Over the weekend Insteon appears to have vanished, leaving users in the dark (maybe literally 
).
This is why for smart home stuff I’ve long suggested using Home Assistant since it’s open source and there are lots of integrations that don’t require a connection to “the cloud”.
I’d thought nobody could do worse than when Wink shut down; sad to see this sort of thing.,
Another option, though not fully open source, is hubitat.com.
How long do you think the Judicial System will allow companies to sell items requiring backend cloud that the user can’t take over in the instance of company failure? I wonder what will be the event that takes over the zeitgeist to tackle this legally?
In the absence of any new purchased lobbied for legislation, corporations will hide behind the DMCA. The TL;DR of this is that any anti-circumvention method deemed ‘adequate’ (by 1998 standards) allows OEMs to prevent unauthorized usage of their firmware by users and subjects those selling - or merely disseminating - the means to do so potentially liable for damages.
There would need to be laws requiring a support lifespan before that would happen. And if we’re mandating mandatory support lifespans, I suggest we start with road construction, and bridges and infrastructure and eventually work our way down to smart light switches.
@ESmith we are already seeing challenges to the DMCA on the right to repair front. We will see how those hold up around personal electronics. I bet before we see DMCA law changes, we will see companies making components more available to shut down some of the most egregious issues. This is already happening symbolically in some major tech manufacturers like Apple.
@jswilson64 I believe the small items will lead to change sooner than infrastructure items. This is because infrastructure is often built with other’s money. Add, holding a politician accountable for an infrastructure issue that fails years later is near impossible, let alone the likely defunct LLC that did the work. Both of which likely hit the limelight well before the manufacturer of the product used.
Right to repair is important, but in the meantime I vote with my wallet and only purchase things that don’t require an internet connection to work. There are tons of great options in the smarthome world, both open source and proprietary, that are easy to setup and won’t brick when the manufacturer disappears.
Z-Wave is a common and well supported protocol for smart home devices. I’ve got deadbolt locks from Schlage, Smoke/CO alarms from First Alert, and dozens of sensors (temp, humidity, door, window, water, etc) from Aeotech. All working well together, and easier than ever to setup in Home Assisstant with the new Z-Wave JS driver.
For slightly more advanced users, systems like ESPHome offer an extremely powerful and easy to use way to integrate any esp8266/esp32 based devices into their smart home setup. I replaced every light switch with esp8266 based smart switches (Tuya brand) and flashed the firmware to use ESPHome.
For example, building my own garage door controller required only 3 components:
ESPHome in Home Assistant lets you flash device firmware from your browser now, so all that’s left is to click through a few prompts, toss in some yaml (this is what I wrote) and you’re done.
Personally I went the route of Apple HomeKit for most of my automations so far. Lutron Caseta light switches mostly. I’ve heard of Home Assistant. Have heard it can be integrated with HomeKit but haven’t taken the time to really dive in with other projects.
Would you be willing to put together a class for those interested or point us to the dummy manual?
Dummy manual is plenty if you’ve used a Raspberry Pi before. It can be hosted on other stuff too but most people use it with a Raspberry Pi.
They have a nice mobile app too and a service for it if you don’t want to setup a VPN.
The app can still be used without the service but you’d need a VPN to use it while away from the network. Being able to control outside lights from the phone is nice like a driveway light. 
I haven’t used HomeKit but I’ve heard good things about it, I imagine it’s probably the easiest way for a beginner to get a smart home setup. Home Assistant supports both connecting to an existing HomeKit setup and connecting “Works With HomeKit” devices directly to Home Assistant.
As Luke said, it’s fairly painless to get setup if you’ve ever used a Raspberry Pi. I suggest following the Install Home Assistant Operating System route, as it’s the easiest to setup and maintain.
If there’s interest, I wouldn’t mind doing an intro to Home Assistant class!
As it turns out, Home Assistant just recently posted this on their blog!
Meh… I ran into this years ago with a Seagate external hard drive that had a web interface. The back-end to that site was in the cloud, powered by Seagate. They shut the back end site down and you could no longer use the drive for backup. Their solution: You should buy an external USB case and transfer the drive to it.
After that, F*** the cloud based garbage.
Anyone remember Nest thermostats?
Remember them? They still make them, right?
Google hasn’t yet killed them or turned them into another chat app
What happens when they stop supporting the model you own?
Your Nest Learning Thermostat is about to not matter | Tom's Guide.
What happens when they end an interoperability program?
What happens when you get a bad update?
Yes! Here are “18 The Best Nest Thermostat To Buy Passed Our Test 2022”!:
I guess “what happens” is we start talking about them like they went out of business or something.
@mblatz That page is just painful!
I’d imagine the vast majority of people are not in the ‘roll your own’ market and this issue is going to remain for quite some time, as @ESmith covered already I think. Not only are the politics an issue but the business models for IOT tend to favor selling new widgets.
I suspect there can also be concerns over insurance and liability issues, e.g. what changes if your DIY automation injures someone vs a product that’s UL listed and widely available from a multi-national corporation like Google.
I’ve been using Hubitat with mostly Z-wave for a few years and it works well without using any of the cloud options, local only. However we’ve grown to like the Echo based voice commands we can use like “Alexa, turn on [whatever]”. I’ve not found great options to easily replace that functionality in a local-only mode. Anyone used Ada for Home Assistant by chance?
Precious few out there can be arsed with running an ethernet cable to stationary devices - thereby rendering the connection almost 100% reliable, greatly improving performance, and forever dealing with WiFi contention problems - so they’re for sure not going to mess with anything that looks like what geeks call “rolling your own”. Even NAS appliances with reasonably polished streamlined UIs that can make for pretty effortless local backups and do small-scale local server duty are a niche item, with most preferring to rent storage in the cloud.
I mean, I’ll run ethernet cable (mostly because I work from home, have traumatic memories of tech support for WiFi problems, and I’m a casual network geek) but I’m not motivated to DIY my own server.
In my experience consumer IoT tends to come in two major flavours:
