We’ve been talking a bunch of home automation on the Podcast lately, and this week, in the Mailbag segment, a reader asked us about our setups. Neither Kristina nor I are poster children for the home automation movement: she has absolutely no smart anything because she didn’t want her data up in “the cloud”, and I have an entirely local system that’s really nothing more than a bunch of ad-hoc scripts that talk to an MQTT broker, everything fully DIY but held together with metaphorical duct tape. Neither of us are doing it right, but we’re doing it wrong in interestingly different ways.
Kristina thought, probably because of the range of commercial devices out there that tie you into using their remote data storage services, that giving up control of her data was necessary to use it. And it might be, if you insist that setting up the system be as easy as possible. But the tradeoff for this ease is a drastic reduction in simplicity. You shouldn’t need a remote server in some foreign country to turn your lights on and off. Adding “the cloud” into the mix brings a lot of complexity, mostly in the form of servers that have to be paid for somehow by whatever company is providing the service. It needs to be secure. You might even have to create accounts, remember passwords, and manage that whole deal. Sure, that’s easy enough, but it’s a lot of moving parts, and you can’t blame her for rejecting that complexity.
