Smart Homes

cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/118334

[ comments | sourced from HackerNews ]

Welcome to the Internet of Stings, an occasional series in which we report on connected devices that are abruptly bricked or rendered considerably more costly due to the actions of their vendors.

Today's tale concerns the Miku Baby Monitor, a $400 device aimed at parents who want to check up on their precious poppet from the comfort of their smartphone.

Spend the cash and you'll get a camera that will also monitor breathing, room temperature, humidity, and provide some two-way communication to reassure the baby that its parent or guardian has taken a break from YouTube or Candy Crush to check that all is well.

The upfront cost was steep, but what price can one put on the reassurance of a breathing waveform and being able to bring up some live video while you're out and about? Apparently, $9.99 a month.

eufy is best known for its range of smart home security, including security cameras and video doorbells, as well as smart cleaning products like the best robot vacuum cleaners. Its new Dual Camera series is the world’s first home surveillance mesh powered by local AI, and is featured packed with enhanced surveillance capabilities. Oh, and it’s incredibly affordable, too.

The main advancements to the Dual Camera series is its AI detection. All four devices in the line-up (the SoloCam, the IndoorCam, the Floodlight Cam and the Video Doorbell) have cross-camera tracking, meaning if you have multiple cameras, the devices use AI facial recognition to identify the same person or animal across multiple cameras.

This new feature means the cameras can seamlessly track people and events across all devices, so there’s no interruptions or confusion with what each camera is tracking. For people who hate being bothered by app notifications, the new eufy Dual Camera series will only send you one notification rather than multiple and deliver a single auto-edited video, making your update more condensed, convenient and easier to view.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/2904988

Automated post: UNRAID related video posted on YouTube 'DIY Smart Home: Home Assistant auf Unraid installieren - Tutorial | Easy Tec'

We live in an age where just about everything can be "smart." Your TV, lights, refrigerator and even your pet's food dispenser can all be controlled wirelessly via an app on your phone.

But how exactly can energy be smart? With a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection, new products allow you to monitor and control the circuits of your electrical panel from your phone.

You can switch circuits on or off, monitor each circuit's energy usage and set automations. This might not seem all that valuable at first glance. But add some solar panels or a solar battery to the mix, and things get even more interesting.

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What are the benefits of a smart energy system?

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Avoid peak time of use rates

Most smart energy systems are designed to help you be as energy efficient as possible. This includes accounting for peak time of use rates, when some utilities charge more for electricity during hours of high demand. Smart energy can help you find the cheapest times to charge your EV, run the dishwasher or even make dinner.

Optimize your solar

If you have solar panels with a solar battery, a smart energy system can help you get the most out of your electricity production. A solar battery essentially gives you a reservoir of energy that can be used to store and remove energy as necessary. Smart energy systems work with the battery by pulling energy from storage and pushing it to wherever it's needed the most, whenever it's most cost-effective to do so. Things like charging your EV or running your AC off solar might be be much cheaper than buying energy from the grid. It's all about correctly allocating your energy to get the most bang for your buck.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6041456

With the release of Tapo version 3.0, TP-Link integrates their two lines of smart home devices into a single application, reducing the number of apps needed to control their devices.

Additionally, the update claims improvements to the user interface, optimized camera features, a sleeker status page, and faster responses and startups.

The blow post also suggest that improvements to lighting effects, smart actions, geofencing, and a dark mode will be coming in the future.

I think the best takeaway is that I can have one less app on my phone!

TP-Link Blog - Brand-New Tapo Version 3.0

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/4026114

According to its current privacy policy, with an account, Hue gets access to the configuration of your system to provide the right software updates to the devices. It can only use your data for marketing or share it with third parties if you provide additional consent.

However, in a change to the current policy, Yianni says Hue will not collect usage information from users without additional optional consent. “So, we do not require users share anything about how they use our products,” he says.

“Previously creating an account was consent for usage data processing that we are in the process of decoupling and will be decoupled before accounts become essential — that makes sure it’s possible to create an account without sharing usage data,” says Yianni. However, if you choose to use the cloud services for things like out-of-home connectivity, you will need an account, and Hue will process your data, he says.

If this change to the privacy policy does happen, Home Assistant’s Schoutsen agrees that it would make the requirement for an account more palatable. “But it all depends on the exact changes,” he says.

The Sonoff SNZB-02D is a good quality temperature and humidity sensor with an LCD screen. The sensor is capable and accurate, although humidity calibration was needed in my case.

Regarding Zigbee communication, the EFR32MG22 module gave me no issues with connectivity in both my testing setups. For reference, the first one is Zigbee2MQTT with a Sonoff ZBDongle-E and the second one is ZHA with a Conbee II stick. The reporting interval is not as frequent as a BLE-based sensor, but this is a Zigbee characteristic to save battery.

The only thing I really didn’t like is the LCD screen of the SNZB-02D. It has bad viewing angles, the contrasts gets distorted fast and you cannot glance it from a distance. This is somewhat expected with an LCD, but for comparison, the SwitchBot Meter Plus has as an incredible LCD screen with thick numbers which can be seen from across the room.

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Regarding Zigbee communication, the EFR32MG22 module gave me no issues with connectivity in both my testing setups. For reference, the first one is Zigbee2MQTT with a Sonoff ZBDongle-E and the second one is ZHA with a Conbee II stick. The reporting interval is not as frequent as a BLE-based sensor, but this is a Zigbee characteristic to save battery.

The only thing I really didn’t like is the LCD screen of the SNZB-02D. It has bad viewing angles, the contrasts gets distorted fast and you cannot glance it from a distance. This is somewhat expected with an LCD, but for comparison, the SwitchBot Meter Plus has as an incredible LCD screen with thick numbers which can be seen from across the room.

After six years of reviewing a variety of Wyze security cameras at Wirecutter, we’ve made the decision to suspend our recommendation of them from all our guides.

On September 8, 2023, The Verge reported an incident in which some Wyze customers were able to access live video from other users’ cameras through the Wyze web portal. We reached out to Wyze for details, and a representative characterized the incident as small in scope, saying they “believe no more than 10 users were affected.” Other than a post to its user-to-user online forum, Wyze Communities, and communication to those it says were affected, the company has not reached out to Wyze customers, nor has it provided meaningful details about the incident.

We believe Wyze is acting irresponsibly to its customers. As such, we've made the difficult but unavoidable decision to revoke our recommendation of all Wyze cameras until the company implements meaningful changes to its security and privacy procedures.

The concern is not that Wyze had a security incident—just about every company or organization in the world will probably have to deal with some sort of security trip-up, as we have seen with big banks, the US military, Las Vegas casinos, schools, and even Chick-fil-a. The greater issue is how this company responds to a crisis. With this incident, and others in the past, it’s clear Wyze has failed to develop the sorts of robust procedures that adequately protect its customers the way they deserve.

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If this were the first such incident, we might be less concerned. However, it comes on the heels of a March 2022 Bitdefender study (PDF), which showed that Wyze took nearly three years to fully address specific security vulnerabilities that affected all three models of Wyze Cams. The company did eventually alert customers of the issue, and it notably guided them to stop using the first-generation Wyze Cam because “continued use of the WyzeCam after February 1, 2022 carries increased risk, is discouraged by Wyze, and is entirely at your own risk”—but that was long after the serious vulnerability was first discovered and reported to Wyze, on multiple occasions, without getting a response.

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We continue to recommend Wyze lighting, since we consider them lower-risk, lower-impact devices—a security breach of a light bulb, for instance, wouldn’t give someone a view of your living room.

cross-posted from: https://derp.foo/post/265688

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

Here we are, seven years since the first Google Home speaker hit store shelves in 2016, and the virtual assistant space really isn't much better. Sure, you can spot improvements if you look close enough — Continued Conversation was, in some ways, a game changer — but nowhere near where I hoped we'd be in this amount of time. Sure, the hardware has improved, with better speakers and bigger displays, but it's tough not to feel like Google's efforts are in a standstill.

Even my favorite smart display, the Nest Hub Max, is starting to feel sluggish now that it's over four years old. And with the news that Google is severely limiting one of its best selling points by neutering Google Meet support and eliminating Zoom altogether, the future I once hoped for may be over before it ever arrives.

At one point in time, the list of best Google Assistant smart displays was a lengthy one with options for multiple brands, each offering something different. Companies like JBL, Lenovo, Bose, and more offered features its company was well-known for with the addition of access to Google's robust digital assistant. With Google killing off support for third-party smart displays back in April of this year, that list has dwindled significantly; the newest option on that list is now over two years old.

I'm not saying that a smart speaker or smart display is something that should get updated annually, but surely, we should be seeing more improvements here than we have so far. However, instead of providing long-term support, improved experiences, and new features, Google is removing them, limiting how Meet works on their displays and ditching Zoom entirely. And that's not even factoring in the slow degrading of Google Assistant in its usefulness. From disappearing support for notes and lists for third-party apps to the death of Assistant games, it feels like our displays are becoming more limited with each passing day.

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What seems to be an impending demise of smart displays — even as Amazon works to revitalize Alexa alongside a new Echo Show 8 — is pointing to what many fans of consumer tech and Google know but tend to forget: you can't expect much or grow attached to anything Google provides. There is literally a site dedicated to keeping tabs on everything that Google kills off.

The Nest x Yale lock first made its debut in 2018 and, five years later, it’s effectively been ignored for a while in Google’s updated smart home ecosystem. Without a proper sequel on the horizon, we’ve been looking at Yale’s new Matter-enabled smart lock which should be a good stand-in for Google’s overdue sequel, but instead, shows Matter’s limits yet again.

Yale Assure Lock SL is one of the first Matter-enabled smart locks for a door, and it rests on a pretty simple pitch. Instead of installing a lock on your door and needing a specific app to control it, why not just have one that pairs directly to your smart home app of choice?

It’s a good pitch, and a world I certainly want to live in, but the idealized pitch of Matter holds it back.

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The other big appeal of a smart lock is the ability to set auto-lock timers, something Yale advertises right on the lock’s website. But, through the Google Home app, you can’t access that option at all. In fact, you can’t adjust any settings through the app. You can’t adjust the master code, add codes for guests, or really anything else. You can just lock and unlock. You can set up auto-lock on the lock itself, which works well enough, but I can’t even count the number of times I’ve turned that feature on or off on the fly on the Nest x Yale lock when I’ve had people working on my house, or when moving things in or out of the house.

The biggest deal-breaker for me in this is the inability to set up guest codes, which is a tremendous help when family and friends come by, or someone stays to watch our dogs. Instead of giving them our code, I can set one up that they pick and are more likely to remember, and also turn that code off if needed.

But that’s not Yale’s fault by any means. It’s just a limitation of Matter, and one we’ve seen time and time again. Whether it’s a smart light or anything else, adding a device through Matter instead of a dedicated app typically means sacrificing granular controls for the sake of simple setup and day-to-day functionality. And by no means does anyone have to feel bad for making that choice. The fact that this lock (at least in theory) should work without internet for locking/unlocking, and that I don’t have to have another app installed to control it is incredibly appealing. Thanks to Matter, I can also use it in the SmartThings, or Apple Home apps with ease, which is just great. Notably, it doesn’t work with Alexa right now.

Normally, this is where I’d add that you can just use the manufacturer’s app to unlock these features, but that’s actually not the case if you buy Yale’s Matter lock. It will only work via Matter, which is a bit odd, and perhaps the single biggest hurdle I’d have in recommending it to someone. That said, with much of the core functionality working without even a Matter connection, it’s at least functional if the needed Thread device in your home goes down.

I assumed I hadn't heard of them because they were things that didn't need to be made smart, except so the company making them could charge more and I was mostly right (bed? Tap/faucet?). Mostly:

Kohler Numi 2.0 smart toilet

A smart toilet might seem like a strange idea at first, but for smart home enthusiasts with especially deep pockets, it might just be worth splashing out on. After all, it's already known as the throne, so why not make it feel like one? The Kohler Numi 2.0 offers hands-free lid opening and closing, a heated seat with the exact temperature customizable through the app (yes, there's an app for this toilet), and even ambient lighting to make the whole experience feel a little more dramatic.

Bizarrely, it also comes with a built-in audio system, so you can listen to your favorite playlist straight from your toilet. Other features include smart water-saving tech and cleaning jets with warm water to ensure optimal hygiene when you've finished your business. For all that tech, there's an eye-wateringly steep price to pay: the Numi 2.0 retails for $11,500, although at the time of writing, it's on sale on Amazon for a slightly discounted price of $8,625.

😱

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/487981

Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.

(more in the article)

Amazon has announced that it’s shutting down Alexa Guard — a DIY security feature for Echo devices that listens for intruders or household alarms when you’re away from home. The free version of Alexa Guard that listens for household disturbances was included as a standard feature on Amazon Echo devices.

In a recent email to customers, Amazon said that some of Guard’s features like smoke and CO alarm detection will instead be moved to its new Emergency Assist service, which is available for $5.99 per month or $59 per year.

Guard features like Home and Away modes (to arm and disarm your Ring Alarm) and Away Lighting (which switches on your lights to make it look like you’re at home) will still be available for free as part of the standard Alexa experience. Other features like glass break sound detection will require an Emergency Assist subscription “starting soon.”

According to Amazon, Ring Protect Pro customers who linked their Ring and Alexa accounts as of September 20th, 2023, will receive Alexa Emergency Assist for free until October 31st, 2024.

And to really turn the screws on Alexa Guard users, the Emergency Assist signup page also notes the $5.99 subscription for Emergency Assist is an introductory price that will expire on January 8th, 2024. After this, the $5.99 subscription will only be available for people who subscribe to Amazon Prime (which starts at $14.99 per month). In a statement to The Verge, Amazon spokesperson Deanna Kugler said that pricing for non-Prime subscribers will be confirmed “later this year.”

And this hot on the heels of them announcing a subscription to use their Look as a picture frame.

Amazon is finally turning its Echo Show into a proper digital photo frame, but you have to pay extra for the privilege. Announced at its fall hardware event this week, the new Echo Show 8 Photos Edition costs $10 more than the standard edition of the new smart display but lets you make your photos the “primary home screen content.”

The Show 8 Photos Edition is coming this Fall for $159.99 and has all the same features as the new Echo Show 8 (third-gen). But for the extra $10, you get a six-month subscription to Amazon’s new PhotosPlus service, which enables this new “enhanced photo mode.”

Amazon announced the Echo Hub ($179.99) at its fall hardware event on Wednesday. Designed specifically as a smart home controller, the Echo Hub is a slimline version of an Echo Show 8 or a shrunken version of a Show 15. It should sit flush on your wall or could be propped up on a table or shelf with a desktop stand.

An eight-inch touchscreen device, the Echo Hub shares the same DNA as an Echo Show smart display, but it is fundamentally a new device. Its slim look resembles a tablet, and while it runs the same OS as the new Show 5, Dave Limp, Amazon’s SVP of devices and services, says the Echo Hub has a different processor, and there’s no camera.

Specifically billed as a smart home hub because it contains Zigbee, Thread, Bluetooth LE, and Amazon Sidewalk radios and functions as a Thread border router and Matter controller, the Echo Hub connects to Wi-Fi or ethernet with a compatible power over ethernet (PoE) converter. It is a full Alexa device with a speaker and mic array.

Instead of a camera, the Echo Hub has an IR sensor that it uses to wake up as you approach, so there’s no need to tap once and then tap again to activate any of the smart home widgets on the touch screen — such as turning on the lights or viewing a security camera.

Whether you're a smart home expert or just starting out, it’s always a good idea to check out what the essential products are. You may have already heard about some of the best smart plugs or the best smart sensors, but many people also assume that adding smart products to your home can be a pricey task. Yes, they’re not wrong, but there are also a lot of options out there that don’t cost the earth. A lot of well-known companies such as Philips Hue or Amazon have cheaper alternatives, meaning accessing smart home products doesn’t have to be as expensive as you think.

This is going to be the first part of our building a smart home series, and we're starting off low on a budget of £50.

That's £50 each, not total. They have a companion piece: How to build a smart home for under £100 also per item.

In 2022, Hue's parent company Signify committed to adding Matter support, but it was then delayed from its promised March 2023 debut. Then in August 2023, Hue again committed to the standard, and said that its support would go live in September.

Now according to the German tech site Hueblog, that support is live. Reportedly, the update is rolling out worldwide.

Hueblog says that the release comes with an update to the iOS Hue app. Where it previously had a setting for Voice Control, there is now a "Smart Home" option which includes all the Matter-related settings.

The Matter connectivity and interoperability standard was launched with great aplomb in November by Amazon, Apple, Samsung, Google, and hundreds of other companies. It’s designed to solve the issue of connectivity among smart home devices and platforms once and for all, offering a single communication protocol that everything, and I mean everything, was supposed to work with. Supposed to, anyway.

Yet In the year since the smart home standard was released, adoption has ground to a halt, and improvements and iterations on the standard have not materialized. In early September, I met Chris La Pre at the enormous IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin. Chris is head of technology for the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), which steers the Matter standard and herds the cats responsible for its development. He acknowledged that, while there are about a thousand “certified” devices listed on the CSA site, there are perhaps 30 on the market today. And that includes the dozen hubs sold by Google and Amazon.

Apparently, Matter simply doesn’t matter.

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Matter’s invisibility is partly by design: thanks to cross-brand compatibility with the spec, everything is supposed to just work. Your light bulbs and doorbells will talk to your security cameras and stereo seamlessly and smoothly. Hence there’s no need to market or even mention the spec. If it’s Matter, it’ll work. In reality, Matter devices today rarely speak to each other, instead requiring a hub like the Samsung Station or a Google Nest Hub.

And the CSA noted that standard is built to allow founding companies like Google and Apple to endorse their own platforms, rather than a Matter smarthome app. The end of the Google Blog post from last December is telling, handily advising you that “to make sure devices from other brands have been tested to work well with Google devices, also look for the Works With Google Home badge.”

With no visibility to consumers – no app on your phone, no settings in your iPhone or Android device, no options to tick in Windows, no logo anywhere in the Windows, iOS, or Android software – Matter is purely behind the scenes.

Amazon is at a crossroads with its devices. At the end of the last decade, Amazon’s ambition was to include Alexa in as many devices as possible. And that meant throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Echo Buds. The strange Echo Frames smart glasses. The cute Echo Input. And in 2021 the still niche Amazon Astro robot and drone-based Ring Always Home Cam, both of which have had limited releases since. There was even an Alexa microwave.

In short, Amazon seems like it would try anything. And it had the money to do so, of course, But such frippery can’t last forever and last year Business Insider suggested that 10,000 jobs were being axed at the company, with the Alexa unit one of the worst affected under new chief executive Andy Jassy.

It was suggested that the Worldwide Digital group was on track to lose $10 billion during 2022, with a lot blamed on the failure of Alexa to become a cash cow. Not that it ever would have been able to, of course. It doesn’t make additional revenue. Voice shopping? Doesn’t really happen. Apps? Free. Alexa devices? Sold at a loss or break even. It’s no wonder the cash didn’t come.

for the last decade, Home Assistant has been the go-to software for privacy-focused nerds who want all the benefits that Apple, Google, and Amazon products provide with infinitely better flexibility and fewer security risks. And now, for the software’s 10th birthday, the people behind Home Assistant are introducing a new product in the hopes of extending it beyond the domain of nerds: the Home Assistant Green.

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Priced at $99 and planned as a permanent item alongside the Home Assistant Yellow, what makes the Home Assistant Green novel is not that it has powerful, high-end hardware, although the RK3566 quad-core CPU is fast enough to run the software without issue. What makes the device unique is the 32GB eMMC storage that’s preloaded with Home Assistant’s platform. It’s a more affordable and much easier entryway for people who want to dip their feet in the water without having to flash a memory card from another PC. The unit also comes with 4GB of LDDR4x RAM, a few USB 2.0 slots, an HDMI out, and a microSD slot for expansion.

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“Currently we’re aiming for the audience we call the ‘outgrower,’” Schoutsen explained via Discord. “It’s the one that uses Amazon / Apple etc., runs into the limitations and wants more. Searches the web and finds Home Assistant. At that point users already know they want a smart home and are looking for solutions to their problems, which Home Assistant generally can solve. We believe that with requiring a Raspberry Pi to get started or the relatively high price of the Yellow (you don’t know if your problems will get solved for $200), we were missing out on a good chunk of outgrowers. So with Green, we’re trying to offer a way for anyone to get started with Home Assistant.”

Sensors are some of the most important components homeowners consider when piecing together their smart home system. These little gadgets may not look like much, but smart home sensors help to watch over motion, entry into your home, temperature, humidity, flooding, and even the detection of glass window breakage.

No one company services all of your smart-home needs. My lightbulbs are from Philips, my plugs are from Meross, my watering system is from Hunter, and my air conditioners are from Midea. In some cases, these products require you to purchase a separate hub from them, which acts as the controller, and almost all have an app you need to download as well. They use a few different connectivity standards like Zigbee, Z-wave, Ha-low and others, and no one standard dominates the market share.

Once the products are up and running, you can simply add them to a home control hub, like SmartThings or Google Home (and, in limited cases, Apple HomeKit or Alexa). The majority of the time, you interact with the home control, so you don’t need to think about the jumbled spaghetti of tech underneath it, but you still need all those random apps on your phone and extra hardware hanging out in your house. When your power goes out, it’s notification chaos, and it’s an extra hurdle when shopping to ensure the device you’re buying uses a standard that’ll be accepted by your home control hub.

In a Matter standard future, there are no separate hubs and apps—just one accepted standard used by everyone. No more having to decide between Apple or Google for home control: You can use whatever you want. The universality of Matter means you choose one home control hub and stick with it, aggregating everything else to it. Most importantly, any company can build a Matter home control hub, and it will work with all Matter devices. The devices work over wifi, ethernet and Thread, but you may need a bridge for Thread. (Some Matter home control hubs have that bridge, but some don’t—yet.)

You'd be lying if you haven't heard of Philips Hue, and I'd also be seriously surprised if you haven't got at least one of its products. Known for its incredible range of smart lighting, Philips Hue has been a driving force for the entire smart home industry. It really is no surprise that it holds top spaces in our best smart light switches and best smart bulbs buying guides. Philips Hue also recently announced the launch of several new products at IFA 2023, as well as a significant Matter update. Exciting times, right?

Well, John Lewis must be in the same celebratory mood as it has announced a huge 3-day sale across most of the Philips Hue range. It has discounted a huge amount of products by 20%, particularly across some of Philips Hue's bestsellers.