alt Hacker NewsI tried quite few "smart" things and I hate them with passion.
Smart light bulbs, for whatever reason I couldn't get them to work with my Apple Home setup, despite trying few different brands.
Smart power sockets, kind of work, but they're big, bulky and have this natural design flaw where when anyone unknowingly or out of habit use the lamp's switch, they stop working, not to mention how useless they are when the wall socket is behind some obstacle, furniture, etc.
Smart radiator controllers that are super noisy in operation and impossible to calibrate, so they constantly report inaccurate temperatures.
Smart home security systems that keep raising false alarms because a cat, a leaf, a bee, a spider or just because.
IKEA smart temperature and humidity sensors (the latest ones) that pair with my Apple Home network for few days and they all just stop reporting data, until a hard reset and re-pairing.
I'm done for anything "smart" for at least few years, they're all a horrible annoyance.
I agree on active devices, and most of the ecosystem is similarly frustrating to deal with.
And why rely on someone else's software for this in 2026? I vibecoded a Rust+Starlark zigbee hub software that uses a few MB of RAM on my router and can directly dispatch HTTP for alerting, as well as exposing prometheus metrics. Zigbee2MQTT apparently wants several hundred MB of RAM.
For passive monitoring, I have six water leak sensors and two temperature/humidity sensors.
The crucial thing is that I can fix it if it breaks. I can debug the low level network packets, support whatever hardware I want, and not have to rely on someone else's cloud ecosystem.
It's great!