IOT

[Steve Q]

The Internet of Things (IOT) seems to be a hot topic lately. Lots of articles about the huge potential market growth of devices connected to the internet.

The Homeseer community is an extremely well informed group about home automation. As more and more devices become internet connected, what will we do?

I for one, see this as a never ending upgrade situation. Continuously adding new plugins to HS3 until it becomes totally unmanageable!

What will home automation look like in 3-5 years?

Steve Q


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[mrhappy]

I still think that there is a limit in terms of what is practical and reasonable to automate, some things if automated are more trouble than they are worth and then it becomes a novelty nightmare. I'd prefer to focus on core things (lighting, sound, heating etc) rather than trivial automation but some people I know like the gadget factor. There is automation for the sake of automation (I have been there!).

I am someone who carries around pen and paper everywhere I go as I have never found a note taking facility on laptops/PC's that I am happy with. No matter how technical some people are people still have limits as to what they want to use a computer for.

[Automated]

I will continue to automate devices myself where I want such features inside the private areas of my home, as not a single company can be trusted with such data or access.

[Pete]

As more and more devices become internet connected, what will we do?

Personally here want to keep automation / security at home. I am not tethered to my smart phones or tablets and shut them off when am at home.

Internet based automation will grow exponentially in the next few years. It is cheap and easy for newbie automators. You only need to be able to utilize your smart phone to use it or talk to your internet VR / AI device and it will be billed by the month.

IE: Folks are shutting off cable TV and ISP's now are wanting to manage your home security and automation. Introduction packages now for television, internet, phone, security and automation are great deal's now at $199 per month for a year or two...

[logbuilder]

Looking into my crystal ball......

Currently we are in a phase where manufacturers are trying to get as many things connected as they can. Even though they may not have well thought out use cases, if they can say it is connected, that is a plus.

Unfortunately, everything tends to connect in a unique way. We have z-wave, zigbee, insteon, wifi, BT, BTLE, meshes of all flavors and many more protocols. They are all little islands with the inability to talk. In steps the cloud providers (think Echo) and they start tying things together with bailing wire. Poor performing, insecure, unreliable. But hey, it kind of works. The goal is to make them interconnected.

Hopefully we will see some shakeouts in the connectivity options. Products such as MQTT, IFTT, Tasker will get better and will hopefully be able to operate without the cloud if desired. That should move us more into interoperability.

OK, 3-5 years?

• Z-Wave will get more popular along with BT as ways to locally connect devices.
• Cloud usage will be the most common ways to create interoperability. I wish not but that's the way I see it.
• Locally, mesh networks will be the thing everyone thinks they need.
• One or two of the big guys - Apple, Goggle, Amazon, Samsung - will have emerged as the leader in the home hub category.
• Manufacturers will continue to add connectivity to devices that have no good use case to justify. Consumer demand will dictate what lives and what dies.

[langenet]

Here, as I like to automate things, I certainly don't want to have every switch or plug automated. I see guys on here who have scores of light switches which are all controlled. I wonder how big of a house they live it. I mean, I own a 3400 square foot house with attached 3-car garage and can't imagine needing that granularity of control. For now, I manage with a decent level of HA. As well, and we have talked about this, should anything happen to me, I'd want my wife to be able to live in the house without HS. She's technical enough, but I still haven't written the automation documentation...

I've got a programmer buddy at work who has gone through a good handful of automation hubs which he still hasn't settled on one yet - big Kickstarter fan... For some reason which I don't understand, he doesn't want to get into it to the depths of us HS folks to settle on one HA solution which would prove more beneficial in the long run with broader scope of use, but a bit more effort to set up. So IOT is for someone like that who would rather pull out is phone for control. I keep telling him, that's not home automation!

Robert

[logbuilder]

My (log) house is 1900 sq ft total. 1200 sq ft down and 700 up. Open floor plan. I just looked and I have 29 insteon devices which are mostly lights. The mudroom has quite a few since the water heater, well pump, softener are in there as well as lights and security.

My decision to add a device is all geared around a scene or event. If there is a use case and it needs a new device, likely it will get added. Lately I have been building my own devices using the arduino plugin and the ESP8266 nodeMCU wifi connected chip. I can build a device that has just what I need for that area or use case for way less than I could buy one.

Here is an example. In the mudroom, I have an arduino that controls automatically turning on lights when you enter and off after 5 minutes (via HS events of course, based on triggers). That required a PIR motion sensor. It samples and reports temp and humidity. It also monitors a leak sensor in the water heater overflow pan. It is wifi connected back to HS where it updates devices which are easily dealt with in an event. Where in the world would I have even found that configuration and at what cost. And it cost me $15 to build.

Robert

[Kerat]

IOT

My wife and I chatted about this a little while ago. I have lighting tied into my HA. I have the HVAC system tied into HA, I have ceiling fans tied into HA. I have lamps tied into the HA. I monitor operation of the clothes washer/dryer.
I sunchronize the furnace fan cycles with the ceiling fans so that my fans are not running 24-hours a day.
I automated lighting in our shared areas based on activity and occupancy detection. We don't touch the switches in those rooms.
Lighting intensity is changed by the time of day and the house mode.
I configured my HA to turn down intensity as the sun sets. I did this due to reading about the effects of artificial light on the human circadian rhythm. I noticed that my kids used to fight me between 07:30 and 10:00 pm. My kids now are in bed and sleeping most nights by 08:30 pm.
The last time the system went down we walked into the house after a long day. I have occupancy configured to turn on lamps in the main area, this didn't happen, I knew immediately. My kids ran down the hallway and stopped. My 5Yo said "dad the lights didn't turn on on their own." I said "yea, the system is down, I will take a look at it in a bit." My wife and I were talking later and she said you know our kids may grow up never needing to flip switches on and remembering to turn them off. I said yea, kinda like how most people don't know that the save button is actually a floppy disk, or the sound that a camera on a phone makes is from old mechanical cameras.
It makes me think of my freshmen economics classes in college "The cost of something isn't what you paid for it. It is what you gave up to have it." While I am interested in seeing what the world will do in the next 40 years, I can't help to wonder what we will be giving up to get it.


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[Pete]

Very nicely said Kerat!

I continue to enjoy and accept the new with the old even though I say I am a curmudgeon from the baby boomer age.

Here college was in the 70's and family now is in the great grandkids era generation wise.

Always it has been not what is said but rather what is done.

As always one of my favorite hobbies is technology (and time).

@Steve....there are many folks here on the forum still using first generation of Homeseer and totally happy with no real interest in updating any more while there are also newbies here to Homeseer want to do everything possible relating to automation...just the way it is .....

[Kerat]

IOT

I won't lie, even though I have some moments of mindfulness, a friend of mine got me into this home automation habit. Now, I like to automate whatever I can. I also like monitoring a few areas for on/off, network monitoring, network security, network optimization, moisture detection, and temperature monitoring.
I have a ranch home with a fully finished walk out basement. I have just under 3300 finished square feet. I have 358 total devices and 180 events.

Of those I have 37 physical Zwave devices I am in the process of adding in another 17 Zwave devices. And will after that need another 25 Zwave devices to complete all my automation projects.

With all of that in Zwave I still want to tie in other unique systems into my home automation:
1. my security system into HA and monitor open/close on all entry points.
2. Add in security camera monitoring and use it for automation.
3. Add in whole home audio and tie it into TTS notifications.
4. Finish getting voice command using Alexa working.
6. Finish occupancy detection.
7. Install and add in passive and controlled attic circulation.
8. Monitor crawl space fan function
9. monitor radon fan function.
10. Monitor moisture detection in all remaining high risk areas.
11. Whole house power monitoring.
12. Network device shutdown and WOL for off hours away from home power saving.
13. add in monitoring and notifications of and into my HTPC systems.

For me, HS3 not being technology and protocol married is what makes the interoperability possible.

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[waynehead99]

3 to 5 years... HSTouch will finally be stable.

I still don't see automation mainstreamed and I still see fighting for the market space. I am one of those that thinks iOT is actually going to murder what we see as automation. Every company wants you in their ecosystem and very few allow outsiders.

Plus most still think of fancy phone control as automation and that is what is becoming more mainstream. An app for this an app for that.

I do look at things I have done in my house and have recently realized, I have contributed to my wife being "dumb" to the technology. I added the automation very quickly after moving in, and we have a few places that have a bank of at least 5 switches and to be honest, neither of us could do to that switch set and know what did what anymore.

[Steve Q]

Thanks for all the great comments.

For me, home automation started as a hobby and for the most part I still think of it as a hobby. However, I now have quite a few devices that are fully controlled by HS3. For example, my ceiling fans are fully automated. They are temperature controlled and occupancy controlled. Without HS3, it is a major issue to control them.

The terminology home control vs home automation is becoming more blurred. For example, scene control is becoming more available on a lot of phone apps. I think it is hard to argue that a scene that turns on all the lights, adjusts the thermostat, and turns on the TV is NOT automation. Most people would consider this home automation.

I find myself using my iPhone to control more and more of my devices. Of course I want my house to do everything by itself, but I think it is impossible to create events to handle all the exceptions. When I have family or guests, I always need to control things manually. For me, it is not worth my time to try to create HS3 events that handle the exceptions. So I like the idea of using the iPhone as a controller.

IOT will bring lots of opportunities for additional home automation. I have no problem with the cloud knowing if my refrigerator is running, and I would welcome an email from the cloud telling me the fridge door is not fully closed. The beauty of IOT is that we can pick and choose what we want to do with it.

I think the automotive industry will be the driver (pun intended) of the future of home automation. In 3-5 years, new cars will be cloud connected and will have all kinds of automated diagnostic, maintenance, fuel management, and entertainment features. This will create a huge level of awareness and market demand for similar things for use in the home. Maybe this is why Google is entering the car market?

I continually struggle with decisions about my existing technology platforms. Yes, I know that my current computers meet my current needs, but I also know that they will fail at some point and that eventually I will not be able to keep Windows XP, 7, or 10 running.

My hope is that we continue to have products like HS3 that can bridge old technology with the new technology like IOT. We need lots of diversity. It's a big world!

Steve Q


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