While government leaders spent the last three years hyperventilating about TikTok, less talked about has been the dodgy “internet of things” (IOT) space; a broad assortment of mostly ov…
I’m so over most of the IoT. Nope not going to connect my new garage door opener to my wi-fi. My roomba gets the pass since that thing is magical though.
If your garage door opener has a wired button to activate it, you can make it ‘smart’ without the cloud pretty easily.
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Z-Wave controller - Costs around $100, works great as long as you have a Zwave hub of some sort
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Shelly 1 - Shelly have a cloud functionality but also can work completely locally via wifi and mqtt.
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Konnected - They just released a wifi garage door controller. I haven’t actually used this one yet but I have their security panel boards and they work great, no cloud required. They’re all based on the ESP32 chip so you can even flash them with open source firmware like ESPHome if you want.
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I love my smart stuff but I’ve been buying zigbee whenever possible. You can’t trust the cloud even from big companies. Google got rid of the API for nest devices without a replacement ready so I went over a year without being unable to control it with home assistant. Alexa got dumber over time to the point telling her “turn on the fan” while in my bedroom turned on the fan in my mother’s room but telling it to turn off the fan turned off the fan in my bedroom like it was supposed to.
At this point I’m only interested in smart home stuff that can be connected to home assistant sunning on my home server.
