A fairly major fourth concern with cloud services is said services going away. One vendor going bankrupt can brick a whole lot of devices, if those devices work only with the cloud service. As allergic as vendors are to open standards and platforms, common adoption of home automation simply won't happen until a very simple on-the-box badge can explain to the customer that they aren't buying a thing that won't work their other things, or will stop working in a year when the VC-backed startup that made it stops being able to con VC for yet more money...
I've found that home automation is a really good environment to use "home-cooked" software. Robin Sloan discusses this at length in the article "An App can be a Home-Cooked Meal". The thesis is that while some people who cook are (or want to be) professional chefs, many others are happy cooking for themselves, friends, and family. Likewise, some people who write code are professionals, but it's possible to write software that's "home-cooked" in the same way: written by somebody to use for themselves or close friends and family. Home automation is a great place for this kind of software. You mentioned that you have projects that you want to put online for anybody to use, and that's awesome if you want to do it. But for anybody else here: it's OK if your home-cooked software remains just yours. Not thinking of all home automation code I write as a (free, open-source) product made me feel a lot happier writing that code.
Good talk. Not boring. Watched the whole thing. Pretty much confirmed my suspicions about interop and lack of maturity in the IOT space. I will stick to WiFi devices as I don't want to get on the consumer treadmill. I've never heard anyone pronounce latency like that. Is that pronunciation typical in your part of the world?
fascinating video as always!
A fairly major fourth concern with cloud services is said services going away. One vendor going bankrupt can brick a whole lot of devices, if those devices work only with the cloud service.
As allergic as vendors are to open standards and platforms, common adoption of home automation simply won't happen until a very simple on-the-box badge can explain to the customer that they aren't buying a thing that won't work their other things, or will stop working in a year when the VC-backed startup that made it stops being able to con VC for yet more money...
I've found that home automation is a really good environment to use "home-cooked" software.
Robin Sloan discusses this at length in the article "An App can be a Home-Cooked Meal". The thesis is that while some people who cook are (or want to be) professional chefs, many others are happy cooking for themselves, friends, and family. Likewise, some people who write code are professionals, but it's possible to write software that's "home-cooked" in the same way: written by somebody to use for themselves or close friends and family.
Home automation is a great place for this kind of software. You mentioned that you have projects that you want to put online for anybody to use, and that's awesome if you want to do it. But for anybody else here: it's OK if your home-cooked software remains just yours. Not thinking of all home automation code I write as a (free, open-source) product made me feel a lot happier writing that code.
Good talk. Not boring. Watched the whole thing. Pretty much confirmed my suspicions about interop and lack of maturity in the IOT space. I will stick to WiFi devices as I don't want to get on the consumer treadmill. I've never heard anyone pronounce latency like that. Is that pronunciation typical in your part of the world?
same - to me, the first syllable of latency rhymes with "bay"