Stupid house

Brief introduction

TLDR: go directly to the conclusion!

When I read numerous articles about home automation on non-core resources (such as Habr), I am constantly gnawed at the idea that different people have a very different idea about the smart home. When I faced the task of designing my own house and I became interested in topics related to the design of individual houses (heating, electrics, water supply, etc.) - the divergence of views on the world became even more pronounced.
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Verbose Introduction

In this article I would like to share some of my views on the current state of things in the field of home automation and, perhaps, to encourage the reader to rethink some of the “basic” ideas for today related to this topic.

Just want to note that:
firstly, I am an amateur in everything related to the hardware part of the implementation of smart homes;
secondly, I describe the state of things from the point of view of a middle-class consumer, without touching on expensive and ultra-expensive solutions from the premium segment, which are devoid of both the majority of the shortcomings I mentioned in the note and the reason to buy them in cases where you do not have extra one hundred thousand dollars;
thirdly, I am not trying to impose anything on you, sell or promote any service;
fourth, there is a lot of text in the article



I fully admit that for automation specialists my opinion will seem naive or even vulgar, in this case I propose to send their righteous anger not to the meager knowledge of the author of this note, but to awesome marketers who provide a disservice to the entire industry.

Although I will try to consider the general details of the modern concept of “smart home”, many of my comments will concern the concept of “smart cottage / mansion / country house”, and not “smart apartment”, i.e. a detached building in which the owner can and must dispose (reasonably) of all communications at his discretion.

For illustration: in an apartment building, the apartment owner has few opportunities to influence the organization of ventilation beyond what the designers and builders and installers have implemented. As an example: in many houses, good neighbors can easily block the ventilation channel with a refrigerator, and in old houses there is no normal ventilation system (“natural” ventilation in such houses works as a matter of fact only in winter and only with slots in the windows and doors) - therefore some smart appliances such as breathers have the right to life in such situations.

In addition, I would like to consider the most favorable version of the approach to automation - this is when an automation project is created at the design stage of the house in agreement with other projects, and not after the completion of the rough finish and even more so after finishing the house. As in many areas, the iron rule works here: the farther from the design stage and the closer to the finished product stage major changes are made, the more expensive and more difficult the implementation goes. Only in this case the finished product is the house.

Stupid house

What is the difference between a smart house and an ordinary house? An ordinary house is not able to do anything on its own, and an intelligent house can guess your desires and adapt itself to you, making you comfortable or safe.
What is the difference between a stupid house and an ordinary house? An ordinary house does not know how to do anything, but a stupid house can do something, but it does something “wrong”, not like a real smart house. The main goal of a stupid house is to bring money to sellers, while pretending to be smart.

The brightest symptom of a stupid house is the Cult of the Control Panel . Thousands of sites on the Internet depict stories about how you can manage and keep control of your entire home for just the sum of N zeros, just from One Control Panel or Control Terminal, or even from the Absolute Authority Console.

Nanopies "Customer is ready"

The shining office of the company "Super Smart Home LLC". At a massive table sits a sales manager in a strict suit. He is stately, spectacled and stern. On the other hand, the couple is sitting: a serious man (apparently a businessman) and his young wife.

Manager ( continuing the story ): ... And here you are approaching the gate, get the Phone ...
Wife ( interrupting ): Phone ?! Maybe Remote? I've seen at Svetka ...
Manager ( fixed gaze, full of contempt at infinity behind the couple, with a condescension in his voice ): The console is the last century ...
Wife ( with enthusiasm ): Aah!
Manager ( with pride in voice ): Our dynamic company is moving with the times, therefore we offer our Clients only Modern Technologies.
Husband ( with interest ): Hmm!
Manager ( pauses, relishes the last sentence ): Yes. So you take out the Phone and open the gate directly from Him. (No remotes, God forbid, we are serious people!) Moreover, you can open the gates in your house near Tula, even if you climb to the top of Everest. Is an ordinary remote control capable of this?
Wife ( with even more enthusiastic delight, throws up her hands and turns to her husband ): Ooh, this is so modern!
Husband ( frowning sternly, trying to show that he is also an advanced person ): Does this work through the Internet?
Manager ( casually tossing with the look of a specialist wise over the years ): Cloud Technologies ...
The wife kicks her husband with a foot, "Dear, TAKE NOT SLOWLY NOR MINUTES."
A curtain.


The gate is a great example that shows the degree of a distorted, in my opinion, understanding of the tasks that a smart home should solve. A smart home is not a set of components connected by a remote control into one interface, it is a higher order system that anticipates the needs of the home owners, and does not force them to press the same buttons each time just to get an identical result in each cases.

Gates that open with your hands are mechanical gates. Gates that open from the console - automated gates. There is nothing clever about them, they do not make any decisions. There is a signal - we open it, there is no signal - we do not open it.

Suddenly, but the smart home does not need to ask every time to “open the gate”, he must understand when to open, when to close, without human intervention. How to do this is a matter of technology, which I leave behind the notes (radio beacons in the car, OCR numbers from the camera - the details of the implementation are not so important for the client). A person in a smart home does not have to push buttons! Therefore, I believe that the Cult of the Console is a dead-end concept for everything connected with the direction of “smart homes”. Nobody argues with the statement that the central console should be in the system of a smart home, but only as a backup interface for sending commands to the house, and not the basic and only one.



Look at the picture, on the left we have the usual TV from the 50s, and on the right the TV from the 50s with one of the first remote controls. Can we call the right TV smart? Of course we can! We need to sell our solution to a client ...

If it seemed to someone that I exaggerated about Everest and management from another point of the world - you just never read advertising brochures from integrators of "smart" systems. A reasonable question: why would I need to constantly change the level of illumination for the five light sources in the bedroom, from zero to one hundred percent luminosity, in increments of one percent and the possibility of choosing the color from the 65536 possible options for each of the fifteen light bulbs in the room individually, while in another room at home, not to mention another country? Maybe someone from the readers will call the real scenario of remote control of all the lights in the house, well, if you throw away witty scenarios like “scare the mother-in-law”? And why should I even care about such things myself? You sell me a smart home, so let it control the light yourself.

But no, under the slogans of imaginary comfort and under a thick layer of new, and therefore unusual impressions for the user, they simply sell him “an automated workplace of the operator of the house”. Agree that it sounds not so beautiful to the buyer's ear as the “Smart Home System”, although the essence of the many solutions on the market, the first name reflects oh where much more honest.

Let's finish with “comfort” and turn our eyes to the second mover of sales of “smart” houses: security. Or rather, to another concept distorted by the market for a stupid house - Imaginary Security .

In an amazing time, we live, comrades. On the one hand, customers are saved as much as possible from boring and complicated details of the implementation of this or that system (I turned on and work, magic cloud technologies, the cult of the magic button “make me feel good”); on the other hand, they are trying to sell the most basic and simple sensors under the sauce of the “ready-made system” that can, at best, just squeak loudly and post on Twitter.

" With Wally, you won't worry, " writes a smart seller of a set of humidity sensors for three hundred bucks. "Unfortunately, this is a revolution, only in the field of marketing. So I imagine the pacified face of the user when, after a well-deserved five-day vacation without the Internet on a tropical island, he receives the message: “Wow, it seems we have a flood in our apartment! Do not worry, now you know about it! Knowledge is power, your home is safe! ” Surprisingly, such systems of class "sensor-sms" still buy. And this is in the most developed segment of the home security market - control over water leaks, where there are many serious systems with shut-off automatics that will not only inform you of the problem, but also take steps to eliminate the problem, i.e. shut off the water.

Continuing the parade of analogies: you fly on the highway at a speed of 120 km / h. Suddenly in the path of the car there is a strip of melting snow. To drift with unpredictable consequences remain a split second. The case includes the automatic stability control system, which vigilantly collects information from a pile of sensors, which instantly takes control of the situation from the driver and helps to stabilize the car on the road through many simultaneous actions. Oh, sorry, your system is not intercepting. It really collects information from the sensors, but all security measures are reduced to a sound signal in the cabin (polyphonic signal, you can choose from 10 preset ones or download your melody via iTunes). More advanced models can send you SMS to 3 numbers, while the most advanced ones also post instegram selfie from the salon at the time of the accident.

Sounds absurd? Only if you are not a marketer for smart security systems. Be sure to write in advertising, what a huge damage can cause your home fire. The next paragraph will tell you what a great fire alarm system we have, and give you 10 points why it’s better than a regular fire detector for one and a half dollars, including on this list: likes your photos on Facebook containing images of open fires, keeping statistics on your fires in the cloud service "Vogne", a proprietary protocol specially made for the device and a daring design in the form of a fire tower (after all, everyone should see that you have not spent $ 250 in vain). Ah, well, the fact that the signaling only works when there is an Internet connection - so this is a virtue! After all, everything is getting better with bluetooth and wifi!

Are you afraid of theft? Do it right! After all, your time is worth nothing, why don't you work as an operator of your camera, even if it constantly works on a cat or a curtain? And if you are really robbed, our cameras will help you to assess the skills of masked burglar online, and also save on YouTube a recording of perplexed policemen in a police squad who arrived late at the crime scene for viewing in the family circle - and the ten pre-installed filters for vidosikov - included!

Dear marketers, stop popping us with your sensors under the slogan "Your home is protected!". If your installation does not have a fire extinguishing system, an automatic shutdown of gas supply, electricity, the inclusion of emergency lighting, a smoke removal system, then this is a fire warning system, not a fire protection system. If your security camera does not control the turret with machine guns around the perimeter of the house, live grids and the rapid response team, then this is a system for spying on your wife, and not a system of protection against theft. In the “CCTV camera - security guard” system, it is the security guard who performs the functions of protecting the object, not the camera (at least as long as there is no “find and destroy the intruder” program and the built-in grenade launcher).

The sensor will be able to alert you at a critical moment, but you or the relevant services, rather than the “smart” system, will prevent or eliminate the consequences of an emergency in such cases. How much benefit will the fire alert system bring to the hosts if the hosts see these alerts 8 hours after the plane landed? Would they call such a system clever in this situation, or would they call it something more differently? I will leave the answer to this question at the discretion of the reader.

Another trump card in the deck of sellers "dreams" - Economical savings . It's not even funny to me. A system for $ 5,000 (not the most expensive, let's say), which will help you save $ 25 a month on a communal flat (and this is also a good saving, try to achieve it using purely software methods in the CIS) will pay off in just sixteen and a half years . And only after these sixteen and a half long years will you begin to receive profit. It provided that the system will live these years without failures and breakdowns. Provided that you do not want to buy a house in Sochi, instead of a house in Novosibirsk. Provided that in sixteen years this system and this way of saving will still be relevant.

Very often, cunning marketers create for themselves a simple enemy in the form of an outdated technology and successfully smash it, keeping silent about what they attribute to themselves the merits of more modern technology. "The old switches do not know how to control the light flexibly, there are only two positions!" It does not matter that dimmers have been available on the market for decades. “Old incandescent bulbs, 100 watts each, consume energy, and our new system saves it!” It doesn’t matter that these savings are based on ordinary diode lamps available in any store.

Too smart home

And so, the user, already inspired by new knowledge, already able to distinguish good from evil, and smart at home from stupid, imagines himself in a house that constantly and imperceptibly adjusts to the owner. In his dreams, a new adept of a smart home walks through the rooms with a glass of wine, while his house at this time thinks and analyzes, turns on music and changes light, goes through lighting scenarios, heats the toilet lid and cools the oysters, watches the level of oxygen in the corridor, and scent pine forest in the living room, behind the noise of the dishwasher and the amount of light coming through the curtains into the bedroom, vigorously guards the perimeter, prevents voltage surges, does not forget to save heat and brings slippers.

And somewhere at this moment a person begins to think, is there some kind of a fly in the ointment in this barrel of honey? And she is right there, collapsing at the dreamer with a swift jack in the form of a supertanker, full to the brim with tar, with a big inscription on board: " THE PRICE OF SOLUTION ". The price of a truly smart home is stunning and shocking to the depths of the soul of any person who is not accustomed to writing out checks with a lot of zeros with a tired movement. An ordinary person begins to vaguely understand that the cost of implementing such a system is able to elegantly and reliably cover all the costs of building construction and decoration.

What to do in this difficult situation? There are several classic answers (of course, omitting the most popular variant of all time - “to score”): to turn the system assembly into a hobby, investing your time instead of your money (good, relatively inexpensive hardware and open software solutions for enthusiasts have enough) or head down to go to the market of budgetary stupid houses "turnkey". At first glance, the choice is not encouraging - no one guarantees you that a friendship with a soldering iron and an open source will help make a really smart home, and I have already smashed the stupid house from the set “ready-made budget solution from a marketer Vasya” into pieces with all this mass of text above.

But wait a second - maybe you don't need a smart home? Perhaps you do not need to centrally collect all the sensors in one mega-system? Perhaps we can pull out the Pareto rule, beaten with moths, blow off dust and enjoy an acceptable level of comfort for 20% of the system cost?

Fedot, but not that

It is an amazing fact, but, most likely, your home is not an International Space Station or a workshop of a high-tech factory for the production of robots to conquer Mars. Where did this obsession to control all possible parameters in the house come from? Maybe mass culture with futuristic interfaces in every superhero movie may be to blame for it, there may be a desire to surprise friends with a cool thing, maybe something else. I propose to leave such arguments for psychologists, and do the more interesting task.

Let's discuss some of the scenarios that the sellers of the “smart” house are trying to impose on us and try to give an alternative (and cheaper) option for a head-on solution.

Statement : It is extremely necessary for you to connect all these 15 gate opening sensors with the central server, because the full statistics of gate opening online is the key to your security! Our clever algorithm analyzes your medical records and, by the nature and extent of injuries, selects the ideal time to turn on and off the light at the site after the gate opens, the algorithm needs only six months to study!

Denial : A timer and several motion sensors in different places on the site are enough to turn on the street light. Let the gate open and close with a remote control that will hang on the car key. Central server needs no. There is no need to connect these two systems into one. You can install them as soon as free money appears, independently of each other, without looking at jointly supported protocols and without panic about the transcendental cost of solutions locked in one vendor.

Statement : only our experts will be able to configure such systems!

Denial : firms that put ready-made systems for unlocking the gate (along with the gate) - a dime a dozen. One competent electrician will cope with the lighting of the site according to your design. Not sure what exactly you need to highlight? Live a couple of months without light on the site with all your habits and daily routine - and you will know where and what lamps to put better than anyone in the world. And this knowledge is completely free!

Statement : Our innovative system allows you to collect up to 50 indicators of weather conditions at six points on the street and flexibly adjust the temperature of your house based on complex calendar rules. In the premium package you will be available 24 different options for displaying the weather graph.

Disclaimer : A boiler with weather-dependent automation (one or two sensors) and competent planning of the heating system with thermostats under the temperature sensors in the rooms (one per room, if you want) will solve the problem of comfort not worse. The number of sensors can be reduced by reasonably grouping the rooms according to their intended purpose, thereby making the solution even cheaper.

Discuss the price of "flexibility" of regulation in a tenth of a degree of heating through the rooms with a specialist in domestic heating, he will open your eyes to the feasibility of this event, as well as please the cost of equipment from the premium segment. And it can also tell you that your unique premium cauldron can get sick, and at the same time the closest detail to it will be so inappropriate for only a week from you. After all, you have thought up a spare option for heating the house at -20, in the form of the usual “stupid” boiler from the middle price segment, right?

For heating, there is again no need for a central server. You are afraid of a sharp drop in temperature in your absence - put an inexpensive GSM monitoring system and give the keys to reliable friends. In many countries, home security services install similar sensors as part of a security system and provide services for the resuscitation of the heating system at critical times - and, importantly, they themselves support the entire system with full-time specialists.

Statement : Only our specialists will be able to configure such systems!

Refutation : the companies that supply equipment for heating and are engaged in its installation, to put it mildly, are not small. Calculate the heating system is able to any competent specialist power system, working in these same offices. This is not an exclusive service, but the most basic one.

Statement : Collecting weather information is your primary responsibility! Buy our weather station and link it with all the equipment in your home!

Denial : You are surprised, but you do not need to collect information about the weather in your area! Moreover, it is going for you on your taxes and, with great probability, is available for free on the Internet!Do you live in a megalopolis and crave a reliable weather forecast for the short term? Look for data from the meteorological radar of the nearest airport, they are often in the public domain. Believe me, your vacuum cleaner does not always need to know the exact pressure in the house to spend a lot of money and connect it to your personal weather server on the same network.

Statement : Controlling ventilation and air conditioning is a complex task requiring an integrated approach!

Denial : Absolutely! And it is perfectly solved by manufacturers of serial equipment directly at the factory. You can choose the automation unit and options for installing the system to your taste directly from the seller of such equipment in the office. And here again there is no need for a damn server. Better think about where you will take the condensate.

Statement : Between the exhaust hood in the kitchen, the system of removing moisture from the bathroom and the air recovery system have little in common, but we will still tie it into one megasystem!

Disclaimer : Please do not! Putting a humidity sensor or a timer on the switch for a small exhaust in the shower is one of the most trivial tasks for an electrician. On the kitchen hood, of course, a lot of buttons: OFF, 1, 2, 3, LIGHT - but probably you can deal with this somehow without a central server, right?

Statement: The twelve lighting modes in the basic package almost completely cover your lighting needs, but we would recommend you a VIP package with twenty-four modes - you deserve it! Three remote control are included, for the add. The board can be downloaded to the phone (sorry, but we only support the latest version of iOs). Share your lighting schemes through Facebook!

Denial: A dimmer with three supporting positions: OFF, PRIMESH and BRIGHT and an infinite number of intermediate positions - will most likely solve all your needs for different light scenarios in a given room, if not (and this is a kitchen or living room) - add another couple of light sources to different cases with their own switches. Search for the phone, and then the desired application in the phone to turn off the light - a dubious rationality idea, in my opinion (oh sorry, an update arrived, wait just 5 minutes and we will update). A group of several illuminated switches will help you 100% of the time, even if you lost this damn console somewhere under the sofa or your slightly inebriated guest is trying to find a way out of the dark room for the first time.

Light sensor, and a couple of meters of LED strips - why not a solution to the problem of lighting the stairs? For you relevant light scenarios "Dream of a child", "Romantic dinner" and "Car shop" in the same room? Maybe it is worth thinking about investing in more housing, instead of this cool light control system? And I already said that you do not need a server for this, right?

Statement : Only our specialists will be able to configure such systems!

Denial: The task of creating light scenarios is easily handled by interior designers. After reading a couple of articles, you yourself can come up with similar scenarios for yourself. Electrician will help you realize this in the gland. If you can’t imagine your life without controlling the light from the phone, so be it - buy three smart bulbs, without intermediaries.

Statement : By connecting all switches to a centralized server, you can easily control any of them from anywhere in the world. Have you forgotten to turn off the iron? The safety of your electrical network is our concern.

Denial: Ask a good electrician to make you the main switch in the hallway, which will extinguish all non-critical lines in the house, leaving only your refrigerator and router in the network. If you suffer from forgetfulness, take note of the hotel system with cards or key rings - left, took the keys, the light went out. Network security - in competent switching of lines, calculation of loads, installation of protective devices, etc. This is the work of an electrician who has nothing to do with a smart home. You. Not. Is needed.Server. For. This one. And buy yourself an iron with a timer off, finally.

Statement : Six basic curtain management scenarios will give you unforgettable comfort!

Denial : Tear off the ass from the couch and draw them in your hands. The solution is universal and suitable for all types of curtains, roller shutters, blinds, Roman curtains, curtains, curtains and curtains without exception. Move more, it is good for your health!

Statement : A flexible role system for controlling access to different rooms will provide you with the highest level of security.

DenialA: A high level of security will be provided by the security service, which has helmets, body armor and the right to open fire to kill. And the alarm you will make these guys. And they have their own server! To monitor another room in the house, you can buy a baby monitor for $ 50.

Statement : You can always learn about all the important processes taking place in the house from the control panel of the central server!

Denial : You will be forced to delve into all the processes occurring in the house from the control panel of the central server!

What the hell does this coffee maker turn on on even days at one in the morning? Why do two timers to turn on the light at the same time work, and three - not always? How to roll an important security update on supercustom Linux, without having root rights, if the system developer knew Zen and left for Tibet forever? Who is harder: the hard drive of your central server with all your unique settings or a child with a water gun? And after all, the backups were on the company's servers, but three years ago, they lost their base, they changed the passwords forcibly, and the letter got to you in spam - and all these years your smart server has been unsuccessfully breaking to the backup server with an outdated password ... Why does a Chinese tablet, beautifully attached to the wall, stand like a not very old car? Who will replace it, if you accidentally poke a fork there, and then you find out that the firm,released these tablets, left the market two years ago? Perhaps leave a place for your imagination.

If you think that I am exaggerating a lot, this is again not the case. Similar statements replete with all advertising. Having set a goal to entertain yourself, advertising texts can be analyzed on the fly: “cloud technologies” means your equipment can turn into a brick without a server, “control from a phone” means convenient analog switches, don't wait here, “security” - what kind of security is it , maybe just a copywriter overdone it? Definitely worth looking for the words "our warranty" next to the word "security."

Another very popular take agitation I call the " Naked King". The fact is that advertising pretends that everyone here has long been aware of all the capabilities of the system, so it simply describes one particular opportunity, but well, everyone is still aware of the rest. Of course, everything is up to date except reader, and he asked again kind of awkward.

A nasty example: remote control of light. In any ad for this system, you can read about “the broadest possibilities”, only the same scenario will always be presented as an example: imitation of the presence of people in the house. Sellers, are you serious ?! At all corners they trumpet such a system, do you really think that thieves are still so stupid that they don’t know about it? Even in the good old film of 1990 “Home Alone”, the hero did not just need to turn on the light here and there, but had to move the mannequins to deceive the thieves. Are your mannequins attached to your systems? Or maybe, finally, you will come up with a new real-world scenario to promote remote control of the light? How about playing on people's fears to forget to turn off the light bulb in the basement for a month?

Predatory Internet things

It is time to look at one funny concept, all gaining and gaining popularity. This is about such a mysterious thing as the Internet of Things. I called it mysterious because it seems that no one really can clearly articulate what it is. Kettle and coffee maker with internet connection? Coffee maker and coffee grinder with connection to each other? RFID tags for bread and sausage plus bread slicer with manipulators and sandwich machine? Label store on a jar of caviar? All store tags on all the jars of caviar in the city? Harmonious collaboration of drones, charging for your fitness tracker and toaster with access to YouTube? Honestly, I do not know, do not ask.

If we take a vague definition from Wikipedia, we have been living on this Internet of things for twenty years now - and what is logical, we have a lot of things, and they are connected to the Internet, and some even to each other - which is not the Internet of things. Who came, following this logic, to replace the electrical network of things (and no one had thought of taking money for such a wonderful term, they overslept, sir).

As always, the difficulties with the wording have never prevented marketers from making money. It may be recalled that in the 90s all household appliances, although remotely related to transistors, were molded the term “digital”. Now, to everything connected with the Internet, the term “cloudy” is molded. And, although for the end user nothing has changed at all, everyone knows that their data is not stored anywhere in some impersonal data center, namely, in the fashionable "cloud". We can recall Gates with his "information at his fingertips" or, say, java's ambitious plans to seize all devices, from credit card chips and SIM cards, to telephones and TVs, or a relatively recent UN resolution recognizing access to the Internet as a basic human right. All these are evolutionary, progressive achievements of technical progress,that neither cold nor hot from any labels that are hung on him, posing as a revolution. (To be fair, thanks to cloud haipu, we got an excellent metaphor for saving data to the Internet as an icon of a cloud, so not everything is so bad.)

Nowadays, you should attach a wifi to a toothbrush and voila - this is now a smart brush of the Internet of things. In futurists' dreams, one brush looks somehow lonely, but give time to progress, and we will have flying drones who deliver pasta for evening teeth cleaning, and ubiquitous bristle cleaning and replacing machines, and a host of online consultants for choosing individual modes and teeth cleaning tracks that collect data about your diet from your smart teapot, smart teapot, smart oven, smart ashtray and smart coffee maker for accurate prediction of the dose and composition of today's paste. And it will be possible to correct their readings by sensors from smart toilet paper and from a smart toilet bowl. But I have not said about smart sensors on a smart brush,who notice a strong discoloration of the enamel and have your smart coffee machine pour more water and add less coffee.

Maybe someday the usual napkin, butter knife and tube of cream with constant internet connection will look absolutely natural, but for now we only have a blatant marketing, expensive toothbrush with Wi-Fi and a vague idea that with this whole economy do.

Marketing algorithm

Step 1 . Take the usual device
Step 2 . We add there sensors, the possibility of remote control, we connect it to the Internet (we try not to ask ourselves the question "why?").
Step 3 . We cling to him the label "smart". We screw up a proprietary data exchange protocol that is incompatible with anything else and is thrown onto the market.
Step 4a . If the device took off - we did everything right.
Step 4b . If the device fails - we say that the world is simply not yet ready for our smart toothpicks for $ 600.

I am sure that if we collect hundreds of marketers and evangelists of the Internet of Things and ask them to reveal what they mean by this term, then we will have a hundred different definitions. Well, okay, let's leave them alone and move on to more mundane matters - namely, the use of smart things in a smart home.

It would seem that here it is, the technology of our dreams. Instead of expensive and monolithic industrial complex from a real smart home, we have many small, relatively cheap and relatively independent things. Unfortunately, the overall picture is not so rosy.

We will not discuss the pricing of "smart" items, let's go straight to the question: "why are they needed?".

It is no secret that most people on the planet do not have the desire and (or) the ability to redo all the engineering networks in a house or apartment every few years, keeping pace with the new products. Do not want to do expensive repairs in the bedroom to prepare for dimmed light? You buy a smart light with regulation of light. There is no way to hammer a wall under the switch? Wireless switches will help. You can not alter the system of "passive" ventilation in the house, and the windows everywhere tightly block the access of air? You buy a breather.

It seems to be all right, a niche was found, with the goals sorted out. But, as is usually the case, distortions begin. Marketing sharply forgets that the purpose of many clever things for the house is to correct the shortcomings of existing communications with less blood and begins to squeal that these things are indispensable and most necessary in the house. To listen to them, it turns out that a smart light bulb is not one of the budget ways to organize light scenarios in the room, but the only one and the best.

Another imbalance is the ignoring of the fact that most smart appliances have not yet got out of the scale of one room. It would seem that there is an internet connection, Twitter can now post data even a toaster, but alas, when a network of devices of the same type is really needed, this possibility is not always the case. Even large companies have not avoided trouble. For example, the smart thermostat Nest never learned to work in cooperation with its comrades and, in the best traditions of despotism, controls the temperature in the whole house at once. They put 22 degrees - get 22 degrees in all rooms. Well, or 22 degrees in a room with a thermostat and an unknown temperature in the other rooms (there are no temperature sensors in the same place). For objectivity, it is worth noting that in the next project - a fire signaling device Nest Protect,the company corrected this misunderstanding and allowed to connect devices within the network.

What else is negative about trends? Let's get a look.

Everybody needs internet . In 2016, a permanent Internet connection is difficult to attribute to minuses, rather, it is convenient.

Appearance .The fact that the engineering devices in the non-attractive enclosures were no longer shy to hide, they gave a beautiful case and even allowed us to choose the color - another positive trend from my point of view.

Statistics . Collecting a bunch of data from the sensors and drawing beautiful graphics is a great opportunity. But so far it is not particularly clear what to do with this data. We bought smart watches that write 10 indicators of your vital activity, well, great of course. But the function will be really useful only when your therapist (or medical AI) learns how to work and make decisions based on it with this data.

Vendor lok. And here we have a serious problem. Proprietary protocols, complete dependence on a good corporation, which, well, never extinguish the server of your piece of iron is a very bad idea. The sad cases have already been, from the recent - the story of Revolv. And there are no alternatives yet. If you are accustomed to the functionality of Amazon Echo or Apple Siri, even open protocols and the ability to choose any data processing server will not help you much - to write and maintain such open solutions and to maintain data centers for them is a little expensive for enthusiasts.

Security. Since you are controlling your light from another point of the world, why don't I direct your light from another point of the world? Here, too, everything is very sad, partly because of the illiteracy of users, partly through the fault of the developers (or even by their malicious intent, remember the situation with backdoors in the Linksys and Netgear routers). Any device with Internet access is a potential hole in your network. There are also no simple solutions: either you don’t buy a piece of hardware, or you give up some of the device’s functions, or a shaman with network equipment, or you meekly entrust your data to the developers of the device.

Conclusion

Of course, there is a lot of exaggeration in this text, but I tried as best I could to induce the reader to think about the status quo. A brief summary of the article:

For homeowners who do not own an oil campaign, the independence and autonomy of home systems and equipment from each other is good, not evil. The more complex the system, the more different parts it has, the greater the chance of failure of one of them. Replacing the blunt boiler of firm A with the blunt boiler of firm B will take at least a couple of days. Replacing the smart boiler, which is part of a complex heating system, to reconfigure the system for a new one, especially if it does not support the data exchange standards 8 years ago, is a rather complicated task.

It must be remembered that on independent devices prom. manufacturing is a manufacturer's warranty, you can read reviews on the Internet about them, ask the repairmen from the service centers about the main jambs. A custom solution can only be guaranteed by a company that mounts them, and you can only guess about the individual components of the system, especially if you are far from electronics.

Over time, things tend to fail. Integrator firms can close, competitors can buy them, they can turn the direction of "smart" houses. And well, if your system will be built on the basis of open technologies and you will have a full up-to-date documentation package on your system. And if not? Bought a device from a foreign company with good sales and smart plans for the future and think that Google will not buy them out and not put out all the servers in half a year?

Ask yourself what will happen to your unique and complex system in 10 years, in 15 years? Who will support her and how? Remember, because 15 years ago, video recorders were still popular, and where are they now? Maybe in your case it is more rational to build a system of home devices from independent and unrelated components, which can be easily changed in any order?

Many of the things that smart home vendors give out for their know-how are not really special: an electrician and designer can fulfill every whim of your house lighting, only lazy people do not deal with security systems, all engineering networks design and install many specialized firms that are not affiliated with smart homes. And all of them are narrow specialists, i.e. with at least they have competence no worse than an integrator of a smart home, who has to jump in all areas at once and pull out compatible technologies from there.

Having a bunch of sensors in your house without control devices is much better than having nothing, but you should understand that you yourself will be the operator of these sensors. In some situations there is no way out at all and you have to limit yourself: for example, if you are renting an apartment and have no right to touch engineering communications or if your house cannot be connected to the security service with automatic weapons. In these cases, it is worthwhile to estimate the possible risks and cost of the solution - if your homemade security system is cut down when power is lost or it can be extinguished with a 3g silencer - most likely it will not help you to avoid property theft. On the other hand, finding out about the leakage of water and arriving home two hours after the beginning of the flood is still better than arriving there after eight hours.

Small “smart” devices penetrate our homes much faster than complex all-in-one solutions. Good or bad, but at the moment serious manufacturers of equipment for smart homes consider wireless communications more like solutions from the budget segment, and the “second wave” of manufacturers of smart devices (start-ups and giants of the IT industry) focuses their efforts only on areas that do not require planning. / rework of engineering networks. Personally, I am pleased with the tendency, but whether time will come to find the mythical standard protocol and, one day, to fully replace the real smart home system with a network of such smart devices.

The modern world is ruled by marketing and big words. When you read the categorical advertising campaigns in the style of "This is what you need!" Ask yourself the question "Why do I really need this?" More often. Feel free to question every word sellers and ask tricky questions - because it does not cost you anything !