This week’s show comes to y’all from Paris and the English seaside, with Kevin and I wondering exactly what happened to Wink. We also offer options for the few remaining holdouts on the platform. We then discuss Hive’s decision to pull back on smart home devices and its new smart thermostat (Hive plans to continue making smart energy devices). Then we focus on surveillance news starting with San Francisco’s Rule’s Committee broadening support for law enforcement agencies to access Ring camera data. Then we share how often police got access to Ring device footage without the owner’s permission. The Federal Trade Commission has a warning for companies that say they anonymize their data when in fact, they do not, and Home Assistant now has a program for formal integrations. We also share our perspectives on BMW charging a monthly fee for access to heated seats. We end by answering a listener question about network extenders.
Our guest this week is Pilgrim Beart, CEO of DevicePilot, which works with companies to provide service assurance for connected devices. We discuss what the heck service assurance actually is, as well as the challenges of the smart home. Beart was the former CEO of AlertMe, which provided the back end for Lowes’ Iris and the Hive smart home systems. He talks about how his companies both shifted from a focus on smart home devices to smart energy. Then we talk about why the energy market is so ripe for disruption from players willing to take advantage of embedded intelligence. We end with a discussion about the role of regulators in the connected energy markets and how they should approach the job. Enjoy the show.
Have not seen your comment re insteon annual fee.
never pay ransoms, ah subscriptions for your smart home. No Wink, no insteon, no home-assistant/nabucasa
I loved my Wink. It pulled me away from Homeseer than I used for 14 years before. It gave me access to my smart home with my Iphone. I switched to SmartThings after they bricked our hubs requiring users to send hubs in to them to fix.
Using a combination of Alexa, Homekit and Google, I found is the best fix. I am just waiting for a solution thats reliable to get Zwave into Homekit. I don’t trust homebridge or hoobs.
ThinkA has A Zwave to HomeKit hub. Officially certified for both homekit and zwave. They are expecting to start shipping a US model by October 2022. The EU model has been available for about a year.
Pros:
exposes zwave parameters so they can be easily set/changed (unlike SmartThings)
Doesn’t care about the brand of the end device as long as it is zwave certified
Runs a health check on the network every night
Cons:
Does not support Z wave locks due to conflicts in the security model between Z wave and HomeKit
Very expensive: €430 for the EU model
https://www.thinka.eu/z-wave
HomeKit News did a detailed technical review after a couple months of use if you’re interested in that. They said the hub itself was well engineered and reliable, they just didn’t think it would be worth the price unless someone was already significantly invested in Z wave devices.
Yeah the biggest con in all sense is that $450. Insanity. Maybe Ring alarm or Some other reasonable device will become a Matter bridge for Z-wave.
It’s not completely outrageous. The Fibaro Home Center 3 is about the same price and doesn’t have HomeKit compatibility. There are also Homeseer models which cost more. It’s a different price range than the low end DIY hubs like wink and smartthings, but then it’s not clear that their business model is sustainable. I guess Hubitat will be the test at that price point.
Thanks for confirming my gut reaction Stacey.
Jerry
I’m a Hubitat fan. I have 40+ devices in my home and around 25 at work. It supports Z-wave and Zigbee out of the box. Great tech support and they are always adding new devices. It falls somewhere between Home Assistant and Wink on ease of use. It can be very powerful or very simple–and sometimes both.
Control can be all local or cloud based. It supports most of the major cloud-based devices such as Ring, Hue, Ecobee, Lifx, and Lutron. . It integrates with my Ring security system so I can use all the Ring devices in my Hubitat apps. Almost like “free” sensors.
I’m not sure about Matter support.