The anti🚫-derailment🚃 & thread🧵 hijacking🔫 thread🧵 ⁉

[amal]

@Az_F

But I still would like to use something more futureproof

Okay well now we’re talking about this

Shelly

I have to say the most impressive iot company I’ve come across is Shelly. Almost all of their stuff can run locally/independently from the cloud. The only stuff that can’t seem to do that is the Bluetooth low energy stuff that needs to go through a Wi-Fi gateway device… but I could be wrong, I think it might be possible to configure the gateway to talk locally as well to report ble events.

Seriously just look at their stuff. A lot of people think that their app is garbage… it has only two stars. These reviews are from idiots. Is the Shelly solution all-encompassing like Alexa or Google home? Not really… the app doesn’t do a lot of fancy stuff like voice control or anything like that, but just the fact that you can set up a Wi-Fi push button device to call various URLs based on the button pattern you pressed is impressive. I don’t mean it talks to the cloud and says talk to the url… the button itself calls the URL itself. You can direct this to an internal web server or a external Cloud server or whatever… the button will run independently from anything and do what you ask once configured.

I ran into a problem updating the firmware on a ble device and it seemed to brick… come to find out I can download a Shelly Bluetooth debug app on the Play store and force push a firmware update to bring it back to life. These guys don’t mess around when it comes to making quality stuff. The only downside I can see so far is that they are simply missing some basic iot devices to round out a complete smart home.

Lutron

The other company I really like is Lutron, specifically their Caseta line. I really like their approach to light switches and motion sensors, and their proprietary low frequency RF protocol they use with their Pico remotes.

The remotes and motion sensors and everything can work entirely locally using their RF direct control protocol for controlling lights and everything. The range on the low frequency RF is pretty good. I haven’t had a situation yet where a remote couldn’t control the lights I needed to control.

The other thing about Lutron is their smart hub… while it is ethernet only and no wi-fi support, this means not a lot of interference for their low frequency RF protocol with the hub. They also publish PDF support documents that detail every single UDP and TCP port the hub uses and what those ports are for. I’m pretty sure the Smart hub will totally function with something like home assistant even if the cloud is down.

Network stuff on Lutron's site

I haven’t tested this yet but the software plugin for home assistant seems to connect directly to the smart hub and not to the Lutron cloud service.

The final thing I really like about the Caseta line is the light switch dimmer system they have. It goes into a standard junction box but it does not require a neutral wire. It goes between the hot and load only. The reason this is important is many parts of my home are still rocking the 1930s wiring which only runs a hot and load wire to the junction box. No other smart dimmer works like this that I have found. Every single light switch now in my home is running a Lutron Caseta, whether it is old school wiring or modern wiring with neutrals in the box. I like Lutron for this function.

Oh one other thing, they make a wall plate adapter for their Pico remote so it looks like a wired dimmer but it’s just the remote in a plate. This is great for things like three-way wiring where you just wire nut together one of the boxes and put a Pico remote over it and put the actual dimmer in the other box. Actually in one situation I just carefully screwed the Pico plate into the wall with no actual box or cut out for a box… just to screw holes to hold the plate to the wall and it looks totally legit like there’s a box there.