Question

Hi all, I would very much appreciate your thoughts on what would be the best home automation platform to adopt. Would an standard platform like Apple HomeKit, Google Home, or Amazon Alexa be the best or would a custom solution that is not as mainstream be better? I would greatly appreciate any feedback you may have. Thanks in advance!  

Answer 1

It just really depends on the scale of your intention. With all of the things you have listed, you’ll be limited to just WiFi devices. Zwave stuff would require an additional hub. HomeKit is (IMO) dead in the water. They are still pursuing the same old “walled off garden” approach that Apple does with everything. They only support a tiny tiny fraction of devices compared to GH or Echo. (And currently has no support model (3rd party or otherwise)for anything Zwave. Amazon (again, IMO) seems to be the leader as far as skills go, and the number of devices / platforms it supports. At least currently. They also seem to be the ones throwing the most money at it. I currently have (or have previously used): Wink hub 2 (G1 hub retired in the closet) SmartThings v2 Vera hub Hubitat hub About 85 various Hue lights / strips / Go’s / Play bars / Outdoor Spotlights / Hue sync A dozen or so Echoes Google home & Hub 3 Schlage locks (zwave) 20something Zwave switches and another 12ish WiFi plugs. 2 Nest thermostats Arlo cameras Ring Pro doorbell

Comments

Thank you, Joe. I appreciate your feedback. I have heard of some of the products you have mentioned, but not all, and will look into the ones I had not previously heard about. Thanks again.  

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BTW, one point I have heard about HomeKit is that, although Apple is pursuing a "walled off garden approach", their platform is the most secure. I don't know if this is true or not, and is definitely something I want to look into.  

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@chausses Amazon leader? Their platform doesn’t support Z-wave. Alexa is useless as a home automation platform. Talking about home automation, there is SmartThings and Hubitat. All else is a joke.  

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@kali55 - I literally said Amazon doesn’t natively support Zwave. Not sure if you missed that part. And as far as 3rd party platform integration, (which is what it does) Amazon is the leader, compared to Siri and Google Home.  

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@weese - that is true, it is the most secure, but at the end of the day, if you can’t integrate anything, what good does it do to be THAT secure? There’s really no reason they can’t use HTTPS (the S stands for secure - it’s encrypted) to make API calls to 3rd party web-based applications. I’m personally not worried about that aspect of it at all. Worst case scenario is someone can mess with my lights or turn up the thermostat. in which case I change my passwords and move on.  

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@kali55 i wouldn’t suggest home-assistant/node-red is a joke. You can check here for the number of integrations (home-assistant. io/integrations).  

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@kali55 HomeAssistant?  

Answer 2

Hi Steve, unfortunately there is no real good way to answer this question. It's entirely subjective. There is no, best or better. What your question is similar to, is going to a car enthusiast group and asking what the best car is. It all really comes down to what is important to you, and how you personally operate as well as how the members in your home operate. When I sit down with a client to help them wade these waters, I basically do a full on lifestyle interview, and spend a lot of time getting to know them. What their tech experiences have been, what they want the end product to look like and do, etc. For some people, the Alexa ecosystem really is a better choice and option than Siri or Google Home. For others, it really is Homekit. And others don't even want voice assistants and choose to go a whole other direction with automation using things like Home Assistant. The real kicker is that neither of them are wrong. The trick is to find a solution that integrates so well with your life, that you hardly notice it, yet desperately miss it when you're visiting family out of town.  

Comments

Hi Mark, thanks so much for your comments. Have you seen any resources you would recommend that provide suggestions for coming up with automations that are so valuable to me that I will desperately miss them when I am out of town? Up to this point, I have seen automatons that save me some amount of effort, but nothing so valuable that I would say that I desperately miss them when I am not at home. Thanks again.  

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That really is the challenge. Unfortunately, yet again, it's hard to suggest this sort of thing for you, because I know nothing of your day to day routines or lifestyle. I know that one simple thing that most people notice right off the bat if they get used to using voice assistants is getting into bed somewhere else and trying to tell Google or Alexa to turn off the hotel lights or set the temp for you. It's pretty basic and underwhelming until you get that awkward moment elsewhere when it's your habit to use that feature and now it's gone. Some people like having the peace of mind that everything is in order. For example, with smart water sensors and a shut off valve, you never have to worry about leaks. With smart outlets you never have to hear your wife ask you to reassure you that she didn't leave her hair iron on. When you leave the house, everything can automatically shut off and give you one notification that the house is shut down. That means lights, stove, hair dryer, door lock, garage door, etc all as it should be. There is a lot of peace of mind that smart tech can offer. Then there are the daily routines that people get used to. I know people that hate using alarm clocks and depend heavily on their switchbot curtain gadget to open the curtains slowly in the morning and have music slowly grow louder to help them wake up. It just all really comes down to how you live.  

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There are YouTube channels like Tech With Brett, or Smart Home Solver, and many others that let you see how the tech has improved THEIR lives. They serve as a good launching point to inspire ideas that could work in your life.  

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@kym, thank you. I will check out the resources you recommended.  

Answer 3

Home Automation is still a left-field play. You have demanding platforms which require lot of effort like SmartThings and Hubitat and costumer grade stuff like Amazon and HomeKit which offer very little in terms of interoperability and functionalities

Answer 4

Zwave is likely going to be your best best. I will recommend www. fibaro. com Home Center 3. You can get tons of compatible devices easily and its more stable.  

Answer 5

The last thing I wanted to mention is, none of these systems are perfect. Expect there to be hiccups occasionally, and that happens no matter what system you buy. At the end of the day, this is still all “consumer” grade stuff, and with that, don’t expect 99. 9999% uptime. Most of what I use my stuff for is simply convenience. To be able to sit down in the recliner, and yell at Alexa to turn off the lights, or turn on a ceiling fan. doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I can never go back   I actually have very few “automations” to speak of. off the top of my head, I use the sensor on the ring doorbell to turn on the porch lights if it’s after 11pm. And I have the garage lights set to go on/off when the garage door opens/closes. And the garage door set to auto close at a specific time, because I can’t trust my kids to remember to close it ‍♂️

Answer 6

It really depends on what you are after. I wanted the home equivalent of a self-driving car, so going down a totally bespoke DIY route was the only answer for me. You will never get a “Tesla” by hacking together bits from consumer vendors like Apple, Google, Samsung, etc. It needs a much better architecture, a higher level of integration and greater control. Limiting yourself to specific wireless technologies like Z-Wave, Wi-Fi is a huge mistake. The best decision I made was to go hybrid technology and use both wired and wireless. I use Z-wave, ZigBee, etc but only where it makes sense. I have developed my own unified comms protocol to allow me to integrate anything.  

Comments

" I have developed my own unified comms protocol to allow me to integrate anything. " When you say "comms protocol" I thinking message protocol, which leads me to think MQTT. Why not just use that rather than develop your own?  

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@kym No MQTT is not the right answer for lots of reasons. I needed something simple and light-weight that could be implemented on all the hardware I use and have a very light footprint. I needed something that worked P2P and client-server based. It needed good encryption but occasionally none. I evaluated MQTT but it didn’t meet all my requirements. I’m actually using something JSON based that is both machine and human readable and very extensible. Above all it makes doing stuff really simple and testing new stuff really easy.  

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@variola0 when are you going to publish it!?  

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@kym Good question. I’d love to this year but, I’m a one man startup and it’s down to time and business priorities.  

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@variola0 that makes sense. I would love to pick your brain more on it. As a CyberSecurity R&D guy, this sort of thing fascinates me. Unfortunately, it's 3am where I live and I'm not certain I'm even typing complete sentences at this point.  

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@kym There is some info on one of my websites here:  I've yet to find something I can't integrate using my approach so long as there is a 3rd party API. I've developed a lot of hardware myself though and this is incredibly easy to integrate  
https://smartisant.com/research/hcs...s.php

Answer 7

Smart things with bixby is the future!  

Answer 8

Check out HomeSeer. www. homeseer. com

Answer 9

I second the HomeSeer. Very flexible.  

Answer 10

No right answer. Looks like you've got some research to do.  

Answer 11

I think there are two different topics going on in this post. There is the speaker option; how you interact with your smart home ie Google home vs Alexa and what kind of a hub you should use. The smart speakers are not nearly enough generally to complete a smart home. Some peripherals will connect directly to the speaker though. I've been very happy with Samsung SmartThings. I have a bunch of their automation products but the hub makes it so you can connect any zigbee or Z-Wave products. The real debate between the hubs is whether to have a cloud-based hub or not. SmartThings is a cloud-based hub, which is probably better for someone that has very reliable internet, and maybe travels a bit more. Beyond that the only criticism of it is the app which I can't remember the last time I've used it. When it comes to the smart speaker systems I went very early on with Google home. I think I have between 16 and 20 now. My only complaint is they seem to release one product to Amazon's five. Google's research and development seems to have abandoned smart Home. It seems they went with crappy consumer-grade wifi instead. So in that regards I'm kind of jealous of Alexa.  

Comments

No, this misses the point. Voice control is not smart. It's just another form of remote control. A properly smart home does stuff intelligently around you without you needing to ask (in most situations). Obviously this can't be done all the time but this "zero touch" user experience is what you should be aiming for.  

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@variola0 my house is way too dynamic for this. Kids, vacations, nanny, we change our behavior so much. We have some stuff that is auto ie sprinklers/hue lights/heat. Even with that I'm changing it quite often.  

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@snug51948 Yes, there will always be some stuff like this. My smart home just knows automatically if we are on holiday though and changes it’s behaviours accordingly.  

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@variola0 yeah so does mine. But we just got a puppy (against my will). All the programming I've done until this point. Throw it in the trash can lol