I'm a programmer. I miss my 70s thermostat. Hot/cold/off, temperature, and fan on/auto. Very simple. Just worked.
The smart thermostat is nice, but it's something I'll need to revisit when I have time.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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I SWEAR it's impossible to make fun of the selfhosting / hacking communities. I made a joke once that they should hack a toothbrush then I found they already did
"Oh so you're telling me it works via the flow of electrons to power motors and sensors? Hold my beer."
Side note: This is why it's infuriating that companies seem to believe what we want is unsecured bluetooth / wi-fi enabled toothbrushes hooked up to our home networks and smartphones via some equally hacky app that tries to link toothbrush usage to buying habits and ad efficiency.
Tape a raspberry pi to the wall with some relays and a temperature sensor dangling and call it a day. Anything else is spying on you.
As the other poster said, both Zigbee and Zwave devices do not talk to the Internet. They can't even connect to your Wi-Fi anyway. They need to connect to a device that acts as a router but specifically for Zigbee or Zwave, usually called a Hub or Coordinator.
There's many different hubs around. Many commercial ones do indeed connect directly to the WiFi and therefore internet. But nothing is stopping you from buying a USB Dongle Hub with open source firmware and plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, if you want to eliminate the potential spying.
The Zigbee and Zwave networks inherently cannot communicate with the Internet. So the only risk of spying is if you installed something in the Raspberry that spies on you.
Both Philips Hue and IKEA Trådfri and many other vendors simply use Zigbee, which means you can bring your own Hub and completely eliminate the risk of spying.
Yeah, I use Zigbee with Home Assistant, it's pretty great, except it sometimes bugs out and I have to restart a few devices.
Do you trust every device you buy without question?
Nope, but I trust the ones that lack the hardware for dialing home.
But generally I don't buy devices unless I have reason to trust them.
Well that's not quite true.
I have some z-wave thermostats, which I know do not talk to the Internet, just a local system with a zwave dongle.
For a relative, recently set up a similar setup, but with a homekit thermostat. Similar deal, though it really really wanted to connect to a cloud server and you kind of had to trick it to a non apple homekit setup. The follow on model from that brand did drop homekit support, presumably because they wanted to force their cloud servers, which became required for any advanced functionally.
There are ways to get automation friendly devices without a cloud connected requirement, though admittedly you have to be paying pretty close attention. Generally offerings for business are more likely to be locally workable, but that's hardly a given either
"Smartknob View"
Everything is laugh and giggles until the thermostat is turing complete.
Most programmers (those doing fancy GUIs and C# programming on a PC) would be seriously out of their league if they ever actually tried to program such a thermostat. Or any other embedded system. You really need a special skillset and hardware knowledge to even get a simple embedded system running. This is what my trainee just learned the hard way in the last weeks...
Except thermostats. You literally could do it with a Raspberry Pi, some 24V relays and a temperature sensors. Thermostats are not that hard.
That will get you a really shitty thermostat. Sure, even modern boilers can be controlled with a simple on/off signal but you really don’t want that, because it sucks. At the very least you need to make something that speaks OpenTherm. That allows you to modulate the boiler. With a simple on/off style thermostate you get relatively large temperature swings, with a modulating boiler/thermostat you can achieve very constant temperatures, which is way more comfortable, but requires both a more complicated protocol as well as more complicated logic.
Raspi is overkill. Mine runs off an esp32 using code I wrote in Arduino. The web interface takes up more space than the code. Only reason it's an esp32 instead of an Atmega 328p is the wifi support
Smart thermostats do way more than just set the temperature: that's just table stakes and of course easy. Off the top of my head the ecobee will:
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Set the temperature also taking the room's humidity into account
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Communicate with sensors throughout your house
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Can change things via the Internet in case you accidentally forget to set it to a better temperature when you'll be gone for a few days
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Tweak your schedule based on demand
I'm probably missing things, but they're actually pretty useful, and I'm someone who thinks most IoT is shit.
Which are all things you can easily do with an RPi and some simple python. My response was to OP stating that embedded systems are hard.
If you’re using a specific embedded system and want to make it pretty, sure that could pose some issues, but if you want to make something functional that matches what a smart thermostat can do, there’s not much behind it.
Programmers love to oversimplify things; "do easily with an RPi and some simple Python" is kinda meaningless. Like, yes, an RPi is a general purpose computer and Python is turing complete, thanks.
For one, UI/UX is actually hugely important for a consumer device and definitely nontrivial, but on top of that, there is way more that goes into creating custom hardware than a bill of materials (which isn't just saying "Raspberry Pi") and choosing a programming language...
A thermostat is controlling a very expensive device that runs on a highly flammable gas that costs me real money to use. I want 0 serious bugs. I also want 100% uptime. A poorly made "smart thermostat" is way worse then the old school analog metallic ones imo. I also want my partner to be able to control the temperature in the house. These devices are actually not simple at all and I assume that's the reason there isn't a good open source/open hardware solution.
Embedded systems aren't some mystical impossible thing - contrary to the previous commenter I actually find working with them easier then designing GUIs - but the commercially available devices are definitely nontrivial to recreate
For one, UI/UX is actually hugely important for a consumer device and definitely nontrivial
Hugely agreed. I'm a huge proponent of DIY / open-source / self-hosting / repurposing etc...but also I realize if I duct-tape-engineer something that "requires a little fiddling until it works" and I'm the only one who can competently use it, I'm setting up the rest of my household for failure when (not if), for whatever reason, I'm not there to babysit it or walk them through it.
Which are all things you can easily do with an RPi and some simple python.
Just like anyone can “easily” rebuild their transmission or patch a piece of leaky copper pipe or bake an apple pie from scratch or hit a bullese from 50 yards out.
What’s easy for you isn’t easy for everyone.
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