home automation

Three bizarre home devices and a couple good things at CES 2025

AI, ai slop, CES, CES 2025, Google Home, Google Nest Hub, home automation, lg, matter, philips hue, Smart Home, switchbot, Tech / Rejus Almole / January 11, 2025

You can’t replace cats with AI, not yet

Some quietly good things made an appearance at CES 2025, amidst the AI slush.

Credit: Verity Burns/WIRED UK

Every year, thousands of product vendors, journalists, and gadget enthusiasts gather in an unreasonable city to gawk at mostly unrealistic products.

To be of service to our readers, Ars has done the work of looking through hundreds of such items presented at the 2025 Consumer Electronic Show, pulling out the most bizarre, unnecessary, and head-scratching items. Andrew Cunningham swept across PC and gaming accessories. This writer stuck to goods related to the home.

It’s a lie to say it’s all a prank, so I snuck in a couple of actually good things for human domiciles announced during CES. But the stuff you’ll want to tell your family and friends about in mock disbelief? Plenty of that, still.

AI-powered spice dispenser: Spicerr

A hand holding a white tubular device, with spice tubes loaded into a bottom area, spices dropping out of the bottom. — Credit: Spicerr

Part of my job is to try and stretch my viewpoint outward—to encompass people who might not have the same experiences and who might want different things from technology. Not everybody is a professional writer, pecking away in Markdown about the latest turn-based strategy game. You must try to hear many timbres inside the common voice in your head when addressing new products and technologies.

I cannot get there with Spicerr, the “world’s first AI-powered spice dispenser,” even leaving aside the AI bit. Is the measurement and dumping of spices into a dish even five percent of the overall challenge? Will a mechanical dispenser be any more precise than standard teaspoons? Are there many kinds of food on which you would want to sprinkle a “customized blend” of spices? Are there home cooks so dedicated to fresh, bright flavors that they want their spices delivered in small vials, at presumably premium prices, rather than simply having small quantities of regularly restocked essentials?

Maybe the Spicerr would be a boon to inexperienced cooks, whose relatives all know them to under-season their food. Rather than buying them a battery-powered device, they must charge to “take the guesswork out of seasoning,” though, you could … buy them good cookbooks, or a Times Cooking subscription, or just a few new bottles of paprika, oregano, cumin, cayenne, and turmeric.

Philips Hue’s (sigh) AI-powered lighting assistants

Image of AI assistant responding to prompts from user, — Credit: Signify

I’m not dismayed that Philips Hue is jumping on the “This has AI now” bandwagon. Well, I am, but not specifically dismayed, because every vendor at CES this year is hawking AI. No, the bad thing here is that Hue lights are devices that work great. Maybe Philips’ pursuit of an “AI assistant” to help you figure out that Halloween lights should be orange-ish won’t distract them from their core product’s reliability. But I have my doubts.

Hue has recently moved from a relatively open lighting system to an app-and-account-required, cloud-controlled scheme, supposedly in the name of security and user control. Having an AI assistant is perhaps another way to sell services beyond hardware, like the $130 or $3/month LG TV app it now offers. The AI service is free for now, but charging for it in the future is far from impossible.

Again, none of this should necessarily affect people who, like me, use Hue bulbs to have a porch light come on at sunset or turn a dim, warm hue when it’s time to wind down. But it felt like Hue, which charges a very decent amount for their hardware, might have held off on chasing this trend.

Robot vacuums doing way too much

Switchbot K20+ Pro holding up a tablet while a woman does a yoga pose in front of an insanely wealthy-person view of a California cliffside. — Credit: Switchbot

Robot vacuums are sometimes worth the hassle and price… if you don’t mind doing a pre-vacuum sweep of things that might get stuck in its brushes, you’ve got room for an emptying base or will empty it yourself, and you don’t mind that they usually miss floor edges and corners. They’re fine, I’m saying.

Robot vacuum makers have steadfastly refused to accept “fine” and are out way over their skis this year. In one trade show, you can find:

Eureka’s J15 Max Ultra, incorporating “IntelliView AI 2.0,” infrared, and FHD vision, detects liquid spills and switches brushes and vacuums to better clean and avoid spreading.
Roborock’s Saros Z70 has a “mechanical task arm” that can pick up objects like socks and small debris (up to 10.5 ounces) and put them in a pre-determined pile spot.
SwitchBot’s modular K20+ Pro, which is a vacuum onto which you can attach air purifiers, tablet mounts, security cameras, or other things you want rolling around your home.
Dreame’s X50, which can pivot to clean some small ledges but cannot actually climb.
The Narwal Flow, which has a wide, flat, off-center mop to reach wall edges.

Pricing and availability are not available for these vacuums yet, but each is likely to set you back the equivalent of at least one new MacBook. They are also rather big devices to stash in your home (it’s hard to hide an arm or an air purifier). Each is an early adopter device, and getting replacement consumable parts for them long-term is an uncertain bet. I’m not sure who they are for, but that has not stopped this apparently fertile field from growing many new products.

Now for good things, starting with Google Home

Nest Hub second generation, on a nightstand with a bamboo top and dim lamp in the near background. — Credit: Corey Gaskin

I’ve been watching and occasionally writing about the progress of the nascent Matter smart home protocol, somewhat in the vein of a high school coach who knows their team is held back by a lack of coordination, communication, and consistent direction. What Matter wants to do is vital for the future of the smart home, but it’s very much a loose scrimmage right now.

And yet, this week, in a CES-adjacent announcement, Google reminded me that Matter can really, uh, matter. All of Google Home’s hub devices—Nest screens and speakers, Chromecasts, Google TV devices running at least Android 14, and a few other gadgets—can interoperate with Matter devices locally, with no cloud required.

That means people with a Google Home setup can switch devices, adjust volumes, and otherwise control devices, faster, with Internet outages or latency no longer an issue. Local, no-cloud-required control of devices across brands is one of Matter’s key promises, and seeing it happen inside one major home brand is encouraging.

More we’ll-see-what-happens news is the unveiling of the public Home APIs, which promise to make it easier for third-party devices to be set up, integrated, and automated in a Google Home setup. Even if you’re skeptical of Google’s long-term support for APIs, the company is also working with the Matter group to improve the Matter certification process for all devices. Device makers should then have Matter to fall back onto, failing enthusiasm for Google Home APIs.

This cat tower is also an air purifier; it is also good

Two fake cats, sitting on seats atop an air purifier at CES 2025 — Credit: Verity Burns/WIRED UK

There are a lot of phones out there that need charging and a bunch of gamers who, for some reason, need even more controllers and screens to play on. But there is another, eternally underserved market getting some attention at CES: cats wanting to sit.

LG, which primarily concerned itself with stuffing generative AI interfaces into every other device at CES 2025, crafted something that feels like a real old-time trade show gimmick. There is no guarantee that your cat will use the AeroCat Tower; some cats may just sit inside the cardboard box it came in out of spite. But should they deign to luxuriate on it, the AeroCat will provide gentle heat beneath them, weigh them, and give you a record of their sleep habits. Also, it purifies the air in that room.

There is no pricing or availability information yet. But if you like your cats, you want to combine the function of a cat tower and air purifier, or you just want to consider something even just a little bit fun about the march of technology, look out for this one.

Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch.

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Home Assistant’s Voice Preview Edition is a little box with big privacy powers

home assistant voice, home asssistant, home automation, Smart Home, Tech, voice assistant, voice preview edition / Rejus Almole / December 19, 2024

Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition

Home Assistant’s voice device is a $60 box that’s both focused and evolving.

Credit: Home Assistant Foundation

Home Assistant announced today the availability of the Voice Preview Edition, its own design of a living-room-friendly box to offer voice assistance with home automation. Having used it for a few weeks, it seems like a great start, at least for those comfortable with digging into the settings. That’s why Home Assistant is calling it a “Preview Edition.”

Using its privacy-minded Nabu Casa cloud—or your own capable computer—to handle the processing, the Voice Preview Edition (VPE) ($60/60 euros, available today) has the rough footprint of a modern Apple TV but is thinner. It works similarly to an Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri device, but with a more focused goal. Start with a wake word—the default, and most well-trained version, is “Okay, Nabu,” but “Hey, Jarvis” and “Hey, Mycroft” are available. Follow that with a command, typically something that targets a smart home device: “Turn on living room lights,” “Set thermostat to 68,” “Activate TV time.” And then, that thing usually happens.

Home Assistant’s Voice Preview Edition, doing what it does best. I had to set a weather service to an alias of “the weather outside” to get that response worked out.

“That thing” is primarily controlling devices, scenes, and automations around your home, set up in Home Assistant. That means you have to have assigned them a name or alias that you can remember. Coming up with naming schemes is something you end up doing in big-tech smart home systems, too, but it’s a bit more important with the VPE.

You won’t need to start over with all your gear if you’ve got a Google Home, Alexa, or Apple Home ecosystem, at least. Home Assistant has good “bridge” options built into it for connecting all the devices you’ve set up and named inside those ecosystems.

It’s important to have a decently organized smart home set up with a VPE box, because it doesn’t really do much else, for better or worse. Unless you hook it up to an AI model.

The voice device that is intentionally not very chatty

The VPE box can run timers (with neat LED ring progress indicators), and with a little bit of settings tweaking, you can connect it to Home Assistant’s built-in shopping lists and task lists or most any other plug-in or extension of your system. If you’re willing to mess with LLMs—like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini—locally or through cloud subscriptions, you could trigger prompts with your voice, though performance will vary.

Home Assistant’s Voice Preview Edition, not quite sure what to do with non-home-related questions.

What else does Home Assistant’s hardware do? Nothing, at least by default. It listens for its prompt, it passes them onto a Home Assistant server, and that’s it. You can’t ask it how tall Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen is or how many consecutive Super Bowls the Bills lost. It won’t do simple math calculations or metric conversions. It cannot tell you whether you should pack an umbrella tomorrow or a good substitute if you’re out of eggs.

For some people either hesitant to bring a voice device into their home or fatigued by the failures of supposedly “smart” assistants that can seem quite dumb, this might be perfect. When the Home Assistant VPE hears me clearly (more on that in a moment), it almost always understands what I’m saying, so long as I remember what I named everything.

There were times during the month-long period when I muted Google Assistant and stuck with Home Assistant that I missed the ability to ask questions I would normally just look up on a search engine. The upside is that I didn’t have to sit through 15 seconds of Google explaining at length something I didn’t ask for.

If you want the VPE to automatically fall back to AI for answering non-home-specific questions, you can set that up. And that’s something we’ll likely dig into for a future post.

The hardware

Home Assistant’s Voice Preview Edition device, with Apple TV (4K, 2022) for scale. Kevin Purdy

As a product you want to keep somewhere it can hear you, the Home Assistant VPE blends in, is reasonably small, and has more useful buttons and switches than the competition. It looks entirely innocuous sitting on a bookshelf, entertainment center, kitchen counter, or wall mount. It’s quite nice to pay for a functional device that has absolutely no branding visible.

There are four neat things on top. First is two microphone inputs, which are pretty important. There’s an LED ring that shows you the VPE is listening by spinning, then spinning the other way to show that it’s “thinking” and reversing again when responding. A button in the middle can activate the device without speech or cancel a response.

Best of all, there is a physically rotating dial wheel around the button. It feels great to spin, even if it’s not something you’ll need to do very often.

Around the sides is clear plastic, with speaker holes on three sides. The speakers are built specifically for voice clarity, according to Home Assistant, and I agree. I can always hear what the VPE is trying to tell me, at any distance in my living room.

There’s a hardware mute switch on one side, with USB-C inputs (power and connection) and a stereo headphone/speaker jack. On the bottom is a grove port for deeper development.

Hearing is still the challenge

The last quasi-official way to get a smart speaker experience with Home Assistant was the ESP32 S3 Box 3, which was okay or decent in a very quiet room or at dining room table distance. The VPE is a notable improvement over that device in both input and output. If I make a small effort to speak clearly and enunciate, it catches me pretty much everywhere in my open-plan living room/dining room/kitchen. It’s not too bad at working around music or TV sound, either, so long as that speaker is not between me and the VPE box. It is best with its default wake phrase, “Okay, Nabu,” because that’s the most trained and sampled by the Open Wake Word community.

And yet, every smart speaker I’ve had in my home at some point—a Google Home/Nest Mini, Amazon Echo (full-size or Dot), Apple HomePod (original), the microphones on Sonos speakers—has seemed better at catching its wake word, given similar placement as the VPE. After all, Home Assistant, a not-for-profit foundation, cannot subsidize powerful microphone arrays with advertising, Prime memberships, or profitable computer hardware ecosystems. I don’t have lab tests to prove this, just my own experiences—with my particular voice, accent, phrasing, room shape, and noise levels.

I’ve been using this device with pre-release firmware and software, and it’s under active development, so it will almost certainly get better. But as a device you can buy and set up right now, it’s very close—but not quite—to the level of the big ecosystems. It is notably better than the hodgepodge of other devices you can technically use with Home Assistant voice prompts.

Is it better for my privacy that the VPE is not great at being triggered by ambient speech in the room? Maybe. At the same time, I’m more likely to switch away from said big-tech voice devices only if I don’t feel like I have to say everything twice or three times.

It’s fun to craft your own voice system

I’ve been able to use the VPE on a bookshelf in my living room for weeks, asking it to turn on lights, adjust thermostats, set scenes with blinds and speakers, and other automations, and the successes are far more common than failures. I still want to test some different placements and try out local hardware processing (requiring an Intel N100 or better for common languages), since I’ve only tested it with Home Assistant’s cloud servers, the generally faster solution.

The best things about the VPE are not the things you’ll notice by looking at or speaking to it. It’s a smart speaker that seems a lot more reasonable for private places, especially if you’re running on local hardware. It’s not a smart speaker that is going to read you an entire Wikipedia page when it misunderstands what you want. And it doesn’t demand you to use an app tied into an ecosystem to use, other than the web app running off your Home Assistant server.

Paulus Schoutsen said on the VPE’s launch stream that the VPE might not be the best choice for someone switching over from an established Google/Amazon/Apple ecosystem. That might be true, but I think the VPE also works as a single-user device at a desk, or for anyone who’s been waiting to step into voice but concerned about privacy, ecosystem lock-in, or their kids’ demands to play Taylor Swift songs on repeat.

This post was update at 5 p.m. to note the author’s wake word experience may relate to his voice and room characteristics.

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Z-Wave Long Range and its mile-long capabilities will arrive next year

home automation, shelly, Smart Home, Tech, z-wave, z-wave long range, z-wave lr / Rejus Almole / December 18, 2024

Z-Wave can be a very robust automation network, free from the complications and fragility of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Just how robust, you ask? More than a mile long, under the right circumstances, as hardware soon to hit the market promises.

All claims of radio distances should be taken with amounts of salt unhealthy for consumption. What can be accomplished across an empty field is not the same as what can be done through buildings, interference, and scatter. But Z-Wave Long Range (or Z-Wave LR), operating “in long range mode at full power,” can hit 1.5 miles, according to the Z-Wave Alliance, presuming you’ve got the right star-shaped hub network.

By using a star network topology instead of a more traditional mesh, Z-Wave LR reduces the need for hubs and repeaters, relying instead on a central hub. It can be more reliable for larger commercial spaces, security setups, and bigger homes, and also more power efficient. Devices automatically adjust their signal strength while on Z-Wave networks, extending the battery life of a single coin cell up to 10 years—again, under best-case circumstances. If you’re really a glutton for punishment, you can fit up to 4,000 devices on a network running Z-Wave LR, because LR can co-exist on the same network as standard Z-Wave meshes.

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Four desk-organizing gifts you don’t technically need but might very much want

cable management, cable wrangler, flic buttons, home automation, label maker, label makers, shopping, Tech, USB-C accessories, usb-c charging / Rejus Almole / December 3, 2024

Brother P-Touch Cube printer on a light wood table, with a handful of — Welcome! Credit: Brother

The drawer-sized label maker that will convert you

My quirky wireless keyboard can keep up to three Bluetooth connections memorized. Can I, a human being, remember which of those three connections corresponds to which device and which number? No, I cannot. That’s why there is a little label on the back of my keyboard, reminding me that Fn+Q is the MacBook, Fn+W is the Chromebook, and so on.

Maybe you would do the same, but you don’t want to commit to a whole-danged label maker. That’s why Brother now makes the P-touch Cube. It offloads the typing and design to a phone or computer you already have and crams the heat transfer printing into a 4.5-inch square by 2.5-inch-thick cube. The Plus version can connect to a computer by USB and has a rechargeable battery and automatic label cutter, while the basic version is a pared-down, smartphone-only affair.

Like a lot of devices, the P-Touch Cube software wants you to do a lot more than you probably need it for. But the thing it does—make labels that improve your life, even if you live in the tiniest apartment—is good enough to forgive some very Brother-ish software.

A light green pillow with three cables magnetically stuck to its top. — Credit: Smartish

Flexible cable management that looks kinda nice

When I’m rushed or stressed or distracted, I let cables run everywhere. When I have a moment but don’t really have a plan, I bundle them up with reusable twist-ties, Velcro, or zip ties. It’s always hard for me to commit to anything more permanent, because a new desk setup, new ideas, or some new piece of hardware is always around the corner.

The gear that can get past my “That’s too permanent” cable chaos mentality are made of magnets. Specifically, a little cable pillow with magnets inside.

Smartish, maker of good phone cases, makes the Cable Wrangler and Bigger Cable Wrangler in enough colors and finishes that one should be acceptable. It’s a little pad onto which you can place the ends of your cables, or run them through one of the included collars. It can feel silly to have a dedicated magnet pillow for cables, but having and naming the space—”This, here, is where the cables go”—helps me remember not to leave them elsewhere. It’s also great for the cable extenders I use to switch my headphones and mouse between a Mac and a gaming PC.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

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I, too, installed an open source garage door opener, and I’m loving it

APIs, apple home, Cars, esp32, Features, garage door, Garage Door Opener, GENIE, home assistant, home automation, homekit, ifttt, mqtt, Open Source, opengarage, Smart Home, Tech / Tim Belzer / November 15, 2024

Open source closed garage

OpenGarage restored my home automations and gave me a whole bunch of new ideas.

Hark! The top portion of a garage door has entered my view, and I shall alert my owner to it. Credit: Kevin Purdy

Like Ars Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson, I have a garage. The door on that garage is opened and closed by a device made by a company that, as with Lee’s, offers you a way to open and close it with a smartphone app. But that app doesn’t work with my preferred home automation system, Home Assistant, and also looks and works like an app made by a garage door company.

I had looked into the ratgdo Lee installed, and raved about, but hooking it up to my particular Genie/Aladdin system would have required installing limit switches. So I instead installed an OpenGarage unit ($50 plus shipping). My garage opener now works with Home Assistant (and thereby pretty much anything else), it’s not subject to the whims of API access, and I’ve got a few ideas how to make it even better. Allow me to walk you through what I did, why I did it, and what I might do next.

Thanks, I’ll take it from here, Genie

Genie, maker of my Wi-Fi-capable garage door opener (sold as an “Aladdin Connect” system), is not in the same boat as the Chamberlain/myQ setup that inspired Lee’s project. There was a working Aladdin Connect integration in Home Assistant, until the company changed its API in January 2024. Genie said it would release its own official Home Assistant integration in June, and it did, but then it was quickly pulled back, seemingly for licensing issues. Since then, no updates on the matter. (I have emailed Genie for comment and will update this post if I receive reply.)

This is not egregious behavior, at least on the scale of garage door opener firms. And Aladdin’s app works with Google Home and Amazon Alexa, but not with Home Assistant or my secondary/lazy option, HomeKit/Apple Home. It also logs me out “for security” more often than I’d like and tells me this only after an iPhone shortcut refuses to fire. It has some decent features, but without deeper integrations, I can’t do things like have the brighter ceiling lights turn on when the door opens or flash indoor lights if the garage door stays open too long. At least not without Google or Amazon.

I’ve seen OpenGarage passed around the Home Assistant forums and subreddits over the years. It is, as the name implies, fully open source: hardware design, firmware, and app code, API, everything. It is a tiny ESP board that has an ultrasonic distance sensor and circuit relay attached. You can control and monitor it from a web browser, mobile or desktop, from IFTTT, MQTT, and with the latest firmware, you can get email alerts. I decided to pull out the 6-foot ladder and give it a go.

Prototypes of the OpenGarage unit. To me, they look like little USB-powered owls, just with very stubby wings. Credit: OpenGarage

Installing the little watching owl

You generally mount the OpenGarage unit to the roof of your garage, so the distance sensor can detect if your garage door has rolled up in front of it. There are options for mounting with magnetic contact sensors or a side view of a roll-up door, or you can figure out some other way in which two different sensor depth distances would indicate an open or closed door. If you’ve got a Security+ 2.0 door (the kind with the yellow antenna, generally), you’ll need an adapter, too.

The toughest part of an overhead install is finding a spot that gives the unit a view of your garage door, not too close to rails or other obstructing objects, but then close enough for the contact wires and USB micro cable to reach. Ideally, too, it has a view of your car when the door is closed and the car is inside, so it can report its presence. I’ve yet to find the right thing to do with the “car is inside or not” data, but the seed is planted.

OpenGarage’s introduction and explanation video.

My garage setup, like most of them, is pretty simple. There’s a big red glowing button on the wall near the door, and there are two very thin wires running from it to the opener. On the opener, there are four ports that you can open up with a screwdriver press. Most of the wires are headed to the safety sensor at the door bottom, while two come in from the opener button. After stripping a bit of wire to expose more cable, I pressed the contact wires from the OpenGarage into those same opener ports.

Wires running from terminal points in the back of a garage door opener, with one set of wires coming in from the bottom and pressed into the same press-fit holes. — The wire terminal on my Genie garage opener. The green and pink wires lead to the OpenGarage unit. Credit: Kevin Purdy

After that, I connected the wires to the OpenGarage unit’s screw terminals, then did some pencil work on the garage ceiling to figure out how far I could run the contact and micro-USB power cable, getting the proper door view while maintaining some right-angle sense of order up there. When I had reached a decent compromise between cable tension and placement, I screwed the sensor into an overhead stud and used a staple gun to secure the wires. It doesn’t look like a pro installed it, but it’s not half bad.

A garage ceiling, with drywall stud paint running across, a small device with wires running at right angles to the opener, and an opener rail beneath. — Where I ended up installing my OpenGarage unit. Key points: Above the garage door when open, view of the car below, not too close to rails, able to reach power and opener contact. Credit: Kevin Purdy

A very versatile board

If you’ve got everything placed and wired up correctly, opening the OpenGarage access point or IP address should give you an interface that shows you the status of your garage, your car (optional), and its Wi-Fi and external connections.

Image of OpenGarage web interface, showing a — The landing screen for the OpenGarage. You can only open the door or change settings if you know the device key (which you should change immediately). Credit: Kevin Purdy

It’s a handy webpage and a basic opener (provided you know the secret device key you set), but OpenGarage is more powerful in how it uses that data. OpenGarage’s device can keep a cloud connection open to Blynk or the maker’s own OpenThings.io cloud server. You can hook it up to MQTT or an IFTTT channel. It can send you alerts when your garage has been open a certain amount of time or if it’s open after a certain time of day.

Screenshot showing 5 sensors: garage, distance, restart, vehicle, and signal strength. — You’re telling me you can just… see the state of these things, at all times, on your own network? Credit: Kevin Purdy

You really don’t need a corporate garage coder

For me, the greatest benefit is in hooking OpenGarage up to Home Assistant. I’ve added an opener button to my standard dashboard (one that requires a long-press or two actions to open). I’ve restored the automation that turns on the overhead bulbs for five minutes when the garage door opens. And I can dig in if I want, like alerting me that it’s Monday night at 10 pm and I’ve yet to open the garage door, indicating I forgot to put the trash out. Or maybe some kind of NFC tag to allow for easy opening while on a bike, if that’s not a security nightmare (it might be).

Not for nothing, but OpenGarage is also a deeply likable bit of indie kit. It’s a two-person operation, with Ray Wang building on his work with the open and handy OpenSprinkler project, trading Arduino for ESP8266, and doing some 3D printing to fit the sensors and switches, and Samer Albahra providing mobile app, documentation, and other help. Their enthusiasm for DIY home control has likely brought out the same in others and certainly in me.

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Matter 1.4 has some solid ideas for the future home—now let’s see the support

alexa, apple home, Biz & IT, connectivity standards alliance, csa, EVSE, Google Home, home automation, matter, matter 1.4, Smart Home, Tech, Thread / Paul Patrick / November 8, 2024

With Matter 1.4 and improved Thread support, you shouldn’t need to blanket your home in HomePod Minis to have adequate Thread coverage. Then again, they do brighten up the place. Credit: Apple

Routers are joining the Thread/Matter melee

A whole bunch of networking gear, known as Home Routers and Access Points (HRAP), can now support Matter, while also extending Thread networks with Matter 1.4.

“Matter-certified HRAP devices provide the foundational infrastructure of smart homes by combining both a Wi-Fi access point and a Thread Border Router, ensuring these ubiquitous devices have the necessary infrastructure for Matter products using either of these technologies,” the CSA writes in its announcement.

Prior to wireless networking gear officially getting in on the game, the devices that have served as Thread Border Routers, accepting and re-transmitting traffic for endpoint devices, has been a hodgepodge of gear. Maybe you had HomePod Minis, newer Nest Hub or Echo devices from Google or Amazon, or Nanoleaf lights around your home, but probably not. Routers, and particularly mesh networking gear, should already be set up to reach most corners of your home with wireless signal, so it makes a lot more sense to have that gear do Matter authentication and Thread broadcasting.

Freeing home energy gear from vendor lock-in

Matter 1.4 adds some big, expensive gear to its list of device types and control powers, and not a moment too soon. Solar inverters and arrays, battery storage systems, heat pumps, and water heaters join the list. Thermostats and Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE), i.e. EV charging devices, also get some enhancements. For that last category, it’s not a moment too soon, as chargers that support Matter can keep up their scheduled charging without cloud support from manufacturers.

More broadly, Matter 1.4 bakes a lot of timing, energy cost, and other automation triggers into the spec, which—again, when supported by device manufacturers, at some future date—should allow for better home energy savings and customization, without tying it all to one particular app or platform.

CSA says that, with “nearly two years of real-world deployment in millions of households,” the companies and trade groups and developers tending to Matter are “refining software development kits, streamlining certification processes, and optimizing individual device implementations.” Everything they’ve got lined up seems neat, but it has to end up inside more boxes to be truly impressive.

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I added a ratgdo to my garage door, and I don’t know why I waited so long

Apple, home assistant, home automation, homekit, ratgdo, Tech / Mike M. / September 4, 2024

Photograph of a ratgdo — Enlarge / A ratgdo, version 2.53i.

I live in suburbia, which means I’ve got a garage (or a carhole, if you’re not so fancy). It’s a detached garage, so part of my nightly routine when I check to make sure the house is all locked up is to peek out the back window. I like to know the garage door is closed and our cars are tucked in safely.

But actually looking out a window with my stupid analog eyeballs is lame, so I figured I could make things easier by adding some smarts to my garage. The first thing I did was use this fellow’s instructions (the original site is sadly offline, but the Wayback Machine is forever) to cobble together a Raspberry Pi-based solution that would fire off an email every time the garage door opened or closed. I couldn’t remotely open or close the door from inside the house myself (well, I mean, I could with the actual garage door opener remote control), but I could just glance at my inbox to see if the garage door was open or shut in the evenings.

This worked great for a couple of years, until Texas summers murdered the poor Pi. (This was possibly my fault, too, because of the PoE hat that I’d slapped onto the Pi, which resulted in extra heat.) So, I was back to peeking out my window to check on the garage in the evenings. Like a sucker.

There had to be a better way.

Insultingly, offensively awful OEM solutions

I had just two requirements in my search for that better way. First, whatever automation solution I settled on had to be compatible with my garage door opener. Secondly, anything I looked at needed to interoperate with Apple’s HomeKit, my preferred home automation ecosystem.

The first thing I looked at—and quickly discarded—was using my garage door opener’s built-in automation functionality. My particular garage door opener is a LiftMaster, which means that it’s part of a big group of garage door opener brands under the “Chamberlain” banner. The OEM-sanctioned way to do what I want, therefore, is to use Chamberlain’s “MyQ” solution, which—and I am being generous here—is total garbage.

MyQ requires an accessory the company doesn’t sell or support anymore in order to hook into HomeKit, and Chamberlain would really, really, really like you to install their adds-nothing-of-value-to-me app in order to actually control things—likely so they can have a shot at collecting and monetizing my personal and/or behavioral data. (To be clear, I have no proof that that’s what they’d do with personal data, but monetizing and selling it would definitely be playing to type.) Given that the Chamberlain Group is owned by a big value-removing private equity firm with a history of poor stewardship over personal data, this all tracks.

A snippet from the MyQ <a href= — Enlarge / A snippet from the MyQ privacy page. It’s about as gross as you might expect.

That’s gonna be a “no” from me, dawg. I’d rather jam bamboo under my fingernails than install Chamberlain’s worthless app just for the privilege of controlling an accessory in my own home while facing the potential risk of having my personal information sold to enrich some vampire capitalists.

So what else to do?

I added a ratgdo to my garage door, and I don’t know why I waited so long Read More »

How I upgraded my water heater and discovered how bad smart home security can be

esp32, Features, GitHub, home assistant, home automation, iot, journalism, rinnai, Smart Home, tankless water heater, Tech, Zigbee / Mike M. / May 17, 2024

The bottom half of a tankless water heater, with lots of pipes connected, in a tight space — Enlarge / This is essentially the kind of water heater the author has hooked up, minus the Wi-Fi module that led him down a rabbit hole. Also, not 140-degrees F—yikes.

Getty Images

The hot water took too long to come out of the tap. That is what I was trying to solve. I did not intend to discover that, for a while there, water heaters like mine may have been open to anybody. That, with some API tinkering and an email address, a bad actor could possibly set its temperature or make it run constantly. That’s just how it happened.

Let’s take a step back. My wife and I moved into a new home last year. It had a Rinnai tankless water heater tucked into a utility closet in the garage. The builder and home inspector didn’t say much about it, just to run a yearly cleaning cycle on it.

Because it doesn’t keep a big tank of water heated and ready to be delivered to any house tap, tankless water heaters save energy—up to 34 percent, according to the Department of Energy. But they’re also, by default, slower. Opening a tap triggers the exchanger, heats up the water (with natural gas, in my case), and the device has to push it through the line to where it’s needed.

That led to me routinely holding my hand under cold water in the sink or shower, waiting longer than felt right for reasonably warm water to appear. I understood the water-for-energy trade-off I was making. But the setup wasted time, in addition to potable water, however plentiful and relatively cheap it was. It just irked me.

Little did I know the solution was just around the corner.

Hot water hotspot

Attention!

Kevin Purdy
Nothing’ll happen. Just touch it. It’s what you wanna do. It’s there for you to touch.

Kevin Purdy
The Rinnai Central app. It does this “Control failed” bit quite often.

Rinnai

I mean that literally. When I went into the utility closet to shut off the hose bibbs for winter, I noticed a plastic bag magnetically stuck to the back side of the water heater. “Attention! The Control-R Wi-Fi Module must be installed for recirculation to operate,” read the intense yellow warning label. The water heater would not “recirculate” without it, it noted.

Enlarge / The Rinnai Control-R module, out of bag.

Rinnai

Recirculation means that the heater would start pulling water and heating it on demand, rather than waiting for enough negative pressure from the pipes. To trigger this, Rinnai offered smartphone apps that could connect through its servers to the module.

I found the manual, unplugged the water heater, and opened it up. The tone of the language inside (“DO NOT TOUCH,” unless you are “a properly trained technician”) did not match that of the can-do manual (“get the most from your new module”). But, having read the manual and slotted little beige nubs before, I felt trained and technical. I installed the device, went through the typical “Connect your phone to this weirdly named hotspot” process, and—it worked.

I now had an app that could start recirculation. I could get my shower hot while still in bed, or get started on the dinner dishes from the couch. And yet pulling out my phone whenever I wanted hot water felt like trading one inconvenience for another.

How I upgraded my water heater and discovered how bad smart home security can be Read More »

Home Assistant has a new foundation and a goal to become a consumer brand

home assistant, home automation, local voice assistant, NVIDIA, nvidia jetson, Open Source, paulus Schoutsen, Smart Home, Tech, voice assistants, z-wave, Zigbee / Mike M. / April 23, 2024

An Open Home stuffed full of code —

Can a non-profit foundation get Home Assistant to the point of Home Depot boxes?

Kevin Purdy – Apr 22, 2024 5: 34 pm UTC

Open Home Foundation

Home Assistant, until recently, has been a wide-ranging and hard-to-define project.

The open smart home platform is an open source OS you can run anywhere that aims to connect all your devices together. But it’s also bespoke Raspberry Pi hardware, in Yellow and Green. It’s entirely free, but it also receives funding through a private cloud services company, Nabu Casa. It contains tiny board project ESPHome and other inter-connected bits. It has wide-ranging voice assistant ambitions, but it doesn’t want to be Alexa or Google Assistant. Home Assistant is a lot.

After an announcement this weekend, however, Home Assistant’s shape is a bit easier to draw out. All of the project’s ambitions now fall under the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization that now contains Home Assistant and more than 240 related bits. Its mission statement is refreshing, and refreshingly honest about the state of modern open source projects.

The three pillars of the Open Home Foundation.

Open Home Foundation

“We’ve done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware,” the Open Home Foundation states in a press release. “To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves—so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes.” Along with keeping Home Assistant funded and secure from buy-outs or mission creep, the foundation intends to help fund and collaborate with external projects crucial to Home Assistant, like Z-Wave JS and Zigbee2MQTT.

My favorite video.

Home Assistant’s ambitions don’t stop with money and board seats, though. They aim to “be an active political advocate” in the smart home field, toward three primary principles:

Data privacy, which means devices with local-only options, and cloud services with explicit permissions
Choice in using devices with one another through open standards and local APIs
Sustainability by repurposing old devices and appliances beyond company-defined lifetimes

Notably, individuals cannot contribute modest-size donations to the Open Home Foundation. Instead, the foundation asks supporters to purchase a Nabu Casa subscription or contribute code or other help to its open source projects.

From a few lines of Python to a foundation

Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen wanted better control of his Philips Hue smart lights just before 2014 or so and wrote a Python script to do so. Thousands of volunteer contributions later, Home Assistant was becoming a real thing. Schoutsen and other volunteers inevitably started to feel overwhelmed by the “free time” coding and urgent bug fixes. So Schoutsen, Ben Bangert, and Pascal Vizeli founded Nabu Casa, a for-profit firm intended to stabilize funding and paid work on Home Assistant.

Through that stability, Home Assistant could direct full-time work to various projects, take ownership of things like ESPHome, and officially contribute to open standards like Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Matter. But Home Assistant was “floating in a kind of undefined space between a for-profit entity and an open-source repository on GitHub,” according to the foundation. The Open Home Foundation creates the formal home for everything that needs it and makes Nabu Casa a “special, rules-bound inaugural partner” to better delineate the business and non-profit sides.

Home Assistant as a Home Depot box?

In an interview with The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, and in a State of the Open Home stream over the weekend, Schoutsen also suggested that the Foundation gives Home Assistant a more stable footing by which to compete against the bigger names in smart homes, like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Samsung. The Home Assistant Green starter hardware will sell on Amazon this year, along with HA-badged extension dongles. A dedicated voice control hardware device that enables a local voice assistant is coming before year’s end. Home Assistant is partnering with Nvidia and its Jetson edge AI platform to help make local assistants better, faster, and more easily integrated into a locally controlled smart home.

That also means Home Assistant is growing as a brand, not just a product. Home Assistant’s “Works With” program is picking up new partners and has broad ambitions. “We want to be a consumer brand,” Schoutsen told Tuohy. “You should be able to walk into a Home Depot and be like, ‘I care about my privacy; this is the smart home hub I need.’”

Where does this leave existing Home Assistant enthusiasts, who are probably familiar with the feeling of a tech brand pivoting away from them? It’s hard to imagine Home Assistant dropping its advanced automation tools and YAML-editing offerings entirely. But Schoutsen suggested he could imagine a split between regular and “advanced” users down the line. But Home Assistant’s open nature, and now its foundation, should ensure that people will always be able to remix, reconfigure, or re-release the version of smart home choice they prefer.

Home Assistant has a new foundation and a goal to become a consumer brand Read More »