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People often ask me about my vision for Home Assistant. Before I can describe where I want to go with Home Assistant, I should first talk about how home automation would look in my ideal world. This will be the aim of this post. I’m not going to focus on protocols, networks or specific hubs. That’s all implementation details. Instead, this post will focus on what is most important: the interaction between the users and their home.

Source: Perfect Home Automation – Home Assistant

After my MHVLUG talk on IoT and Home Automation, I stumbled upon Home Assistant. It’s an exciting project, and the maintainer has a great view of what home automation should look like.

I agree with all of this. The best user interface is no interface, things are just correct when you need them to be. The cloud should be very optional, and a cloud outage shouldn’t cripple your home (like the recent Nest issue). Graceful fallback is important.

I’ve had fun contributing to the project so far, and look forward to making this the primary interface to my house over the next couple of months.

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Smart Home Woes

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Gizmodo has a great piece on cheap home automation gone terribly mediocre. It’s actually really interesting to realize how often we as humans need to relearn the idea of resiliency, durability, usability and in systems. Home automation is neat, and I’ve enjoyed playing with parts in it. But if your normal workflow requires a smart phone, you are taking a step backwards. Sadly, most of the solutions out there today head down that path.

A much better approach would be to put smarts directly into existing electrical structures (wall plates, switches), and ensure that all of them had physical manual override. Some of the zwave wall switches out there do that, to the best of my knowledge no one has done that with plugs.

I think a lot of the folks working on these solutions probably need to read The Design of Everyday Things. I promise if you read that, you’ll never look at a phone or a wall switch the same way again.