Call me old fashioned. But when I press the brew button on my coffee machine, it works every time. No internet, apps, or 'smarts' required. Just consistent quality.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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I use my coffee machine as an alarm. Like a really pleasant morning alarm for the whole house. It's nice. Works every time.
I don't even need a timer for the microwave oven. I just rig that shit up where when you close the door, it cooks, and when you open it, well it stops cooking.
Don't ask why, had to temporarily fix things for my mom. At least we didn't have kids around the place...
Edit: AI can suck my nugz.....
So you just leave it open when you’re not cooking?
Does it not have a light in it?
Remove the light, obviously. Bypass the control circuit..
Geez, didn't Electroboom teach you anything?
Don't do these things at home, obviously...
I can’t stand cupboard drawers or microwaves hanging open it would drive me nuts.
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Coffee machine??? I hand-grind my coffee every morning in a mortar and pestle and then use my Rok to manually press the perfect espresso.
But I also let a self-hosted AI model control the lights and HVAC in my house, cause it does it way better than I ever could manually.
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I'm also old fashioned and it was always faster for me to reach to light switch than to unlock my phone, find the app and toggle it from there.
Mumbling "Hey google, turn the lights off" from bed and the entire house going dark is pretty nice though.
or even better yet get a non-electronic coffe maker, just the carafe or a french press.
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If anyone wants privacy while maintaing a smart home, then Home Assistant is the solution. Its not adopted widely because it has a learning curve and it needs a bit (or a lot) poking around to make it work. It also has a voice assistant that is not AI powered ( but it could be supplemented by a local LLM if you really want to). A big rabit hole if anyone is interested to go to.
It's not adopted widely because every single smart home device marketed to normies is infected with cloud bullshit. Go to Home Depot or whatever and look on the shelf: literally every single product will have "Works with Alexa," "Works with Google Home," and/or "Works with Apple HomeKit" badges stamped all over the package, but not a single one will mention a damn thing about Home Assistant even when the device actually is compatible. The closest you get is ones that mention "Matter" 'cause it's at least supposed to be a standard, but it feels like it's getting slow-walked harder than CableCard sometimes (and if you don't remember how that worked out, the answer is "not well").
I would almost call it a conspiracy against openness, but it's really just the banal result of no rent-seeking leading to no excess profit to plow back into marketing... which is even worse.
Few of them also could be open, but just don't advertise it.
IKEA stuff was all ZigBee, now upgrading to add matter support, so you could mix and match them with Philips Hue, Agara, Nedis and quite a few others. Main issue is always software support on the hub or app - Ikea has no smart thermostats, so even though it can connect to them, they don't show up properly. That's where Home Assistant shines, as it supports basically everything imaginable.
But you are right, most are proprietary because they want to lock you to their ecosystems. Exactly like cordless power tools and their batteries.
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Most people don't find turning the lights off and on burdensome enough to justify a whole lot of effort to avoid.
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Quote: "This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn’t do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time I ask."
Why? Seriosly! The author spent XXX kWh energy running AI because is lazy to switch ON damn coffie machine?
Pre-Alexa-Plus it wasn’t AI, it was simple pattern matching with very constrained commands.
They’ve replaced these very limited sets of commands with bullshit interpretation that tries to not only understand “like a human” but respond in a similar manner. Those same commands can now be interpreted in a number of ways, and you have no guarantee how it will be taken.
Coffee machines are for the weak anyway, French press that shit and be smug about it!
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The real issue with smart home adoption has been proprietary formats all vying for dominance and fragmenting the market. I don't think AI has changed much.
Matter (and Thread) are a huge change to the SmartHome landscape because they're open protocols and have well-documented standards - and they've finally begun appearing in big manufacturer's line-ups such as IKEA.
Once their availability spreads I suspect a lot more people will get into running their own local (eg HomeAssistant) smart home because they won't have to do the 'ok do I need z-wave or ZigBee or HomeKit or IFTTT or Hue or Tuya or.... you know what, fuck this'. It'll all be the same protocol and communications and config & debug will be much easier.
When you know which xkcd it is before you click it...
There's an xkcd for everything, isn't there.
Its not wrong, but the major attraction to Matter is it must allow devices to operate locally (not tying them to cloud services that die every internet outrage, or permanently when the service retires), and it's an application-layer protocol. Meaning it can operate over WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread.
Many existing smart home hubs have been able to program support for Matter and simply send out an OTA update to add certified Matter support.
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I suspect the average smart home is not based on home assistant, but on an ikea hub with their app, or similar.
If you are willing to selfhost a home assistant, then it is not a barrier to add various antennas to it.
So this step to standardization might help mixing different manufacturer products easier. We will see how standard their implementations will be. We had zigbee as shared standard in theory what only worked properly with the manufacturers hub.
For sure. IKEA is a great place to start (or stay), as it's a cheap ecosystem and their app/implementation doesnt require permanent internet access - functions fine during an internet outrage, and quite privacy-respecting.
HomeAssistant is not anywhere near as hard to set up as it used to be. If you have an old mini-PC retired from work sitting around there are HA images for PCs now, and it's pretty simple to set up to use your IKEA hub (or whatever you have already), while adding a huge swath of optional features.
I agree it's still not something your average Joe will set up, but the continual lowering of barriers will get more people into running a self-hosted local config is a great thing for privacy and expanding the hobby.
Most smart homers i have assisted run a ikea hub or similar like Hue and really just want it to be plug and play, after that they find out what happens when the network shut down and can't access their home. Then they reach out to support people that can install Lan assist.
It's why I live so much commercial stuff and things like bacnet.
Everything basically is just basic I/O with either analog or digital signal wires. Well documented. But it typically requires lots of actual wires running back to a controller.
I hate how consumer stuff is all different connections in so many different ways and they don't care if they deprecate a feature or something. What works today can be fucked up because they have unilateral control to change how their shit works in "updates."
If a home automation product isn't self hosted, it can fuck right off
AI sucks but a smart home can be actually nice if set up well
I just want my smart home fully or semi fully airlocked on my lan
HomeAssistant is the answer.
Or if you want a simple & cheap off the shelf solution, IKEA stuff has being online as an option, not a requirement, and all the devices are ZigBee or matter compatible and not locked to some proprietary WiFi cloud bullshit.
Home Assistant! I got a cheap refurbished mini PC for 60 bucks and a zigbee stick for 12 or so, been running HA for a year now, it works very well and pairs perfectly with the IKEA zigbee stuff. I have it read the alarm from my phone and turn on radio on a wifi speaker and smart lights at that time. Kitchen light is now automatic with a little motion sensor and ESP I got from AliExpress for a few bucks. Everything is completely local, no internet access. It's great!
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I’m so glad my wife & I never got sucked into using things like Alexa.
A 100% fully automated smart home is a fucking bad idea. Might as well sign your death certificates. Our family had one such system (not Alexa) and it controlled the whole thing. Yes, we should have researched better but the sellers were really convincing. Anyway there was a malfunction and it trips multiple breakers in our house. Our rhought at the time was to get the fuck out and called the electricians. Guess what? The doors refuse to open properly, so we had to climb over....
If anyone really really really wants a smart home, please only assign the system for mundane tasks like music, lightings. Dont do it for security stuff like doors, cameras.
Or just dont install one, even better.
Bad setup isn't a reason why something is a bad idea. Whatever your opinions of cars are, talking about how bad they would be if everyone drove drunk doesn't really prove your point.
In any security system, and this should also apply to home automation, one of the things you have to account for is failure. If you don't have a graceful failure mode, you will have a bad time. And context matters. If my security system fails at home, defaulting to unlocked doors makes sense, especially if it's due to an emergency like a fire. If the security system in a virology lab fails, you probably don't want all the doors unlocked, and you may decide to have none of the doors unlocked, because the consequences of having the doors unlocked is greater than having them locked. Likewise, but of a much less serious nature, if your home automation fails, you should have some way of controlling the lights. If you don't, again, it hasn't failed gracefully.
We haven't gone whole-hog into home automation, except for a zone-heating and hot-water controller. In a part of the world with winter, that makes a big difference. The controller I use has a web-based but also offers a nice API. Another good thing about it is that it includes a way to know when we're in or out of the house, based on mobile phone detection. So I wrote some scripts to manage the system in a nicer way than having a big bunch of static profiles. One of the reasons it works well is that none of it's AI. Just some event detection and use of the output of one-time runs of optimization algorithms based on our utility provider's pricing. It's less flaky than I am about controlling the heating zones, so it's cut my gas bill by another 10% over the 30% savings we got from installing the controller and running it on a timer with occasional manual intervention.
So the API runs on the controller provider's website, but they don't sell our data (at least they claim not to), and the script that invokes the API lives on an otherwise retired netbook on our home LAN. Not 100% private, but not unduly intrusive either. The only downside is that, if the internet goes tits-up, the only option is manual override (which isn't too bad).
The approach I'm using is also what I'll do if I ever feel motivated to install solar (which is useful but not optimal in the country we live in, and the location of our house).
Check out home assistant sometime
Or, you could just get up and flip the damn switch. And if you want it warmer turn up the thermostat. This is not hard.
Cool, you gonna hang out in my greenhouse and wake me up when the temp drops below a certain point? What about alert me to an increasing trend of the sump pump running more often?
Home automation isn’t just “Alexa I’m lazy turn off the light switch I’m next to” and presenting it as such is simply disingenuous.
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