The smart home is dying but Matt Holder is here to save the day by showing us how open source can keep the smart-lights on…

T his month we’re going to look at some of the reasons smart homes can work against us. We’ll be considering hardware issues running self-hosted systems as well as what happens if vendors decide they don’t want to provide certain services any longer, if they want to introduce a subscription charge or that they simply become bankrupt and can no longer function. Finally, we’ll be looking at ways that we can mitigate these problems by having stable equipment at home and running services to keep traffic in our home networks.

The first thing to discuss is unreliable hardware running any self-hosted systems. Your author experienced problems for a number of months when running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi with micro-sd cards, followed by reliability problems using a virtual machine on an old desktop PC. Understandably, during this time the spousal disapproval factor was a thing, while we were both very frustrated with constantly needed reboots, failing microsd cards and so on. Lesson one is to purchase suitable kit to ensure a good experience. Your author’s home runs a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as the main host and is booted from a 240GB USB SSD, which has proven to be a rock-solid combination and provides enough RAM and processing power for everything that’s required.

One of the earliest protocols to be used for home automation purposes was X10. This was first designed in the mid-1970s and could operate both using radio frequencies to communicate with devices and also as a signal injected over the mains power lines. This was originally controlled using dedicated controllers, but devices with serial port connections eventually became available, which were used to enable devices to be computer controlled. While being largely superseded by other protocols, X10 devices are still used around the world and can be operated with large open source home automation systems, which will be discussed later on in this article.

The past number of years have seen companies fall into the habit of everything being cloud-controlled when it really isn’t necessary. Local and open APIs are the best way to communicate with your smart home kit because it removes the risk that the supplier will make a change in a firmware update and you’re then locked out.

Rising costs

Running a cloud service for a large number of customers is expensive and possibly not properly considered when deciding to release a device that’s dependent on the cloud. The short-term boost to a company from selling a device for a profit is quickly eaten up by the costs of running databases, servers, load balancers and other cloud-based services or servers. Over the years there have been a number of announcements from companies that they are either shutting down or beginning to change the previously free to a charged-for cloud service. This is a real insult to customers who were promised a service and the reason that local APIs and self-hosted control software offer a level of control against this happening to you.