Not really… I simply envisage OH to be similar to say a KNX or Clipsal system. These two systems, for example, require specialist knowledge and tools, so does OH.
Of course this can be argued… but I see the difference as much as your computer works differently to mine, can you fix mine, can I fix yours?
In other words, my assumption, proven over almost ten years, or as long as OH exist, has been proven to be reliable. The incident two weeks ago had nothing to do with automation in general or OH specifically.
I have a local IT guy who uses OH and Linux and can attend to the system; I am sure there are others too.
As for the light switches, I have conceded to having them installed!
For bigger areas, or multiple lights, they will be broadly grouped and assigned to a light switch (with will be a momentary switch triggering a relay, the automation system can also control (but works without the latter).
Why should the rPI – used in industrial control system, not be good enough for my domestic environment?
Well, updating things to fail, where is the test system, before deployment, or roll-back capability?
Much to the dismay of my wife, I basically open any device and check it out. What I see at times is shocking, and no better than my ATMEL-based micro-controllers.
A valid point… I see the opposite, it can be. Why not?
Like may innovations or new way of doing things, people take time to adopt.
We used to have land lines; now have ‘wireless’. This is a technology change. so is automation.
In summary, I get some of the arguments; I will install light switches, but am not sure about switches for the blinds. The more legacy stuff I add, the more cost I add for no perceived benefit.
I am already at a point where I run sophisticated commercial systems (imported from Germany), which most Aussie trades will not understand or be able to fix. I already put my plumber to the test, who never installed a floor heating (let alone balanced one), and can not commission the multi-input hot water storage tank and controls.
Even these controller will be replaced by the industry in years to come (no different to SmartHome components.)
On a side note: can also make hot water from solar, combustion heater and electric.
Rasberry Pis are not certified hardware for industrial purposes. They’re historically educational boards. If you use them in ICS, you’re outside of any spec.
I think I made my point quite clear. openHAB to me is merely an orchestrator of a bazillion of individually working devices, nothing more.
Or to put it in IT-terms: I don’t use openHAB as a monolithic application server, but more like a way to handle microservices. All Microservices can run on their own in a way. Perhaps limited and they need manual commands, but they run, even if the monolith is down, there’s not internet connection or another microservice is broken. Better explained?
you can buy and or licence the SoC and stuff around it and use it in your own environments, but all the 30bucks (or 100bucks for Pi5) hardware is not ICS-ready and you won’t get any decent SLA on it.
That’s typical German answers to avoid conceding that they are absolutely the right tool for the job.
You don’t need any SLA in private households. And you don’t need an installer to replace them, you can do yourself. Which is what the installer does not want you to because he wants to do that business.
Even in industrial use, you don’t really need ICS - certifications and SLAs are mostly for cowards that are more looking after being able to blame others when the solution doesn’t work (“hey not my fault, they certified it !”) - rather than to put their energy and intelligence into making the solution work long term.
Which can be accomplished a lot easier when you use common off the shelf hardware you can buy everywhere rather than specific HW only some specialized dealer offers for a limited period of time and at high cost. That, too, is very German thinking.
If my zwave actuator dies and I can get a replacement quick and for cheap, fine.
If not, I’m replacing it with a Shelly.
A vast improvement in availability by (in terms of IT) prioritizing MTTR reduction over MTBF improvement.
More often than you would think.
I once used to have an OH server outage with a bright zwave light in my bedroom on that has no switch (because it’s a color light I didn’t find a switch for).
At 2 a.m. Not clever. Had to use the breakers to get sleep because I was too tired to fix it right away.
FWIW, searching the forum I found this old thread where I already told someone not to omit switches long ago … guess who
This is only part of the considerations it is use the right tool and the right materials.
Can I use a pipe wrench and 6 penny nails to install my crown molding ? sue it will stay on the wall but most likely I will not be happy with the results.
Could I use a Rpi to replace a manufacturer provide custom controller that monitors the safety interlock switches on my 50 ton hydraulic press yea it may work but do I really want to puts someone’s life at risk by doing so?
Sorry for the long reply, timezone differences mean I miss out on these in real time.
There is a reason it’s a code requirement. That’s a safety issue. And the code is requiring a backup plan in this case. The staircase is the backup plan.
Lighting, HVAC, large moving objects (e.g. garage doors), locks, egress, etc. are all safety issues too. While code enforcement may not require these, the reasoning is the same. When OH breaks, what then? If it’s safety related it’s not acceptable in my book to say “oh well, guess we’ll sit in the dark until I can fix OH.” There must be at least minimal functionality possible outside of the automation.
What if the automation gets hacked or runs amok? There has to be a way to override it until that problem can be addressed.
If you are automating your beer brewing process or streaming music to your speakers or non-safety related stuff like that, no backup required. Those are not safety issues. There won’t be higher potential for injury or property damage if these don’t work.
Of course not. But there should be a switch for at least one of them (I’d choose ceiling but what ever is convenient). A backup doesn’t mean everything has a switch. It means when all else fails, you can turn on at least one light in that room through a physical switch. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be wired (though that’d be preferred). You can have Zwave and Zigbee devices send commands directly to each other without going through the controller for example.
And maybe it’s just one light fixture somewhere in the corner that isn’t even a part of the automation and it never used except when there is a failure.
Maybe not even for every room, but important rooms like kitchen, hallways, utility room, server room, etc. The places you need to be to fix whatever went wrong and be able to live in the house until it’s fixed.
If the controller fails, the HVAC will maintain the last setpoint and you have a way to adjust that setpoint manually if necessary. For irrigation you can manually turn off the valve if OH went down in the middle of watering.
You can lock/unlock the doors with a key.
The home doesn’t need to be fully functional. It needs to be minimally functional in those areas that have safety implications.
My wife is a type 1 diabetic. I do have backups for the fridge including keeping a good deal of ice on hand, a small one that can run from an UPS for a small bit, and a cool case that you can get wet and it will keep at least two vials at temp for two days.
It is a safety issue for us as we do have a backup.
Propane grill.
No but I have a bike, Lyft/Uber/taxi, friends with cars, etc (I live too far out to have access to public transit, the US sucks in that regard).
There you go, built in backup. So you are not against backups after all.
We are not unreasonable.
LOVE this!
What has a backup is obviously going to be selective and different from one user to the next because everyone has their own unique requirements. @binderth probably has more redundancy built into his home than I do. But we have different requirements.
Though it’s a little more than mere preference when it comes to safety.
Family who survive you might.
I think you might find argument with this assertion. I personally see no evidence that home automation is in fact mature enough to replace it when safety is at risk.
I think you are because a statement like
Do I really install four light switches, to switch Zigbee bulbs, which should be ON to act as coordinators?
clearly is far beyond what I’ve said or intend. There needs to be minimal functionality, not full functionality.
We in the home market have not had the sorts of man hours invested in reliability and maintainability as you find in the commercial and industrial spaces. Often the technologies used are drastically different from what is available to us.
We also don’t have a company on retainer with a MTR service agreements to get us back up and running when something goes wrong.
And even if this was available, we couldn’t afford it.
It’s not a fair comparison.
And there are switches, they just are not necessarily on the wall in that room. There is also emergency lighting which is run on a separate circuit with backup power so when power is lost there is still lighting. These are backups. Even in this commercial environment there are backups.
Again, you are taking my advice too far to mean “you must be able to do everything manually all the time.” No, you just need some minimal functionality available where you can still exist in the home safely.
Do you really have someone who you can hire to do this? Consider yourself lucky. I’ve looked (preparing for the case something happens to me) and there is no such service that I can hire here to do something like that. People can come and put in their own system but no one is going to come help my SO fix my broken system.
Right now my plan is “unplug these devices and the house returns to a dumb home.” I’m still a little troubled about what to tell her to do with the opnSense firewall which runs the parental controls. She’s a musician and would not be able to manage upkeep of the home automation, even if she wanted to which she has made clear she emphatically does not.
Why do you assume it doesn’t apply to other technologies? It does. But those are out of scope for this forum so we don’t really bring them up.
Boom, you’ve a backup! Excellent! I’m satisfied.
We do! My thermostat can operate independently from openHAB. Some of my lighting can operate independently from openHAB. My garage door and door locks can operate independently from openHAB.
Are they as convenient? No. Can I operate everything openHAB controls? No. They are not intended to be and they don’t have to be. And in some cases they are really inconvenient to use manually. But the option is still there.
And just about everything else you mention we do have backups for too:
car? rental car, public trans, ride share, Lyft/Uber/taxi, getting a ride from a friend, etc.
fridge? already talked about that above
cooking? propane grill
heating (it does get cold here)? gas fireplace and kerosene heater
lighting? flash lights and candles
It’s not but this forum is focused on automation so that’s what we focus on. And we tend to have enough experience to know that home automation software is not even remotely reliable. It will go down and when it does we don’t want to be stuck in the dark rushing to fix what’s broken and we certainly don’t want the home to be a danger to person or property when it’s down.
We don’t talk about all these other backups (car, electricity, etc.) much here though because they are not relevant to openHAB. OH has no influence on these if they are down. We focus on what happens when openHAB itself goes down.
That’s not a safety issue.
If it’s safety related we do cry foul. But again, that’s outside the scope of this forum.
Your SmartHome is more likely to fail than your HVAC is. But more importantly, your SmartHome is relevant to this forum and failure modes of your HVAC, outside of their interactions with OH, are outside the scope of this forum. It’s an OH forum, we talk about and are concerned with OH.
If you lose power and don’t have a backup, well sorry but addressing that isn’t our concern. If you build an home automation and OH fails, that is our concern.
Just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean we don’t care. It’s simply out of scope.
Not be able to operate them until OH is back online.
This is a big source of failure. We need to keep everything up to date for security and to get new features but every update risks breaking something. Most (but not all) of these other systems mentioned are more stable (meaning changing less) so are less likely to fail.
And yet OH went down and your automations failed. It’s not always going to be OH’s fault.
In those systems they almost never run stock Linux and instead tend to run on a real time OS with the kind of reliability, repeatability, and deterministic behavior impossible for stock Debian and OH to achieve.
I wouldn’t for those. But do these have a button or an IR/RF remote that can control them by default? A phone app? There’s your backup if so. But blinds are really safety critical so I wouldn’t worry to much about a backup way to control them. But I bet there is one already.
I think the compute modules are certified. Could be wrong about that though.
Sorry, not true, at least for knx.
I don’t know Clipsal, but I know knx, which is:
Every device has it’s own controller, so every device is smart. There is a single point of failure, that is the power adapter. If one device is failng, the rest will continue to work as intended.
I’m struggling a bit with this conversation, because you’ve said that you’re only concerned about this topic within the scope of home automation. However, you’ve offered examples that have nothing to do with home automation:
While rejecting any counter-examples as not applying to you:
The only thing I can say to this is that your example of needing to buy a second car is not applicable to me, living in the city. Hence:
Your example is logical for your circumstances
My example is logical for my circumstances
Also, it’s Russ, not Ross.
Again, circumstances that are specific to you and don’t apply to others. I think it’s safe to say that most of us do care about resale value, even if we have no immediate plans to sell our homes. If you’re unwilling to entertain this preference, then you’ll never understand any decisions that result from it.
This is what I was trying to convey when I said:
I now think the real issue here isn’t, “why do we think redundant manual controls are logical within the scope of home-automation?” It’s the underlying assumptions captured in this sentence:
One of the key words here is “mature”. I think you believe home automation is mature enough that backups are not required. I do not share your confidence.
The other key word is “legacy”. It’s perfectly understandable that you would want to get rid of a legacy approach to reduce cost and complexity–for you, they add no value. But for me, home automation is not a direct replacement for physical controls–it’s an augmentation. As such, physical controls aren’t legacy (to me), and they don’t exist purely for when the home-automation breaks down.
So, let me revise my earlier statement:
“Your opinion is quite logical for someone who believes home automation is mature enough that legacy manual controls aren’t required. The advice given by by Rich, Justan, me, and many others is logical for someone who does not believe home automation is mature enough to replace manual controls or does not believe that manual controls only have legacy value. Both of these things can be true.”
To answer your question directly:
If someone doesn’t trust home automation as much as you do, then it’s logical for them to also want manual controls to be available as an alternative/fallback option.
If someone views home automation as complementing and working with manual controls (rather than as a direct replacement), then manual controls are not legacy devices and continue to have value.
My wall switches are both manual controls, in a sense that it would continue to work and operate the lights even when openhab is down, and also it’s very much a part of my smart home, because they interact with openhab and provide inputs to openhab. I can use them with double, triple, hold press to command openhab to do specific tasks for me.
Some of the led indicators on my wall switches have purposes to tell me the status of e.g. air conditioning zone status for the room so I can tell at a glance.
These are deta switches from Bunnings but flashed with esphome.
My summary:
Removing all emotions, basically, people expect commercial performance (as in reliability and availability) from their domestic home when it is automated. Those requirements do not seem to exist for an non-automated home.
The reasoning for parallel technologies in most cases is safety, which I relate to the nines after the decimal, each nine raising cost by 10x.
I am looking forward to the self-driving car. Resistance will be immense, as it already the case. Another example of automation, where automation has demonstrated to be 10x safer in driving than a human. Yet, the public comes up with all sorts of reasons and edge cases as an argument for avoiding adoption.
I get it, that when a light switch fails, you have other lights; if the automation fails you may have none.
I run 10 acres and have a tractor. This tractor is pivotal to the operation of the ‘farm’. As the tractor is central to all “add-ons” (called implements), I cannot slash, sow, transport, chip, pull trees, drill holes, and much more. Do I or other farmers have a back-up tractor? Even if they can sow, mow, slash, drill holes manually, they wouldn’t be able to, be it for time or strength constraints.
Some said, if this and that doesn’t work, I go without. In my books, unless you have a medical requirement, none of the systems in a domestic house a critical, if lost on a relative short-term basis… and without considering living in Alaska where heating is critical.
I am not making fun of any contributions or authors. For those who have individual micro-controllers in their actuators so it functions without automation, good on you. But… the cost is significant, if not prohibitively expensive for most … in fact, at least in my case, the automated home is cheaper to build than legacy systems. E.g, one mains cable to run all lights per room, which are individually Zigbee-controlled w/o switches and related cable runs.
Maybe I am too far ahead of our time; like the yoke on a Tesla, like no stalks for indicators, like steer by wire… all very acceptable to me, but met with (even vile) resistance by many.
To conclude, I go with the recommendation to install a minimum set of light switches and the added expense for mixed (manual and automated) operation. Hence, your commentary was not in vain. Thank you.
I will extract the key elements from all posts, and analyse these further, to see, what I may have missed.
Yes, as it was said, this conversation was had before, I have been reasoning with myself literally for years which way to go and more so why.
I used to build data centres for a living, used to be a systems engineers and project manager, hence, I claim to understand availability, system performance, specs and requirements, their analysis, options and associated costs. I am not saying or claiming to know it all, but to demonstrate that I have smelled roses before.
But again it’s a false comparison though. You can live without a tractor for a good long time. It’s not safely critical. It’s not automation related. It’s a false equivalency logical fallacy.
Also, we would never argue you need a second tractor so that’s a strawman logical fallacy too.
But, can you sleep because you can’t turn off the lights? What if the heater is stuck on? How long can you afford for an irrigation valve to be stuck on? If OH is down, off is not the only failure mode. And if through OH is the only way to control it it’s going to be stuck on.
These are the things that need a backup way to control, even if it’s as primitive as pulling the plug. Though the less primitive, the less pressure there will be to get OH back online.
And all the discussion about drive by wire and self driving cars and such is dangerously close to the ad hominem logical fallicy. *You" asked us to explain our position. To basically leave the conversation with the equivalent of “you all are a bunch of Amish luddites but fine, I’ll install a switch or two” is kind of insulting.
I assume that’s not what you meant but it is what you said and it kind of stings.
You’re the one who has to live in your house, not us. And frankly we are not even trying to convince you one way or the other. It’s not a win for us that you concede the need for a couple switches. We aren’t trying to have that argument, let alone win it.
We’ve explained our position and tried to clarify where there was confusion or lack of understanding. You can decide whether any of it makes serve for you or not. But you don’t have to call us illogical and afraid of new technology through the use of false equivalency and strawman arguments.
Not sure what pushed your buttons.
… and what you are reading in to.
Your perception is your reality (nothing I can do anything about).
I cannot recall having ever deliberately disrespected people or their posts on this forum.
I listened to what people had to say, expressed my gratitude and conceded that physical switches will be installed.
Even you said switch only one light (of many) in a room, as a minimalist approach; which resonated with me.
As for the tractor, it was not about living, but a critical, pivotal business tool, like an openHAB system, when it fails it will be repaired.
Also, one can turn off any light by switching off the breaker or unscrew the bulb.
I am talking about myself, and my adoption of innovations that break with the old; it is you who turned this into a perceived assault on the collective audience.
That aside, I’ll mention a cautionary tale. In every house I’ve owned I’ve put in a fair bit of cat5 or cat6 cabling. Back in the day, you couldn’t beat a cable, but these days Wifi is so good that even I don’t need the cables much. Right now, in the house I’ll probably leave in a coffin, most of the cables are unused and will probably never get used.
My point here is that something as simple and dumb as strands of cable go out of date, and out of favour. What home automation or “smart” gear we have gets replaced every few years - and that rate increases sharply if you’re talking about cloud-dependent gear. From this, I conclude that whatever you put in today will be out of date in 5-10 years and will probably be non-functional in 10-15.
I’ll also mention OpenHab - it gets major updates around about annually - honestly, the upgrade is relatively painful. Whatever rules and scripts you have often need some rework, some devices don’t seem to survive the update and need re-adding, or whatever else. I’ll normally set aside several hours to do such an upgrade (during which automation will be unavailable, I might add!). My point here is not to “have a go” at OpenHab - but just to say that all that home automation needs a certain amount of your time to keep it working.
Lastly, as I get older, I find I have less and less inclination to do “pointless” things. Obviously, what I consider “pointless” and what someone else thinks are different, but I’m pretty sure I won’t want to be upgrading OpenHab, or climbing up ladders to fix something in the ceiling when I’m in my 70s or 80s. By then, I’ll either get my kids to do it for me, or I’ll have a local tech guy come and do it (or it’ll have been pulled out so it doesn’t need doing). If anyone else is going to do it - they’ll need to understand it. For that to be true, it doesn’t want to be too customised by me showing off how clever I am - the more out-of-the-box, the more standard it can be the better.
In conclusion then… simple is better than complex. Simple for other people means they can help you with it. Complex means only you can ever do anything with it, which means you’re responsible for it for the rest of your life. The redundancy/usability conversation that’s raged here takes on a different meaning if you think of things in those time frames.
Either way though, the world needs some pioneers, and if you’re going to pioneer the fully automated home, then good for you. I think we’d all like to know how you get on with it, and how it works out for you in the long term.
I think this explains it best, how I make use of a “smartHome” (whatever understanding one might have of a smarthome).
get “standard” devices, services,…
make sure, said devices do have a local API
get openHAB to use that API (via bindings or using some kind of scripts)
Every single one would function, if openHAB crashes. Or - I’m not around anymore.
I do have a pretty up-to-date description of our devices in our house, but I’m also pretty sure, that no one will have the time - and patience - do take over my structure in openHAB (or any other “sytem”).
So I do my best to use the “standard” devices, services or whatever I use as “intended” and openHAB just uses the API to do stuff, one could normally do on that device or service.
So, if I’m too old/sell house/…, one could simply replace openHAB with whatever choice of “smarthome” and everything works again.
Circling back to TO:
If I did, what a device does within openHAB and leave out lets say the physical switches, that would not be possible at all, if openHAB is the only way to flip lights/valves/…
All of ours perception, actually. About anyone on this thread except yourself liked Rich’ post for stating that. I myself have been reading about the same things into it as Rich and Russ did.
