind of stuff isn't progress, its merely another layer of crap on top of a different layer of crap. I can walk over to my thermostat and adjust it to the temperature I want. I really don't want to program it to automatically lower the temperature at 10:47 p.m. every night because I might stay up later, or go to bed earlier, and the same for bringing the temperature back up in the morning,
And I really don't want to have to by Norton's for Toasters.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I prefer having a dumb home that passively does what it should do. That is what I designed and built. It is low cost, low maintenance, low taxes and passive. It just works. It keeps us sheltered from rain, warm in the winter and cool in the summer with a minimum of effort, cost and upkeep.
Smart Homes are a Dumb Idea that gadget makers have been trying to sell for a long time. The problem is do you really want to be upgrading and replacing your home's parts every five years or more frequently?
What will be worse is subscription homes. It's called renting.
No dice.
In a proper home automation setup, the light switches are replaced with smart switches. This leaves the simplicity of turning lights off at the switch in place, but adds the ability for remote control.
I've had a "smart home" for many years, and it takes a long time to figure out which aspects of having a smart home are actually useful in practice. While most of the lights in my home can be controlled remotely, I only control a small number of them from my phone on a regular basis. For the most part, I've found that I want automation around switches that are not likely to be in convenient locations. For example, I commonly use my smart interface to shut off my back porch light, because I often forget when I go to bed, and it's way easier than running downstairs. I also use various climate controls (thermostat, ceiling fan) a lot. Light switches in the same room that you're occupying, not so much - it's faster to just walk to the switch and flip it than pull the interface up from a controller.
Automatic timers and sensors I've found to be a mixed bag. They work well until you want to "override" whatever behavior they're doing automatically. For example, I have an automatic sensor that turns on my hallway lights to a dim setting if I approach it at night time, so I can see at night. That automation is helpful 95% of the time, but the other 5% I may want to turn the lights on bright and leave them on. I don't have an easy intuitive way to tell my automation to stop trying to show the dim light without pulling out my smartphone.
My hot tub is probably the best example of where my automation really shines. I can turn it on remotely so it's ready for use by the time I get home. Once I'm home, I can control everything about it from one screen - I can turn the filter pump on/off, turn the heater on, turn the light on, and turn the outdoor speakers on, even fill the water up if it's low, all from one place. Doing those things manually otherwise requires going to many different places and getting into weatherproof boxes to access the manual switches.
I think lighting control, in general, is the least useful part of my home automation setup, despite it being the most iconic.
If someone patents in interface, it's gone from every other vendor. And since it's the "best" it's worth more, so a $5 item is now a $100 item (gotta pay back that engineering time). It's not expensive because it's mechanically robust or physically challenging to build the parts, it's because of the monopolistic lock in that each standard brings.
Plus, there are no (useful, universal) standards for home automation. Partly because it's just too wide open, partly because shit is changing all the time. How often has the primary power distribution in a home changed in your lifetime (0)? How many times has TV transmission (once, maybe twice)? How many times has network requirements changed (I've run out of fingers)? A simple, end-user programmable, extensible system available on a commodity basis from multiple vendors simply doesn't exist.
FWIW, 20 years is a blink of an eye for a house. I regularly run across basically the same dumb electrical components in 1950s buildings that are being installed in today's brand new homes. And multiple manufacturers offer interchangeable parts for houses built today and 60+ years ago. Until Smart stops meaning outrageously overpriced for the hardware provided, it's never going to be mainstream.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
For working smart home, he needs to upgrade to the Centurion plan.
Hi, my name is John, and I have been in the consumer electronics industry for over 15 years now. Currently I am employed at one of the nation's largest distributors of consumer electronics and home automation gear. Home automation is one of the "hottest" trends right now, and we are seeing a flood of products enter the market, promising to make your home "smart". Most of them, unfortunately, are needlessly complex, have limited functionality, or poor compatibility with existing gear.
It is VERY hard for someone, even someone who thinks that they are highly technical, to get everything working in their home properly.,,and even harder to make all of those devices communicate SEAMLESSLY and with 100% reliability to a control system! There are many pitfalls when designing an automation and control system, and one of those is cost. Let me tell you the bad news bluntly. This is not something you are going to do cheaply. There ARE "budget" systems...X10 being one of the most famous. But, if you expect it to actually WORK every time you press a button, you are better off hiring a professional integrator! Nothing will end your adventure into home automation faster than having your wife unable to operate a light switch when she presses the button on the wall! You are investing in your HOME here, people. Budget appropriately.
There is quite a lot that goes into designing and installing a good system. First of all, the integrator needs to select the proper equipment that is going in. It does you no good to go shopping for the latest and greatest thermostat, for instance, if that thermostat won't work with the rest of your system! The Nest thermostat is a perfect example. For all of it's "smartness", it was unable, for the first year on the shelf, to talk to ANY home automation system! Sonos is another example. Great system, HORRIBLE integration (although most major control systems DO now work with it, this was NOT the case as recently as last year).
Also, the home owner needs to decide what functionality and control they need in each room. Are you going to have everything controlled from a smartphone or tablet? What happens when you don't have either on hand? What hardwired controls or hardwired touchpanels are you going to need? What functionality is needed in each room? Are you just going to control lights and heat in a room? Or are you also going to have a TV? Surround sound? Distributed audio? Door locks? Do you want a dedicated remote in that room? All questions that should be asked before starting.
After the equipment is selected, then the integrator has to decide how to control it. Is it going to be with IR? RS-232 serial? IP? What metadata feedback do you need or expect from each device? Is it enough to know that the TV is on? Or do you need the control system to show what song you are playing and display cover art?
Then, after all of that, the integrator needs to design and implement a control interface. I have seen some companies (supposedly experts in their field) release control systems with HORRIBLE interfaces! The interface should NEVER seek to replicate all of the functions of your equipment. The point of it all is that when your wife/girlfriend/grandmother walks into a room, she can press "Watch TV" and everything just WORKS. Devices like Harmony remotes TRY to get this right...but you should NEVER have to press a "help" button...it should work properly, EVERY SINGLE TIME IT IS USED, FOREVER. Rock solid reliability is just as important as any other feature of the system...and this is where most DIY systems fall short.
In short, you would be well served by hiring a pro to go over all of these things with you...to help you answer all of these questions and more before a single piece of gear is purchased or programmed. I can't stress this enough. Even if you ARE the most technically minded person in the world, you will NOT have access to the better control systems and the software needed to program them. Systems like Savant, Control4, RTI,
"The GE Link light bulbs were the worst part .. my apartment requires 17 lightbulbs. And because I'd switched hubs, each of the bulbs needed to be reset, a process that involves a specific and particularly well timed flipping of the light switch. After that each bulb needed to be set up while there were no other new bulbs on the circuit, meaning I had to take all of the bulbs out and set them up one-by-one."
the biggest lie their marketers tell us is that it'll be simple and easy to set up and operate all these gadgets.
LMAO, same with all computers and gadgets, another quote "It will make your life easier".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Google's next project after that failed glasses thing:
The Google House
Most the stuff is FREE but you must log-in to enter your house. It tracks everything you do and keeps that information forever!
Your phone or grocery store advertizes that you might like to buy some bran muffins. no reason... (except Google House recognized you were constipated today.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You're never going to get the control you need by putting in a few of those smart lightbulbs. You're going to have to replace some of the basic components of your houses wiring so that they can be controlled either from a device or manually. X-10/Insteon type devices are about the best idea I've heard of as far as smarthome technology on a budget. You replace your household switches and outlets with devices that have assigned address and use your home wiring for communication, then you can program switches and remotes to activate/deactivate those devices from anywhere via controller modules (independent or PC based). Now its the best "idea", I'm not saying it is the best system. They may have gotten better but I know for quite a while they had some serious interference, feature & quality issues. Smart bulbs an sockets may have their niche uses, but not for general home automation.
Not one person has mentioned controller OS upgrades. What if you manage your home automation from Windows version x and Windows version z is now the standard and you upgrade your OS. If its like most software it won't be upgraded to work on the new OS unless you buy some new hardware. For those using smartphones will the app still work if you switch from Apple to Android or Windows phones? Or if you upgrade your phone will the app to control your home still work on the next version of the OS?
It may have been Stereophile, or was it Listener Magazine (some of the best and funniest magazine writing ever, but back to my point)...a writer was writing about why hi-rez digital music formats, such as DVD Audio, Super duper DC, etc. etc., never really took off. His simple answer for Mr. Average man: "these fix a problem I don't have."
Yeah, a "smart" air conditioning system might have some benefits, but I've lived in Los Angeles are for 63 year, and only had air conditioning for 10 years.
When I read about Smart Homes, and the associated Internet of Things, I ask myself, qui bono? My usual answer is: not me very much. The companies that make $$ do, and what else will Samsung do with it, considering the spying they can already do. I suspect they are trying to sell us our own prison cell. A velvet prison cell, but a prison cell none-the-less.
Our system was perfect. Anyone could voice command anything in the house. The four of us were happy as clams but ... over a six month period we gained a total of 102 pounds, one of us now has diabetes and another is pre-diabetic. All of us suffer aches and cramps at various times and we don't sleep as well as we did before.
In the interest of preserving our remaining health we have bypassed the voice control system. We have moved the control apparatus for each light or other device as far as possible from any convenient place, requiring us to stand up and walk somewhere to activate or deactivate the device. Certain devices such as the television will not function until someone pedals the stationary bicycle/generator at a vigorous speed.
Yes, we've gone back nearly to the stone age. It's been 6 weeks and we've collectively lost 18 pounds and we have fewer health problems. While this story may be exaggerated, or entirely fictional, it serves as a lesson for those who idealize a perfect system for lazy people.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Yes it's half the cost of anything else but you'll pay dearly in time trying to fiddle with it. I ended up getting a smartthings hub, twice the price but it's actually usable.
As far as the bulbs, I'm not really sure what the utility of smartifying the bulb is when you have to worry about the switch. Just get a smart switch. You can control it just like a regular switch and you can do things like assign schedules or remote control.
After encountering the adventures and lifetimes of trying to turn my home into a real life minecraft, I gave up and surrendered. The real world would never be cubic eneough. Desperate, To warn others of the dangers of SMART technologies, I founded the brilliant new technology start-up for trading the DUMBSTONE around. We set off to change the world, and ended up making stone soup instead.
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What is driving the rush into these things is that the companies behind them want to mine the data that they generate. Imagine: all those devices phoning home, and companies able to collect data on when people are using things, where people are etc. - all that data can be input to data analysis and find patterns. Those patterns are worth a-lot of money.
"There's no apparent reliable activity confirmation set up in the protocols from what I can tell, so the software never knows if a device is on or off."
So what you're saying is that the devices should probably be renamed UDP Connected.
Karnal
My wife already has already figured out an easier way with voice commands.
All she does is say "I gotta pee" or "I have to talk to this person" and magically the TV pauses until she gets back. Then once she is settled it starts up right where it left off and she doesn't lift a finger or say a word.
I like microcars
Why would anyone have to put tape on a light switch? If you don't want it to work, then just buy a blank plate, remove the light switch (cut the power to it first!), and replace the switch and switch plate with a blank. This is very easy to do. Better still, there should be a smart light switch which can be controlled remotely and will never completely cut power to the smart device being switched from it, even when the switch is physically turned off.
The biggest failing for all of these systems is that they fail to acknowledge that hoses are standalone entities in there own right. House don't stop existing when you leave in the morning. Most house have more than one occupant and usually plants and pets. They need to run without outside help. This is where all the devices that need a smartphone or cloud connection to fail. Houses won't be smart until they don't need smartphones or people to run.
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Get up off your lazy fucking asses and throw the light switch yourself!!
Home automation is neat - and towards the end of every season of "This Old House" they're pimping something that the average home owner cannot afford to control lights and the such... and everything seems to be on some proprietary platform.
My brother got me an X-10 starter kit some years ago - and while it was "neat" - I found it to be more time/trouble than it was worth. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I still have it boxed up after we sold the last house - just don't have a real need for it here. My house is a modest 1,300 sq feet... not a mansion.
Other than some motion sensing lights outside and a programmable thermostat - I have all the automation I need. Would a $300 Nest thermostat save me money? My guess is it would take longer to achieve ROI for something like that above and beyond what I get out of a $40 day/night/weekend thermostat from Home Depot.
For the mobility impaired - automation makes some sense - but it needs to be simple, reliable, cost-effective and easy to maintain/service. Who is someone in a wheelchair gonna call at 10:00 PM when their lights won't turn on?
in many rooms light goes on and off automatically because I have movement sensors, which is super convenient.
My Dad lives in a seniors apartment where they still have their own kitchens. If you could designed simple safety IoT gadgets for seniors that would give their middle-aged children more peace of mind, that would be a big help.
A common issue in seniors apartments is that grannie and grandpa still fiercely fights for their independence. But fuses on ovens get pulled because grannie forgets what she did with her oven or stove, or that she already made bread. A sink overflows on rare occasion. Can we not make intelligent stoves that set timers for specific purposes (or calculate when bad things or bad timings are happening), or taps that check their flow rate and beep a reminder and auto-shut off? How about a gadget that senses when someone falls and alerts specific people (not an expensive monthly monitoring company?)
Basically I use smart light switches, only light switches, in a fairly dumb configuration, i.e. no smartphone or net connection. I just use wall mounted dedicated remote controls. I use Z-Wave. So this basically just compensates not having light switches in convenient places, or in enough places, or for certain lights in any place. Turning on a bunch of exterior lights for instance - my house was just never wired for that and putting in hard wire switches would be a nasty mess. I also use them to turn about 3-4 separate lights on at once and set the dim levels in a 'scene' type of scenario. Just in the living area and kitchen. Oh yeah, I have some lights switch on and off at certain times. This can all be done with just a cheap programmable hand remote. If you keep it simple they are quite useful, reliable, and low hassle. But if you go much farther than simple scenes, it quickly gets complicated. I had the ancient X10 system for years, which was never very reliable and got worse over the years. I recently made the switch to the Z-Wave system, which has been pretty bulletproof for the last 6 mos anyway. Yeah you can hook up Z-Wave stuff to a smart hub and control it away from home and from your computer or phone etc, add things like sensors and cameras and security . . . I guess . . . but ixnay to all that say I. You will spend a whole lot of time and money setting that up and futzing, and for me just no advantage to the lights only, stationary, set and forget wall remote.
Also, I and ignorant 3rd parties can always just go over and hit the actual hard wired wall switch and operate the lights. Which is, you know, nice.