Every light bulb in my home is on Wi-Fi and has its own IP address. And then several outlets have their own IP address. Door locks. Robots. My Christmas tree had an IP address when it was up. My air purifier. My air quality monitor. Security cameras. Lots of things. Seems pretty normal.
I think it's safe to assume that 80+ wireless devices puts you in the top few percentiles. So while not unheard of, not "normal" exactly. And even less common in dense apartment environments where having more than 3-4 rooms is unusual.
10 window/door sensors, 5 cameras, 10 radiator thermostats, 20 lightbulbs and some other now that you've started and you're already at 50 while "only" doing the "basic" smart home.
I've heard of at least a handful of people that have done this and more this year alone.
Yeah, it obviously does happen from time to time, but is it normal? My anecdotal data point: 3 devices all isolated on their own AP with no way to talk to eachother or the rest of the world. 50 is a lot. 120 is just insane. :)
I struggle to figure out how to reach 120 devices, but I can easily see 60-70 if you want a smart home. 3-4 lights in each room, a thermostat, air quality sensor, smoke alert, window sensor, door sensor and a camera. 10 sensors in one room. It's only seems like a lot because it's not mainstream yet.
Yeah, that might just be me. What you are describing sounds completely alien to me. I still struggle with comprehending why people insist on bringing the basic stuff online -- my security cameras should not require Internet access -- but I guess there's a reason I live in an old house on the countryside, and not in the middle of a city. :D
Cameras in each room? It's a privacy nightmare and I frankly don't trust my equipment, my network, nor myself to set that up safely. Especially if the cameras I own are any indication of how the rest work (hard-wired default passwords, security flaws, upload of FTP credentials to some Chinese business' servers, constant attempts at leaking data through DNS lookups when regular traffic is blocked, etc).
Thermostats and humidity sensors make sense if each room has it's own heaters/air conditioners, though.
Shitty design. Doorbells should never need batteries. Even a tiny, tiny solar power panel and a method of power storage would be able to keep it going indefinitely.
Our door bell harvests the kinetic energy from being pressed and uses that to generate the trigger signal for the base-station. Sadly it fails if the push isn't firm enough, it appears not to have any sort of battery.
I could imagine securely setting up cameras through a house.
Of course, the first thing I would make sure is that they don't connect to the internet or any wireless network. So I can't imagine the ones the GP is talking about being anything other than a privacy nightmare.
By the way, what happened to data over electricity wires? It's the obvious way to set the home automation stuff.
There are quite a few cameras that record to a device on the internal network - put them on a VLAN that has no outside connection and you have it all. That is quite an advanced setup though and it's good practice to save the recording at another location as well.
LAN over electricity wires is a proper pain in the ass. It's not like you can plug in a "router" to one outlet and have network in all others. It only goes to the group that particular outlet is in, so unless your wiring is made in a particular way, which existing houses aren't since it's not an established standard.
Well, what is stopping people for creating switches that go into the distribution panel? They can even fit as circuit breakers, so no change at all is necessary.
One would need a large diversity of products to make it work, what puts it out of reach of any small manufacturer. But why the large home automation sellers insist on their "you must add this huge panel, pass all those wires around, and can't retrofit any new device once the layout is settled" technologies is a mystery to me.
Hmmm. My two bed 120 year old house has 9 rads and 28 bulbs. It's not what I, as someone in the UK so used to smaller houses than the US, would call, _large_.
I've got to ask, although I'm afraid I already know the answer: how do you do patch management with that many devices? I've come to the point where I'm running about 12 VM's and patch management has become a bother, so I'm curious how people deal with this stuff when their light bulbs are tiny little servers.
Having said that, if I had the money, I'd totally automate everything in my house as well. It's just too much fun not to.
80 IoT device seem like a little more than normal, but I wonder how many devices the average person have without really thinking of them as IoT devices.
Some of IoT device you list I’d actively avoid, but thinks like robot vacuums is really useful.
The kitchen appliances are a little weird. People keep claiming that it impossible to avoid, but I have yet to see any of them in stores. Not even a gimmicky smart fridge is available.
Hey, it is available. At 20.000DKK ($3235) and in that double width I don't see many buyers, regardless if it's IoT or not.
Interestingly, at one of the largest Danish chains, it's listed under "American fridges", most of those DO have wifi. If you just pick: "Fridges", then none of them have wifi.
A lot of modern designs have flat controls with no tactile cues that renders them unusable for the blind. Being able to connect with an app using VoiceOver makes the device accessible.
Even non iot kitchen tech is ridiculous. I tried to buy an oven with as few features as possible. I foolishly assumed that two knobs meant “mode” and “temp”. Nope. It has loads of features which you access by clicking and holding and twiddling one while opposite twiddling the other. Smeg.
They have backup batteries and form their own mesh network which works independently of the main WiFi.
If the central unit disappears, the detectors still all go off if one is triggered. (Central unit offers app interface and optional 4G fallback network connection.)
I graduated from Software Engineering in 2003, and recently worked for Canada's biggest Telco for 4 years.
I didn't even know half of the IoT's on your list even existed !
I love your love of automation. One question: is it harder to say setup one controller with an IP address and WiFi to control a set of dumb light bulbs rather multiple IP enabled bulbs?
IP-enabled bulbs (or rather, 2.4GHz controlled Bulbs, by whatever protocol) have a bit more nuance to them. A controller could probably at best hope to control a dimmer hooked up to the light bulbs. I've setup my own apartment with the IKEA LED bulbs, which is great for giving more individualised lighting (I use the colored LEDs to provide a dimm red light in the evening to simulate sunset more closely aligned with my actual sleep schedule).
There are non-IP full-color LED bulbs like this Zigbee version[1] which have the same flexibility as the WiFi models. Color and brightness can both be configured dynamically through the controller in response to arbitrary user-defined rules.
My IKEA models are not Wifi either and have a lot of flexibility (and the gateway is offline-first too). I can understand the demand for IP, since it probably simplifies a lot of things about the software stack (and licensing).
There is a wireless LAN in my space, all devices that need connectivity should just use that LAN.
More hubs are more headaches. You need to not lose their power adapters when moving, you need to find a place to put them that is within range of all your devices (may not be as easy as Wi-Fi since they may be using other bands that don't transmit as well or have FCC restrictions, and I already have Wi-Fi mesh network everywhere, you can't easily mesh arbitrary protocols on arbitrary frequencies), you need to set them up using typically a shitty spyware phone app, you need to keep their firmware updated in addition to device firmware. And you also need a hub for every brand of appliance you buy. A Philips Hue hub will not work with some other brand of lights. Whereas you can mix and match hub-less lights and you don't need to have a pile of hubs on a shelf somewhere.
I imagine that powerline networking for lightbulbs would be ideal. Note the serial numbers, screw the bulbs in, plug controller into an outlet somewhere, assign bulbs to groups/rooms by serial#.
But knowing the state of IoT they'd probably take 3-5 seconds after turning on to negotiate connection since the power had been cut, and they'll default to blinding white at full brightness during that time.
That's the thing, Zigbee isn't 802.11/wifi based, it IS a radio, but has really great range for low bandwidth purposes like turning a light on or off, and runs from 784-915Mhz (depending on country).
I don't feel the need to have a single "smart" light bulb or outlet. If I'm turning a light on or off, it's because I'm leaving or entering the room, in which case I'm walking by the light switch anyways.
This is a lot to ask, but.. what are all those things?! (My house has 0..I think)